In today’s WSJ, Fouad Ajami has a perceptive piece entitled “Obama and the Politics of Crowds.” Here in Raleigh, we’ve just seen the phenomenon.
There are a whole lot of people who have been led to believe that national salvation rests with the election of Barack Obama. He promises everything and claims to be a unifier. The crowds are uplifted, thrilled.
It’s great political theater, but reality lurks just over the electoral horizon. All that Obama and his Democratic partisans will presumably have is one thing: coercion. Maybe he’s naive enough to think that more taxes, redistribution of wealth, and federal mandates will lead to widespread economic improvement for the nation (lawyer intellectual types can be amazingly foolish when it comes to economic realities; they exemplify Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision”), but good intentions don’t guarantee good results. (And they often pave the road to hell.)
Ajami writes, “The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd. Defeat — by now unthinkable to the devotees — will bring heartbreak. Victory will steadily deliver the sobering verdict that our troubles won’t be solved by a leader’s magic.”
Quite right, so how will the Democrats go about keeping the devotees from becoming disillusioned? From giving up on the fantasy that politics can be, to use a favorite leftist word, “transformative”? Of course, they will employ the usual bag of tricks including political trinkets such as affirmative action, “equal rights for women,” increased support for education and so on. My guess is that won’t be enough. They’ll feel the need to repeatedly demonize an enemy that’s mysteriously responsible for the lack of any measurable progress in living standards for Obama’s electoral base. Look for the real life equivalent of Orwell’s Two Minute Hate with spokesmen instructing the faithful that it’s because of the opposition of “laissez faire ideologues” that
things aren’t getting better. FDR made “economic royalists” his whipping boy. Look for an updated version.
