July 1, 2008

Obamessiah Update

Arthur Silber sounds a warning on the cult of Obama, reflection on Sacramento Bee story from January on how Obama accolytes are trained to share their "conversion stories" about how they "came to Obama." The story backs up my personal experience talking to Obama supporters - outside of a few policy-wonkish bloggers, most of 'em can't tell you what he stands for beyond "hope and change." There's a reason for that. Obama's speeches are stuffed with soaring rhetoric but short on substance. He packs less substance in a 30-minute stump speech than most teenagers put into a text message. It's all hope and change and mesmerized crowds chanting "Yes we can."

The Obama campaign wants its followers to be caught up in emotion and feelings, not agenda and ideology and policy details.

Silber sees echoes of the 1930s in it:

This kind of reaction - an emotion-driven response utterly devoid of coherent ideational content, a response that leads far too many people to be enthusiastically willing to believe virtually anything that Obama might proclaim and to follow him anywhere - is one that Obama and his campaign explicitly seek to elicit.

People had better wake the hell up, and they had better study some history very damned fast. I have sometimes remarked, and I repeat the warning here, that the twentieth century was a nonstop train of horrors - yet in one sense, the most terrible and horrifying aspect of the twentieth century is that we learned absolutely nothing from it.

Among the horrors of the twentieth century were several notable leaders who initiated events that led to slaughter and destruction on an ungraspably monumental scale. These charismatic leaders evoked a response from their followers almost identical to that called forth by Obama.

The big question is, who would Obama offer up as his Sudetenland? Afghanistan? Iraq? Israel?

And can we really afford to find out?

No. Because, as impossible as it seems in retrospect, the stakes now are higher than they were in the 1930s, and if we get it wrong, the destruction and horror and death will be massively worse than that unleashed by all the mass-murdering dictators of the 20th century combined. None of them ever had the nuclear weapons that Ahmadinejad now seeks.

Update: I found the Silber piece via Instapundit, where Glenn also links to an Ann Althouse post discussing the trend of many of Obama's disciples adopting his middle name to honor him.