Prof. Foud Ajami, who helped give W. intellectual cover for the invasion of Iraq, has an election message of his own: those massive Obama crowds are not a token of yearings for democratic change, but a mob only setting itself up for dangerous disappointment once they elect Obama, who is little more than "a blank slate."
Writing at wsj.com, he says:
There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.
Follow me over the jump, as Ajami tries his best to morph from failed wartime analyst to sociologist. It's not pretty.
In effort to (re-)establish some street cred as an intellectual, Ajami invokes the classic of Elias Canetti, "Crowds and Power." But this is really just a fig leaf from behind which to launch an unoriginal rant against the Obama camp. Here the themes are familiar: "redistribution for the poor, postracial absolution and 'modernity' for the upper end of the scale."
The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest -- African-Americans and affluent white liberals -- has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking -- Canetti's feeling of equality within the crowd.
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So far, Ajami has done little than to dress up GOP talking points in a bit of social science garb. Then he loses it, invoking his own "three decades" of experience as a Middle East watcher to warn of the dissapointment and havoc to come.
My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.
Of course no one knows how an Obama administration may fare. Both the domestic and international landscape are in turmoil, the nation's financial and military resources stretched toward the breaking point.
But that is not Ajami's real point -- as far as one can tell. Rather, he seeks to link images of unruly -- gasp, Muslim -- crowds and their unrealistic demands for redemption with a large portion of an American electorate that appears energized for the first time in decades.
America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination.
This is really just bait-and-switch argumentation, from a failed analyst whose cheerleading for the war might well have discouraged a lesser man from future prognistication.