Fouad Ajami has for many, many years been a darling of the neoconservative right. As an expert on all things Middle Eastern, he played a key role in helping establish the idea that all that region needed was a little kick start from us before it could turn into something approaching a democratic paradise. Sure thing, events have almost universally proved him wrong, but never mind that. He's still adored.
Today he takes to the pages of the Wall St. Journal to hold forth on, well... read this:
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....
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. The day after, the crowd will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama's vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort....Save in times of national peril, Americans have been sober, really minimalist, in what they expected out of national elections, out of politics itself. The outcomes that mattered were decided in the push and pull of daily life, by the inventors and the entrepreneurs, and the captains of industry and finance. To be sure, there was a measure of willfulness in this national vision, for politics and wars guided the destiny of this republic. But that American sobriety and skepticism about politics -- and leaders -- set this republic apart from political cultures that saw redemption lurking around every corner.
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.
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.
So many thing to say, so little time...
Crowds are new to American politics?
Widespread excitement and participation are a bad and dangerous thing?
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't mean what they say?
Americans are now just like the "Arab street"?
A candidate who has written two books and published dozens upon dozens of policy papers and proposals on this web site is a dangerous blank slate?
And please... Not everything in the world relates back to the mid-20th century Middle East. Obama isn't Nasser. We aren't looking for salvation or for a messiah.
For the 5,476,972nd time: This isn't about him. It is about us.
And lastly: If this system of popular participation in politics is so wrong, what precisely would you propose instead? And why if it is so bad did you so enthusiastically support a war designed to bring the system to your home lands?
But seriously... Crowds are new to American politics? Someone might want to call the entire nineteenth century and let it know.
