Fouad Ajami has a rather provocative take on "Obama and the Politics of Crowds"
up at the Wall Street Journal today. He marks the unreality of 75,000
Americans gathering in Portland, or 80,000 in Denver, or 100,000 in
Missouri to see and hear the Democrat speak. He repeats the well-worn
idea that public attraction to Obama lies in his being a "blank
slate"--an observation that the candidate has himself advanced.
Further, he notes that
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.
In
some ways, this latter point is not sound social science but another
jab at the messiah complex of which conservatives such as Ajami often
accuse Obama. But, reflecting back on my (pre-journalistic) gatherings
at political rallies in Europe and in the US, I can concur with the
first presumption. Even though Americans hardly blink at massive
spectatorship today, it's clear that this is
something new to our civic culture. The 150,000 rabid Europeans whom I joined at the Bastille just days
before
the Iraq War began could have been reassembled without much
provocation--there, protest approaches the highest form of poetics. But while I've marched with
earnest dozens on the national Mall and in other major American cities, I
daresay that in the last few decades, one would never see that many
Americans congregated for anything but a sporting event.
This, writes Ajami, is because Europe craves "equality" while staid
America values "liberty." He believes that to abandon such liberty to a
madding crowd is the cause and the effect of failure:
Only now that the financial markets have melted does the white working
class--the storied "real America"--"seek
protection, the shelter of the state, and the promise of social
repair." But the "shelter" of crowds is an imperfect source of
redemption, he argues, citing a 1960 Elias Canetti treatise on "Crowds
and Power," because "the crowd, as such, disintegrates. It
has a presentiment of this and fears it. . . . Only the growth of the
crowd prevents those who belong to it from creeping back under their
private burdens."
I disagree. Obama's remarkable ability to
draw thousands says far less about him than it does about the participants
who have crept out, not from underneath their private burdens, which
remain--but toward a political culture aimed at addressing them. They have
the fortune of having a candidate that makes people want to stand in
the rain or stay up late to listen to him. But such testimony--most memorably involving call and response--followed by a specific plea to action, has always been a key rhythm of the Obama campaign
message. And whether it's Obama (or Sarah Palin), technology or the incredible stakes of this
election that has expanded the public square, the nation of lone
bowlers--however nostalgic it makes Ajami--seems to have vanished.
--Dayo Olopade
(Photo: Marian Anderson performs at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939.)