Fascist Fairy Tales

Once upon a time, there lived a Good Prince. Wait! Make it a Bad Prince!

By James Taranto
The Wall Street Journal
August 8, 2011

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904007304576496210107745664.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

The collapse of the Cult of Obama is triggering a variety of reactions from its erstwhile followers. Some, such as Jacob Weisberg (see our Friday column), attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance between the reality of Obama and their idealized image of him by taking refuge in extreme oikophobia. They lash out at the American people for being unworthy of the great leader that they still imagine Obama to be. On Saturday the Daily Beast carried this to its reductio ad absurdum, publishing an article by liberal Republican Charles Fried titled "Obama Is Too Good for Us."

Another approach was on display in a fascinating if overlong op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times. The article, by Emory University psychologist and Democratic tactician Drew Westen, weighed in at a morbidly obese 3,300 words, leading us to wonder if the Times has had to cut back on its budget for editors. Still, amid all the excess verbiage, there is some very revealing stuff.

Westen acknowledges having been a follower of the Cult of Obama. Unlike Weisberg, he has a moment of clarity in which he acknowledges the disconnect between the fantasy Obama and the real one:

Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues. ...

Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in "Dreams From My Father" appended a chapter at the end that wasn't there--the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.

Let the record show that those of us who were neither "bewitched" nor "enthralled" saw all this clearly all along. (In fact, we're tempted to search our 2008 columns to make sure Westen didn't plagiarize them.) And although Westen deserves some credit for this belated bow to reality, it is only incidental to his piece.

His main purpose is to replace the now-discredited myth of Obama with a new, counterfactual one. Obama could have succeeded, Westen claims, if only he had told "a story the American people were waiting to hear--and needed to hear":

The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. ... We seek movies, novels and "news stories" that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories.

Further evidence that the Times's editing budget is at a breaking point is that it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone how foolish putting "news stories" in scare quotes makes the paper look.

Westen claims that at the time Obama was inaugurated, "Americans were scared and angry." Like traumatized children, "Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end." Seventy-six years earlier, "Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right." Obama's failure is that he did not do the same thing.

Specifically, Westen faults Obama for failing to single out "villains" including "Wall Street gamblers," "conservative extremists" and George W. Bush:

That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement.

Westen's counterfactual has provoked wide (though far from unanimous) enthusiasm from liberal commentators, including an endorsement from Time's Joe Klein:

Obama is often eloquent. ... But he has never deployed these skills in service of the larger story--never really explained where we are as a country, how we got here and--Westen is spot on here--who the villains have been. He has never gone to war on behalf of the American people. ...

At a similar point in his presidency, Jimmy Carter delivered his famous "malaise" speech--the word was never actually used--that was an accurate description of the problems we faced then (it reads very well 30 years later) but a complete bummer. The public needed to hear more than a description of what wrong [sic]; it needed to be told what was necessary to make it right. Ronald Reagan came along, posited optimism and an easily comprehensible set of principles--and Carter was history.

I am not suggesting Obama is Carter. But they do share a trait: an inability to tell a story. The most popular stories have good guys and bad guys. If he wants to be re-elected, Obama is going to have to start telling us who the bad guys are and what he plans to do about them.

In citing Reagan, Klein unwittingly underscores the liberal misunderstanding of his success at "communication," which Peggy Noonan explores in her most recent column. There's a world of difference between "an easily comprehensible set of principles," which Reagan did offer, and a fairy tale about "good guys and bad guys." The former is for adults, the latter for children (or for adults seeking mere entertainment).

The Cult of Obama imagined a Good Obama, who was going to inspire hope and transcend America's divisions. Westen and Klein now long for Bad Obama, who would exacerbate those divisions in order to vanquish the "bad guys."

Although Good Obama sounds far more attractive than the actual Obama, the idealized Bad Obama is an incipient fascist. When Klein complains that Obama "has never gone to war on behalf of the American people," he doesn't mean it literally. He uses nationalistic and martial rhetoric to urge a campaign of vilification against putative domestic enemies. Westen regrets that Obama did not resolve to rule in a quasi-authoritarian fashion, making clear to Republicans that "this would not be a power-sharing arrangement."

One is tempted to read into Westen's and Klein's comments a cynical Weisbergian elitism. They seem to be suggesting that the American people are stupid children who would be easily dominated by a father-figure president telling them scary yet ultimately comforting stories about "bad guys" hurting people and "good guys" coming to the rescue.

Westen and Klein no doubt think they are more sophisticated than they believe the "masses" to be. But are they? Perhaps they are making these recommendations cynically--effectively advising the president to lead by lying. But if not--if Westen and Klein actually believe the stories about "good guys and bad guys" that they would have the president tell--then it is they who are infantile. (Maybe the public at large is too, but we doubt it.)

We incline toward the latter explanation because the story that they are now telling about Bad Obama, like the earlier one about Good Obama, is itself a fairy tale. In real life, President Obama sometimes acts like Good Obama and sometimes acts like Bad Obama. He talks a lot about compromise and unity, but he also frequently vilifies "corporate jet owners," "millionaires and billionaires" and of course George W. Bush. And in steamrolling ObamaCare through Congress, Obama treated the opposition in exactly the kind of peremptory way Westen wishes for.

The trouble is that because he is an ineffective leader--inexperienced, inflexible, committed to rotten ideas--his Good side does not inspire confidence and his Bad side does not inspire fear. (That's not to say Obama doesn't scare the hell out of people. But one fears him the way one would fear an 8-year-old behind the wheel of a large automobile.)

Westen and Klein, and other like-minded progressives, have revealed that they dream of a strongman uniting the "masses." If that requires vilifying selected groups of Americans, they don't mind and may even view it as a plus.

Even if he wanted to, Barack Obama could not be a strongman, in part because he is a weak man and in part because America's constitution is a strong charter of liberty. But if Obama had the means and inclination to impose a dictatorship, is there any doubt that Drew Westen and Joe Klein, at least at the outset, would goose-step with gusto?

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence