On Crowds
The most insightful piece on Barack Obama, written by an American Arab
It is way too late for this, and Faoud Ajami is probably too subtle for most people, but he has written the best analysis of the Obama tsunami that I have read so far.
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.
I have just quoted the opening paragraph, but he goes on to describe his boyhood in Egypt, the Arab street, his disappointment to realize that this is happening here in the United States. Oh, and he talks about the disillusionment that is sure to follow:
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.
From Elias Canetti again: “But 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.”
The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd.
Often the sweep of history overwhelms reason. This is not new. I am not much into Hope, but I hope that Obama is not going to lead us, or the rest of the world, over a cliff. His words are meaningless. But he can simply be a benign empty suit or something much, much worse.
- Aggie