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November 14, 2008
Obama and the new age of sobriety
‘Bush is an alcoholic who has never been treated’, said Frank. ‘[H]e needs an intervention… I think the only way to deal with him is to isolate him, and neutralise his behaviour, which would mean blocking everything he proposed, and refusing to go along with it: sanctioning him, quarantining him, censuring him, and impeaching him. He needs to be removed from office. He’s a very destructive man, who is not in touch with his destructiveness.’ Well, what are the democratic wishes of 50million American voters compared with the diagnosis of one doctor? The demand to treat Bush, or quarantine him, even to topple him, reveals the reactionary streak in the moralistic, borderline Catholic critique of his sinfulness. Many of the liberals who criticised Bush for his denigration of liberty and democracy in the name of politics seem happy to denigrate liberty and democracy in the name of therapy.
Obama, in contrast to Bush, is not only healthy and organic, he has also talked openly about his former ‘abuse’ of drink and drugs (though he still struggles with his addiction to cigarettes). This is one of the essential differences between Obama and Bush, argues the influential commentator Juan Cole: Obama wrote about his personal problems, and ‘honesty is the highest form of leadership’. In other words, Obama seems to accept the Gospel According to Oprah, built upon the Old Testament of Alcoholics Anonymous, which decrees that we must all accept our personal powerlessness and open ourselves up to external intervention. The spectre of the religious right was always partly the product of fevered liberal minds; the far more powerful religious force in the US today is the religion of therapy, with its emphasis on self-esteem over self-belief and meekness over ambition. At least part of the reason why members of the cultural elite are loudly celebrating the victory of healthy Obama over self-destructive Bush is because he better represents their irrational faith.
"Obama and the new age of sobriety," by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked!, November 10, 2008
Posted at November 14, 2008 09:27 AM | Categories: Caught Our Eye
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