Much of the left’s ideology is based in emotion. Their deep emotion is caused by a deep faith that their policy prescriptions will work. Their deep feelings are more powerful to them than decades of evidence to the contrary.
Back in the spring syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker attribute some of the left’s emotion and passion this year to the “religious tenor” of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
“Reports of women weeping and swooning — even of an audience applauding when The One cleared his proboscis (blew his nose for you mortals) — have become frequent events in the heavenly realm of Obi-Wan Obama.
His rhetoric, meanwhile, drips with hints of resurrection, redemption and second comings. ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,’ he said on Super Tuesday night. And his people were glad.
Actually, they were hysterical, the word that best describes what surrounds this young savior and that may be more apt than we imagine. The word is derived from the Greek hystera, or womb. The ancient Greeks considered hysteria a psychoneurosis peculiar to women caused by disturbances of the uterus.”
Parker, being a woman, is allowed to write that.
“So what is the source of this infatuation with Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?”
Parker attributes it to the culture of narcissism and the cult of celebrity. These symptoms are tied to the decline of the family, Parker wrote, and “the self-absorption of the narcissistic personality” is enamored of rock stars like Obama.
It’s doubtful that any of the young people who pack the auditoriums to hear Obama know much about the radical left-wing approach he would take to solve the nation’s problems. For that matter, thanks to the communications failures of Republicans, they probably don’t know anything about an alternative approach either.
Parker says Obama’s popularity “transcends mere policy or politics”:
“It is hunger, and that hunger is clearly spiritual. Human beings seem to have a yearning for the transcendent — hence thousands of years of religion — but we have lately shied away from traditional approaches and old gods.
Thus, in post-Judeo-Christian America, the sports club is the new church. Global warming is the new religion. Vegetarianism is the new sacrament. Hooking up, the new prayer. Talk therapy, the new witnessing. Tattooing and piercing, the new sacred symbols and rituals.
And apparently, Barack Obama is the new messiah.”
Parker concludes that this is obviously not a “renaissance of reason.” Instead –
“It is more like, well, like whoa.”
Read Parker’s column here.
