"Mark my words," I said last night, as the exuberant throng wept with joy across a vast expanse of Chicago's Grant Park. "This will end badly." Mark Steyn is back writing the back page for National Review after his trial in Canada and the Chris Buckley fiasco, and his first column is pretty good—and, as always, very timely. Well-adjusted citizens of a free society, he says, greet "whichever of their fellows would presume to lead them" with naught but "stilted cheers" and occasionally "widespread derision." In other words, the Bush-induced mass disillusionment has been generally bad for the country (not that it isn't immature and stupid), but Obama-mania has the potential to be much worse.
In the Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates describes how people become misanthropes: “Misanthropy comes when a man without knowledge or skill has placed great trust in someone and believes him to be altogether truthful, sound and trustworthy; then, a short time afterwards, he finds him to be wicked and unreliable…in the end, after many such blows, one comes to hate all men and to believe that no one is sound in any way at all. Have you not seen this happen?” (Grube trans., 89 d-e).
I was telling everyone who would listen last night that this whole experiment will end in one of two ways: either our president-elect will be completely, 100% successful in executing his agenda (a self-evidently disastrous proposition) or he won't. And because, in all likelihood, President Obama will have to make major compromises and significant sacrifices, those millions of people who made Harlem a haven of jubilation and Grant Park a sight to be seen will be more disillusioned than ever.
Of course, national misanthropy isn’t the greatest danger of mass adulation toward our leaders. Grant Park last night was indeed a sight to be seen, but it was a sight we had seen before—in a very skillful film by Leni Riefenstahl.
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