Might the Establishment Turn Against Obama?

 

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A disturbing trend among American conservatives is the increasing sense of optimism about President Obama's slow fade in mainstream perceptions, and its ramifications for the future of American leftism.  Does Obama's decline entail the undoing of the movement he represents?

Progressivism's history reveals another option, which is that the movement will, in the name of saving itself, reject Obama.


Progressives are rigid in their ideology, to be sure, but this rigidity does not extend to their support for leaders.  For it follows from the inhumane core of progressivism itself that all men -- even "historic" ones -- are expendable in the name of the cause, namely history's march into totalitarianism.


It is true that Obama has begun to get some bad, or at least unworshipful, press, and that this is both causing and reflecting a drop in his general popularity.  It is naïve, however, to assume that it betokens a breach of the establishment's ideological firewall. 


Apologists for Stalin's Russia were reluctant to admit that their hero was a bloodthirsty tyrant.

However, when the state-controlled press and a complicit Western intelligentsia were unable to suppress the truth any longer, even those apologists turned on him -- not because he no longer represented their views, but because he no longer served their interests.  Subsequently, this process of blaming all the regime's evils on one leader as a way of purifying the next became an essential mechanism of Soviet oppression.  It is not hard to see how democratic politics may be corrupted into the perfection of such a mechanism.  Thus, a similar fate could befall Obama, if American progressives find that their shiny hood ornament has become a rusty eyesore. 

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