In the mainstream media, the narrative of the Democratic nomination is the dry, calculating establishment candidate Hillary Clinton against the charming, charismatic, hope-inspiring idealist Barack Obama. This story line draws comparisons to the contest of 1968, when anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy challenged sitting Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. McCarthy's message attracted politically radical college students from across the country who, in the fashion of the day, often sported obscenely long hair and beards and had questionable hygiene practices, leading to the call to "get clean for Gene," so that they could go door to door spreading his message in rural and small-town states. The anti-war, anti-establishment revolution did not succeed, thanks to a national population that never supported the radicalism that "defined" the era.
Unlike the anti-war movement of 1968, however, the Obama "phenomenon" is a movement built around little more than a single man's "charisma," with the implication that Obama can, through the force of his personality, unite a country divided by political partisanship and its history of racial discrimination.
It goes unappreciated that this is a type of politics wholly unfamiliar in historical practice in this country, and of a nature that would have baffled the founding fathers. Words such as "phenomenon," "charisma" and "personality," so easily conveyed in the political context became ubiquitous not by American political philosophy, but by German efforts to create the discipline of social science.
Max Weber, following Nietzsche, rejected metaphysical notions of objective truths, but sought to preserve empirical methodology in understanding human nature, thus formulating a distinction between "facts" and "values." From this perspective, no social values have any relative weight over one another, thereby prompting the question of how societies come to create and accept values in the first place, and how values change over time. Weber's theory is that of the "charismatic personality" who, without regard to any underlying truth of his or her claims, inspires others to take up a particular set of values.
In the past several months, numerous news stories have justified Obama's popularity on the basis of charisma alone. Only a few generations ago, such a claim would have seemed preposterous since it was believed that the inspiration of a person's words came not from charisma, but the truth of his or her statements. That is the influence that the emigre German philosophers have had on America in the 20th century.
Weber demonstrated through his study of how the teachings of John Calvin were corrupted by the spirit of capitalism that the ideas of great men are rarely realized in popular culture as intended. Weber, for his part, spent the last years of his life in a state of permanent foreboding, warning against the rise of "academic prophets" of the Weimar Republic who, seeing the end of the era, sought the power of personality to recast a new order. Not surprisingly, Weber's value relativism and theory of personality was the final result of centuries of German philosophy that, when combined with Germany's predilection toward militarism, led to a particular political party's advocacy of the Fuhrer Principle - the idea that the fate of the nation should be shaped by the will of a single man.
Lost to many of Obama's supporters is just how revolutionary the idea of personality politics is in America.
To be precise, the power of popularity is in direct opposition to the country's constitutional infrastructure, premised on the idea of rational self-interest rather than value commitment inspired by personality. The Clintons, with their mastery of special interests, thus have the decided advantage in the grand election scheme, easily withstanding the ideological leanings of the small liberal elite. So now, just a week after his New Hampshire disappointment, Obama is compromising his most obvious appeal by playing petty identity politics in calling Clinton "insensitive" to blacks.
Obama's dilemma is discordant: He can be the personality who leads a small but committed group of followers to inevitable defeat before a self-interested crowd, or he can engage in the traditional type of politics that undermines his whole rationale for being elected in the first place.
Staha is a law student and former chairman of the Senate of College Councils.
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