On the Cult of Personality

This is the second of three responses to Benjamin Gorman's blog Unapologetic Conjecture, where he has a pair of recent posts. The first asks why conservatives hate Obama, and the second delves into the nature of American Exceptionalism. This second response will expand some of the comments I've written on his blog, and get to the heart of why the problems with Obama move beyond mere policy disagreement.

I'm sure I'm not alone in having a number of songs, films, and TV shows from my childhood that I'd like to see again. Every once in a while, I'll try searching around and see if they pop up, and if I find nothing, I'll forget about it for a few more years. I was happy to discover last week one I'd long sought. It was an episode of Spitting Image that aired under the name of The Ronnie and Nancy Show. While I generally oppose bootlegging, when I can't find a commercial source for something, I take what I can get. Someone has hosted the episode—the only episode I've ever seen—to their MySpace page. We had the same episode recorded on a VHS tape between Cat's Eye and Maximum Overdrive, so I'd tend to watch the whole tape through back when I was 10 or 11. I didn't get much of the political humor, but it did spoof familiar people like Michael Jackson and Madonna. What I really remember regarding the political aspects was how shocked I was to see a sitting president so thoroughly derided as Reagan is in this episode. As a very young child, your take on the president is that he's the American equivalent to a king, albeit one elected, and images in children's stories abound of despotic monarchs brutally suppressing dissent with calls of, "off with their heads!" This isn't to say I was so ignorant of civics at the age of 10 that I thought a president could decapitate his detractors, but given holidays on presidents' birthdays, monuments, faces on currency, etc., it still seemed a president was owed great respect and deference, even if only for the office he held.

I've come to appreciate many things since that time which explain the scathing satire. The first, and the most important by far, is that deriding the Commander in Chief is a proud American tradition as old as the country itself. The president is not a monarch, and the United States was the first nation to abolish nobility in its founding; it is a core principle. In defining American Exceptionalism, Gorman points to the coinage of the phrase by the American Communist Party, who said that the US was the exception to the "scientific socialist" principle of Marx that predicted an inevitable expansion of communism. The American Communists said that it would not happen in the US due to our "natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions." Gorman dismisses out-of-hand the idea that these are the principles behind the American belief in American Exceptionalism. I think he's wrong to dismiss it. Not only do these things tell us something important about how Americans feel about America, but enshrined in that quote is an important point about why we ridicule the Commander-in-Chief: we lack rigid class distinctions. I think that understates it. We abhor class distinctions and we work with great zeal to the end that we tear down the high and mighty.

To this end, there are a couple of things that will make you a target for mockery and scorn above all others. One is to stand upon pedigree as a means to self-promotion. We hate the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful who attain further wealth and power by means of their family ties. Though we have a habit of still expecting great things and voluntarily placing power in the hands of the children of the elite (Roosevelts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, Bushes, Gores, McCains, and Daleys, to name a few), we nevertheless devote added effort to tearing down such people, even if the added attention only increases their wealth and power (Paris Hilton, anyone?). A great deal of the contempt for G.W. Bush was his apparent disregard for his political opponents, but this was all expanded beyond what that alone would accomplish due to his blue blood.

The other quality which begs derision is to have a cult of personality. Just as pedigree hearkens to our fears of nobility, cult of personality hearkens to our vigilance against dictators. When you use a propaganda machine to elevate yourself up, it doesn't matter if your origins are humble or high; the more you gather admirers and unthinking devotees, the greater will be the mob roused against you to tear you down.

Neither party has any monopoly on such cultish fawning. Those with a cult of personality can be found from either party, from any class background, and with any ideology: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, McCarthy, JFK, Malcolm X, and Schwarzenegger are all good examples of where to find it. Three important additions are Ronald Reagan, who earned the scorn displayed in the above linked video, Barack Obama, the target of derision that Gorman seeks to understand, and Sarah Palin. I bring up Palin as I had invoked her in a question to Ben Gorman regarding the contempt for Obama: why does he hate her so much? She has no power to set policy, little chance of obtaining office, and her much vaunted "king-making" power in the primaries in 2010 promoted candidates that failed to secure incredibly vulnerable Democratic seats for the GOP, in DE and NV races for the Senate most particularly. But I do not ask why he hates her because the answer eludes me; it's rhetorical. She's an overrated hack surrounded by a media circus, and unless you avoid all national news networks save NPR, you're probably going to hear far, far more about her than she deserves. In short, she has a cult of personality about her, and such a cult is polarizing. If you don't fall into its sway, you will hate it and the object of its adulation with a passion. You will hate Palin far more than you would hate her fellow conservatives that may hold her same views but aren't media-saturated attention whores.

This rhetorical question I posed garnered no response from Gorman, though in it, I think he will find the most important part of his answer. While he specifically excluded any references to Kool-Aid drinking or "the messiah" in asking for the reasons conservatives dislike Obama, I don't think that's a fair barrier to place. Certainly, from a policy position there's plenty to criticize Obama about that doesn't involve the cult, but if you're looking to justify bumper stickers (note that these are bumper stickers seen online and not actually on the vehicles of conservatives he knows), you really cannot ignore the cult. I can't ask him to tell me why he hates Palin but "ignore her fans, her folksy speak that endears her to some while alienating the many, the fact she's only on camera because she's attractive, or that her attention is in excess to her qualification." I can't ask anyone to explain why they hate Paris Hilton but to "avoid mentioning that she's an attention whore, that she has no talent or virtue that justifies her degree of exposure, or that she has tons of money that she didn't earn."

If you want to talk about legitimate policy disagreements, there's plenty of room for that, and most of it has already been addressed. But I'd say that deriding the subject of cultish fawning merely because of the cultish fawning is a legitimate action in its own right, and it has played a fundamentally important role in American history. It's a right we exercise ceaselessly to prevent that there should be any erosion of that right, no matter how hard Orwellian Truth Squads may seek to curtail such free expression. Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for the simple act of displacing a constitutionally ineligible lame-duck 8^th year president from office. How does one not resent such unearned accolades? We will always strike back at the very idea that he is worthy of unearned recognition, or that he stands on a pedestal far above us.

If you want to question whether he actually has a cult of personality, I'd have to question either your senses or your intellectual honesty. He had the first logo I've ever seen for a candidate, quite in addition to his illegal co-opting of the presidential seal for a campaign piece. He made up an "Office of the President Elect" fake seal for a fake office that doesn't exist. A teacher had school kids sing songs of praise to him using words originally used to praise Jesus Christ. Far beyond mere campaign buttons, I saw T-shirts that were released after he won, and buttons reading:

worn well after the election.

I could go on. But all in all, it was a degree of praise far beyond any president I've ever seen, and beyond most any degree of mass admiration short of a truly holy figure. While people can agree that opinions on sports teams or music artists are due to region or aesthetics, love of Obama seemed to suddenly take on a moral quality. This was no longer mere politics; this was about right versus wrong, good versus evil. The things opposed by Obama—pollution, inequality, elective wars, tax cuts for the wealthy, etc.—were evils, meaning that supporting Obama was a morally righteous notion. The idea can be seen in the song linked above, but then again, that's just one song by some random person in one of the countless thousands of schools across the country. I'd point to somewhere else where this idea is manifest: it's manifest in the original question posed by Benjamin Gorman asking why there's such vitriol. He's an American President, and Americans always mock the president with incredible scorn. Do you have any idea how many of these (NSFW) bumper stickers I've seen around Seattle? What makes Obama so special that you'd expect him not to receive the scorn that befalls every other American president?