Anti-Expertism

Using a slightly different tack than my last two political posts, Michael Knox Beran argues that the undercurrent of Obama’s charisma is the assumption of a communual society where people are fundamentally good.

In other (my) words, if elected, he could usher in a New Jerusalem: 

The danger of Obama’s charismatic healer-redeemer fable lies in the hubris it encourages, the belief that gifted politicians can engender a selfless communitarian solidarity. Such a renovation of our national life would require not only a change in constitutional structure—the current system having been geared to conflict by the Founders, who believed that the clash of private interests helps preserve liberty—but also a change in human nature. Obama’s conviction that it is possible to create a beautiful politics, one in which Americans will selflessly pursue a shared vision of the common good, recalls the belief that Dostoyevsky attributed to the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionists: that, come the revolution, “all men will become righteous in one instant.” The perfection would begin.

In rejecting the Anglo-American politics of limits, Obama revives a political tradition that derives ultimately from Niccolò Machiavelli. In theDiscourses on Livy and The Art of War, Machiavelli argued that it is possible to create a communitarian republic like the one whose outlines he glimpsed in Livy’s (highly romanticized) version of Roman history—a polity in which citizens, forsaking their own swinish pursuits, would become happy in the pursuit of a common good. Wise laws, he maintained, would “make citizens love one another.” The virtuous res publica of the Romans could be conjured anew.

To liberate a people from the bondage of pain and establish a new communal order, a statesman must possess, Machiavelli argued, a kind of charisma he called virtù. He described the most charismatic statesman with whom he was (personally) acquainted, Cesare Borgia, in Weberian terms, as one who “exhibits a fortune unheard of, a virtù and confidence [so much] more than human that he can attain all he desires.”

The entire article is brilliant. Read it.