Frequent commenter Lickmuffin sent this link, discussing some interesting notions from the 2008 US presidential campaign:
Cast your mind back to January 2009, when Barack Obama became the president of the United States amid much rejoicing. The hosannas — covering the inauguration was “the honor of our lifetimes,” said MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews — by then seemed unsurprising. Over the course of a long campaign, hyperbolic rhetoric had become commonplace, so much so that online wags had started calling Obama “the One” — a reference to the spate of recent science-fiction movies, especially The Matrix, that used that term to designate a messiah.
It all seems so long ago now, as one contemplates President Obama’s plummeting approval ratings and a suddenly resurgent Republican Party. Yet it’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being “reality-based” and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations, and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come.
