{"id":3708,"date":"2010-05-12T08:48:31","date_gmt":"2010-05-12T12:48:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=3708"},"modified":"2010-05-12T08:48:31","modified_gmt":"2010-05-12T12:48:31","slug":"when-politics-takes-on-religious-attributes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/05\/12\/when-politics-takes-on-religious-attributes\/","title":{"rendered":"When politics takes on religious attributes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Frequent commenter Lickmuffin sent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/2010\/20_2_liberal-enthusiam.html\" target=\"_blank\">this link<\/a>, discussing some interesting notions from the 2008 US presidential campaign:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Cast your mind back to January 2009, when Barack Obama became the president of the United States amid much rejoicing. The hosannas &mdash; covering the inauguration was \u201cthe honor of our lifetimes,\u201d said MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews &mdash; 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 \u201cthe One\u201d &mdash; a reference to the spate of recent science-fiction movies, especially <em>The Matrix<\/em>, that used that term to designate a messiah.<\/p>\n<p>It all seems so long ago now, as one contemplates President Obama\u2019s plummeting approval ratings and a suddenly resurgent Republican Party. Yet it\u2019s 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 \u201creality-based\u201d 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\u2019s likely trajectory in the years to come.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &mdash; covering the inauguration was \u201cthe honor of our lifetimes,\u201d said MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews &mdash; by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[158,188,37,101],"class_list":["post-3708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-electionwatch","tag-matrix","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-XO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3708"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3710,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3708\/revisions\/3710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}