We are all Oprah-ites now

Future historians may well cite the Iowa presidential caucus of 2008 as the beginning of the end for American civilization. They may write that it was the key reversal point, the moment when the forces that would lead America into decline crystallized out of the cultural solution and took form. That form has a name, and it is Oprah.

As we all know, Oprah Winfrey stumped for charismatic Democratic upstart Barack Obama, and led him to a stunning victory in the caucus last Thursday. But the Democratic party has long been the natural home for Oprah-itis, even before the spirit of Oprah took human form and began her gentle assault on American culture. But Iowa represented the triumph of Oprah-itis over both parties, as the once sober and sensible Republican caucus fell prey to the soothing charms of evangelical preacher and former disc-jockey Mike Huckabee, a man whose foreign policy vision is to make America into the popular kid in high school. Oh Oprah, what hath thou wrought?

Peggy Noonan sums up the method behind the Huckabee madness:

What we have learned about Mr. Huckabee the past few months is that he's an ace entertainer with a warm, witty and compelling persona. He won with no money and little formal organization, with an evangelical network, with a folksy manner, and with the best guileless pose in modern politics. From the mail I have received the past month after criticizing him in this space, I would say his great power, the thing really pushing his supporters, is that they believe that what ails America and threatens its continued existence is not economic collapse or jihad, it is our culture.

They have been bruised and offended by the rigid, almost militant secularism and multiculturalism of the public schools; they reject those schools' squalor, in all senses of the word. They believe in God and family and America. They are populist: They don't admire billionaire CEOs, they admire husbands with two jobs who hold the family together for the sake of the kids; they don't need to see the triumph of supply-side thinking, they want to see that suffering woman down the street get the help she needs.

Help? Like a NEW CAR!! Straight from the Oprah playbook. Opraism is the newest of the great religions, and like all things new it is as old as the hills. It is a cargo cult, pure and simple. For the last three decades one of the mantras of the Religious Right has been that leftist redistributionism and nanny-ism is a symptom of a secular populace bereft of a connection with God, and therefore dependent on the state to fill its spiritual void with a security blanket of material goods. Those who were right with God, we were told, do not need the security blanket of worldly materialism, because they were secure in their eternal relationship with God.

It was a lie, of course, a lie forced upon religious populists by their shotgun wedding to traditional free market, small government conservatives under the Reagan coalition, when southern religious "social" conservatives left the Democrat party, a party that rewarded them gladly with redistributed cargo via the New Deal, over the Democrat party's abandonment of traditional social conventions in the 1970s. It is a lie that has been exposed by Huckabee's victory in Iowa, due largely to the evangelical vote.

It should be no surprise that deeply religious people would prefer cargo cult statism over free market government minimalism. All religions are in a sense cargo cults. The evangelical faith puts special emphasis on salvation as a totally unearned gift from God, so the idea of getting something for nothing is psychologically ingrained in the faith.

The other important aspect of Oprah-ism that is evident in the Obama and Huckabee victories is the idea of "connecting" with the people. The devotees of Oprah don't want merely to be informed or entertained by their host; they want to be personally validated. They want to see a reflection of themselves, they want their pain to be felt, their insecurities acknowledged and shared publicly. They want to be hugged. For evangelicals, the Iowa vote for Huckabee was one big group hug. But Huckabee has shown a knack for connecting to people beyond the walls of the evangelical identity compound. He talks about being a former fattie who was addicted to french fries. He shares how he was the unpopular, unathletic kid in school who was ridiculed in gym class. He comes across as likeable and "real". On Jay Leno he said that people want to elect a person that reminds them of someone they worked with, instead of reminding them of someone who laid them off.

That's all well and good, but likeable schlubs don't have a good track record as national leaders. Jimmy Carter was likeable, once, and he was probably the worst American president of the 20th century. And Carter looks like Machiavelli compared to Huckabee. How much do we really want to pay for our personal validations? Isn't it enough that we have a whole industry devoted to that very need? Can't we be satisfied with our daily Oprah fix without needing to have our narcissism drive our decisions on governance and national security?

George Will points out the dark underside of the politics of likeability:

Huckabee told heavily subsidized Iowa -- Washington's ethanol enthusiasm has farm values and incomes soaring -- that Americans striving to rise are "pushed down every time they try by their own government." Edwards, synthetic candidate of theatrical bitterness on behalf of America's crushed, groaning majority, says the rich have an "iron-fisted grip" on democracy and a "stranglehold" on the economy. Strangely, these fists have imposed a tax code that makes the top 1 percent of earners pay 39 percent of all income tax revenues, the top 5 percent pay 60 percent, and the bottom 50 percent pay only 3 percent.

According to Edwards, the North Carolina of his youth resembled Chechnya today -- "I had to fight to survive. I mean really. Literally." Huckabee, a compound of Uriah Heep, Elmer Gantry and Richard Nixon, preens about his humble background: "In my family, 'summer' was never a verb." Nixon, who maundered about his parents' privations and wife's cloth coat, followed Lyndon Johnson, another miscast president whose festering resentments and status anxieties colored his conduct of office. Here we go again?

Huckabee fancies himself persecuted by the Republican "establishment," a creature already negligible by 1964, when it failed to stop Barry Goldwater's nomination. The establishment's voice, the New York Herald Tribune, expired in 1966. Huckabee says "only one explanation" fits his Iowa success "and it's not a human one. It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people." God so loves Huckabee's politics that He worked a Midwest miracle on his behalf? Should someone so delusional control nuclear weapons?

...

Although Huckabee and Edwards profess to loathe and vow to change Washington's culture, each would aggravate its toxicity. Each overflows with and wallows in the pugnacity of the self-righteous who discern contemptible motives behind all disagreements with them, and who therefore think opponents are enemies and differences are unsplittable.

Lets leave our fantasies with Hollywood and elect adults to look after our business in Washington.