Obama's core: the West, for him, is not the best.(2008 IV)(Barack Obama)

LEON TROTSKY's The Russian Revolution does not occupy a high place in the literature of conservatism. But the old Bolshevik could on occasion be perceptive. Analyzing the improbable rise of Rasputin, he noted how frequently shamanism flourishes in the bowels of a decaying oligarchy, when the languishing elites crave the stimulus that only a certain kind of messianic figure can give. The commissar had a point. In the fourth Eclogue, Virgil beguiled the patricians of the collapsing Roman republic with a vision of a miraculous child who would inaugurate a golden age. Eighteen centuries later such charlatans as Mesmer and Cagliostro practiced their mystic arts in the salons of the ancien regime.

True to the morphology of exhausted elites, it is the privileged element in the American polity that has proved most susceptible to Barack Obama's appeal. Historians of the future, seeking to understand this enthusiasm, may well conclude that it was a kind of despair, the despair of those who, having lost their faith in the traditional remedial institutions of their culture, embraced a mirage.

T. S. Eliot put his finger on the problem when he compared the poetry of Dante to that of the modern age. Dante's poetry, Eliot said, stood for a "principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe." Eliot suggested that the old poetic culture of the West, with its emphasis on harmony, proportion, and order, brought coherence to the world and did much to reconcile men and women to the larger rhythms of life. The roots of this culture, Werner Jaeger showed in his classic study, Paideia, grew out of the Greek belief that poetry and music, together with rhythm and harmony, powerfully influence the mind and are therefore one of the bases of civilization. Fletcher of Saltoun expressed the Greek view when he said that "if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation."

Already in the 19th century, Nietzsche detected in Europe a "brutalization and decay of rhythm." Generalizations are over-simple, but the culture that has to a great extent replaced the old poetic culture values cacophony rather than harmony, brokenness rather than wholeness, and ungraceful forms of order rather than those grounded in poetic rhythm. The new culture--a significant force in education, popular entertainment and the arts, and modern architecture and town planning--has much less unifying power than the old culture; its perfection lies not in the organic whole but in the isolated fragment. Eliot, indeed, formed The Waste Land out of poetic fragments in part because he was attempting to render, in verse, the effect on the mind of the desolate and fragmented waste land he found modern life to be.

Whatever its merits, the new culture has failed to give people the tools they need to amalgamate disparate experience and perceive what the Greeks called the "wholeness of life." Dissatisfied and profoundly isolated, confined, in Tocqueville's image, "within the solitude of his own heart," the modern man, and in particular the modern man who comes from the well-to-do and predominantly agnostic classes, seeks consolation in the various and always inadequate intellectual and spiritual opiums on sale in the philosophical markets--Marxism, psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, Weatherman-style radicalism, the pharmaceutical eucharist of the anti-depressant tablet.

Obama is, if not quite the messiah of this new culture, certainly an artifact of it. He discovered early that what he calls his "story," that of a multi-racial prophet equally at home at Harvard and in the slums, struck the profoundest chords in desolate upper-caste hearts. Middle America, by contrast, has mixed feelings about the new culture. It has embraced television and adjusted to a new set of musical rhythms, but it remains suspicious of other elements of the modernist and ...