Mark Lilla Ponders Conservative Hysteria about Obama

Like me, Andrew Sullivan, and a lot of other people, Mark Lilla thinks Obama is a very moderate, even conservative sort of guy, and can't understand why he upsets people so much:

Whenever conservatives talk to me about Barack Obama, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. But what exactly? The anger, the suspicion, the freestyle fantasizing have no perceptible object in the space-time continuum that centrist Democrats like me inhabit. What are we missing? 

There are really only two possible explanations for the crazed reaction to Obama. One is white people's fear of losing their dominant status. Lilla passes on this one in favor of something more subtle and historical. Reviewing I Am the Change, an anti-Obama tract by Charles Kesler, Lilla explains that conservative intellectuals have made Obama into the latest leader of a dangerous cult that stretches back 250 years. Kesler does not try to deflate Obama's self-presentation as a change agent, but exaggerates it:

Instead, it is that rarest of things, a cheap inflationary takedown — a book that so exaggerates the historical significance of this four-year senator from Illinois, who’s been at his new job even less time, that he becomes both Alien and Predator. Granted, there is something about Obama that invites psychological projection, notably by Scandinavians bearing gifts. But Kesler outdoes the Nobel Prize committee by raising the Obama presidency to world-historical significance, constructing a fanciful genealogy of modern liberalism that begins just after the French Revolution in the works of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel; passes through Karl Marx and Charles Darwin and Oswald Spengler; and culminates in . . . “The Audacity of Hope” and 2,000-plus pages of technical jargon in the Affordable Care Act.

It’s some performance, and actually quite helpful. A sense of proportion, once the conservative virtue, is considered treasonous on the right today, and Kesler cannot be accused of harboring one. But his systematic exaggerations demonstrate that the right’s rage against Obama, which has seeped out into the general public, has very little to do with anything the president has or hasn’t done. It’s really directed against the historical process they believe has made America what it is today. . . .

The thing is, the conservatives have also spooked themselves. They now really believe the apocalyptic tale they’ve spun, and have placed mild-mannered Barack Obama at the center of it. It hasn’t been easy. Kesler admits that “Obama is at pains to be, and to be seen as, a strong family man, a responsible husband and father urging responsibility on others, a patriot, a model of pre-’60s, subliminally anti-’60s, sobriety.” But that’s just a disguise. In fact, he’s the “latest embodiment of the visionary prophet-statesman” of the Progressives, someone who “sees himself engaged in an epic struggle” whose success will mean “the Swedenization of America.” Or maybe its Harlemization, given that “the black church replaces the Puritans in Obama’s chronicle of American spirituality.” In any case, Barack Obama is, without doubt, the “most left-wing liberal to be elected to national executive office since Henry Wallace.” (Take that, Hubert Humphrey!) And what is Kesler’s evidence for these extravagant claims? He hasn’t any.

My impulse is always to belittle my political opponents, to think that they are bumbling idiots or demagogues who want memberships in the Congressional gym, and to assume that history will soon pass them by. But some people seem to enjoy turning their enemies into Saurons with vast armies and dark powers. We are all only human, and our parts in history are small.