Michael Goodwin's piece in the New York Daily News this morning is a ridiculous knock that Obama is to be feared because the public is behind him and Obama is eloquent and confident.Typical of rightwingers Goodwin just wants to smear; that it has no grounding in fact or evidence is besides the point. Nor is it important that Goodwin likes to quote from books that he hasn't read. Good enough for the Daily News.
Goodwin borrows from Eric Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts on The Nature of Mass Movements by insisting that Obama is a scary "true believer" because he seems so well-spoken and confident.
One has to believe that Goodwin never actually read Hoffer's book that popularized a serious domain of social-psychological research in the 1950s that tried to explain why people would do stupid things like join fascist movements and align themselves unthinkingly with authoritarians.
The true believer is a fanatic. He has no intellectual curiosity, no sense of history, and no need to critically examine any aspect of the ideology or the authoritarian to which he assigns himself, and certainly no need to read the book from which he cites. Writes Goodwin:
It's too early for Obama to back up all his claims, but midway through his compelling press conference on Wednesday night, after he had asserted a list of accomplishments, I scribbled the words 'The True Believer' in my notebook.
After only 100 days on the job, our talented new President shows no signs of doubt.
He is a follower who can be found jumping from one crazy movement - NAZIism, Communism, Nationalism - to another.
Considering this uncontroversial thrust of Hoffer's work, are we then to assign the term "true believer" to Obama as an unthinking follower or an authoritarian?
Goodwin doesn't even try to make the case.
- via mal contends
No comments:
Post a Comment