Are We Being Gaslit About the Endless Charm and Appeal of Beto O’Rourke?
Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, writing in October:
Like Obama, O’Rourke is running on hope over fear; he exudes compassion and speaks about “power and joy.” Christine Allison, a Republican-turned-independent, is president of the company that publishes D Magazine, a city magazine for Dallas, and one of O’Rourke’s ardent supporters. “He listens,” she told me, saying that he has what Christians sometimes call a “servant-leader approach to politics.”
Quartz magazine, mid-October:
He’s transformed Democratic regulars into fervent volunteers, and the politically neutral into committed voters. “He gave me hope,” said Lauren Thompson, a 22-year-old recent college graduate who sat out the 2016 presidential election and is determined to show up for the midterms. O’Rourke is even turning some Republicans. Dianne Martin, a 70-year-old retired high-school Latin teacher who said she once felt conflicted about Barack Obama because of his race, told me now she wants to be “on the right side of history.”
A typical Facebook comment: “Beto’s speeches are so inspirational & gives us hope!”
Around the same time, Britt Daniel, the lead singer of the venerable indie band Spoon, describing the stickers and t-shirts for Beto O’Rourke he was seeing around New York City: “Maybe they just see him as someone who has a future for the party, a future in politics, or maybe they’re just genuinely inspired by him.”
Last year and this year we’re witnessing Beto-mania, just a few years after different groups of America embraced Trump-mania, eight years after another group of Americans embraced Obama-mania . . . (Let’s face it, there never was much Romney-mania.)
Are our politics more driven by cults of personality than in the past?
I’m not just talking about enthusiasm for the candidate; that’s always existed. I mean the weirdly over-the-top reverence exhibited by the O’Rourke devotees, seemingly inspired by the most mundane things — he plays guitar! He skateboards! He swears! — and the repeated references that he “brings people hope,” and personal testimonials from fans that he restored their hope for the country.
He’s . . . just some guy. He was in Congress for six years and nobody noticed. He hasn’t done much in his life — no wartime heroics, no remarkable entrepreneurship, no inspiring tale of overcoming adversity or discrimination or long odds to success. For his first 30 years, he’s something of a slacker screwup. In these profiles, he keeps driving around with a reporter, using the F-bomb, getting fast food, talking wistfully of Ciudad Juarez and the correspondents freak out like they’ve hanging out with the Rolling Stones.
What’s so exciting and inspiring about him?
It’s easy to see what got people excited about Barack Obama. He’s a classic American success story. Biracial, absent father, often absent mother, a name that marks him as an outsider from day one. Whatever you think of Obama, you can see that it would not have taken many wrong turns for him to end up on a much worse path in life. He pulled himself together from his “choom gang” days and made his way up a difficult path; he figured out what it took to climb the ladder all the way to the top and he did it. A lot of people saw themselves in Obama because he was the guy who wasn’t born with all the advantages, the guy who was ignored, dismissed, counted out, underestimated — “slept on and stepped on,” as Pitbull says. If Obama can make it to the top with all of his challenges and disadvantages, so can you. Plus, it’s easy to understand the excitement and hopes surrounding the election of the first black president. You can’t begrudge people for believing that event would make some sort of turning point for the better in American history.
Just because I’m inoculated against the appeal of Trump doesn’t mean I don’t see its roots. Trump’s the millionaire who became a billionaire, the guy who has “to hell with you” money and isn’t afraid to say “to hell with you” to anybody. He refuses to play by anyone else’s rules, and people feel a sense of vicarious liberation in that. He’s famous for saying, “You’re fired,” not out of cruelty but out of a need to enforce accountability. Critics charge he’s a fearmonger, but he sometimes articulates genuine, valid fears that a lot of other figures ignored or downplayed. “If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country.” “I think Islam hates us.” “Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.”
But with Beto O’Rourke? I don’t see it with this guy. I don’t see much of anything with this guy, and it feels like the emperor’s new clothes. I can’t tell if I’ve become too cynical to relate to “normal Americans” or whether someone is gaslighting the rest of us.
There’s a little bit of evidence that it might be the latter. Last night Marc Ambinder, who’s moved on from his old political reporting, tweeted:
So here’s an observation from having spent a week in DC with students and reconnecting with lots of political, [national security] folks, and old friends. The Dems know they have to pretend to like Beto O’Rourke…. Those who’ve met her and him separately tend to love her and realize they have to pretend to find him cool.
No doubt, some people genuinely love O’Rourke and find him a breath of fresh air, fun, relatable, authentic, and unpretentious. Where I see an Owen Wilson character waiting to happen — the guy trying too hard to be cool — they see a Matthew McConaughey role, the earnest, plainspoken former congressman with his eyes on the horizon and a dream to revive the American spirit.
But watching this trend — Obamamania, Trumpmania, Betomania — one can’t help but wonder if the modern world has left Americans with a hunger for heroes that is so unmet that we’re shoehorning politicians into this role in our lives. We used to know the names of brave soldiers, astronauts, inventors.
Or is it that as we become a less religious society, we need to find another inspirational figure who promises deliverance to believe in? H/T National Review
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