The Obama train is like Blair in 1997

Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey. Obama goes to Washington by train. The crowds were disappointed in Jesus because he did not bring heaven on earth, but they have hopes for their new messiah, the new changemaker on the block, Barack Obama. To non-believers, this media stageshow might smack of hubris and presumption: a wise and respectful man should enter Washington like a servant of the people not like some conquering emporer. His supporters disagree. They revel in his triumph, all played out on TV. They believe in the religion of progressive liberalism, closely related to other faiths such as Communism, which promises an earthly utopia of equality, justice and a new rational ordering of society. They think they have captured America from the past they despise.

The last such triumphal procession was that of Tony Blair's to Downing Street in 1997, another triumph of faith over content, when popular acclaim seemed to waft the left's great hope into power. The adoring spectators in Downing street, whose hands Blair graciously shook and tremulously clasped, were in fact labour party activists. That was never mentioned on the BBC, but the media obligingly showed the pictures. What mattered was the spectacle, the play at being hero of the people, agent of their will. Having ascended to power with such popular acclaim in 1997, Blair's final act as leader of his country was to agree to the European Constitution, thereby giving up more of our democratic rights to the European Union. What will Obama do in power?

His supporters don't seem to care. Nor do they care that this media circus shows scant respect for America's traditions or institutions by exalting Barack Obama, the man, at the expense of the presidential office and the institutions which he is meant to preserve. Obama's staged inauguration betrays the fascination with the ascent to power, and avoids the responsibility of asking how he will use that power: no one knows what Obama's Change agenda will be, but his supporters have faith that Change will be good. Unfortunately the evidence of history suggests that progressive solutions don't actually work: their election programme was deliberately shorn of any content because they didn't dare suggest specific policies; so, to make up for the vacuity of the programme, there is the spectacle of change. This is why we have the fetishing of Obama's accession, the ecstatic moment when the corrupt old order gives way.

In the revolutionary past of the progressive movement, there was the storming of the Bastille and the October Revolution, which tore down the old order, as if by spontaneous will of the masses. We know what happened to the masses afterwards. Obamas' train to Washington and Blair's procession to Downing Street are sanitised reenactments of these terrible moments, divested of physical violence to be sure, but symbolic none the less of a disdain for the past and an unsubstantiated belief in an idealised future where everything will work out - as long as we trust in words like Equality, Progress, Change, Modernity, Freedom and Humanity. Implicit in these processions is a disdain towards the traditions, culture and morality that we have inherited. The liberal media revel in this.

It is ironic that in the cold war, we tended to contrast the dominant liberalism of the Western world with Communism; but modern-day progressive Liberals , unlike classical Liberals whose name they have stolen, have more in common with the Jacobins or the Communists than people realise. Having failed to appreciate the hard-fought gains of our forefathers, and seeing only their faults, these modern day revolutionaries are ideologically committing to dismantling our traditions and remaking society according to the ideals of the French and Russian Revolutions, updated for the new political context of course, but basically the same ends. Rather than appreciating the benefits of civilisation they have inherited, and carefully building on what others have by effort achieved, they are intoxicated with their moment on the stage of history. They want to be the makers of history and grand gestures are their stock in trade. They delight in the frisson of rebellion, of being seen to reject the corrupt and oppressive past; they want to be on the side of the victors and to build new Jerusalem in their own image even if they destroy the most beautiful and useful structures in the process.

They say they care about the poor and the disenfranchised, but only when these people serve their ideological agenda. See how the left have deserted the working classes on issues such as immigration, crime and Free Trade - because the globalist ideology of a common humanity trumps concern for their own people. Social Justice, Equality, Freedom - these are just pretexts, words they use to justify the underlying aims of their malignant charity. These worshippers of Change use the language of rational political discourse, but underlying their rationalisations is a deep-rooted, modern-day Dionisian cult where, like the Bacchic revellers of myth and history, they can delight in tearing down the old order simply because, like Pentheus, it stands before them.