After all the brouhaha of the last week I remembered a post from a couple years ago.  It bears repeating.

A while back Barbara Walters said the difficulties engulfing President Barack Obama are a reflection of the let-down people are feeling from the high expectations they had during his earliest days in office when she and others thought he was going to be “the next messiah.” She said it, I didn’t. There is a difference between messianism and being the Messiah. You get messianism when you have removed religion and faith and Christ from public life. When you do that political parties become our religion. Or in the case of some of the ideologies they become the religion and the political party that enhances that ideology is a part of the religion. We call that politicization. I have been waiting a long time to put this on the blog but I have always hesitated. Read it in light of what Walters said and what we witness each day in the news and someday I will tell you who wrote it and when.

What does this process of politicization mean? What finally is happening with these powers, which today wrestle for rule and whose influence upon souls appears to be greater than the influence of the church? As philosophically based world views the older of them came to exist in the first half of the previous century. Marxism and the great conservative and liberal democratic doctrines about society rose between 1830 and 1848 upon the debris of the great philosophical systems of the Enlightenment and the classical period. To this day among us political membership is a matter of worldview. These powerful mass organizations have in this parliamentary-democratic episode of our history, usurped rule over the state for themselves. Their power finds the most striking expression in the press, whose proper goal is no longer reporting news – one of the chief tasks of the editor is the concealing of facts – rather the formation of mass opinion and of mass will using every means of suggestion at its disposal. Today the old form of the parties appears to have survived. The democratic nature of the party must indeed take in to consideration the voters, which one would win. But that will become superfluous the moment the mass has been assembled, and its rule accomplished. Only the individual can think and decide. The mass will relieve a person of the trouble of thinking and from the agony of decision. We wants to be lead. The idea of the leader and the idea of the Mass belong together. Worldview is more and more surrendered to the leader. It reaches into the past and becomes progressively more primitive. Compare the rich thought of the older systems perhaps of Karl Marx [1818-1883] and Friedrich Julius Stahl [1802-1861] with the ideological content of the present party program. There is today no party, which does not live from the thought of the nineteenth century. Only the leader concept is new, along with the rhetoric! Now it’s no longer an issue of productive thought, but rather the creative will, not about worldview but forming the world. Embodying this one will, and equipped with a plenitude of power, the leader elite transform the antiquated apparatus of the party into the new form. It is a living movement in which the masses, a great following of once isolated, atomized individuals now associated, who entrust themselves to a leader. It is not because they completely approve of his goals, which they don’t even know – only he knows where he is leading us – but because they believe in him. The mystery of the leader the deep compulsion toward leadership by the leader resides not in the human greatness of his individuality, not in the great richness of his ideas – rather in the power of his will, in his ability to organize masses…