Why Obama isn't Reagan

When Reagan made his Berlin Wall speech, everything that followed was a fait accompli -- not because of the drama of his speech, but because of all the work that had been done prior to that point, most of it not done by the US but by many factors orchestrating a perfect storm of freedom. Republicans seem to admire the Great Man who takes a stand, but without much understanding of how one must work with surrounding circumstances and not attempt to push the river of history uphill by force. To make a Great Man, things have to line up just right, and it's only marginally a matter of individual will. Bush acted Reaganesque, without the preparation or historical momentum to make the Great Plan work out. Obama isn't that blind, that I can see.


Worshipping the Great Man is a strange mistake for Christians to make, given that Christianity is a transcendent religion that provides no support to the Great Man theory. Nobody is great, that was the point of Christ's denunciation of hypocritical religious power. When the stoning mob was about to devoutly stone an adulteress to death, Jesus stepped in and used the best line ever from the field of revolutionary judo: "Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone." Anyone arrogant enough to take a throw would immediately single himself out, and his peers would know well from the grapevine that he was no saint. That kind of statement levels the usual power disparity between the well-connected and the isolated -- the anonymity of the jury pool is eliminated by the fact that *someone* has to be the first to throw, and instead of legitimizing the cruelty of the second and third throwers, the first stands alone and is judged by his own judgment. Note how this works before any stones are thrown at all -- the woman is saved from a horrible death at the hands of an arrogant, judgmental mob acting in God's name. The stoning mob is not punished, in part because they represent the law and it would be difficult to hold them accountable in such a system, but also because the intervention WORKS. It has power in the moment that matters to change the course of events and disrupt a contagiously oppressive mindset of unaccountable judgment.

I don't know how one would create a similar dynamic to stop gangs of self-righteous biker-priests. But the principle must be useful somehow.