By nature, I am a worrisome person, more often than not about things which are not worth my sparsely-available old man’s energy. So I churned into worry when I read the article about Obama supporters gathering at OM Lounge—a nightclub once accurately described to me as “the place where fifty-year-old bankers go to try to get their daughters’ friends to have sex with them”—to raise money for their cause. I started worrying that somebody might find out about this and feed it into the echo chamber of pampered noblesse oblige liberals chatting about intellectual liberal policy in obsequious East Coast bars. I considered blogging about it then, but remembered that fundraising is a necessary, if ugly, spine of the political system, and that getting worried about rich people in bars might only betray my naïveté rather than raise an effective alarm.

Then, today, I read that Democrats are getting flown to North Carolina to campaign for Obama at the behest of wealthy Italian expats. And my worries came back. Obamaism at its best is refreshing break from the politics of malfeasance we’ve suffered through for eight years, and it is infused with a truly revolutionary and truly historical bent. Obamaism at its worst, however, is demarcated by vaguely liberal college students casting their lot with a person who “feels right” to them and flying to North Carolina on the dime of the rich in order to convince yokels that their homegrown superstitions are backwards and that they ought to be voting for ‘change.’ A sort of latter-day mission civilisatrice, if you will.

Far be it from me to lend any assist or support to the wearisome culture wars which the media produces from sparklers and black powder for its own entertainment. But I worry that this sort of thing smacks of the worst sort of cultural domineering, and is politically tenable only from the point of view of an increasingly provincialized urban élite.