English 83

Again, on the image of “Camelot” – the Kennedys, and Democratic politics – Mat Bai notes that comparisons between Barack Obama and Robert F. Kennedy are on the loose:

There’s something unhealthy about all this Baby-Boomer reminiscing, because it forces Democrats always to look backward, to serve some unrealized ideal of government rather than a more modern and relevant vision of what government might become. There is a faint line between nostalgia and delusion, and with each passing year, those liberals who long for the reincarnation of their heroes seem ever closer to obliterating it.

We may be at some kind of sea change, where the Camelot/Kennedy myth could be receding as so many post-boomers, who have no memories (real or manufactured) of the 1960s, vote. The Arthurian myth may recede a bit with it, or just become another vehicle for a different kind of political nostalgia.