A philosopher named Simon Critchley has an essay about Obama, entitled “The American Void,” in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine. It’s a classic example of the despair, together with incomprehension of ordinary human experience, that are characteristic of a generation of academics who have immersed themselves in Marx, Nietzsche, and their intellectual descendants.

Critchley says that in promoting the idea of a common good, Obama “dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism [the ‘competition’-RMW] that constitutes political life.” But the result of such a dream, according to Critchley, is to “consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.” So the upshot, for Critchley, is that “we must believe, but we can’t believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realization that nothing will change.”

Talk about nihilism! What Critchley doesn’t seem able to acknowledge is that Obama’s appeal to the common good is neither merely “emotional,” nor a “balm”—it’s an appeal to an ideal. Like many disappointed idealists, Marx and Nietzsche disparaged appeals to ideals. (Though the appeal of their actual programs depended, in unspoken ways, completely on ideals: of justice and brotherhood, in Marx’s case, and of personal freedom, in Nietzsche’s. But they never acknowledged this fact.) After the idealistic hopes of the 1960s generation were (to a significant degree) disappointed, many intellectuals followed in Marx’s and Nietzsche’s footsteps, becoming bitterly suspicious of ideals and talking instead about “matter,” “power,” “agonism,” and so forth.

Now Obama’s unforeseen degree of success has shown that many non-“intellectuals” (at least) are still open to the appeal of ideals. Critchley’s failure to grasp this simple fact—and the difference between intelligible and discussable ideals (on the one hand), and “emotional, fusional balm” (on the other)—shows how deep despair can go. Evidently Critchley didn’t find it possible to adopt Plato’s attitude toward ideals—that they can be discussed, criticized, clarified, and founded on the truth about human beings—when he joined the discipline of “philosophy” whose name Plato coined.

Another story of the sad abandonment of youthful ideals is that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, during the years after the French Revolution collapsed into the Terror, and then into imperialistic conquest. Let us be more patient with the world than Wordsworth and Coleridge and Marx and Nietzsche were! We have more experience of the durability of ideals of freedom, justice, and the “common good” than they had.

No doubt many of our high hopes for the Obama administration will be disappointed. Obama is human, and so are we. But the ideals to which Obama appeals will remain in our hearts, and in minds that don’t succumb to despair, to be tapped again.