In Part 1, I took note of the reportage casting Fox News as "populist" highlighted by Kargo X, and wrote:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
In this diary, I want to dig back into history, and uncover some key turning points that brought us from the economic populist solidarity of the New Deal to the sorry state we find ourselves in today, where the Democratic Party is still virtually clueless about how to respond to such outrageous lies. A key figure in this story is the pivotal Republican President of the past 75 years--Richard Nixon.
While Barack Obama and legions of his supporters insist on seeing Reagan as his hagiographers have painted him--as a trascendental transformative figure--the simple reality is that he was nothing of the sort. He was the beneficiary of an enormous amount of high-power myth-making. But Nixon was the one who made it all possible.
I've argued elsewhere about why 1968 was a de-aligning election--ending the "New Deal" Fifth Party System, in which Democrats dominated Congress and the presidency as thoroughly as any party has ever dominated a party system, and ushering in the only party system in American history in which the dominant "party" is divided government. Now, in an excerpt from his new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein provides a striking snapshot of how that deeply split 1968 election sent down much deeper splits into the bedrock of American politics. The excerpt, "Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" (at American Prospect Online) describes the progression of blue-collar anti-anti-war violence, rioting, and eventual mass marching that thrilled Nixon with the prospect of a vast political realignment:
Nixon had tried to talk to the student demonstrators. He concluded he preferred the hard hats. "Thinks now the college demonstrators have overplayed their hands," Haldeman wrote in his diary, "evidence is the blue collar group rising against them, and [president] can mobilize them."
New York construction workers now took every lunch hour for boisterous patriotic demonstrations. So did hard hats in San Diego, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Some of the rallies were not entirely spontaneous: "Obviously more of these will be occurring throughout the nation," White House staffer Stephen Bull wrote in a memo to Chuck Colson, "perhaps partially as a result of your clandestine activity." Peter Brennan, the combative head of the Building Trades Council of Greater New York, accused of organizing the "hard hat riot," defiantly denied it -- then showed what he could do as an organizer: one hundred thousand marchers on May 20, complete with a cement mixer draped with a LINDSAY FOR MAYOR OF HANOI banner. Signs read GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT and WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW. Time called it "a kind of workers' Woodstock."
In my previous diary, The Ontology of Snark: A Prelude, I presented a basic outline of ego defense mechanisms, and their progression from primitive to mature, even sophisticated. But I also noted the existence of a couple of anamolies-splitting and projective identification-and promised to say more about them in a future diary. Well, the future is now.
In contrast to the ego defense mechanisms, the these two processes first appear before the ego is formed, even before a clear sense of "me" and "not-me" exists, and play import roles in the process of early development out of which the stabilized ego emerges. However, that is hardly the end of them. Rather these mechanisms persist throughout the developmental process, and indeed, throughout life. Projective identification has been associated with a wide range of mature phenomena; it has been seen as the foundation of empathy, as well as being the basis of the therapeutic relationship-indeed, as the foundation of all human relations, according to some. Splitting is even more primitive, and as such, arguably underlies virtually all psychological processes, one way or another.
While these two processes are fascinating in themselves-and have direct manifestations in the political realm-the purpose of this diary is not to explore them in any great depth, but rather to follow the path from them to a pair of concepts about basic psychological orientation, which in turn have a broad applicability to politics. These are Melanie Klein's inter-related concepts of the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. As well see, these can be directly related to differences in outlook between reactionaries and progressives.
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