On Friday, Max Blumenthal was on Democracy Now! to talk about his new book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. I haven't seen a copy, much less read his book, but at first listen, it sounds like he has done an excellent job of hitting the bulls-eye of target that others--in books that were already excellent in their own rights--have only clipped before, without quite realizing that the bull's-eye even existed.
This passage from the publisher's description (link above) describes that bull's-eye:
more that just an expose, Republican Gomorrah shows that many of the movement's leading figures have more in common than just the power they command within conservative ranks. Their personal lives have been stained by crisis and scandal: depression, mental illness, extra-marital affairs, struggles with homosexual urges, heavy medication, addiction to pornography, serial domestic abuse, and even murder. Inspired by the work of psychologists Erich Fromm, who asserted that the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right, transforming the nature of the Republican Party for the next generation and setting the stage for the future of American politics.
Numerous other writers have noted how frequently religious right figures get into trouble with sex scandals. I mean, you've got to work pretty damn hard not to notice it. And in Great American Hypocrites, Glenn Greenwald went one step further, describing how conservative political heroes, not specifically religious figures, have repeatedly turned out to be the polar opposite of the images of the rectitude that they project, but here, Blumenthal is examining this phenomena not simply as hypocrisy on a grand scale, or a grand deception, but as the inexorable workings of natural laws, taking Fromm's insights and applying them systematically to a history that has been staring us in the face now for decades.
What's more, when Blumenthal includes James Dobson in this pattern, he (perhaps inadvertently) outflanks George Lakoff as well. In Moral Politics, Lakoff discussed Dobson's work in Dare To Discipline as exemplifying what he called the "Strict Father" model of childrearing on which American conservatism is based. However, in retrospect Blumenthal's approach reveals how Lakoff seemingly downplayed the more disturbing implications of what he had uncovered.
Some excerpts from the interview, and further explanation of what I mean on the flip.
"It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he [William Ayers] had led a fugitive life years earlier." -- former Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson.
"Now we're all sons of bitches." -- Ken Bainbridge, test director, first atomic bomb test, Los Alamos, New Mexico, July 16, 1945.
It may seem like a minor point at best, a moral abomination at worst, but it bears saying, nonetheless: The labeling of William Ayers as "a domestic terrorist" in the 1970s is a debatable point at best. This is not to defend his choices at the time. It is, rather, to insist, ala George Orwell, on the importance of preserving accurate language, for without it, our collective capacity to tell and know the truth disappears.
Furthermore, one could just as well argue that John McCain was "a state terrorist" for his role in the Vietnam War. But that, of course, is politically unthinkable. Making some things unthinkable, and other things unquestionable is what "democratic" authoritarianism is all about.
There is nothing new in this. In a democracy, the people are responsible for the actions of their government. When our government drops atomic bombs on large Japanese cities, we are all terrorists to some degree. So, too, when we drop napalm on small Vietnamese villages, or when our tax-supported allies kill nuns in El Salvador, or arm religious fanatics in Afghanistan. Terrorism, like suburbia, became a way of life during the Cold War. No wonder we need a scapegoat, into whom all our guilt and self-loathing can pass.
Over at Talk2Action--the preimer progressive blog on the intersection of politics, religion, history and culture--former religious right leader Francis Schaeffer has an excellent now post--"The Phony McCain vs. The Real Obama"-- calling attention to what I'd call John McCain's Jesus Complex:
Senator McCain's motto seems to be: Judge me not by what I say or do or who I climb into bed with, rather judge me by the fact that I served my country. This is what might be called the, I'm Jesus Christ argument. Having suffered, been imprisoned and then raised again on behalf of America, who are ordinary mortals such as Senator Obama, to question McCain's judgments?
Two related stories in today's New York Times illustrate McCain's I'm-Jesus-so-above-criticism deceit. The Timesreports that McCain repudiated the Reverend Hagee for saying that God used Hitler to get the Jews to return to Israel. In another story the Times reported that Obama backed the New GI Bill to give vets better educational benefits. The Times also reported on McCain's opposition to the New GI Bill.
In one of the stories Obama was answering questions from a Jewish audience about his support for Israel. "If my policies are wrong, vote against me because my policies are wrong," Obama told people gathered inside the synagogue, B'nai Torah Congregation. "Don't vote against me because of who I am."
In the other story on military benefits Obama said: "I respect Senator John McCain's service to our country ... But I can't understand why he would line up behind the president in opposition to this G.I. Bill." McCain retorted, "I take a back seat to no one in my affection, respect and devotion to veterans," Mr. McCain said. "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did."
What does this add up to?
McCain didn't support Senator Jim Webb's new GI Bill, but that doesn't matter because McCain served his country.
McCain is relying on the support of bizarre evangelical anti-Semites to win the White House, but that doesn't matter because he served his country.
Schaeffer, who's written a book about his past, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back., has a lot more to say about McCain, Obama and these two stories. And I'll have more to say about McCain this weekend, too. But I just want to stop here and highlght this particular aspect of McCain's psychology, because increasingly his entire campaign is coming to rest on it--not just the fact that he served his country, but a quasi-religious claim that because he served his country, no one can question him about anything, because his has rendered him virtually Christ-like.
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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