Last weekend, I wrote a 6-part series exhaustively going through Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". I called it "Conservative condescension: Projection and conservative victomology on parade". There's a brief reminder of what was in each part on the flip. You'd think I had enough already. But there's some very good reasons why this is not the case.
First of all, a very good point was raised by Oaktown Girl last weekend about the need to come up with the exact opposite of what I had provided--a short--very short--response to Alexander that could be widely disseminated to counter the potential power of his narrative. We're talking one-liners here, folks--elevator speeches at most.
I'll be running a diary on that--soliciting your suggestions--later today, currently scheduled for 3:30 PM EST.
Second, I wanted to do up a systematic shredding of his touting of "welfare reform" as an example of something that conservatives got right and liberals got wrong because of their "condescension." I'll be doing a diary on that sometime tomorrow.
Third there were a couple of stunning rebukes of Alexander in the news this week. The first is relative simple to deal with--turns out that 80% of Americans are condescending liberals!Yikes! But the second takes up the vast bulk of this diary: a delving into the weirdness of CPAC. I'll just say this flat-out, you don't get much more condescending than the way conservatives talk about President Obama. But there's something much uglier and more primitive going on here, and I'm not talking racism, though that's certainly part of the mix. I'm talking primitive psychological processes that I've written about before that need to be looked at again.
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.
Friday, at DKos, BarbinMD sampled the press take on the state of play following Childer's romp in MS-01. In shortened versions, from the New York Times:
Republican defeat... waves of apprehension across an already troubled party... heavy losses in the fall... a once-steadfast Republican district... foreshadowing more losses for the party in November... level of distress was evident... the Republican Party had been severely damaged... could lose 20 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate... putting into play Southern seats that were once solidly Republican... the string of Republican losses suggested a problem with the Republican label... vast dissatisfaction, frustration and discouragement...
Stunned House Republicans... their third straight election defeat in once-friendly territory... the worst since Watergate and far more toxic than the fall of 2006 when we lost 30 seats... President Bush is unpopular... Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee enjoyed a cash advantage of $44 million to $7 million... We're not going to be able to scare people into voting Republican... the loss of three seats in special elections was a significant blow... They are canaries in the coal mine, warning of far greater losses in the fall...
House Republicans turned on themselves yesterday... contemplating widespread Democratic gains in November... decried their leadership as out of touch with the political catastrophe they face... "The Change You Deserve" -- came under mocking fire... mirrors the advertising slogan for the antidepressant Effexor... a deficiency in our message and a loss of confidence in the American people... ..Republican strategists were downcast... fail to understand the deep seeded antipathy toward the President, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures... a tense closed-door meeting... I've never seen members so frustrated or demoralized...
After that, D-Day went on to cite a whole boatload of BushCo dirty laundry that's come out in the last month.
And yet, despite all this whole lotta shakin' goin' on from below, all these cracks in the conservative hegemonic order of things, it's still the case--as I pointed out in a diary last weekend--that "A List of 50 Top Pundits Illustrates Conservative Hegemony In Action". And so it was no surprise that today Glenn Greenwald wrote about the continued prominance given to a kindergarden gay-baiting screed at the Washington Post in place of serious commentary on Edwards' endorsement of Barack Obama.
All of which is to say, this was a week in which the battle-lines of this election cycle were sharply drawn.
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."
But hey, no one could have predicted that Fox would use these appearances for PR purposes, right?
So there you have it. For everyone who was so sure this was brilliant, because the candidates were "reaching out," apparently we forgot that the traditional media would still have an opportunity to define for America to whom they were reaching out. Fans of the candidates assured us that it was (pick one): 1) swing voters; 2) open-minded conservatives (ha!), or; 3) people who had lost their TV remotes. But gosh darn it if the Fox PR machine hasn't schooled us all. It was populists! Which means both Clinton and Obama -- and all Democrats, by extension -- are elitists.
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".
This is a very old game, and it's way past time we got a better handle on it. Before getting into any sort of messy details, it's important to note--ala my diary two weeks ago, "The Ontology of Snark: A Prelude"--that there's a common ego defense mechanism in play here:
Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet; separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her husband.
Real, actual conservative elites have been using displacement as a stock in trade for millenia, creating ghost elites for unwitting populists to misdirect their anger at. It was virtually inevitable that Obama's "new politics" of "change" would be targetted with this ancient charge. It was not inevitable that it would have such a weak response. But, then, the consultant class that crafted it really is part and parcel of the Versailles elite. So what could we expect?
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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