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.
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.
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 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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