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I'm a great believer in overdetermination. Virtually nothing in human affairs has a single cause. So nothing in this diary is meant to disparage, diminish or trivialize other factors. There are all sorts of socio-political reasons for Obama's obsessive and equally fruitless mania for "consensus." Corporate power has grown so enormously over the past 40 years that it's grown far more daunting to oppose it straight-out, and this, in turn has given rise to a welter of reasons not to do so-not to mention the entire Versailles political culture that finds such opposition quite literally unthinkable.
But there's more to Obama than simply going along with the political tides. There's also the vast pretense of doing no such thing-of being someone who brings sweeping changes... by seeking consensus with the titanic forces of the status quo. Contradictions such as this should also be understood as being primarily generated by the socio-political system as a whole. (Just to take one example-if Obama really were the great reformer he pretends to be, would he have been Wall Street's #1 beneficiary of campaign contributions in the 2008 election cycle? Or would he have been starved for such funds, like, say, John Edwards, or even Dennis Kucinich?) But a politician who actively and continually embodies such contradictions in their everyday life will have a definite edge if their personal psychology is particularly suited to embracing those contradictions for purely internal reasons. A true believer in public falsehoods has the edge of "authenticity"-always a big plus in politics. And it's hard to argue that Obama's relentless, ideological commitment to centrism is inauthentic.
So what explains it? The specifics may be rather complicated, but in broad outline, the answer is fairly simple: it's the ego-defense mechanism known as reaction-formation. Wikipedia explains:
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In psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation is a defensive process (defense mechanism) in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions and impulses are mastered by exaggeration (hypertrophy) of the directly opposing tendency.[1][2]
Reaction formation depends on the hypothesis that
"[t]he instincts and their derivatives may be arranged as pairs of opposites: life versus death, construction versus destruction, action versus passivity, dominance versus submission, and so forth. When one of the instincts produces anxiety by exerting pressure on the ego either directly or by way of the superego, the ego may try to sidetrack the offending impulse by concentrating upon its opposite. For example, if feelings of hate towards another person make one anxious, the ego can facilitate the flow of love to conceal the hostility."[3]
Where reaction-formation takes place, it is usually assumed that the original, rejected impulse does not vanish, but persists, unconscious, in its original infantile form.[2] Thus, where love is experienced as a reaction formation against hate, we cannot say that love is substituted for hate, because the original aggressive feelings still exist underneath the affectionate exterior that merely masks the hate to hide it from awareness.[3]
In a diagnostic setting, the existence of a reaction-formation rather than a 'simple' emotion would be suspected where exaggeration, compulsiveness and inflexibility were observed. For example,
"[r]eactive love protests too much; it is overdone, extravagant, showy, and affected. It is counterfeit, and [...] is usually easily detected. Another feature of a reaction formation is its compulsiveness. A person who is defending himself against anxiety cannot deviate from expressing the opposite of what he really feels. His love, for instance, is not flexible. It cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do; rather it must be constantly on display as if any failure to exhibit it would cause the contrary feeling to come to the surface.[3]
Reaction formation is sometimes described as one of the most difficult defenses for lay people to understand;[1] this testifies not merely to its effectiveness as a disguise, but also to its ubiquity and flexibility as a defense that can be utilized in many forms.
If "exaggeration, compulsiveness and inflexibility" don't describe Obama's infatuation with consensus and compromise, I don't know what does. What's more, reaction formation also helps explain Obama's hostility towards progressives who want him to actually do something-whether they be single-payer advocates pressing for real health care reform, the ACLU looking for a complete repudiation of Bush's trampling of civil liberties, economists like Paul Krugman calling for a robust stimulus, and meaningful financial regulations, GLBT activists seeking repeal of DADT, etc., etc., etc.
Of course it's more complicated than that, since Obama himself gave overt-if sometimes qualified-encouragement to those seeking real change during the campaign. Thus, it wouldn't be accurate to say that Obama's embrace of centrism masks a more progressive impulse, since he himself openly expressed that impulse during the campaign. But it is fair to say that Obama displays a genuine fear of progressivism, and need to control it, even when he articulates progressive positions. He's not against all wars he says-just dumb ones-and he says this at an anti-war rally.
Indeed, Obama is right at home with the neoliberal wing of the party that has long sought-ala the DLC's "Progressive Policy Institute" to redefine "progressive" in a manner that's distinctively non-threatening to the status quo, whereas previously "progressives" self-identified as such to distinguish themselves to the left of the "Cold War liberals" who brought us the Vietnam War, the establishment predecessors of the kind of "progressives" that Obama does feel comfortable with. This is how personal psychology links up with broader political realities.
The progressive instincts that Obama is reacting against are not simply long-suppressed infantile wishes, as might at first appear to be the case from the above description of classic reaction formation. Rather, the way that reaction formation works can be quite complicated. One may initially be attracted to a person, thing, activity or idea, only to have a reaction formation triggered at a later time. While the root of this dynamic may trace back to early childhood, and relate to infantile desires, there may well be a period of time in which the attraction is experienced in a more mature form, as does indeed seem to be the case with Obama.
Indeed, one might say that Obama's transition from campaigning to governing marked a distinct transformation in which a significant reaction formation occurred. This is not to say that everything changed at once. There is abundant evidence that Obama shifted positions gradually over time from more progressive to more status-quo points of view on a number of issues. He is hardly the only politician to ever do so. But the transition from campaigning to governing was particularly striking for the degree to which his positions changed, even though the extent of change was not immediately apparent-especially to strong Obama supporters, who, for example, repeatedly claimed that the re-appointment of Bush officials did not mean a policy continuity, or that recycling Clinton officials, rather than bringing in new blood, did not mean continuity with Clintonism, either. In hindsight, one year later, those excuses can be clearly seen for what they were, and thus the starkness of the transition is all the more apparent-along with the looming political consequences of failing to keep his campaign promise of breaking decisively with Bush's failed policies.
It's important to realize that reaction formation doesn't occur in a vacuum. Ego defenses can interact with one another, they can become more or less prominent, they reflect a complex and dynamic mix of internal and external pressures. As I said at the beginning, I'm a great believer in overdetermination, and virtually nothing in human affairs has a single cause. But reaction formation does represent a pattern of affect and behavior that I believe is clearly visible in Obama, and that adds a dimension of dysfunctional inflexibility in dealing with the fact that his ideological commitment to the neoliberal/New Democrat/GOP-lite approach has run into a brick wall, regardless of whether or not it could ever actually solve the problems we now face. Recognizing this pattern does not mean using it as an excuse to stop making other sorts of arguments about policy and political efficacy. It just means adding another facet to our understanding of the forces in play in the politics of Versailles. One more obstacle we have to take into account. Not a new obstacle. Just a newly names and recognized one.
Which in theory should make it more possible to deal with. |
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