The Infantile Style in American Politics

[Bronco_Beerslug]

Very long read but the similarities are amazing between now and then...

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Tuesday, Dec 6, 2011 4:30 AM India Standard Time
The infantile style in American politics

The GOP has reverted to a pre-potty-trained state. A 50-year-old essay explains why

By Gary Kamiya

The farce known as the GOP presidential campaign has officially become a freak show. Newt Gingrich, the creepiest huckster in American politics, whose unique combination of hypocrisy, opportunism and sanctimoniousness led to his being unceremoniously bounced from Congress back in 1998, is now the front-runner to become the Republican presidential nominee.

Having gone through Michele “the founding Fathers ended slavery” Bachmann, Rick “I’d close down the federal government if only I could remember what it is” Perry, and Herman “all this stuff twirling around in my head” Cain, Republican voters have now embraced their latest unelectable stooge, a narcissistic, ethically challenged trough-feeder and third-rate history professor whose brilliant ideas include a ludicrous two-track Social Security option and undermining the Supreme Court.


Richard Hofstadter (left) (Credit: Wikipedia/Winslow Townson/AP)


I pity the mainstream journalists who are required to pretend they take this grotesque process seriously. The GOP campaign has become indistinguishable from one of those episodes on “Montel” where a mouth-breathing woman in a hot pink warm-up suit accuses a big-haired sleazebag in a leopardskin muumuu of sleeping with her skanky boyfriend, who watches them pulling each other’s hair with a glazed, stoned smirk. How are you supposed to write about this rogue’s gallery with a straight face? Pretending that Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann are qualified to be president is like calling Meat Loaf “Mr. Loaf.”

Since the circus will be in town for another year, and prolonged exposure to it should carry a warning from the surgeon general, I offer the following imaginary and inaccurate summary as a public service. Newt will enjoy his moment in the sun, until it is disclosed that ACORN paid him $5 million to read its staff his Ph.D. thesis on the virtues of Belgian colonial education. He will be replaced by Ann Coulter, who will soar to the top of the GOP polls until she is caught trying to plant a suitcase bomb in Haji’s Palace, a local kabob restaurant.

The next GOP supernova will be Joe the Plumber, who will excite the faithful for five minutes, then withdraw to write a $10 million book about his experience. Just when all seems lost, the Great Goddess Sarah Palin herself will arrive in her helicopter, machine guns blazing away at wolves, caribou, whining liberals and other species over whom God has given man dominion. But tragically, Palin will be forced to withdraw with severe eyestrain after spending the entire campaign on her roof trying to see Putin rear his head.

That will leave Mitt Romney as the last GOP candidate standing. But the Republican base, the angry white Tea Partyers whose desperate search for candidates as reactionary as themselves is what started this whole process, will refuse to vote for the despised Mitt, who actually had to govern in the real world and thus left a track record that falls short of the absolute Maoist purity in right-wing word and deed demanded by the faithful. And so Barack Hussein Obama, foreign Commie, death-panel guru and Muslim terrorist, will run unopposed.

There is something disturbingly infantile about this process. It’s like watching a wailing baby rejecting one type of food after another, angrily hurling first the apricots, then the beans, then the broccoli off his plate while shrieking, “Don’t want it!” And the presidential campaign is not the only example of such regressive behavior and thought. The reaction of the Tea Party (which for all intents and purposes has become the Republican Party) to the mild and innocuous centrist Barack Obama — a president little different in his governing style, with due allowances being made for changed circumstances, from Dwight D. Eisenhower — is so irrational that it is difficult even to grasp what president it is talking about.

The Tea Party’s sense of limitless outrage, its bizarrely overwrought rhetoric of betrayal and dispossession, is closer to the rage of a toddler than the reasoning of an adult. The anger appears to predate its putative cause. The institutional party has behaved in exactly the same way: for three years, Republicans in Congress have essentially been having a temper tantrum. “Won’t raise taxes! Don’t care if we default! Waah!”

How did one of the two major American parties regress to a pre-potty-trained state?

Of all the analyses of the American right wing, perhaps the most penetrating, and by far the most prescient, was that offered by historian Richard Hofstadter in four brilliant essays. His 1964 piece “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” is by far the most famous of those pieces, but “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt — 1954,” and “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited — 1965,” actually contain the heart of his analysis. A final essay, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics,” is a chilling reminder that right-wing thought so extreme that it once appeared marginal and almost bizarre has become mainstream. (The pieces, along with several other essays, are available in a 2008 Vintage edition with an informative foreword by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz.)

In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadter traces the long tradition of irrational, conspiratorial and paranoid thinking in American history. While the left has not been free from this phenomenon — the absurd “9/11 truth movement” is perhaps the most salient example — the ideological eruptions of what Hofstadter drily calls “uncommonly angry minds” have overwhelmingly been found on the social, cultural and political right.

Hofstadter begins his tour of hysterical thinking with the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment, anti-clerical movement that was accused of plotting “the total destruction of all religion and civil order.” He then examines the widespread belief that Freemasonry was “an engine of Satan…dark, unfruitful, selfish, demoralizing, blasphemous, murderous, anti-republican and anti-Christian,” before moving on to nativist fears of demonic Catholic plots to take over America and Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic populism. He concludes with Joe McCarthy’s warnings of a Communist “conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man” and the perfervid ravings of the John Birch Society, whose founder, Robert Welch Jr., believed that the Supreme Court “was one of the most important agencies of Communism.”

Hofstadter boils down the elements of contemporary right-wing thought to three elements: fear of a government conspiracy to “undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the central government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism”; the belief that government has been infiltrated by sinister, un-American traitors; and the belief that large swaths of the country, including the media and schools, are also in on the plot.

“The Paranoid Style in American Politics” devotes relatively little space to analyzing why Americans have been repeatedly drawn to such beliefs. He notes that modern right-wingers

“feel dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind … The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very centers of American power.”

Hofstadter briefly touches on psychology, noting that “[the] enemy seems on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.” Most intriguingly, at the very end of the essay he writes, “[T]he factt hat movements employing the paranoid style are not constant but come in successive episodic waves suggests that the paranoid disposition is mobilized into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action. Catastrophe or the fear of catastrophe is most likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric.”

CONT...

[Odysseus]

Thanks for the solid post. I don't mind reading. I think reading is a good thing. I don't think these political clowns are playing for real. They are not playing for the American people. They are self absorbed pricks who are not willing to take responsibility once they are elected because it's a childish version of the blame game. It's the ____ party! They didn't listen! \

We need to focus not on electable officials but electing officials.
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news...al-2282998.php

Corporate America hints at stagflation:
http://www.moneynews.com/AndrewPacke...7/22/id/404500


China hints at stagflation:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmou...r-stagflation/

Economists use the term “stagflation” to describe an economy that experiences high inflation while its growth falters—a paradoxical term, as inflation and economic growth are usually positively correlated. When it comes to China, the term is even more paradoxical as the country has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Statistics coming out of China recently confirm that the country may be heading to some sort of stagflation. Economic growth is slowing down, while inflation remains high. Last Saturday, The China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing (CFLP) announced that nonmanufacturing sector slowed down sharply, with the non-service Purchasing Manager’s Index (PMI) dropped from 57.7 in October to 49.7 in November.

The slow-down in the non-manufacturing sector follows a similar slow-down in the manufacturing sector, as announced last Thursday; the manufacturing PMI dropped to 49 in November from 50.4 in October– a contraction that comes at time inflation is still running above 5.5 percent.

China’s stagflation complicates economic policy, posing dilemmas to policy makers. An effort to stimulate economic growth by raising bank reserves and by boosting infrastructure spending will worsen inflation (as it is currently underway), while an effort to curtail inflation will lead to slower growth. But what does Chinese stagflation mean for investors?

For investors in Chinese equities, stagflation isn’t good, especially when expectations run high. Slow growth certainly affects negatively corporate sales and profitability. High inflation is usually positive for corporate revenues, but only for companies that can raise prices ahead of cost–usually State-Owned Enterprises like PetroChina (PTR) and Sinopec (SHI).

For investors in commodities, a prolonged Chinese stagnation means lower demand and prices for commodities, especially industrial commodities. This means that the rally in commodities may have to pause for a while, if not end, at least in the near term. Conservative investors may want to trim positions in commodity ETFs like GLD,SLV, OIH, and FCX, especially after their recent run up. Aggressive investors may want to establish short positions.

Disclosure: Active investor. May take long or short position in any stock or fund mentioned.

Also read, Why China’s Red Big Bubble is Ahead of US

[alkemical]

This has been a very interesting read so far...thanks for the brain food.

I am fascinated with this source so far:

http://www.cepsr.com/clanek.php?ID=328

The Influence of the Concept of Authoritarian Personality Today

[Rohirrim]

Hofstadter opened that essay by arguing that the new far-right dissenters were not in fact conservatives at all. “[A]lthough they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, [they] show signs of serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word … their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways – a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive evidence both from clinical techniques and from their own modes of expression.”

The “clinical techniques” Hoftstadter refers to were those employed by Theodor Adorno and his colleagues in their 1950 work “The Authoritarian Personality.” Adorno was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and he was naturally interested in examining what led so many Germans to embrace fascism. In that work, he and his collaborators conducted interviews and administered tests to their research subjects, including one called the F-Test (for “fascism”), which contained statements like “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn” and “Every person should have complete faith in some supernatural power whose decisions he obeys without question.” The subjects were asked to say how much they agreed with the statements.

After scoring the responses, Adorno et al. listed nine characteristics associated with the “authoritarian personality” (a concept first posited by the psychologist and sociologist Erich Fromm). The nine traits were: rigid adherence to convention; submission to the authorities of the in-group; aggression against those who deviated from convention; opposition to imaginative, subjective or soft-hearted experience; superstition and rigid belief categories; obsession with strength and powerful father figures; generalized hostility and anger at humanity; the tendency to believe that wild and dangerous things are going on in the world, a projection of repressed emotions; and an obsession with sex.

Sh it howdy!

[alkemical]

Originally Posted by Rohirrim

Hofstadter opened that essay by arguing that the new far-right dissenters were not in fact conservatives at all. “[A]lthough they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, [they] show signs of serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word … their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways – a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive evidence both from clinical techniques and from their own modes of expression.”

The “clinical techniques” Hoftstadter refers to were those employed by Theodor Adorno and his colleagues in their 1950 work “The Authoritarian Personality.” Adorno was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and he was naturally interested in examining what led so many Germans to embrace fascism. In that work, he and his collaborators conducted interviews and administered tests to their research subjects, including one called the F-Test (for “fascism”), which contained statements like “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn” and “Every person should have complete faith in some supernatural power whose decisions he obeys without question.” The subjects were asked to say how much they agreed with the statements.

After scoring the responses, Adorno et al. listed nine characteristics associated with the “authoritarian personality” (a concept first posited by the psychologist and sociologist Erich Fromm). The nine traits were: rigid adherence to convention; submission to the authorities of the in-group; aggression against those who deviated from convention; opposition to imaginative, subjective or soft-hearted experience; superstition and rigid belief categories; obsession with strength and powerful father figures; generalized hostility and anger at humanity; the tendency to believe that wild and dangerous things are going on in the world, a projection of repressed emotions; and an obsession with sex.

Sh it howdy!

The reason it "tripped my trigger" was due to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mas...ogy_of_Fascism

The Mass Psychology of Fascism[2], originally Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus in German, was a book written by Wilhelm Reich in 1933. In the book, Reich explores how fascists come into power, and categorized the rise as a symptom of sexual repression.

Summary

The question at the heart of Reich's book was this: Why did the masses turn to authoritarianism which is clearly against their interests?[3] Reich set out to analyze "the economic and ideological structure of German society between 1928 and 1933" in this book.[4] In it, he calls communism "red fascism" and groups it in the same category as Nazism, and this leads to him being kicked out of the Communist Party.

Reich argued that the reason Nazism was chosen over fascism was sexual repression. As a child, a member of the proletariat had learned from his or her parents to suppress sexual desire. Hence, in the adult, rebellious and sexual impulses caused anxiety. Fear of revolt, as well as fear of sexuality, were thus "anchored" in the character of the masses. This influenced the irrationality of the people, Reich would argue.[3]

As Reich put it:

Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.[3]

Reich noted that the symbolism of the swastika, evoking the fantasy of the primal scene, showed in spectacular fashion how Nazism systematically manipulated the unconscious. A repressive family, a baneful religion, a sadistic educational system, the terrorism of the party, and economic violence all operated in and through individuals' unconscious psychology of emotions, traumatic experiences, fantasies, libidinal economies, and so on, and Nazi political ideology and practice exacerbated and exploited these tendencies.[4]

For Reich, fighting fascism meant first of all studying it scientifically, which was to say, using the methods of psychoanalysis. Reason, alone able to check the forces of irrationality and loosen the grip of mysticism, is also capable of playing its own part in developing original modes of political action, building on a deep respect for life, and promoting a harmonious channeling of libido and orgastic potency. Reich proposed "work democracy," a self-managing form of social organization that would preserve the individual's freedom, independence, and responsibility and base itself on them.[4]

[Rohirrim]

Because belief short circuits critical thinking.

[alkemical]

Originally Posted by Rohirrim

Because belief short circuits critical thinking.

Belief is the death of intelligence - I first ran into this concept in my early 20s from Robert Anton Wilson.

Did you ever see this Ro~?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD6V0fMO1Mw

[Bronco_Beerslug]

" the same memes that Hofstadter traced throughout American history."

As Sean Wilentz points out in his introduction, it is useful to be reminded just how reckless Goldwater really was: He praised the lunatic John Birch Society, insisted that the U.S. must utterly defeat the Soviet Union even if it meant risking nuclear war (“a craven fear of death is entering the American consciousness”) and stated that the decisions of the Supreme Court are “not necessarily” the law of the land.

Which takes us back to Newt Gingrich, who has also proposed eviscerating the court, and to the modern Republican Party. Hofstadter and Adorno were writing 50 and 60 years ago, but their work still provides an uncannily accurate portrait of the American right wing.

Take the Tea Party, the flagship of modern right-wing “thought.” In his withering portrait of the Tea Party, Matt Taibbi reveals it to be utterly self-contradictory and self-serving, driven by resentment and anger against undeserving welfare loafers and illegal immigrants. An elderly couple who rage against the federal government turn out to be a government employee and a Medicare recipient whose motorized scooter was paid for by Uncle Sam.

Taibbi concludes:

“After lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of ****. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.”

Taibbi points out that the movement utterly lacks a coherent ideology. “Beneath the surface,” he notes, “the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing.”

The only thing holding it together is free-floating anger, a sense of dispossession and an outraged feeling of betrayal — the same memes that Hofstadter traced throughout American history.