The Politics of the Personal: Where We Stand

Last of a five-part series. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

How is any kind of normative political discourse possible in the environment created by right-wing eliminationist rhetoric? How is it possible to be civil to people who constantly are placing you under threat of assault, verbal and otherwise? How can there be dialogue when the normative rules of give and take and fair play have not only been flushed down the drain, but chopped into bits and swept out with the tide? Do the advocates of civility place any onus on the nonstop verbal abuse, and absolutely ruthless, win-at-all-costs politics emanating from the conservative quadrant? And do they really expect liberals to refuse to defend themselves, even realizing that doing so gets them accused of further incivility?

Ironically, the mainstream right has largely managed to avoid much discussion of its venom-by-the-bucket role in poisoning the well of public discourse by, somewhat predictably, accusing liberals of being unconscionably nasty and vile in how they respond. It’s become a common theme not just from the usual quarters (Malkin devoted an entire book, titled Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, to the subject) but a common talking point among the hoi-polloi “centrists” of the Beltway Village media, “wise men” like David Broder and Howard Kurtz: “decent” Democrats must eschew the very kind of ugly hardball politics Republicans have spent the past decade mastering, and must ignore the loud voices of their increasingly angry base.

It’s a neat trick. Not only has the village lunatic gained their permission to continue wandering the town square poking everyone he dislikes in the eye with a sharp stick, he gets to claim victimhood when they respond angrily.

In reality, this is a classic instance of right-wing projection, the tendency first described years ago by sociologist Richard Hofstadter for the black-and-white dualist mindset of the conservative to see their own worst traits embodied in their enemies. As Hofstadter explained it in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics":

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through "front" groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist "crusades" openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

Projection from the right has become such a common phenomenon that it's now a very useful gauge in guessing where the right is taking us next. Indeed, one of the lessons I've gleaned from carefully observing the behavior of the American right over the years is that the best indicator of its agenda can be found in the very things of which it accuses the left. Whether it's sexual improprieties, slander, treason, or unhinged behavior, it doesn't matter: if the right is jumping up and down accusing the left of it, you can bet they're busy engaging in it themselves by an exponential factor.

For a long time, I really believed that this was simply the right acting out on its own psychological predisposition. But as it's gathered volume and momentum -- especially as the right has avidly accused the left of the very thuggishness, both rhetorical and real, in which it is increasingly indulging -- a disturbing trend began to emerge. It became clear that this kind of projection becomes a pretext for even further eliminationist rhetoric against liberals -- and eventually, for exactly the kind of "acting out" of rhetoric that conservatives claim to foresee from liberals.

In other words, for a number of the right's leading rhetoricians, the projection appears to be perfectly conscious: it is a strategy, designed to marginalize their opposition and open the field to nearly any behavior it chooses. And it is extraordinarily successful precisely because projection, as a trait, is so deeply woven into the right-wing psyche. Those who engage in it consciously set off waves of sympathetic response from their audiences because it hits their buttons in exactly the right spot.

In a way, it’s really a kind of elaborate and absurd joke, an attempt by the right to foist its Newspeak-driven Bizarro Universe upon the rest of us. No one with even a foot in the real world should be willing to play along.

One of the things I learned as a cops-and-courts reporter lo these many years ago was something about crime victims: That they often make themselves vulnerable to violent crimes because they are not prepared to deal with people who are sociopathic, or who exhibit antisocial or narcissistic personality disorders, or in some cases outright psychoses. That they project their own normalcy onto these other people -- they really cannot believe that someone else would act in a way substantially different from their own decent, sane base of operations. This makes them extremely vulnerable to these dysfunctional personalities.

In a way, I think this is a large part of what is happening to our national body politic: People in key positions of media and conservative ideological prominence (Coulter, Limbaugh, O'Reilly) exhibit multiple symptoms of being pathological sociopaths, either antisocial or narcissistic, or a combination of both. And not only their fellow participants in the conservative movement, but mainstream centrists and even liberals are unable to figure out that there is something seriously wrong with these people because they are projecting their own normalcy onto them. They cannot perceive because they cannot believe that these people are not operating within a framework guided by the boundaries of basic decency that restrain most of us.

They are political muggers out of control -- and as their rhetoric encourages both the figurative and physical elimination of liberals, they become ever more likely to actually tread into regions of real violence.

What relatively mild incivility that liberals now exhibit is comparatively minuscule in proportion and prominence to that emanating from the right for well over a decade. Liberals have in fact been, by comparison, the picture of civility, especially since Sept. 11. Remember all those Democratic votes for Bush's war initiatives and the Patriot Act. Remember that there still has been no serious investigation of the causes of Sept. 11, in no small part because the White House has refused to cooperate -- but also because neither Democrats nor moderate Republicans have collected the political will to get it done, and done right. Remember that we are still in Iraq.

And remember, if you will, the stories about the Democratic insiders who, after Sept. 11, told reporters they were relieved that George Bush was the president and not Al Gore -- not, as it happened, because they thought Bush would do a better job, but because they realized (quite correctly) that Republicans would never have rallied around Gore the way that Democrats were willing to get behind Bush in a time of grave national crisis. That they would, more than likely, have tried to seize political advantage from it by the same kind of absurdist machinations that drove Clinton's impeachment. Strangely enough, many conservative organs touted this news story as "proof" they had done the right thing, and that Bush was the right man for the job.

In fact, it has been a longstanding contention of mine that if Sept. 11 had occurred on Al Gore's watch, Congress would have long ago convened impeachment hearings that would have been a classic Fox News show trial. Dan Burton would have been out in his back yard flying model airplanes into watermelons, and Ken Starr would have found reasons to issue a detailed 9,000 page report on Tipper and Al's sex life, which armchair psychiatrists like Charles Krauthammer, William Safire and Andrew Sullivan would have pronounced as the deep psychological root of the Sept. 11 attacks. At the end of the impeachment process, the Scalia Five would have issued a ruling allowing Congress to name a Republican as Gore's replacement.

I'll believe conservatives are serious about civil, adult dialogue when they step back and give liberals some breathing room. When "civil" conservatives seriously confront the violent and vicious rhetoric coming from their own quarters; when they do away with suggesting that their political opponents are somehow disloyal Americans; when they admit that torturing prisoners and wiretapping American citizens is not the kind of America they want; and when they finally acknowledge that the vision of government by “compassionate conservatives” has been an unmitigated catastrophe for the nation and for the world -- then, perhaps, they can expect to start seeing some civility in return.

Until then, everyone else -- liberals, centrists, even old-fashioned conservatives who have the sense to reject what the right has become -- is faced with the stark reality that this movement has been in the process, over the past decade and more, of unleashing the demonic buried in the American psyche. Much of their work over the coming years is going to involve not just stopping those forces in their tracks, but repairing the damage wrought along the way. Some of that damage is broadly political; much of it is personal.

We can hope that our old friendships and relations heal over time, but in the meantime, there is work to do. It will be up to the rest of us to shine a light on the viciousness of right-wing discourse, the trafficking in ideas and agendas between the far right and its mainstream functionaries, and the awful path down which they are leading us. It has to be done fairly, but unflinchingly.

Because what's at stake is democratic discourse itself -- not just our core national institutions, but our basic ability to get along, to share power, to forge a functioning nation. Eliminationist rhetoric is the antithesis, the death of discourse: it responds to an idea or an issue not with a counter-idea, but with the brute purgation of any opposition. It is the fundamental building block of a totalitarian state, and the wrecking ball for the great American experiment.

And failing to respond -- to sit back politely and hope the steam will just eventually blow off -- is no longer an option.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future