ShrinkWrapped

Opposition: Responsible and Irresponsible

From time to time I am reminded (and try to remind myself with some frequency) that much of what I write is, of necessity, based on generalizations.  For me to talk more specifically about how narcissistic pathology shows up in a patient would clearly be problematic, yet to be specific about someone who is not a patient is impossible; there is no way I can know someone well enough to comment on the organization of their unconscious mind without spending the requisite time with them in the specialized environment of a psychoanalysis or psychotherapy.   Further, theory can only offer an outline of a real personality.  As with psychology, so with politics; perhaps at times, I too loosely use terms like liberal and left without being specific; some of this is unavoidable.  I have attempted to define for myself what it means to be a liberal or a leftist.  In my post on Political Religion, I wrote:

I would suggest that most on the left consider themselves to be Secular Humanists.  They firmly believe in Evolution, strict separation of church and state, Affirmative Action, Government aid to level the playing field and lift up those who are unable to succeed in the Capitalist System (aka "victims"), and freedom of Speech when it doesn't clash with the Rights of minorities who might be injured by such speech, and that War is almost never justified and can only be conducted under the auspices of an International Coalition (the UN).  There is of course more to this, it is not meant to be an exhaustive list, and quite obviously, not every Democrat, Liberal, or Leftist agrees with all of the above.  I would further submit that the ultimate arbiter of the Liberal position is the paper of record, the New York Times.  This is instructive.

Later in that post I deduced that some core liberal/left tenets (specifically insistence on the non-existence of innate gender differences [radical feminism] versus the primacy of innate gender preferences [in the homosexual community])  were in direct opposition to each other, and concluded that it more closely resembled a set of religious beliefs rather than a coherent political philosophy. 

In effect, the meme suggests that there are no inherent differences (Nature) between men and women and all differences in outcome can be attributed to social influences (Nurture).  If you have any doubts that this is a religious belief rather than a fact based opinion, do the following thought experiment.  Imagine yourself in a room full of Homosexual activists.  Imagine yourself giving a talk in which you suggest that Homosexuality is the outcome of a complex interaction between a child's inherent constitutional make up (Nature), including the structure of his brain, and his emotional development in relation to his early childhood and parenting experiences (Nature).  The idea that Homosexuality is genetic (any time you read that something is "genetic" take it with  a large grain of salt; as I once read, genes encode for proteins, not behavior) is a "given", scarcely more open to discussion than the idea that women and men are not equal.

I have continued to ponder what it means to be a liberal or a leftist, and have engaged in some interesting conversations with friends, colleagues and family to this end; yet, I find myself at a loss.  The only consistent pattern I have been able to discern is that to be a liberal means to be in opposition to anything Bush (and by extension) the Republicans want to do, and to be a leftist means to oppose any action by a segment of American society that has any power.  To be a leftist is to be a champion of all the victims of America's violence (which can be almost anyone; the left has redefined speech as action, which is then justification for banning, as objectionable speech, anything that hurts the feelings of a designated victim.)  I must admit, I remain somewhat confused about liberalism and leftism, and as soon as the New York Times and the Democratic party figure it out, I will be relieved.

One of the reasons this has come up today is a conversation with a colleague this morning. He has always been convinced that the USSR losing the Cold War had nothing to do with Ronald Reagan.  He is today convinced that the democratizing wave in the Middle East (spreading to Ukraine, other former SSR's, etc.) is completely unrelated to Coalition troops inhabiting Iraq.  He maintains this in the face of comments by the people who live there (Walid Jumblatt, for example); further he suggests if we had only taken all the money we have spent on the Iraq war we could have given every Iraqi $8,000!  Unfortunately we were unable to continue the conversation and I remain curious as to how this would have been done and what effect he imagines it would have had.  When we parted, he wondered how the two of us could have such different perspectives on t he same data set; I must admit, I wonder the same thing.

For the moment, I will take no position on which of us is more correct in our assessment.  What I am struck by is how our political leanings have affected our perceptions.   We take for granted that we can see what is right on front of us.  Yet even the most superficial consideration leads us to recognize that our perceptions are often distorted, and our memories are amazingly plastic.  Lawyers will tell you that eye witness accounts, the gold standard of evidence, are terribly unreliable.  Psychotherapists will tell you how susceptible memories are to change and distortion over time.  It is a wonder we can truly know anything.

And this brings me to my biggest disappointment with the liberal side of the political spectrum.  I am uncertain, and I know I can never be certain, about my own perspective; too much certainty can be dangerous.  In the face of terror and existential threats, one can too easily be lead down the path to more and more security, at the expense of liberty.  I have been called a fascist more than once for supporting Bush and the spread of democracy and I do not believe that President Bush, or myself, is a fascist.  However, I know that history tells us that totalitarianism can creep in slowly and legally.  We need a responsible opposition to raise questions.  If the ruling party is not confronted and forced to defend their reasoning, they will find it all too easy to slip into simplistic solutions to difficult problems, and we will all lose.  We must all rely for "reality testing" on the Democratic Party and MSM, yet both are dysfunctional in fundamental ways.  When the Bush administration is called fascistic because they have put a Lynn Stewart into jail for aiding terror, I begin to wonder if my accuser has lost his sense of reality.  Fascism is when a Lynn Stewart is summarily decapitated because she is a Jew, not put in jail because she is aiding a convicted terrorist spread terror. When the ACLU sues Donald Rumsfeld (see Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part IV for some comments I made earlier about the ACLU) in a transparent attempt to legitimize Islamic terrorists, this does not help sharpen our ability to fight terror while safeguarding our rights.  When I can no longer find anything surprising to read in the New York Times (the emblem of liberal thinking), when everything is slanted against what the country is trying to do, we no longer have a responsible opposition; we have a knee jerk opposition, and they do not serve their vital function.  When I stop paying attention to the Times, the ACLU, defenders of Lynn Stewart, (and I am hardly the only one who feels this way) it creates a serious danger for our government which needs a responsible opposition to maintain their clarity.  None of us are immune to the irrational, none of us can be certain our hidden (unconscious) biases and irrationality aren't affecting our perceptions; we need each other to stay sane.  From an earlier post, Progressives and Totalitarianism: An Irrational Marriage:

When people do not recognize their own irrationality, their own hidden motivations, there is usually a good reason for this self deception; it is almost always based on poorly perceived threats to the self. 

I would argue that only a Democratic system has any hope of finding rational outcomes from the complex interplay of individual and group irrationality. 

Defeat, Humiliation, and Rage

In my last post, Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part IV, in relation to the Global War on Terror, more appropriately called the War on Islamofascism, I wrote about the danger of a significant portion of our society refusing to recognize the danger the enemy presents and acting in such a way as to endanger our war efforts.

The only way we can lose this war is to undermine our efforts from the inside.  When our elites in the media, academia, the judiciary, ignore or refuse to look at the words of our enemies, and support abstractions over reality, it endangers our welfare, and our rights.

Now that the New York Times has tentatively suggested that Bush may have been correct all along, the danger might be thought to have lessened, since so much of our MSM take their talking points for the New York Times.  However, lest we become too sanguine about the prospects, I would suggest the Time's "conversion" is rather shallow and grudging and contains within it a serious danger.  I am using the Times as the liberal/left archetype, but this applies to that portion of the liberal elite who remain convinced they are smarter than the red state conservative bible thumpers (none of whom they know personally, of course.)

I have described how the person who is overly dependent on narcissistic supplies from the outside world tend to have fragile self esteem.  They need constant affirmation of their goodness and value.  Depending on the structure and content of their ego ideal, they may need to be seen as the most dangerous man around (as in the gangsta subculture) or as the smartest man around (as in much of the liberal elite) or the wealthiest (think about Wall Street around bonus time.)   The Narcissistic character has a need to be perfect.  Only by being admired and respected (if need be out of fear) can they feel loved and valued.  Every moment risks falling short of perfection, losing the admiration of the nurturing objects (fans, subjects, significant others, children)

When a person who cannot tolerate being seen as wrong or weak is faced with a reverse, he has few resources to fall back on and little recourse.  For the Narcissist to accept a defeat is the ultimate humiliation (and for many people becomes the impetus for a suicide attempt). 

How is such a person to handle their defeat.  A healthy person capitulates with grace and dignity.  One can't be correct all the time and sometimes the facts are on the other side.  In that case, you are best off admitting you are wrong and come on board, if possible, always retaining the right and ability to disagree in the future when he situation warrants.  Many of the newest of the neo-cons would fall into this group.  One might have been convinced that any attempt to go into Iraq was doomed to be a disaster and a quagmire, but the elections and the spread of the democratic meme suggest that Bush was right to insist that people want freedom.  It may still all go terribly wrong, but anyone with an open mind would have to agree that there is more reason for optimism than anyone would have thought possible on 9/11.

The more impaired and impoverished will have a much harder time admitting an error.  Some will fight with all their might to deny anything has changed.  They may find themselves in the same fix as Nancy Soderberg, who told Jon Stewart that 

"As a Democrat, you don't want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, and you don't want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen."

For more context, some discussion of attempts to minimize her comments and a link to the Daily Show in which shew made the comment, visit James Taranto's Best of the Web.

I believe there are a great many liberal Democrats (I am surrounded by them in New York City) who have the same ambivalence about what is going on in the world today.  The problem for people like this is that their self image is intimately tied to being smarter and more ethical than the hoi polloi, the red state rubes.  How could a Texas cowboy, along with some apostate Jews (like Paul Wolfowitz, the subject of a very nice article, Giving Wolfowitz His Due,  by David Brooks today) be correct when all of the wise sages of Academia and the MSM, along with the elites of the European Union, predicted disaster when we refused to go through the UN and continue talking to Saddam Hussein?  If our elites are wrong, it threatens to marginalize them even further from he power centers of America.  Fewer and fewer people are watching the major network news casts; the circulation of the New York Times, the LA Times, Newsday are plunging; more and more of our young do not buy the left wing cant being promulgated as progressive thought in our universities, places where Ward Churchill is treated as if he is a scholar and where Lawrence Summers suggestion of new, albeit obvious, possibilities are met with threats of fainting by the doyens of the status quo (see my take on the Lawrence Summers kerfuffle here.).  The old elites are seeing their grip on the bureaucracy slipping away; the Democrats are becoming a smaller and smaller minority in the Congress and have little hope of gaining power again anytime soon unless the Republicans stumble badly. 

For the Narcissist, being wrong is humiliating.  Humiliation evokes rage and despair.  They either must deny that they are wrong, and turn the rage outward, which risks a paranoid flight into delusion, or they must accept their error, turn the rage inward, and despair.  The Democratic party is now stuck trying to sort out whether or not they will despair, mourn their lost ideas, and move on to develop new ideas which they can present to the American people in the hope of winning our hearts and minds, or they can resist despair, become more and more paranoid and irrational, and like a defiant child, shout, "NO!" to everything...

And as the left descends into paranoid delusional thinking, some will take the words of a Ward Churchill to heart, and like the Weathermen of an earlier benighted age, join the terrorists in attacking their projected selves.

Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part IV

For the last week, I have been writing about the spectrum of narcissism that leads from healthy self regard through pathological narcissism to malignant narcissism and paranoia. 

Part I looked at the developmental line of narcissism and the close relationship to self esteem. 

Part II looked at some trends in the Democratic party which lend credence to the idea that significant groups at the core of the party have a narcissistic over-investment in a paranoid or fantasied view of the war on terror. 

(For those of you who might support the "Bush lied" view point, the reason I refer to it as fantasied and/or paranoid is because there remains no substantive evidence to back up the charge; it is based on one's feelings rather than the facts.  [As an interesting aside, many people prior to the war noted long lines of trucks from Iraq int0 the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon and wonder if WMD may be there now; life in Syria and Lebanon is going to get even more interesting in the next little bit, but that is for another post.])

Part III was a discussion of malignant narcissism and its attendant paranoia, with a focus both on the Geo-political situation (most tyrants have significant levels of pathological and malignant narcissism, though some discussion of how much is innate, how much is evoked, and how much is acquired would be interesting) and the shape of pathological narcissism closer to home, arising from dysfunctional homes and communities.

My goal in much of this has been to understand how these personal issues conflate with our current political state.  I am especially interested in how personal narcissism among members of our privileged classes endangers our efforts to win what is likely to be a very long war against Islamic fascism.  Some on the left are overtly anti-American; there have always been non-democratic Americans who believe that their particular brand of Utopian ideology is necessary to save our nation.  From the neo-nazis on the right to the Trotskyites on the left, these people do not believe in consensual politics.  Their threat has been obvious and is not my concern at this point.  Today the bigger threat comes from a vocal and integral part of the Western Political Elite, the MSM and the Professoriate.  While many liberals believe Ward Churchill is a dangerous fool, too many think that his ideas, while perhaps too strongly expressed, have some relative validity.  After all, the white man did take the Native American's land; shouldn't we be tolerant and understanding of their anger and the need to redress their grievances.  When he argues that the 9/11 attackers are simply retaliating for our numerous misdeeds, it may be noxious to many, but isn't there some truth to his charges?  After all, the United States did support tyrants in the Middle East and elsewhere.  In another instance of similar logic, the ACLU is suing Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of several people who were abused by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  There is a superficial plausibility to the case.  After all, the chain of command does go through Rumsfeld, and prisoners were abused; shouldn't something be done to set things to right?  In these cases, as in many others, the left and liberal aggrandizement of their own ideological ideas presents a serious danger to our prosecution of the war.  The ACLU, people like Ward Churchill, groups like Moveon.org and Human Rights First insist that their motives are pure (while everyone who disagrees with them have motives that are typically corrupt.)  They are upholding human rights; the right to be treated with respect; the right to counsel; the right to free speech.  As abstractions, these rights are inviolate; as explanations for their behavior (which could appear to be harmful to our nation's interests) they are superficially plausible; yet, reality always supervenes.  To be more attached to abstractions than to the welfare of others in one's community is a classic signifier of the Narcissist.  It is one step removed from the narcissistic disavowal of the other: my beliefs are more important than your life.

Cicero at Winds of Change, writing in The Cedar Express  believes that Lebanon presents an important moment for many of the left wing critics of our efforts in the war.

Lebanon's growing democracy movement offers the Western left the opportunity to become relevant in the War on Terror -- a war that might be more accurately described as a War on Tyranny. Tyranny endures when free people do nothing to stop it; and it prospers when they cut deals with tyrants. Strategic collusion with autocrats had its place in the context of Cold War realpolitik -- but doing so in the Global War on Terror undermines the free world's main line of defense against terrorists, by giving oxygen to the tyrannical regimes that support them.

In Lebanon, tyranny's resilience is being tested. The Democrats' intransigence and incertitude with the War on Terror and European power plays that cynically triangulate the US against despotic regimes mar today's liberals. But there's an opportunity before them called Lebanon, where liberals can become progressives again. It's as though a ship built of cedar has arrived to the Left's dormant shore. Liberals can revitalize their progressive credentials by boarding the Cedar Express and embarking to help expel tyranny from Lebanon, and build a safer Middle East.

If those on the left side of the spectrum can see past their ideological blinders and recognize that through the efforts of Bush and the US military, freedom and democracy are moving throughout the Middle East, they will use the opportunity Lebanon gives them to join in the struggle for human dignity.  It is not a coincidence that the Democratic politician who is currently the front runner for the 2008 presidential nomination (and gives every indication as well of being the brightest of the lot), Hillary Clinton, has  been strongly supportive of our military and the mission in Iraq.  Either she believes what we are doing is correct, or she is opportunistically getting on the ride side of history; either way, her speech has been telling, of late.

Wretchard, at the Belmont Club, is less sanguine about our prospects.  He writes in The Foundations of Barad-Dur about the outcome of the trial in Indonesia of the Bali nightclub bombing mastermind. 

The leniency of Bali bombing mastermind Abu Bakar Bashir's sentence -- 30 months for the murder of 202 people -- has shocked the Australian public, not in the least because after long labor the mountain has brought forth a mouse.

He suggests some of the difficulties that arise from treating a war as a legal problem, and then points to some comments by a local observer about the degradation of the Indonesian political environment.

Veteran newsman Max Soliven of the Philippine Star who has covered Indonesia since the Sukarno era in the mid-1960s talks about the shadow of fear that is spreading where it had never been seen before.

"This sends the message to us, who live fearfully on the perimeter of the JI venom this vicious agitator has been sowing among the pesantren, the thousands of religious schools (equivalent to our Muslim madrasas here) ... the government prosecutors acted like a bunch of nervous Nellies at the trial .... many witnesses refused to testify ... Only one witness, Nasir Abbas, has linked Bashir to terrorism, resolutely testifying that the cleric had personally pit him (Abbas) in charge of "terrorist activities in part of the Philippines".

Indonesia’s turmoil had never been about religion. ... Indonesia was a society in which women played a major role, free from the fetters of second-class status ... In my recent visits, I’ve seen – while some of the smiles remain spontaneous – a visible change. An increasing number of women are wearing head scarves, and even all-black covering (ala the Middle East’s structures). Christian churches are being bombed, Christian communities embroiled in civil war with their once-friendly and happy Muslim neighbors, with the ABRI (Armed Forces) too often siding with the militant Islamic jihadis.

Salamabit*, you don’t even have to go to Indonesia. A Vice-Governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao ... is now insisting on implementing a city ordinance ...  which requires every Muslim female in Marawi City, yep in our own Mindanao, to wear the head-scarve, otherwise be penalized with a fine of thousands of pesos ...  (* Sonuvabitch)

Soliven notes what most of the regular newspapers have missed: that Bashir was at the nexus of the Saudi madrassa system that is the assembly line of terrorism. It is the same system that produced Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a "former Virginia high school valedictorian ... accused in federal court Tuesday of allegedly conspiring with al-Qaida to assassinate President Bush." And it is a system that has proved too powerful to shut down or even criticize.

Wretchard adds that the judge in the Abu Ali case was typically obsequious to the defendant.

Presiding judge O'Grady issued the ritual apology which has become a standard part of treating with these men of the shadows. "I can assure you, you will not suffer any torture or humiliation while in the marshals' custody". Already the victims have become accustomed to craving pardon, in advance, for their unspeakable inferiority, before the emissaries of the madrassas. If US judges are halfway to their knees how likely is it that the Indonesians will hold themselves erect?

Not too long ago, an al Qaeda manual was found in Iraq and translated.  Among its directions was the admonition for any captured jihadist to accuse his captors of torture, whether they had been tortured or not.  al Qaeda knows that there will be willing allies in the western press who will print such accusations without any attempts to understand what motivates the accusation.  Once we know we can and will be accused of torture for daring to use coercive questioning  or humiliation, are we to be reduced to "name, rank, and serial number" for terrorist captives?  Thus we lose an important weapon in our battle.  (Arguments as to what constitutes torture, whether abu Graib and other abuses meets the standard, and the advisability of using coercive questioning techniques have been addressed in many other places.  Obviously, there is a line we should not cross, but exactly where that line is can be, has been, and continues to be debated.)

Wretchard grimly concludes:

Who was it who said that all wars of consequence were conflicts of the mind? Without getting too metaphysical, it still makes sense to regard ideas as the foundation of historical struggles; the thing that animates the visible clashes. While an idea's potency remains it will find adherents.

The casual outside observer would conclude, from the apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders, that it is not worth upholding. Radical Islam, on the other hand, must self-evidently be an idea of great worth, as so many are publicly willing to die for it. And to a limited degree they would be right, for something must be terribly wrong with the West to cause such self-hatred.

America has shown itself apt at striking the visible parts of its enemy but seems unable to touch its foundations. On the contrary, every blow it deals seemingly reverberates within it, spreading cracks throughout its own base. Sometimes I think this is fortunate because I am beginning to suspect that the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West and not within Islam.

The only way we can lose this war is to undermine our efforts from the inside.  When our elites in the media, academia, the judiciary, ignore or refuse to look at the words of our enemies, and support abstractions over reality, it endangers our welfare, and our rights.  If a judge, who can not or will not see that this is merely one more theater in a global war, is successful in engineering the release of Jose Padilla and he then causes an atrocity (he was working on a dirty bomb, and failing that, had planned to blow up an apartment building) does anyone doubt some basic rights will be curtailed at the demands of a frightened and aroused populace?  Does anyone doubt that if we are attacked with mass casualties, our restraint with Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia will be over?  Our system depends on the consent of the governed; when people are told they have no right to reasonably defend themselves and that abstract rights for our "victims" (ie, those who want to kill us and destroy our country) are more important than our rights to (in Dennis Miller's immortal words) "not walk down the street and get blown up", we will see a rapid erosion of the very rights we hold dear.

For those who see fascism in my words, I would suggest the meaning of the word fascism has been lost to you.  At the moment we are not hauling off thousands of American citizens and summarily executing them; we are holding a very limited number of people who have been apprehended in active attempts to attack Americans and cause mass casualties.  Those who fail to see the distinction are blind.

Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part III

I have described in my earlier posts in this series how healthy narcissism develops and showed how it supplies the person with a deep seated conviction that he can be an effective agent in obtaining what he needs from the external world, that he has intrinsic value to himself and others, and that he has a reasonable expectation of a life lived close to his ego ideal.  Such a person has inherent resiliency for the vicissitudes of life and is able to withstand setbacks and failures that all of us must face from time to time.

When a child grows up with a mother who is poorly able to offer her child unconditional love and an adequate, empathic mirror (which a the child needs in order to make sense of his own inchoate affective states and experiences and develop a stable image of himself) it makes it extremely difficult for him to develop an image of himself as a person who has anything of value within himself.

A depressed mother, a deprived mother, an immature mother, a drug addicted mother, or a narcissistic mother, (not an exhaustive list) typically has a limited ability to respond to the needs of her child because her needs remain primary. (I do not mean to imply that any child born to a depressed mother, or a substance abusing mother, is doomed.  The complex interplay between the child’s inherent disposition and constitution and the quality of his nurturing, from parents, siblings, and other significant people, will ultimately determine his psychological status; to paraphrase Richard Feynman in another context, character development is non-computational.)

The damaged child must find ways to compensate or he will be unable to thrive. He may develop a narcissistic or sociopathic self representation. In our current cultural condition, this can be seen in the aggrandizement of the "gangsta". Rap music uses this image, of the tough thug who no one can touch, as a way to use the external world to support a self image that protects them from the weakness, humiliations, and depression that would affect anyone who feels of little worth; their bravado suggests to some that they have high self-esteem (in fact, many felons have high levels of self esteem as measured by superficial questionnaires) but their language and behavior reveals their sense of themselves as having less intrinsic value. Anyone who needs to demand respect, rather than earn respect, has some fundamental doubts about whether he deserves respect. As an aside, while I do not especially like Rap music, I do not think it is dangerous for the majority of children who grow up in secure, loving environments; for them, being a “gangsta” is a pose, often a provocative one, and usually an ironic one, but it doesn't keep them from doing their work, behaving well toward others, etc. In a more damaged child in a dysfunctional family and environment, the "gangsta", (along with the pimps, hos, and bitches glorified in the music) is more likely to become part of their self representation and ego ideal (who they are and who they want to be), making it much harder to manage their self esteem and function in society. If the community glorifies Rappers who project these self images, it leaves such children with very little to balance against it. This problem has long been ignored but recently people like Bill Cosby has begun to speak out on the subject which is an optimistic sign.

One of the outcomes of this kind of family and environmental (emotional) impoverishment is that such children grow up with minimal reserves of self esteem. They don't feel valued and the need to fend off despair requires them to find ways for the environment (the other) to support their self esteem. Other people become important props who can buttress or threaten their self esteem. (Think again of the “gangsta” who "demands" respect; if he is feared and respected, he is powerful and safe; once the fear is gone, he trembles. We see this at work on a larger scale in Afghanistan, the Ukraine, Iraq, now Lebanon and Syria, perhaps Egypt and Saudi Arabia; once the people are no longer afraid of the tyrants, the system can not long be maintained.) Other people are not related to as independent people (objects or selves, in analytic terms) who have their own desires and emotional lives, but as "need satisfying objects" whose sole purpose is to enhance the self esteem of the damaged one. In mild forms, this can lead to people who literally cannot conceive of another person's mind working differently from their own. We all know people who insist that “everyone cheats”; since they cheat (and justify their cheating by rationalizing that everyone else does it, too) they cannot believe that you might not cheat, if faced with the opportunity. 

In more severe cases, the existence of the other person’s mind and life is simply of no consequence.  For the Malignant Narcissist, other people are mere props in the pageantry of their lives.  A tyrant can throw someone into a shredding machine without a second thought because the victim only matters in relation to how he can support the grandiosity of the tyrant; beyond that, he is faceless, nameless, worthless.  It was no accident that Saddam Hussein was surrounded by sycophants who all grew mustaches to look just like him.

As might be apparent from the descriptions of narcissism, the attitude of the other is extremely important (narcissists are very sensitive to slights from others and almost anything that is not supportive is felt as criticism or attack  One can see how, as you move down the spectrum from the healthy narcissist who has a concern and regard for the best wishes of others, to the more pathological narcissist who is intensely needful of being aggrandized, to the malignant narcissist who demands obeisance just as he can not trust anyone to really think well of him, you are moving down a spectrum from sensitivity to paranoia. 

Further complicating the situation is that the Narcissistic Character is extraordinarily sensitive to humiliation and equally intolerant of it. 

What remains in this series is to explore how and why this can become dangerous for our body politic. 

Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part II

A number of bloggers have recently been commenting on the Democratic party's surrender to what Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" in his famous 1964 essay.  James Taranto, in his Best of the Web from last Wednesday,  wrote about this in relation to Congressman Hinchley's charges that Karl Rove was behind the Rathergate imbroglio.    He quotes from Hofstadter:

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. . . .

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.

Taranto notes that when Hofstadter wrote his essay, most of the paranoia was on the right (the KKK, John Birch Society).  He adds that Hofstadter saw plenty of evidence for a paranoid trend on both sides of the spectrum.

Paul Mirengoff, Deacon at Power Line, explores, in his column, "Paranoid, Nous?" at The Weekly Standard, the argument that both sides of the political divide have adopted the paranoid stance. 

Both sides in today's ideological clash stand accused by the other of adopting the paranoid style. James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has argued (in the piece that inspired this one) that the left has become politically paranoid. And a number of leftist bloggers have made the same allegation against conservative blogs. A neutral might be tempted to conclude that both sides are correct. But, as noted, strong partisanship is not the same thing as paranoia. And Hofstadter himself did not adopt a reflexive "moral equivalency" approach--in each of his examples of the paranoid style, it was the mentality of only one side. Thus, we need to explore more carefully the extent to which the two sides of today's debate exhibit paranoia.

His conclusions are worth a look.

Today's left thinks that America's interests are being sold down the river in the name of a strange ideology and oil interests. It believes that its own political interests are being undermined by massive voter fraud and the willingness of the Democratic party to accommodate the enemy. Thus, rational frustration over the outcome of the 2000 presidential election creates a derangement that, in 2004, views a margin of more than 100,000 votes in Ohio as the product of fraud. And the defeat of the most liberal member of the Senate is viewed as evidence that the party lost because it was ideologically impure. As a result, some portions of the left oppose certification of the election results (talk about "the will to fight things to the finish") and have forced the party's "compromisers" to yield to the installation of Howard Dean as DNC chair. The left's actions and beliefs fit Hofstadter's definition of the paranoid style.

This would be relatively inconsequential if the paranoid element in the Democratic party was on the repudiated fringe.  Sadly, this is not the case.  The paranoid left has become empowered by the Internet and by a few wealthy individuals; there is a tremendous amount of money involved. 

From First Read on MSNBC, by way of Peter Shramm at No Left Turns:

Maybe it was the snowy weather that made the Democratic Leadership Council's Capitol Hill offices feel like a bunker.  But the fact that the energy in the party is coming from the left and is focused more on tactics than on policy, as evidenced by Howard Dean's election as DNC chair, is clearly unsettling the centrist group.  A representative of liberal, Internet-driven MoveOn recently accused the DLC of being "out of vogue" and irrelevant.  DLCers, meanwhile, await the 2008 presidential primary as the time when the party's direction will be determined -- just as it was when the DLC and a governor named Clinton gained prominence in the early 1990s.

"You've got to reject Michael Moore and the MoveOn crowd," DLC CEO Al From said in an interview about how the Democratic Party should rebuild after 2004.  From argued that the anti-war Moore and MoveOn have hurt the party on national security, the issue which he says the party needs to make "central to our cause."  Rank-and-file Democrats "are more like us than MoveOn," which From called a group of "elites, people who sit in their basements all the time and play on their computers."

In my last post Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part I I began to explore how Narcissism develops and some of the implications of pathological narcissism.  My next posts will attempt to show how pathological narcissism can lead to and become entwined with paranoia, and why this is important and potentially quite dangerous.