If you have been reading my Blog for any significant length of time you will know that I write a great deal about the problem of Narcissism. I have suggested that the child rearing practices of any society, once it has reached a certain level of material abundance and the reasonable expectation that their children will survive childhood, will tend to produce adults with elevated levels of Narcissism. I will not repeat all my arguments here (there is more here, here, and here) but want to concentrate on a couple of points. High levels of Narcissism leave people with certain liabilities. Such people are more in need of the approval of their like-minded cohort than usual, which means they tend to adopt the most orthodox positions of their group and have trouble questioning those who they consider authoritative. As might be inferred, if their like-minded cohort defines themselves in political terms, they will tend to be more partisan than most. As well, when an idea has become incorporated into their self representation (ie, it is an important element of their identity) they become even more resistant to change or even self reflection.
In our political world, there is a great deal of Narcissistic investment in ideas that have become identified as "liberal" or "left."
[My plan is to use quotation marks to denote those who claim to be liberal, but have devolved into illiberal intolerance. These kinds of people are active in the Blogosphere and currently have hold of the center of the Democratic party.]
The reason I refer to these ideas as "Narcissistically invested" is that they are primarily designed to show that the proponents of the ideas are smarter, kinder, more caring than their opponents. Self described "liberals" or "progressives" are bolstered by such ideas which is why a common theme on the "progressive" web sites is that John Kerry was just telling the truth when he made his now infamous remarks.
So, what does this have to do with the New York Times November surprise?
The New York Times has long been one of the leading voice of "liberalism" in our culture. Using their journalism schooled grasp of sophisticated language, they have done as much as anyone to promulgate the "Bush lied!" slogan, which has long since replaced logical argumentation by those who oppose the war in Iraq. The slogan has never had much validity. It never made any logical or psychological sense for Bush to lie us into Iraq, for oil or revenge or any other reason proposed to explain why any President would risk his political life for such illusory goals. In fact, the claim was not meant to be examined for any factual validity. It was meant to allow people to come out in opposition to the war while maintaining their political viability and, yes, their self esteem.
Here is how this works. In order for the "left" to maintain their self esteem, they must see themselves as being correct. To someone who has a Narcissistic investment in their ideas, to be seen as wrong is an intolerable humiliation. Almost anything is better than being publicly humiliated. Since George Bush and the dreaded Neocons were proposing ideas that were incompatible with the "left" someone must be wrong. How could the "left" be smarter than the moronic Bush if Bush was right about Saddam Hussein. The failure to find WMD was a gift of incalculable proportions to the "left." It allowed them to convince themselves that there were no WMD, that Saddam Hussein was never a danger to us, and that the entire invasion was a disastrous (moronic) mistake. All that was required was a face saving way to avoid responsibility for once having believed Iraq was a danger. After all, many of the leading lights of the "left" including John Kerry, Bill & Hillary Clinton, et al, had been on record in the 90s saying that Saddam was a danger. The Democrats overwhelmingly supported Iraq regime change when it was politically expedient but once the War proved to be more difficult than expected, a way out was needed. The important thing to remember is that for the "left" the content of their ideas never matters as much as the function of their ideas. Once an idea no longer serves to support their sense of their innate superiority, it can be easily abandoned.
(One of the most glaring examples of this tendency is the "left's" long standing support of free speech, going back to the glory days of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. As long as Free Speech could be used as a cudgel against the easily shocked prudes on the "reactionary right", they believed in it as a core value. Once speech began to question their ideas in ways they had trouble arguing, their support of Free Speech evaporated to be replaced by thinly veiled efforts to restrict Free Speech, ie hate speech laws/regulations, McCain-Feingold.)
Today's New York Times November surprise is another attack on the stupidity of the Bush administration. The article, U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer, discusses the archive set up by the government, much supported by the Neoconservative Blogosphere, to facilitate the translation of millions of documents taken from Saddam's Iraq:
Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.
John Stephenson has a terrific round-up of responses and links. He points out the truly astounding revelation that the Times prints with no trace of irony:
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away. [The quote is from the Times article; the emphasis is by JS.]
If you read this story from the point of view of seeking information you might be surprised that the Times reveals such explosive facts which one might expect to help the Republicans next week. Yet if you realize that the goal of printing the story is to frame the Bush administration as stupid and incompetent, so that their opponents, a group of which the Times is a charter member, can maintain the belief in their own intellectual superiority, the contradiction evaporates. To the "left" the story is their wisdom and the "right's" stupidity; they are so sophisticated they don't even see how they discredit themselves.
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