ShrinkWrapped

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled

In the last century evil ideologies emerged which denied human nature and were consciously devoted to enabling the emergence of a "New Man," Utopia to follow.  These ideologies were socialist in nature and required that those who were not "part of the solution" would need to be removed so that the Utopian socialist vision could be realized.  We remember one of the versions of socialism, National Socialism, (collectivism based on ethnicity rather than class) as the most profoundly evil system, one based on the genocide of innocents.  Yet, while Communism has been responsible for more death and destruction than Nazism, the Left has managed to obscure its historical roots in genocide and retains the moral high ground in much of its posturing.

"The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.* [...] They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust."**

- Karl Marx

*Marx. People's Paper. April 16, 1853

**Journal of the history of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1, 1981

Genocide is a necessary component of any ideology that professes to believe in the need for the development of a "New Man"; certainly the modern Left would prefer to raise consciousness by education (and coercion), but when their desire for power is thwarted by "counter-revolutionaries", the only answer is to destroy their enemies.  Note how the rhetoric of the (true believer) radical environmentalists has become increasingly eliminationist as the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming has been increasingly repudiated. 

The idea of improving the volk by eliminating undesirables is an old belief of the Progressive movement and goes back to its roots.  It usually surprises Liberals-by-Temperament when they are told that Planned Parenthood, for example, explicitly promoted abortion and birth control in order to rid society of undesirables:

How Planned Parenthood Duped America

At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.

This does not mean that all Leftists, or any Liberals-by Temperament for that matter, support genocide.  Almost all would be horrified to accept that those most committed to their ideological preferences, inevitably must support evil once they accept that their end (saving the planet, protecting the people from [projected] enemies, ensuring dominance for one's ethnic or religious group) justifies any means. 

The greatest threat facing Civilization today is the alliance between the Left and Sharia Islam.  Most Liberals-by-Temperament have bought into the belief that Islam is under assault by the Right wing in this country.  The lack of anti-Islamic hatecrimes (whose numbers are dwarfed by anti-Semitic hatecrimes) does not impact this belief, a belief actively being promulgated by apologists for, and collaborators with, genocidal Islam.  Patrick Poole summarized the state of the "stealth Jihad" for Pajamas media last week:

2010: The Year of Islamist Infiltration

While the domestic terror trend has continued unabated, elements of pre-violent, or rather stealth, jihad are taking firm root in our government, military, judicial, and educational institutions, without the slightest opposition from the Obama administration and our homeland security agencies. In fact, if we’ve seen anything this year, it has been the willingness of government officials to lend their support to aid this stealth jihad.

The failure to recognize the “civilizational jihad” being waged against us is a bipartisan problem. Driven mainly by Muslim Brotherhood front groups and pushed by non-violent Islamist organizations in the West, the threat remains badly underrated by our national security establishment. But it was placed front and center by the report titled “Sharia: The Threat to America,” issued by the Team B II panel of national security experts including former CIA Director Jim Woolsey and former DIA Director Lt. Gen. Ed Soyster.

His summary, offered after voluminous documentation of the ways in which radical Muslims have insinuated themselves into our government, is telling:

This list is not exhaustive. Certainly more examples could be cited. The Obama administration’s failure to understand the problem of Islamic radicalization and terrorism is fundamental, fueled with an outreach-to-anyone-at-any-cost policy that is perhaps best typified by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s July statements that his foremost mission was to improve relations with the Muslim world. What these twelve examples demonstrate is that our national security, intelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic establishment are utterly defenseless before the stealth jihad that is attacking the heart of our Western society.

If 2009 was the tipping point for domestic terror, 2010 is sure to be remembered as the year that the “civilizational jihad” continued apace. Hopefully in 2011, it will be clear to at least some of our political, civic, and religious leadership that a dramatic change in national policy is urgently needed.

In my opinion, our President is more ideological than the usual Liberal-by-Temperament and is quite comfortable with totalitarians and murderous thugs; he barely can rouse himself and his administration to criticize atrocities committed by the varied thugs who comprise much of the International Community, ie the UN, is tolerant to a fault of attempts to limit the freedoms of individuals, whether at home or abroad, and is facilitating the spread of pernicious ideas that can serve to enable International Law, with all its limitations on speech and behavior in the name of combating bad thoughts (hate speech), to supersede American Constitutional protections for the individual.

The current war being fought between the regressive and repressive forces allied with political Islam and Western Civilization will not be fought with massed armies on battlefields; it will not even be fought primarily in terror-counterterror struggles; it will be fought in the realm of ideas; ideas, which when they finally are allowed to come to their fullest fruition, mandate the death and enslavement of millions in service to the perfect ideology. 

If we close our eyes to the battle that is already underway, just as we have been blinded to the past, we will lose.

The film I have embedded below is long and painful to watch.  It is a worthwhile antidote to those who imagine that their ideology (whether a modern pathology like Socialism or an ancient scourge returned like political Islam) justifies any and every horror inflicted upon its (real, imagined, or manufactured) enemies: [HT: Dr. Sanity, who is once again blogging regularly.]

The Soviet Story

“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now…

The current Left-Islamist alliance is the heir to the Communist-Nazi (and concomitant Nazi-Islamist) and post-WWII Communist-Islamist alliance of WWII.

The evil that is/was an inextricable aspect of Communism and Socialism has been effaced from our historical memory.  It has been a remarkably effective whitewash; just as remarkable is the current self imposed blindness of the West to the evil that infects Islam.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

-Verbal, aka Keyser Soze

The Altruistic Will to Power

There is a small ferment in parts of the blogosphere and media about some proposed changes in the DSM-V, the fifth iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual which forms the nosological bedrock of modern American Psychiatry.  Tuesday's Science Times reported the story (with a wonderfully misleading headline):

A Fate That Narcissists Will Hate: Being Ignored

Narcissists, much to the surprise of many experts, are in the process of becoming an endangered species.

Not that they face imminent extinction — it’s a fate much worse than that. They will still be around, but they will be ignored.

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due out in 2013, and known as DSM-5) has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition.

In reality, the DSM-V proposes to offer a series of Chinese menu options to describe characteristics of disordered personalities, an approach as good as any other; in reality there is rarely (never) a pure culture of a disordered personality and most disturbed people exhibit multiple pathological personality traits.  The so-called normal person usually has a fair number of mildly to moderately pathological parts of his personality as well, likely a result of having a complex and evolutionarily recent mental apparatus.

As long time readers here may appreciate I have little use for standard Psychiatric nosology.  By the time of the DSM-III, any attempts at differentiating Psychiatric disorders by understanding their etiology had been jettisoned in favor of a check list of signs and symptoms that allowed one to, in theory, conduct more reliable research (under the assumption that all Depressions are the same if their superficial symptoms are similar) and direct Pharmacological treatment.  In fact, since DSM-III, a good argument can be made that the sole utility of the DSM has been to direct treatment with drugs and facilitate insurance reimbursement.  [See Better Living Through Chemistry? Part I for a more in depth discussion of the evolution of the DSM.]

The Last Psychiatrist has an interesting perspective on the proposed changes:

Narcissism Out Of The DSM-- And Into The Open

You may have heard the news: "Narcissism is being removed form the DSM."

Narcissistic personality disorder, characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance and the need for constant attention, has been eliminated from the upcoming manual of mental disorders, which psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness.

That sentence is technically accurate.  What's missing, however, is that it would be replaced by something else, a more wordy, symptom cluster description of a personality disorder.  You can still "diagnose" someone with narcissistic traits.

However, on the face of it, people are understandably freaked out:

One of the sharpest critics of the DSM committee on personality disorders is a Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. John Gunderson, an old lion in the field of personality disorders and the person who led the personality disorders committee for the current manual.

Asked what he thought about the elimination of narcissistic personality disorder, he said it showed how "unenlightened" the personality disorders committee is.

"They have little appreciation for the damage they could be doing." He said the diagnosis is important in terms of organizing and planning treatment.

Since he doesn't get Pharma money, there's no need to disclose his megalodon sized bias: his whole career is about measurement tools for narcissism.

And so if you're thinking that the craziness is that psychiatry is the doing away with the concept of narcissism you have fully missed the point: the issue isn't whether narcissism exists or not, the issue is who gets to decide if narcissism exists or not.

His post is worth reading; you will enjoy his description of the vicissitudes of Neurosis.  I was struck by his point that many of the changes involved are immaterial but simply reflect the arrogation of power by the people involved.  Isn't this the problem with bureaucrats in general?  They always make decisions which eventuate in an increased accrual of power and control in their own agencies and they almost always believe they are doing so for the most altruistic of reasons.

When Psychoanalysis lost its position as the authoritative source of understanding of the mind a little noticed effect was the loss of therapeutic humility. 

(There were many good reasons to dethrone Psychoanalysis, among them that the treatment is not appropriate for most people and can be harmful to some; however, the fact that drugs offered rapid symptom relief and the illusion of treatment of disease has done a disservice to people in distress and facilitated anew the view that the mind is simply a not too sophisticated machine and that people can be adequately treated as if they are no more than a collection of chemicals that need to be tweaked form time to time.) 

Even as the Psychoanalyst is in a position of significant importance to their patients, they spend a great deal of time and energy, including in their personal analysis, attempting to understand the ways in which their own desires can contaminate their treatment and harm their patients.  We all want nothing more (consciously) than to help our patients, yet the desire to control others is a deeply ingrained part of the human psyche.  Psychiatrist and therapists of all stripes who have never grappled with such issues in their own intensive therapy all at much greater risk of unintentionally weilding power for their own purposes, not always in the best interests of their patients. 

Only the most ideologicla openly express their desire to contorl others; such peopel are overtly dangerous andm  ust be opposed at all costs.  Yet the soft tyrranny of those who gain power for noble and just purposes is just as inimical to the human spriit, if slower to destroy and less overt.

Its a rare individual who can resist the urge to exert power over others in order to do good.

Gandalf: There is one other who knew Bilbo had the Ring. I looked everywhere for the creature Gollum, but the enemy found him first. I don't know how long they tortured him, but through the endless screams and inane babble, they discerned two words:
Gollum: SHIRE! BAGGINS!
Frodo: Shire? Baggins? But that would lead them here!
[Cuts to a Ringwraith cutting off a Hobbit's head]
Frodo: [holding out the Ring] Take it Gandalf!
[Gandalf backs away]
Frodo: Take it!
Gandalf: No, Frodo.
Frodo: You must take it!
Gandalf: You cannot offer me this ring!
Frodo: I'm giving it to you!
Gandalf: Don't... tempt me Frodo! I dare not take it. Not even to keep it safe. Understand, Frodo. I would use this ring from a desire to do good... But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.

Psychological Attacks

In 1964 the American Psychiatric Association, in one of their more shameful acts, attacked the Republican candidate for the Presidency on Psychiatric grounds.

PsychBlogging and the Goldwater Rule

The Psychoanalysis of public figures, a subset of Applied Psychoanalysis, has a rather checkered history.  In 2004, Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times on The Perils of Putting National Leaders on the Couch.  She described an occasion where Psychiatry was seriously misused:

In 1964, a few months before the presidential election, Fact magazine, now defunct, surveyed the membership of the American Psychiatric Association about the personality traits of Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee. The psychiatrists savaged Goldwater, calling him "warped," and a "paranoid schizophrenic" who harbored unconscious hatred of his Jewish father and endured rigid toilet training.

Such forays into applied psychoanalysis have not been immune to criticism. After the Fact survey, the psychiatric association issued the so-called Goldwater Rule, advising members that it is "unethical for psychiatrists to offer a professional opinion unless he/she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement."

In general, the Goldwater Rule is a smart guideline to follow for Mental Health writers, including bloggers. Exceptions occur and are no less shameful in the recent past than in the distant past:

There have been Psychiatric "hit jobs" performed on the current President, which purport to explain his policies and positions as resulting from his early experiences.  Justin Franks, MD, is a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the author of Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.  Needless to say, Franks has never interviewed the President let alone put him on the couch, yet his book takes extreme liberties with various published sources to skewer Bush. 

Porphyrogenitus, at Winds of Change, offers a useful reminder that such amateurish psychologizing can occur on the Right as well as on the Left:

Blogchair Psychoanalysis

Criticisms of these sort, blogchair psychoanalytics, are insipid and self-defeating regardless of who engages in them. They do nothing to advance the debate, and a lot to poison it. I mean, c'mon, who is fooling who here? Nobody is fooling anyone but themselves. People who think Obama or Reagan should have never been President don't do so because they're the product of alcoholic households or for any other psychoanalytic reason, and nobody who does think either were or are fine Presidents are going to be convinced otherwise by bogus arguments of this sort. The psychoanalitic deligitimization comes after already deciding they don't like their policies. It's never "you know, I really like what this guy's trying to accomplish and support his policies, but he's probably got this deep-seated mental disorder I attribute to him. He might be unfit for office by reason of crazy."

The article to which Porphyrogenitus linked was posted at the American Thinker blog. As far as I can tell, the article was not written by a Psychiatrist, which means that it is simultaneously less perceptive psychodynamically and less authoritative. The writer uses pop psychology memes to categorize the Presidents character and behavior. This would be foolish (and unethical) were it done by a professional; having a lay person write such an inane article is merely foolish.

There is a well understood tendency of those in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis to use the insights they gain in their daily life. This of course is one of the goals of treatment, the hard won attainment of insight which facilitates a widened and more free decision repertoire for the patient. However, many Patients use their insights, typically when the insight is primarily intellectual and has not yet produced character change, as a weapon with which to attack important people in their environment. It is not unusual to hear a patient complain that their significant other attacked them with something their therapist said in a session. “My husband's therapist told him that I am a selfish woman.” Whether or not the charge is accurate is irrelevant; it is meant as an attack and taken as such.

[It is also not unusual for our patients to use our comments as weapons; this typically requires some distortion in how a comment is understood since a good therapist rarely comments directly on the behavior or character of people who they know only through their patients. At other times our patients use others' voices as a weapon to attack us: “My husband said you aren't helping me.” It is sometimes hard to directly criticize and attack one's therapist.]

Whenever I decide to write an applied Psychoanalytic essay that concerns a living person, it is designed explicitly to illuminate weaknesses in their character that might be exploitable. I reserve such efforts for genuine enemies, like Ayman al Zawahiri, rather than political opponents like Barack Obama. We can, and should, oppose Barack Obama on his policies, which I believe are often foolish and occasionally dangerous, but we do ourselves and our arguments no favors when we attempt to hijack Psychology to pathologize our political opponents.

Passionate Intensity

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming -- William Butler Yeats

In the aftermath of the Turkish inspired Gaza "Humanitarian" incident, Israel has been attacked with a frenzied passion not seen since the days of the Third Reich.  A great many words have been written attempting to make sense of the reactions of the sophisticated, mostly liberal, European and American elites, which have at times mirrored the mindless rage of the Palestinians and their enablers.  Two of the more important discussions are worth highlighting.

Walter Russell Mead has written a much linked post discussing the recurrence of a, perhaps naive, facilitation of atrocity, by those who Stalin once referred to as "useful idiots":

Goo-Goo Genocidaires: The Blood Is Dripping From Their Hands

When ‘Understanding’ Becomes Collaboration

Worse, some of the ‘good guys’ sympathized with and made excuses for the bad.  Germany was resentful and bitter, they said, because the Treaty of Versailles was unfair.  Let Adolf Hitler have his ‘reasonable’ goals of reuniting ethnic Germans under one roof, and Germany would become a peaceful and satisfied country, a bulwark of European order.  This sounds crazy now, but it was the conventional wisdom among the intelligentsia and literati (except for the Communists and their closest sympathizers) during the 1930s; this is why voices warning of war like Churchill were so isolated.  War was so destructive, argued the false prophets of fake enlightenment, that only a madman would start one.  And while Hitler was alarming, the apparatus of the German state was sane.  There were moderate Nazis, with limited goals; given western forbearance, wise concessions and enough time, the moderates would edge the Nazi radicals out of power.

That was the standard refrain about Germany from 1933 through 1939 and at every crisis or turning point academics and journalists stepped forward to plead for patience and to predict an imminent triumph of the ‘moderate’ Nazis over the ‘radicals’.  In the meantime, anti-Nazi rhetoric and boycotts in the West only empowered Hitler and united German opinion behind him. Give him the Saar, Austria, yes and the Sudetenland: sooner or later he would calm down and the world would be at peace.  When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming that simply by giving Hitler the Sudentenland (the then-German speaking part of Czechoslovakia that happened to include the country’s mountainous border areas and natural defenses) he had won “peace in our time”, nobody was happier than the fatheaded peace clergy — unless it was the enlightened class of journalists and professors who set the tone for upper middle class enlightenment at the time.

It was the same thing with Stalin.  Half of the peace movement was in love with Communism; the other half thought that poor Stalin had no choice but to be brutal and tough because he was surrounded by hostile states.  Recognize Stalin, trade with him, stop calling him nasty names.  Treat him with dignity and respect, they said, and everything will work out for the best. There had been plenty of sympathy for Stalin in the West during the thirties — even as he was carrying out mass murder on a scale that poor Pol Pot could only envy, Stalin never lacked for apologists and defenders among the chattering classes in those countries where they were still permitted to chat.

It is a remarkable and inescapable conclusion when reading Walter Russell Mead's review of the history of such a strain in the body politic to recognize how history is repeating.  Substitute Hamas, or Iran, or Hezbollah, or Turkey for Russia and Germany and the sense of deja vu is profound.  Consider our current "Peace movement":

It is just not true, historically speaking, that ‘peace movements’ lead to peace or, for that matter, support policies that will bring peace.  More often than not, the opposite is true.  Winston Churchill was a grizzled old British imperialist of the worst kind, but if Britain had listened to him instead of to its peace campaigners in the 1930s there most likely would never have been either a World War Two or Cold War.  We can be very grateful that Ronald Reagan and the NATO leadership turned a deaf ear to the nuclear freeze movement; had those besotted idealists had their way the Soviet Union and the Cold War might be still with us today — along with nuclear arsenals much larger and much more dangerous than anything the US and Russia now have.

Not so long ago we had a word in our society for tiger-strokers: people who thought that if you soothed the savage passions of irrational dictators by treating them with respect and giving them treats then the dictators would become less dangerous.

We called them ‘appeasers’.

Professor Richard Landes addresses an important question concerning these people, many among the most privileged in the West, who appear to be collaborating with those who would enjoy nothing more than to cut their heads off:

From Useful Idiot to Useful Infidel: Meditations on the Folly of 21st Century “Intellectuals”

So why would a late 20th century progressive sympathize with, support, run interference, even lie and deceive, for a movement that manifested all the worst traits of totalitarian megadeath from the 20th century – the cult of death, the embrace of nihilism, paranoia, and genocidal hate-mongering? At least the fellow travelers of the early and mid-20th century had a noble ideal for which they carried out their campaigns of misinformation. But now, we have intellectuals from a wide range of fields running interference for Islam, even in its most regressive forms.

And of course, at this asymmetrical stage in the war that Global Jihad wages against the West, nothing is more critical to the capacity of Jihad to mobilize – to recruit, indoctrinate, train, and deploy – its forces than a cognitive victory in which its targets in the West are kept in the dark about its real intentions. And given the yeoman job that apologists like John Esposito, Noah Feldman and Juan Cole perform in this sense, I think it worthwhile to use the expression “useful infidel” for this new breed of fellow travelers. Nothing is more useful to Jihadi ambitions to subject the entire world to Sharia than non-Muslim intellectuals who insist that Islam is a religion of peace that is perfectly consonant with democracy, and that the terrorists represent a tiny, marginal, deviation from true Islam.

I want to argue that this astonishing paradox – Islamic Jihad is the last thing one would expect reasonable, progressive intellectuals to support – strips away the pretence of naïve good intentions that the older “useful idiot” used to plead. Once we confront the “irrationality” of useful infidelity, and realize the urgency of trying to understand a phenomenon that pushes us in the direction of cultural, even civilizational suicide, we must confront the underlying (self-destructive) emotions.

...

Demopaths and their Dupes

It seems to me that the phenomenon of useful idiocy revolves around a particularly dysfunctional relationship, that between demopath and dupe. Demopaths arise in response to democratic cultures, which they target in a cognitive war suited only to assaults on such societies, that is, ones that embrace principles of a human right to freedom. They themselves embrace authoritarian principles of dominion by force, what Lee Smith has chronicled so chillingly in his latest book, The Strong Horse. Their line of attack: “you (democratic target) do not live up to your commitments; and in particular, you violate our (demopathic belligerent) rights in preventing us from participating in your democracy.”

The key to demopaths is their hypocrisy: they have no commitment to democratic values or human rights. On the contrary, they despise these values, and they have no intention of, once in power, respecting the rights of others. Their motto: “Use democracy to destroy democracy.”

Richard Landes argues that at least some of the genesis of such "useful infidels" stems from cognitive dissonance (the inability to tolerate the collapse of their world view when the Communist Utopia finally and unmistakably failed in 1989), envy (of Jews and Americans, successful cultures and successful peoples) and unacknowledged fear (of Islamists and their rage.)

Both Walter Russell Mead and Richard Landes have made important contributions to understanding how so many in the West can be willing, to paraphrase Lenin, to sell the Islamists the knife with which to behead them.

I would add an additional element. The superannuated Progressive sophisticate in the 21st century, as his forebears before him, prides himself on his distance from the primitive.  Passion in recreational sex is idealized but passion in defense of one's Civilization and its accomplishments is beneath them.  Yet passion, while it can be hidden, does not disappear and die.  In the progressive, passion  lives on vicariously through the idealized "noble savage."  If Rousseau's noble savage was never more than a caricature, it was a caricature that expressed a deep, even primal, yearning for a return to a state of innocence and passionate engagement which the modern man felt was lacking within himself.  If there is no God, there is no passion in religion.  If there is no divinity in man, he is merely a beast and all his passions must be simultaneously denied and expressed in carefully hidden and externalized ways.  Today, the"noble savage" is the Palestinian and the Jihadi.  These are people who are free to express the most primitive passions, and they are held as innocents at the same time.  In this view, they have been driven to extremis by the depredations of the evil, fallen West.  If one is beaten by such savages, it is understandable; they were driven to it and in reality are simply "nobles savages" fighting for the basic rights we take for granted and have denied them.  After being nearly beaten to death by a mob, "journalist" Robert Fisk expressed these sentiments beautifully:

UK journalist beaten by Afghan mob

"It doesn't excuse them for beating me up so badly but there was a real reason why they should hate Westerners so much.

"I don't want this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no reason. They had every reason to be angry - I've been an outspoken critic of the US actions myself. If I had been them, I would have attacked me."

Passionate rage is powerful and exciting.  Fisk could never express such rage simply for his own sake or for the sake of his country; that would be unseemly, unsophisticated.  Yet he could easily express such rage vicariously through those who are willing to express their inchoate rage freely and without reservation or guilt.  For those who are emotionally stunted and crippled by their anomie, such noble passions are admirable.  As a bonus, such passion is generally accepted, within  their social milieu, as entirely appropriate if directed at the hated and envied Jews and Americans.  As a bonus, the Jews and Americans will rarely even murmur a word of protest, let alone threaten your life.  You can even pretend you are "speaking truth to power" and receive a frisson of pleasure at your temerity, without having to actually risk anything at all!

In a civilized nation, we must  learn to tame our passionate rage, the pleasure we gain from destruction and terror.  Those who do not find compensating, more sublimated outlets for their aggression, may find themselves peculiarly susceptible to the siren call of the passionate intensity of the imagined "noble savage."  Thus are "useful infidels" formed, from the intersection of the personal and the political.

As Richard Landes and Walter Russell Mead both recognize, and  as the great poet once noted, in such grim times events take on a momentum of their own and the outcome is unlikely to be promising.

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Sail Away

In America you'll get food to eat
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American

Ain't no lions or tigers ain't no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Ev'rybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard little wog sail away with me

CHORUS
Sail away sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You're all gonna be an American

- Randy Newman

Our approach to and conceptions of Liberty and Libertarianism, Freedom and Slavery, State Corporatism and Liberal Fascism, are being expressed in a somewhat inchoate fashion in our attitudes toward the Tea Party movement.  I suspect Simon has it right:

Not Interested In Politics

This is about the best take on the Tea Party participants (as opposed to the "leaders") that I have read so far.

Beyond their fiscally conservative principles, the ideology of the people involved in the tea party movement tends to vary dramatically. So far, tea party activists "haven't been interested in politics," Fitton said.

I also suspect that some of what confuses people about Barack Obama is that he is as much a Corporatist as any Republican who has ever been a captive of the Military-Industrial Complex that our Liberal friends are always so concerned with, but his Corporatism is more well hidden (because it exists in an MSM blind spot) and more parsimonious to the Left. 

Consider Mark Safranski's comments this morning about Google, a giant information processing corporation which aims to "do no evil":

Google as a Dishonest Broker?

This strikes me as an exceedingly bad idea from Google:

From Drudge:

GOOGLE FRANKENSTEIN: MACHINES TO CHOOSE YOUR NEWS
Mon Apr 12 2010 08:15:34 ET

GOOGLE CEO and Obama political activist Eric Schmidt declared this weekend that his machines will help decide what news you receive!

...

If this no-choice ”opposing view” meme sounds familiar, that’s because a prominent friend and appointee of President Obama, former U. of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, has, for several years, articulated a sophisticated  theory on the need for government to regulate speech, “reformulate” the 1st Amendment to ensure greater “diversity” and compel the presentation of “opposing views”. While I share Sunstein’s concern that many people are deliberately corrupting their OODA Loops by only reading sources with which they already agree, forcing legal adults to read something else isn’t the answer. It’s a free country and with liberty comes the right to be left to wallow in ignorance in peace.

Getting the Congress and states to turn the free speech and free press clauses on their head is a task with small chance of political success. Persuading or pressuring a small number of friendly CEO’s of search engine companies to optimize their own systems to produce politically favorable results for the administration and the Democratic Party is a lot easier, far less transparent to the public and more difficult for the GOP and conservatives (or for that matter, dissident progressives and unpopular minorities) to combat.

To put it simply, the long term strategy here is that the information aggregators - Google being the 800lb gorilla - will become the new “gatekeepers” with their finger on the scales that determine the page rank of opposing views on controversial issues.

The MSM were traditionally our gatekeepers for news, but until the internet, most of us were unaware of this feature and unaware of how it was used.  Google will fail if they try to recreate the halcyon days of the last century.

Most Americans have not been terribly engaged with politics, especially in the last 30 years since Ronald Reagan came along and slowed the move toward an ever expanding state and ushered in a long period of (mostly) economic expansion.  As long as they were able to be left alone to take care of themselves and their families, most Americans were happy to leave the governing to those who were most interested in the effort. 

George W. Bush mobilized the Left, in part, by his feared expansion of the State's power to survey and monitor people in the name of national security.  (Tellingly, none of the Bush "excesses" have been repudiated by the Obama administration; they offer lip service, though with decreasing volume, but have done nothing to dismantle the apparatus established by Bush.) 

Now Barack Obama has come along and has mobilized the vast middle of the electorate, who fear the exponentially larger expansion of the State in the name of Liberal ends, which justify all sorts of potentially illiberal means.

There is an interesting discussion going on at Crooked Timber which neatly illustrates how people can talk past each other while believing they are addressing each other's points.  This post was authored by John Holbo:

Adventures in Libertarian Blind Spots

One of Boaz’ fellow libertarians, Jacob Hornberger – cited by Boaz as a case in point of this odd Golden Age-ism – made a response which made the same damn obvious mistake all over again. His post – “Up from Serfdom – How to restore lost liberties while building on the positive strides America has made since 1776” – hearkens to the good old days of the 80’s – 1880’s, that is:

Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.

As a libertarian, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a society that is pretty darned golden.

...

Obviously [Arnold] Kling and [Jacob] Hornberger could not have done a better job of proving Boaz’ original point. It’s tempting to accuse them of just not caring about liberty for anyone except white men. How else could they miss this stuff? But I doubt that’s it. (Anyway, aren’t they Jewish? It’s hard for me to imagine men named Kling and Hornberger seriously believe they, personally, would be made more free by being transported back to the late 19th Century.) It seems to me the most probable explanation of this truly bizarre blind spot – it really is bizarre and there’s no other word for it – is a sort of strange entrapment in the conservative ‘restoration’ narrative, but perhaps induced by Hayekian rather than conservative rhetoric. If the 20th Century was the Road To Serfdom, it can hardly have been a long march to increased freedom. If progressives and liberals are the authoritarian enemy, it can hardly be that their victories have, on the whole, made us more free. Since the 20th Century was when the bad stuff really got going, how can it NOT be appropriate to be thoroughly nostalgic for the 1880’s as a Lost Golden Age?

I cannot do the exchange justice with excerpts so suggest you read the posts and follow the links to an interesting discussion in which 1880's apples are being compared to 2010's oranges. 

In 1880 many people were not free.  Beyond that, few people had actually developed the idea that more people should be free.  A culture is stuck in its time.  In 1880 the idea that women, or blacks, or immigrants were inherently equal and deserving of equal rights was a thought-not-yet-thought.  To imagine that the rules of 1880 society could be adopted in 2010 is "not even wrong."  It simply makes no sense.

Yet what many Americans are reacting to in the Tea Parties is the sense that our government has now grown so large, with ambitions even larger, that it is inevitably infringing upon our basic liberties.  More and more, we are not just being "left alone" by our government and their infringements are becoming more and more noxious and overt.

For example, when I was a Psychiatric resident in training, we were required to enter chart notes on a daily basis, documenting every interaction with our patients.  By my fourth year, a new state mandated requirement had come into existence.  We were now being required to document written treatment plans.  There were a long list of elements necessary for the treatment plans; writing them was annoying and time consuming an did little to improve patient care.  The time spent on the TPs was time not spent with patients.  The TPs did provide work and a rationale for the establishment of an office in the State Health Department devoted to ensuring compliance with the regulations on TPs.   Today, 30 years later, in the clinic where I work Part time, we are required by the state accrediting agency to have an initial TP, 30 pages of documentation on assessments of pain, drug and alcohol use, cigarettes smoking, past history, quality assurance, and various other forms for the cause du jour.  Every three months a new TP is required, even for those chronic patients who have merely been maintained in a relatively stable state and whose plan is to continue to maintain them out of the hospital.  Needless to say, when a newly mandated form comes down from the state, none of the old forms are dispensed with; new forms are just added to the pile.  (The unfortunate Social Workers spend half their time filling out forms such that they have now been forced to offer 30 minute Psychotherapy sessions instead of the customary 45 minutes; they simply do not have the time to see patients.) 

Now take this experience and multiply it in every area where the government has involvement.  We are being snowed under by rules and regulations.  New taxes are metastasizing to support the increasingly cumbersome bureaucratic apparatus required to make sure each of us behaves in the prescribed manner.  Our rulers even want to add regulations concerning our very breathing! (As luck would have it, we emit CO2 with every breath.)  The Tea Parties are responding to a sense of government growing out of control, with favored groups and corporations receiving public largess while the majority become cogs in a machine designed primarily for the benefit of the governing class. 

The 1880s appear to be a Golden Age because people lived unencumbered by the thousands of laws and millions of pages of regulations which seek to define every aspect of our lives.  And for those for whom even the 1880's were too stultifying, there still existed the frontier.

1880 was not a Libertarian paradise; too many had their horizons too constrained by custom and law.  Yet the 1880s also were a time when those who were most free appear, from here, to have been more free than most of us today.

The Open Mind VI: This is a Challenge

All Previous Posts in this series can be found at The Open Mind archives.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. - Daniel Patrick Moynihan 

Since the passage of the Healthcare bill, a new meme has taken root in the base of the Democratic party, amplified by their echo chambers in the Mainstream Media and the blogosphere.  According to this thesis, the Tea Party movement is primarily composed of  violent, and potentially violent, racists and radical right wingers.  The initial impetus for the propagation of this meme within the MSM was the post-victory march through the Tea Party protesters by a group of black Congressmen:

Tea Party Protests: 'Ni**er,' 'Fa**ot' Shouted At Members Of Congress

Abusive, derogatory and even racist behavior directed at House Democrats by Tea Party protesters on Saturday left several lawmakers in shock.

Preceding the president's speech to a gathering of House Democrats, thousands of protesters descended around the Capitol to protest the passage of health care reform. The gathering quickly turned into abusive heckling, as members of Congress passing through Longworth House office building were subjected to epithets and even mild physical abuse.

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spat on by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a 'ni--er.' And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a "faggot," as protestors shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president's speech, shrugged off the incident.

But Clyburn was downright incredulous, saying he had not witnessed such treatment since he was leading civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s.

"It was absolutely shocking to me," Clyburn said, in response to a question from the Huffington Post. "Last Monday, this past Monday, I stayed home to meet on the campus of Claflin University where fifty years ago as of last Monday... I led the first demonstrations in South Carolina, the sit ins... And quite frankly I heard some things today I have not heard since that day. I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus."

Surprisingly, despite the presence of a great many video cameras and cell phone cameras, no video of the event in which the offending words or behavior could be discerned were ever produced.  The lack of evidence has not inhibited many people from perpetuating the stereotypes.  To my disappointment, Jay Adler joined in last week:

“And You Know That It’s Right…”

Following up on yesterday’s post on the untethering of the GOP from reality, we have

Timothy Egan, The New York Times – “House of Anger“

Having welcomed Tea Party rage into their home, and vowing repeal, the Republicans have made a dangerous bargain. First, they are tying their fate to a fringe, one that includes a small faction of overt racists and unstable people. The Quinnipiac poll this week found only 13 percent of Americans say they are part of the Tea Party movement.

ABC News and new media everywhere – “House Democrats Face Violent Threats After Health Care Vote“

Rachel Slajda, TPMDC -”It’s The Democrats Who Are Fanning The Flames of Violence” say House Minority Whip Eric Cantor

by talking about the threats against them.

Jay concludes:

And I wonder how many of those who flirt with insurrection through its rhetoric, or maybe just spit at heroes of the civil rights movement and call them nigger, or prove themselves faggots by calling Barney Frank a “faggot” before putting the bit back between their teeth – I wonder how many of them are just so, so upset because Obama “palled around with terrorists” that they’re ready to do something about it, by God.

Lock and load.

My initial reaction was probably a mirror image of Jay's.  (Obligatory disclaimer: I have not attended any Tea Party meetings or demonstrations but I have tremendous sympathy for the baseline position of the Tea Partiers, ie our government has grown so large as to threaten our fundamental liberties and only a smaller government, that can pay its bills, will be able to safe guard our liberties.)  I doubted that "my side" would have stooped to such a counter-productive low.  Certainly there are always loose cannons in any crowd but the use of the racial epithet that is one of the "third rails" of American discourse seemed unlikely to me. 

My second reaction was to recall the too-numerous-to-count attacks on George W. Bush in the latter part of his Presidency.  BusHitler was only one of the common assaults on decency that was a regular occurrence at anti-War demonstrations.  (Zombietime has helpfully collected an extensive documentation of death threats against Bush during his Presidency, death threats that were remarkable for how unremarkable they were.) However, the argument that "your side did it, too, and worse" hardly excuses the kinds of verbal assault that the Tea Partiers were accused of. 

My next response was more productive.  I decided to look for actual indicators of violent rhetoric and actual physical attacks.  In the space of a mere 45 minutes I noted a number of items at Professor Reynolds site:

LEFTIST ISSUES death threats to Palin on Twitter. Have these people no decency?. No decency at all?

Posted at 8:19 am by Glenn Reynolds  

 A STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE: Leftist death threats against Bush at protests.

Then, of course, there was Craig Kilborn’s “Snipers Wanted” moment.

Posted at 7:44 am by Glenn Reynolds  

MORE ON THREATS TO REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS: Jim Treacher has the audio of the Jean Schmidt threat.

Posted at 7:26 am by Glenn Reynolds  

OK, maybe Glenn was cherry picking. 

HARRY REID SUPPORTERS ATTACK TEA PARTY BUS!… Update: Breitbart Attacked!

Black Dem Rep. Who Was Reportedly Spit on by Tea Party Protester: I Never Claimed to Have Been Spit on Intentionally, Others Are Making the Claim on My Behalf, Refuses to Confirm it Happened..(Update) He's Full of Shit...

NH Dem Likes To Shoot Conservative Republicans

PROVOCATIVE, CONFRONTATIONAL RHETORIC FROM JAMES CARVILLE AND THE DCCC

There sure are a lot of threats going around the airwaves these days and few of them seem to emanate from the Tea Party.  But wait, didn't Jay link to some provocative rhetoric from a Republican Congressman?

“Let’s beat the other side to a pulp!” Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, shouted to the last stand of Tea Partiers on Sunday night. “Let’s chase them down! There’s going to be a reckoning.”

Should an honest observer conclude this is a hyperbolic statement of political intent or an incitement to attack and kill one's political opponents?  As you consider your response to that question, consider this statement:

 ‘If They Bring a Knife to the Fight, We Bring a Gun’

Mobster wisdom tells us never to bring a knife to a gun fight. But what does political wisdom say about bringing a gun to a knife fight?

That’s exactly what Barack Obama said he would do to counter Republican attacks “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a Philadelphia fundraiser Friday night. “Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

The comment drew some laughs and applause.

[As an aside, George W. Bush had many faults, but he at least had the grace to refrain from the kinds of personal, petty exchange of epithets that Obama seems to revel in.  A President should never respond with an attack on an individual or group of citizens who are merely exercising their right to free speech; Obama has done just that, repeatedly, during his tenure and it is unbecoming of a President, and potentially quite dangerous.]

It is now two weeks since the initial attack upon the Tea Party movement.  The accusation that  a Tea Partier spit on a black Congressman has essentially been retracted.  No evidence of the "n-word" has yet been found on any of the videotapes of the supposed incident, leading  James Simpson at American Thinker to wonder about projection:

The Left's Ludicrous Accusations against Tea Partiers

It is a long and lucid article which includes a long list of violent attacks against Republicans and Conservatives by Liberals and Leftists.  A corresponding list of attacks by Conservatives and Republicans against Leftists and Liberals is non-existent, and not for lack of effort by the MSM.

The lack of substantiation for the "n-word" incident has led Andrew Breitbart to offer a challenge:

Barack Obama’s Helter-Skelter, Insane Clown Posse, Alinsky Plans to ‘Deconstruct’ America

After 14 months of committing 100% to health care reform, the day after the signing of the Health Care bill was to mark the Democratic Party’s new primary concern: destroy the uprising, annihilate by all means necessary, the Tea Party movement.

The first sign that a plan was in place was the ham-fisted, high-camp posturing of the most controversial members of the Democratic caucus walking through the peaceful but animated “Tea Party” demonstrators on Capitol Hill. There is no reason for these elected officials to walk above ground through the media circus amid their ideological foes. The natural route is the tunnels between the House office buildings and the Capitol. By crafting a highly symbolic walk of the Congressional Black Caucus through the majority white crowd, the Democratic Party was looking to provoke a negative reaction. They didn’t get it. So they made it up.

The proof that the N-word wasn’t said once, let alone 15 times, as Rep. Andre Carson claimed, is that soon thereafter — even though the press dutifully reported it as truth — Nancy Pelosi followed the alleged hate fest, which allegedly included someone spitting, by walking through the crowd with a gavel in hand and a shit-eating grin on her face. Had the incidents reported by the Congressional Black Caucus actually occurred the Capitol Police would have been negligent to allow the least popular person to that crowd – the Speaker – to put herself in harm’s way.

That crowd was a sea of new-media equipment. Not only were tens of thousands people armed with handicams, BlackBerrys and iPods, so also was the mainstream media there, covering every inch of the event. Why did not one mainstream media outlet raise the specter that perhaps a video would exist to prove the events occurred? I am still dealing with the same press telling me we didn’t prove that ACORN was aiding and abetting criminal activity because we “did not provide enough audio and video evidence.” (Insert laugh track.) Is there not a blatant double standard at play here? Nancy Pelosi tipped her hand that race was a central part of her strategy. She invoked the Civil Rights Act and compared it with the universally reviled health care bill. Her caucus is doubling down on the civil-rights rhetoric. There are no coincidences.

...

I smelled a rat so I offered at first $10k five days after the highly publicized alleged incidents happened. How could we be five full news cycles into this major controversy and not have any evidence? In fact, the existing footage showed the Congressional Black Caucus walking and never once moving their heads toward any “racist outbursts.” Is it conceivable that all of them stoically walked by the N-word as it was hurled 15 times — as they were holding up cameras to convey they were suspicious of the crowd to begin with?

We are now two weeks since the bill was signed and the $10k reward jumped to $20k in a day after it was mentioned on both Hannity and O’Reilly. At the Searchlight Tea Party event last weekend I upped the ante to $100k. [Emphasis mine-SW]  So where’s the evidence? Ken Vogel of Politico covered this story and said calls to Rep. John Lewis — one of the originator’s of the N-word storyline – were never returned.

Go to Breitbart's site for the accompanying videos; they are enlightening for what is not seen or heard, ie evidence of violent or racist threats.

SO, here is my challenge for Jay.  Either find me some evidence that violent or racist threats are a regular occurrence at the Tea Parties (or have even occurred at the Tea Parties) or retract your comments about the unhinged Republicans and re-evaluate your own prejudices that lead you to so easily believe such scurrilous charges.  While searching for the evidence, you might spend some time as well checking out how a smart liberal makes his case in the lair of "the enemy" without smearing the Tea Parties:

How Juan Williams Advances Liberal Ideas in Appreciating Mainstream Message of Tea Party Protesters

In their remarkable spirit of tolerance, the folks at the taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR)

. . . has asked Fox News not to identify its news analyst, Juan Williams, with NPR branding when he appears on Fox News because of outrage among its largely liberal listener-base.

That was just too rich.  A radio network which leans left on the taxpayer dime upset that one of its commentators appears on a private TV network that supposedly leans right.

And Williams is himself no conservative.  But, before these lefties begin their belly-aching, they should actually watch their NPR colleague on FoxNews.  Personally, I find his presence there one of the best things about the network.  Simply put, he’s a very smart liberal who engages his conservative counterparts.

You might also want to take the time to read Walter Russell Mead's rather brilliant exegesis on the tea parties, in which he places them firmly within the American tradition:

Do Soldiers Drink Tea?

At the tea parties here in glamorous Queens we make sure we serve genuine Devonshire clotted cream with the scones and we keep our pinkies carefully extended while lifting the delicate porcelain cups to our lips, but a very different kind of Tea Party has my friends in the upscale media and policy worlds gravely concerned.   To hear them talk, all the know-nothings, wackadoo birther wingnuts, IRS plane bombers, Christian fundamentalists out to turn the US into a theocracy, the flat earthers and the racists have somehow joined together into a force that is as politically formidable as it morally and intellectually contemptible.  These Tea Partiers, I am frequently told, are ‘reactionaries’.  They long for an older, safer and whiter America — a more orderly place where their old fashioned values were unchallenged, one in which ethnic minorities weren’t in their faces, gays weren’t demanding acceptance, and in general life looked more like “Ozzie and Harriet” and less like “South Park.”

I’m sure that description fits some of the people at some of the Tea Parties, but I think it misses the point.  Yes, the Tea Partiers represent something very old in American life and in some ways they want a return to traditional American values, but the traditional American value that inspires them the most is the value of revolutionary change.  The Tea Party movement is the latest upsurge of an American populism that has sometimes sided with the left and sometimes with the right, but which over and over again has upended American elites, restructured our society and forced through the deep political, cultural and institutional changes that from time to time the country needs and which the ruling elites cannot or will not deliver.

For completeness, here is one more from this morning: [HT: Instapundit]

Suicide Watch at DNC HQ: Four in 10 Tea Partiers Independents or Democrats

Go ahead, Democrats and your media lapdogs, keep insulting and smearing the tea partiers. Come November your obliteration will make 1994 look tame by comparison. Of course they'll probably just scoff at this poll and just continue to dig a bigger hole. I say have at it. 

It turns out that the MSM-Democratic slime machine now includes a great many Independents and Democrats among its "victims."