To start, here's a disclaimer. Unlike Barack Obama,
who's NOT a progressive but frequently plays one on TV, I can't even claim the "plays
one on TV" relationship to professional psychiatry or psychology. But as an enthusiastic
amateur in the field, particularly in its political ramifications, I perceive
an aching, desperate need for a book called "Putting Liberals on the Shrink's
Couch."
I'd write it myself, but as the founder of the True
Blue Democrats progressive revolt movement, my days are already filled with
cleaning up the toxic mess created by liberals' unexamined, undiagnosed, and
untreated neuroses. But if a real professional would like to tackle the book, I
gladly offer you, free of charge, my title and the project.
Of course nothing I say here is meant to imply that
the political Right isn't, as the liberal meme goes, "batshit crazy." (What
would old Freud have made of our choosing "batshit" as the adjective of
choice?) Of course they are, but their malady is plainly NOT of the clinical
category I'm interested in here. If you examine the Right's rhetoric, it's
quite clear they're, if anything, on overly cozy terms with the primitive,
reptilian parts of their brain, and evidence for that only grows if you quiet
your ever-ready liberal indignation, and unwinding over a few friendly beers,
let them regale you with their thoughts on "towel heads" and "sand niggers." Er
... Muslims to you and me.
If my next-to-last line deeply shocked your PC
liberal sensibilities to the extent you wish to edit it out, then I'm doing a
great job as an amateur shrink in bringing you closer to the core of your
repressions. See, it's the hallmark of pathological PC liberalism to be FAR
more offended at offensive language than offensive deeds and realities, and to
care far more deeply that someone even mentions a term like "towel head" than
that the Democratic Party was fully complicit in authorizing the unjust Iraq
war with its slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and its displacement
of millions more. Or your FAR deeper wrath over mere use of the "N-word" than
the REALITY that far too many of the fellow humans beings designated by it--even
under their racial "brother" Barack Obama--are allowed to languish in dangerous,
drug-ridden human hellholes like Camden, New Jersey. (For more on Camden and other
such hellholes, check out Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco's courageous,
neurosis-free book "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.")
Now, whether we want to go more Freudian and talk
about the id, or more modernly physiological and neurological and talk about the
amygdala, there's clearly some repressed primitive part of their personality or
brain structure deeply affecting the behavior of those on the Right that standard PC libs are none
too comfortable in acknowledging or dealing with. So, taking for example the
case of terrorism, garden-variety Democrats (perhaps not identical with PC
libs, but there's a pretty big overlap) have largely the same knee-jerk
xenophobic fear reaction as your average Tea Partier, but quickly repress
with horror any thoughts of "towel heads." In any case, their policy positions
are just about the same as those of any Tea Bagger: support for Obama's drone
strikes and the violation of American Muslim citizens' civil rights. Diagnose that support, if you will, as xenophobia masked by conscious unwillingness to acknowledge
the "xeno." And aided and abetted by liberals' strong bias against religion and
the thought that religious believers might wish to consult their most deeply
held beliefs about the cosmos in organizing their lives. While very bad things
may be done in the name of religion--as in the name of secular ideologies like
Communism or Ayn Rand's--no one, to my knowledge, has given an irrefutable
knockdown argument that religion is utterly worthless or bad. Indeed, it seems
to be a powerful source of motivation for the aforementioned human hero Chris
Hedges.
The "psychoanalysis" of liberals could go much
deeper--and would doubtless include an analysis of the role played by liberal
guilt in the elevation to deity status of Barack Obama, perhaps made even more "penetrating"
(a bad Freudian pun here) by a Richard-Wright-style analysis of the masochistic
acceptance by standard Dem liberals of Obama's sadistic repudiation of most of
their progressive ideals. Joe Biden was being only too revealingly Freudian in
remarking that Barack had a "big stick."
As this is only a sketch for a much deeper line of
inquiry, 'nuff said for now. But if you're a Democratic--or unaffiliated--progressive sick of standard liberals' unacknowledged amygdalas and masochism
toward Obama, check out the True Blue Democrats progressive revolt at www.facebook.com/TrueBlueDemocratsAProgressiveRevolt .
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