The Hysteria of the Left
David Ignatius asks why the Democratic Party seems unable to capitalize on the manifest weaknesses of the GOP. In a rational world, this should be possible, right?
This should be the Democrats’ moment: The Bush administration is caught in an increasingly unpopular war; its plan to revamp Social Security is fading into oblivion; its deputy chief of staff is facing a grand jury probe. Though the Republicans control both houses of Congress as well as the White House, they seem to be suffering from political and intellectual exhaustion. They are better at slash-and-burn campaigning than governing.
So where are the Democrats amid this GOP disarray? Frankly, they are nowhere. They are failing utterly in the role of an opposition party, which is to provide a coherent alternative account of how the nation might solve its problems. Rather than lead a responsible examination of America’s strategy for Iraq, they have handed off the debate to a distraught mother who is grieving for her lost son…..
Today’s Democrats have trouble expressing the most basic theme of American politics: “We, the people.” Rather than a governing party with a clear ideology, they are a collection of interest groups. For a simple demonstration, go to the DNC’s Web site and pull down the menu for “People.” What you will find is the following shopping list: “African American, Asian Amer./Pacific Islanders, Disability Community, Farmers and Ranchers, Hispanics, GLBT (Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender) Community, Native Americans, Religious Communities, Seniors & Retirees, Small Business Community, Union Members & Families, Veterans & Military Families, Women, Young People & Students.” That’s most of the threads in the national quilt, but disassembled.
What can the Democrats do to seize the opportunities of the moment? I suggest they take a leaf from Newt Gingrich’s GOP playbook and develop a new “Contract With America.” The Democrats should put together a clear and coherent list of measures they would implement if they could regain control of Congress and the White House.
It is the last angry woman, Ann Coulter, who has a special insight into Camp Casey or the Ranch Davidians of the ragtag Left:
[L]iberals demand that we listen to the same old arguments all over again, not because Sheehan has any new insights, but because she has the ability to repel dissent by citing her grief. On the bright side, Sheehan shows us what Democrats would say if they thought they were immunized from disagreement. Sheehan has called President Bush “that filth-spewer and warmonger.” She says “America has been killing people on this continent since it was started” and “the killing has gone on unabated for over 200 years.” She calls the U.S. government a “morally repugnant system” and says, “This country is not worth dying for.” I have a feeling every time this gal opens her trap, Michael Moore gets a residuals check.
There is the conflict in a nutshell. David Ignatius wants the Democrats to come up with a Contract with America, full of solid plans and programs. Sheehan shows the soul of the Left. The problem for certain of the Democrats is that they are not in control of their emotions. Cold blooded calculation to regain power would counsel senior Democrats to tell the wing-nuts to shut their pie holes. But the rational side is not in charge. Is it too much to call the current state of the Lefts’ continued and uncontrollable outbursts by a clinical and historical name?
Hysteria
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A nervous affection, occurring almost exclusively in women, in which the emotional and reflex excitability is exaggerated, and the will power correspondingly diminished, so that the patient loses control over the emotions, becomes the victim of imaginary sensations, and often falls into paroxism or fits.
Is it any wonder that the feminized Left, regardless of actual gender, exhibits these symptoms?
This space believes that the Left is in the grip of emotions that are more compelling to them than is their will to power. Hence we see, time and again, self-destructive outbursts like those of Dick Durbin on our Nazi, Pol Pot and Stalinist soldiers. Hence we see the lionizing of Michael Moore. Hence the MSM cannot help itself when it obsessively covers the unimportant story of Ms. Sheehan and ignores the stories of all the pro-war parents, not to mention the military volunteers themselves; lest you not think such behavior is self-destructive, remember that 74% of Americans have a lot of confidence in the military, while only 28% feel that way about the MSM. Giving a lot of air time to Camp Casey is a stupid tactic in the MSM’s desire to rid us of George Bush and the GOP; it only puts their bias insufferably on display, further damaging the Media’s already tattered credibility. Yet they can’t help themselves.
It is a grave mistake to believe that people are always motivated by sensible desires and rational priorities. We counsel those who believe this to take a look at the works, for example, of philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathon Lear, of whom we are a big fan. Here is an excerpt from his famous defense of Freud in the New Republic in 1995:
Freud is a deep explorer of the human condition, working in a tradition which goes back to Sophocles and which extends through Plato, Saint Augustine and Shakespeare to Proust and Nietzsche. What holds this tradition together is its insistence that there are significant meanings for human well-being which are obscured from immediate awareness. Sophoclean tragedy locates another realm of meaning in a divine world that humans can at most glimpse through oracles. In misunderstanding these strange meanings, humans usher in catastrophe.
Freud’s achievement, from this perspective, is to locate these meanings fully inside the human world. Humans make meaning, for themselves and for others, of which they have no direct or immediate awareness. People make more meaning than they know what to do with. This is what Freud meant by the unconscious. And whatever valid criticisms can be aimed at him or at the psychoanalytic profession, it is nevertheless true that psychoanalysis is the most sustained and successful attempt to make these obscure meanings intelligible….
[T]he predominant trend in the culture is to treat human existence as straightforward. In the plethora of self-help books, of alternative therapies, diets and exercise programs, it is assumed that we already know what human happiness is.
There are two very different images of what humans must be like if democracy is to be a viable form of government. The prevalent one today treats humans as preference-expressing political atoms, and pays little attention to subatomic structure. Professional pollsters, political scientists and pundits portray society as an agglomeration of these atoms. The only irrationality they recognize is the failure of these preference-expressing monads to conform to the rules of rational choice theory.
Is there another, more satisfying, image of what humans are like which nevertheless makes it plausible that they should organize themselves and live in democratic societies? If we go back to the greatest participatory democracy the world has known–the polis of fifth-century Athens–we see that the flourishing of that democracy coincides precisely with the flowering of one of the world’s great literatures: Greek tragedy. This coincidence is not mere coincidence. The tragic theater gave citizens the opportunity to retreat momentarily from the responsibility of making rational decisions for themselves and their society. At the same time, tragedy confronted them emotionally with the fact that they had to make their decisions in a world that was not entirely rational, in which rationality was sometimes violently disrupted, in which rationality itself could be used for irrational ends…..
What was Sophocles’s message to the Athenian citizens who flocked to the theater? You ignore the realm of unconscious meaning at your peril. Do so, and Oedipus’s fate will be yours. From this perspective, democratic citizens need to maintain a certain humility in the face of meanings which remain opaque to human reason. We need to be wary that what we take to be an exercise of reason will both hide and express an irrationality of which we remain unaware.
The primary goal of a political party is to win elections. The Left is engaged in irrational and emotive behavior inimical to that cause. There are reasons for that behavior, though we will leave those for another day. For now, it is enough that we should see that, whatever is going on in the Left and in the Democratic Party, it is not the cold calculus recommended by David Ignatius. It is something deeper and more powerful.