A 'Gestalt Gutter'

Michael Tomasky:

The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection--at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done.

Tomasky's cited example is Mitt Romney's coming, attempted assassination of Barack Obama's character:" [Romney's] trying to make it so that Bain as a subject becomes off limits, and he’s laying the groundwork for later, when the real character assassination starts."

I don't disagree with Tomasky on his character-assassination thesis; I only raise the issue because I quibble with his introductory and singular pronunciamento: that "The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is ... their skill at projection."

In part, Tomasky is incontrovertibly correct, in that Republicans' projection skills are one secret of their success. To me, though, "the secret of Republican political success" is, first of all, no secret at all, and second, much more of what we might call a "Gestalt Gutter" thing; that is, Republicans, since roughly the late 1970s, simply have been willing to do whatever it takes to succeed.

At root there lay a vigorous (if brutal) ideology--one essentially wrapped in unsentimental atomism; vernacularly, a dog-eat-doggism, blessed by a self-justifying corruption of Christianity. With that end in mind, Republicans proceeded, Machiavellian-like, to the delicate question of means. And with their end being "good," there could be in their minds no bad means to accomplish it. All was laid on the tactical table as impeccably legitimate.

Projection; character assassination; dirty-money think tanks and propaganda mills; electronic contract killers on radio, television, and soon the Internet; unspeakably massive bundles of cash from the slimmest of demographics; unabashed hypocrisies; mad-dog candidates; twisted and insidious (or most often utterly absent) logic; the reinvention of, or studied ignorance of, American and world history; the expropriated accoutrements of God and flag; and perhaps the crowning jewel of their overall success--their acute and quite useful appreciation of how immensely gullible many voters can be.  

Like I said, a kind of political "Gestalt Gutter" thing, in which one cannot profitably isolate any particular toxicity from its thoroughgoing, wholly filthy summation.

Comments

[Chris Andersen]

I assume you've read up on Leo Strauss. If you haven't you should.

Straussianism essentially argues that only a few elites can ever understand the world enough to manage it and the rest of the rabble should be kept in the dark about what is really going on for their own good.

It's like Randianism, except that where Randites don't give a crap about the well-being of their lessers, the Straussians actually think they are helping the 99% by keeping them in their place.

[Susan Zoon]

I know you are, but what am I? Oh... please pass the puppy.

[Ted Frier]

Projection is something the right learned from the Master, Adolph Hitler, who rose to power by projecting his own demons onto his enemies in order to incite the anger of the German masses and rally their enthusiasms behind the Nazi cause, as Erich Fromm reminds us.

Hitler always accused his enemies "of the very things he quite frankly admits to be his own aims," wrote social psychologist Fromm in his 1941 contemporaneous classic on the rise of Nazism, Escape from Freedom.

In a chapter entitled "The Psychology of Nazism," Fromm said that Hitler constantly attacked Jews, communists, the French and others for "the very things that he says are the most legitimate aims of his own actions." Like many of today's right wing, Hitler's hypocrisy was so flagrant that "he scarcely bothers to cover this contradiction by rationalizations."

By justifying his own, and his movement's, sadism "as a defense against attacks of others," Hitler was able to portray the German people as "always the ones who are innocent and it's enemies as the sadistic brutes."

It's you who has the sadistic intention, therefore I am innocent, Hitler would say - a useful defense mechanism, says Fromm, "against being found out with regard to one's own sadism or destructiveness."

In fact, says Fromm, "there was literally no act of Nazi oppression which was not explained as a defense against oppression by others."

Think "Angry Left."

[John]

It's not a secret, and it's not a skill. They lie and project with incredible clumsiness, and only a press as tame as ours lets them get away with it.

They aren't geniuses, folks. They're just corrupt.

[Matthew G. Saroff]

Strauss is not Randroid, he is Platonic.

Read Plato's Republic. When I read it in High School, I identified it as proto-fascism

[Joe]

"It's not a secret, and it's not a skill. They lie and project with incredible clumsiness, and only a press as tame as ours lets them get away with it."

It has nothing to do with a tame press. It has everything to do with a corporate owned media working hand in glove with their hand puppet Republican congress. We are moving closer and closer to full blown fascism in this country(the merger of corporations and govt). This is the end game for Republicans and will have the full support of their puppet masters.