Projection.
Yeah, I know. Cheap indeed to begin a piece with a definition; it’s usually a sign of desperately padding one’s word count. Just humor me, okay, as I crib this précis of various definitions of Freudian projection culled from, I am assured, orthodox psychology texts:
- A defense mechanism in which the individual attributes to other people impulses and traits that he himself has but cannot accept. It is especially likely to occur when the person lacks insight into his own impulses and traits.
- The externalisation of internal unconscious wishes, desires or emotions on to other people. So, for example, someone who feels subconsciously that they have a powerful latent homosexual drive may not acknowledge this consciously, but it may show in their readiness to suspect others of being homosexual.
- Attributing one’s own undesirable traits to other people or agencies, e.g., an aggressive man accuses other people of being hostile.
- The individual perceives in others the motive he denies having himself. Thus the cheat is sure that everyone else is dishonest. The would-be adulterer accuses his wife of infidelity.
- People attribute their own undesirable traits onto others. An individual who unconsciously recognises his or her aggressive tendencies may then see other people acting in an excessively aggressive way.
- Projection is the opposite defence mechanism to identification. We project our own unpleasant feelings onto someone else and blame them for having thoughts that we really have.
Clear enough, right?
David Brock, of course, is famous enough for asserting that the peculiar vituperation of the current incarnation of the American right (and even, perhaps, their insistence on a vast, left-wing media conspiracy?) is due to projection:
But then there was something deeper that went beyond just partisanship. It went beyond disagreement on the issues. You could only find it in the emotional life of the actual Clinton haters, their own frustration, their own projection of their own flaws onto the Clintons. There’s hardly anyone in the book who wasn’t living in a glass house while they were making all these accusations against the Clintons. I’m not a psychologist, but you have some kind of psychological phenomenon going on where that deep level of emotion and hatred has to do with themselves more than it has to do with anything the Clintons said or did.
Of course, we don’t need to rely on what might or might not be rank psychobabble from a man who admits he isn’t a psychologist to explain what’s going on. There’s a far more prosaic form of projection demonstrably at work, as Nicholas Confessore explains:
When right-wing journalists don’t fall into line, they’re considered traitors, not professionals. In the late 1990s, The Weekly Standard’s Tucker Carlson was nearly banished from the conservative movement for being too critical of strategist Grover Norquist. Meanwhile, The New Yorker’s Sid Blumenthal was banished from journalism for being too close to Bill Clinton. To generalize, conservative pundits assume that establishment media such as the Times are partisan because that’s how their own journalists are expected to operate. They believe Howell Raines runs The New York Times the way they know Wes Pruden runs The Washington Times.
Now, Ann Coulter—
I’ll wait till you stop laughing.
Okay?
Good.
Ann Coulter—stop it!—is, of course, the classic example whenever one brings up the American right wing and projection. Whether it’s the starkly simple example of her assertion that Jesse Jackson presided over riots in Florida streets in 2000, when the only riots in Florida streets were engineered by the genteel, decorous GOP, or multipage analyses of her factually challenged bestseller, Slander, that litter the internet, she is the nonpareil, ne plus ultra; she is the sine qua non for anyone making this argument. Cheekily or not. —Heck, don’t listen to me, open her book to find any of a number of petards:
In the rush to provide the public with yet more liberal bilge, editors apparently dispense with fact-checking…Books that become publishing scandals by virtue of phony research, invented facts, or apocryphal stories invariably grind political axes for the left. There may be publishing frauds that are apolitical, but it’s hard to think of a single hoax book written by a conservative.
But let’s leave behind for a moment the question of what some on the American right are saying and what it might say about them. Instead, consider these points culled from recent news:
- It is easier to demonstrate a link between the Bush administration and Al Qaeda than it is to demonstrate a link between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda.
- The Bush administration continues to persecute by any means necessary a war that’s been planned since 1997, instead of acting against the very real and present threat. (Extra credit: John O’Neill and Marion Bowman.)
- And, because I like a trifecta as much as the next guy, there’s the baffling drive to cripple the very government whose stewardship was gifted to the Bush administration by the Supreme Court.
Given that. Given that projection is the attribution of one’s own undesirable traits onto others. Given that a marked propensity for projection can be demonstrated on the part of the right-wing punditocracy in general and Ann Coulter in specific. Give me all of this just for a moment so that I in turn can ask you, an impish smile on my face:
What can we then infer from the title of Coulter’s summer release?
Intellectually superior psychology always trumps defensive emotionality.
Couldn’t have quoted it out of context any better myself, dearie.
Commenting is closed for this article.
Help me out here, Grover Nordquist wants to shrink the government down to a size that he can 'drown in the bathtub', while at the same time he wants to ban abortion, and implement the rest of the evangelical Right's to-do list.
Doesn't he need a government to wield the cudgel he wants to bloody everyone with? Or does he think the government that governs best is the Christian equivalent of the Taliban?
The next Harry Potter book is coming out in June, too. Wouldn't it be great if Treason and Potter came out on the same day? Then right-wingnuts—the fundy christian ones—would have two books to buy: one to burn through and one, well, just to burn.
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