THE PROJECTION PROJECT

Coming Soon to a Courthouse Near You!

The other day, Frank “Shovel-Ready” Rich accused Republicans of being “Stalinists” for “purging” Dede Scozzadomeafavor–you know, like Democrats did with their VP pick Joe Leiberman.

In support-hose of his thesis, Rich quoted historian Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The Paranoid Style in American Politics back in 1964, shortly after all of you killed JFK.

Trouble is, Hofstadter was a real-life Stalinist, not one of Frank Rich’s phantom Reagan-Stalinists. He was a loyal party member throughout the ’30’s until Stalin gave the game away by signing the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1940.

We might as well learn this stuff since the Desperate Beast is going to howl it even louder in the coming days. Hofstadter:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the tea-bagger Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

It’s “not necessarily right-wing”–but Hofstadter could never think of any left-wing examples. Such as the Communist Party of which he was a member.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization… he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.

Most American conservatives aren’t against political compromise–we’re against the phony manufacturing of our consent by saying that every liberal policy preference is already contained in the Constitution.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

Ah; projection–thy name is Hillary.

Sec. of Statism Hillary Clinton recently had an interesting Charlie Rose interview. Charlie let her pretend she wasn’t a college communist propping up the Berlin Wall–but, then, so did Angela Merkel. She called the Iraq surge a “mid-course correction”, even though her boss called it a failure at the time. Her and Charlie both pretended Iran could be appeased by pretty words and that Mohammed Elbaradei was working to stop Iran instead of working to stop us. She also seemed to be impatient with Pres. Goldilock’s dithering, mentioning his indecisiveness many times.

But the most interesting part was this, from American Thinker:

Clinton: “[W]e do bear some of the responsibility, frankly, for helping to create the very terrorists that we’re now all threatened by.”

bin Laden: “We are sure of Allah’s victory and our victory against the Americans and the Jews as promised by the prophet peace be up on him…We are sure of our victory.

Islamist terrorists are not motivated by grievances, real or imagined, nor by old religious doctrines in and of themselves, but by the perception that their enemies are weak and that Allah — after many years — is again willing to grant victory to Muslim fighters.

In other words, America was created for terrorists to defeat…and America created terrorists to defeat!

That sounds exactly like Hofstadter’s “projection of the self” mirror-imaging. Hillary bin Clinton, meet Obama Rodham-Laden!

We all knew Hillary was a Goldwater Girl back in ‘64…but she still is today!

At least, that’s my Conspiracy Theory. And I’m sticking to it.

Until the Bilderbergers prove me wrong.

UPDATE: That’s the spirit!

Reason’s “The Richard Hofstadter Drinking Game“:

“[T]he G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit,” Paul Krugman warns today:

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay–

Drink!