The Psychology of Santorum and Gingrich

[Star Man]

The Right-Wing Id Unzipped

Tuesday 14 February 2012
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis




Retired Republican House and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren spoke with Truthout in Washington, DC, this fall. Lofgren's first commentary for Truthout, "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult," went viral, drawing over 1.2 million page views.



Although Mitt Romney used the word "conservative" 19 times in a short speech at the February 10, 2012, Conservative Political Action Conference, the audience he used this word to appeal to was not conservative by any traditional definition. It was right wing. Despite the common American practice of using "conservative" and "right wing" interchangeably, right wing is not a synonym for conservative and not even a true variant of conservatism - although the right wing will opportunistically borrow conservative themes as required.


Right-wingers have occasioned much recent comment. Their behavior in the Republican debates has caused even jaded observers to react like an Oxford don stumbling upon a tribe of headhunting cannibals. In those debates where the moderators did not enforce decorum, these right-wingers, the Republican base, behaved with a single lack of dignity. For a group that displays its supposed pro-life credentials like a neon sign, the biggest applause lines resulted from their hearing about executions or the prospect of someone dying without health insurance.


Who are these people and what motivates them? To answer, one must leave the field of conventional political theory and enter the realm of psychopathology. Three books may serve as field guides to the farther shores of American politics and the netherworld of the true believer.


Most estimates calculate the percentage of Republican voters who are religious fundamentalists at around 40 percent; in some key political contests, such as the Iowa caucuses, the percentage is closer to 60. Because of their social cohesion, ease of political mobilization and high election turnout, fundamentalists have political weight even beyond their raw numbers. An understanding of their leaders, infrastructure and political goals is warranted. Max Blumenthal has done the work in his book "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party." Blumenthal investigates politicized fundamentalism and provides capsule bios of such movement luminaries as James Dobson, Tony Perkins, John Hagee and Ted Haggard. The reader will conclude that these authority figures and the flocks they command are driven by a binary, Manichean vision of life and a hunger for conflict. Their minds appear to have no more give and take than that of a terrier staring down a rat hole.


Blumenthal examines the childhoods of these religious-right celebrities and reveals a significant quotient of physical and mental abuse suffered at the hands of parents. His analysis of the obvious sadomasochistic element in Mel Gibson's films - so lionized by the right wing - is enough to give one the creeps. But the book is by no means a uniformly depressing slog: the chapter titled "Satan in a Porsche," about fundamentalist attempts to ban pornography, approaches slapstick.


According to the author, the inner life of fundamentalist true believers is the farthest thing from that of a stuffily proper Goody Two Shoes. They seem tormented by demons that those in the reality-based community scarcely experience. That may explain their extraordinary latitude in absolving their political and ecclesiastical heroes of their sins: while most of us might regard George W. Bush as a dry drunk resentful of his father, Newt Gingrich as a sociopathic serial adulterer and Ted Haggard as a pathetic specimen in terminal denial, their followers on the right apparently believe that the greater the sin, the more impressive the salvation - so long as the magic words are uttered and the penitent sinner is washed in the Blood of the Lamb. This explains why people like Gingrich can attend "values voter" forums and both he and the audience manage to keep straight faces. Far from being a purpose-driven life, the existence of many true believers is a crisis-driven life that seeks release, as Blumenthal asserts, in an "escape from freedom."


An observer of the right-wing phenomenon must explain the paradox of followers who would escape from freedom even as they incessantly invoke the word freedom as if it were a mantra. But freedom so defined does not mean ordinary civil liberties like the prohibition of illegal government search and seizure, the right of due process, or the right not to be tortured. The hard right has never protested the de facto abrogation of much of the Bill of Rights during the last decade. In the right-wing id, freedom is the emotional release that a hostile and psychologically repressed person feels when he is finally able to lash out at the objects of his resentment. Freedom is his prerogative to rid himself of people who are different, or who unsettle him. Freedom is merging into a like-minded herd. Right-wing alchemy transforms freedom into authoritarianism.


Robert Altemeyer, a Canadian psychologist, has done extensive testing to isolate and describe the traits of the authoritarian personality. His results are distilled in his book "The Authoritarians." He describes religious fundamentalists, the core of the right-wing Republican base, as follows:

They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites.

There are tens of millions of Americans who, although personally lacking the self-confidence, ambition and leadership qualities of authoritarian dominators like Gingrich or Sarah Palin, nevertheless empower the latter to achieve their goals while finding psychological fulfillment in subordination to a cause. Altemeyer describes these persons as authoritarian followers. They are socially rigid, highly conventional and strongly intolerant personalities, who, absent any self-directed goals, seek achievement and satisfaction by losing themselves in a movement greater than themselves. One finds them overrepresented in reactionary political movements, fundamentalist sects and leader cults like scientology. They are the people who responded on cue when Bush's press secretary said after the 9/11 attacks that people had better "watch what they say;" or who approved of illegal surveillance because "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear;" or who, after months of news stories saying that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, nevertheless believed the weapons were found. Altemeyer said:

Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds. They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result.... And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going away.

Twenty to 25 percent is no majority, but enough to swing an election, especially since the authoritarian follower is more easily organized than the rest of the population. As for Altemeyer's warning that such personality types "are not going away," the rise of the Tea Party after 2008 showed that he was a better prognosticator than Sidney Blumenthal, who thought the radical takeover of the GOP during the Bush presidency had "shattered the party."


Altemeyer cites clinical data to show us how certain people score high on psychological tests measuring authoritarian traits and that these high scores strongly correlate with right-wing political preferences. What Altemeyer is lacking is a satisfactory explanation as to why a significant percentage of human beings should develop these traits. We obtain some clues in Wilhelm Reich's "The Mass Psychology of Fascism," written in 1933 and unfortunately only obtainable in a stilted 1945 translation full of odd psychological jargon. One does not have to agree with Reich's questionable later career path and personal eccentricities(1) to notice that his 1933 work is a perceptive analysis of the character of the authoritarian political movements that were rising in Europe. Anyone reading it then and taking it seriously could have predicted the new totalitarian regimes' comprehensive repressiveness, extreme intolerance and, within a few years, nihilistic destructiveness.
Reich appears to see fascism as the political manifestation of an authoritarian psychology. Who are the authoritarians?

Fascist mentality is the mentality of the subjugated "little man" who craves authority and rebels against it at the same time. It is not by accident that all fascist dictators stem from the milieu of the little reactionary man. The captains of industry and the feudal militarist make use of this social fact for their own purposes. A mechanistic authoritarian civilization only reaps, in the form of fascism, from the little, suppressed man what for hundreds of years it has sown in the masses of little, suppressed individuals in the form of mysticism, top-sergeant mentality and automatism.

Here again we see the paradoxical nature of the authoritarian personality: rebelling against authority while hungering for it - exactly as the contemporary right wing fancies it is rebelling against big government while calling for intrusive social legislation and militarism. In the midst of dire economic circumstances, why do they expend inordinate energy brooding over contraception, abortion, abstinence education, gay marriage and so forth and attempt to transform their obsessions into law? Reich said:

The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety.... The result of this process is fear of freedom and a conservative, reactionary mentality. Sexual repression aids political reaction not only through this process which makes the mass individual passive and unpolitical but also by creating in his structure an interest in actively supporting the authoritarian order. The suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications. Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars.

According to Reich, a patriarchal, sexually repressive family life, reinforced by strict and punitive religious dogma, is the "factory" of a reactionary political order. Hence, the right wing's ongoing attempts to erase the separation of church and state, its crusade against Planned Parenthood, its strange obsession with gays. Consider the following political platform, which sounds almost as if it were taken from a speech by Rick Santorum:

The preservation of the family with many children is a matter of biological concept and national feeling. The family with many children must be preserved ... because it is a highly valuable, indispensable part of the ... nation. Valuable and indispensable not only because it alone guarantees the maintenance of the population in the future but because it is the strongest basis of national morality and national culture ... The preservation of this family form is a necessity of national and cultural politics ... This concept is strictly at variance with the demands for an abolition of paragraph 218; it considers unborn life as sacrosanct. For the legalization of abortion is at variance with the function of the family, which is to produce children and would lead to the definite destruction of the family with many children.

So wrote the Völkischer Beobachter of October 14, 1931. As Altemeyer warns, they are not going away: certain psychological constructs and the political expressions they give rise to, persist over time and across cultures.


1. E.g., Isaac Newton's eccentricities and unpleasant personality did not invalidate his mathematics. We are interested in the message not the messenger.

* * * * * * * * *
We become in adulthood what we experience in childhood. Gingrich is a perfect example. He was born Newton Macpherson. His father abandoned him and his family for another woman. Newt's mother remarried and army man named Gingrich who adopted Newt. As an adult, Newt has reenacted his childhood experience through abandoning his first two wives and marrying a third who apparently allows him to have an open marriage. Through his affairs and betrayals of his wives, Newt has reenacted what he experienced in childhood.

Psychology's concepts of introjection, projection, and identification offer a deeper understanding of the personalities of Santorum, Gingrich, and other right-wing ideologues. Children absorb information from their surroundings, and they absorb whatever their surroundings present. The brain is basically a blank slate. During the first four years of life while the right hemisphere still dominates the left and before the ability form verbal memories and coherent narratives has emerged, information is stored in the right brain as images, sensations, and emotions. This is called implicit memory, or the unconscious. Information stored in implicit memory motivates behavior throughout life. When Newt's father abandoned the family, Newt's brain stored that information. That is called an introject, specifically a paternal introject. That introject becomes the basis for making meaning of the essentially ambiguous behavior of others. Newt's paternal introject forms the basis of his projection onto the world. When Newt's first wife was dying of cancer and Newt had a girlfriend, Newt did what his father had done and left his wife for the girlfriend. When his second wife was diagnosed with MS, Newt again did what his father had done and abandoned her. Whenever Newt meets a woman, he projects onto her that she is available for an affair and that he must have an affair with her. Newt is utterly unconscious of these intrapsychic dynamics.

Psychotherapy can help a person raise the contents of their implicit memory to consciousness where choices are then possible. The process is called differentiation. At present Gingrich and Santorum and their followers exist in a state of fusion in which their personalities are fused with their family projection processes. These persons project onto their audience, and the audience identifies with the projection.

These are the psychological processes and forces that will destroy our civilization.

Star Man

[Dixon]

Star Man, most of your post, such as the parts describing the psychology/sociology/politics of the authoritarian personality type, seem right on, and consistent with my experience as a conservative religionist (I also see some aspects of such rigid authoritarianism and conformism in certain strains of "New Age" and "politically correct" culture). And Reich's sexual analysis, while more speculative, seems substantially plausible.

But your analysis at the end is, to me, dubious. For one thing, as Steven Pinker has shown in his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, the blank slate model of the human mind is apparently quite inaccurate (I recommend that book). Also, your discussion of the psychological dynamics by which parents' patterns are replicated in their grown children's behavior reminds me of the highly speculative--and typically not well supported by controlled research--theories that held sway when I was studying for my degrees in Psychology and Counseling. I'm far from being up-to-date on the relevant research, but the last I heard, the current thinking is that parental influence on children's grown-up traits/behaviors is almost entirely genetic, with the parent's behaviors having a tiny effect (some studies would say a negligible effect). Apparently, the social influence on our personalities comes almost entirely from non-parental sources--the wider community. (See The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris.) For every instance wherein someone's behaviors resemble those of their parents, as you describe with the Gingriches, there are others in which the child's traits/behavior are the opposite, or simply have no clear relationship to the parents', and kids raised in virtually the same way in the same family commonly turn out very different from one another. So attributing the behaviors of guys like Gingrich to dynamics such as acting out parental introjections is, the last I knew, not supported by the research, and thus probably not a helpful way of approaching the issues.

[Star Man]

Dixon,

My comments on introjection, projection, and projective identification (family projection process) are based on Murray Bowen's Extended Family Systems Therapy, which has a thorough theoretical base and a vast and in-depth supportive literature. Here are three citations along with relevant quotes to support the concepts I referred to in my comments.

Greatrex, T. (2002). Projective identification: How does it work? Neuro-Psychoanalysis, 4(2), 187-197.

“Furthermore, recent findings in affective neuroscience and infant research help us to understand how the spontaneous matching of emotional states between patient and analyst, which occurs in projective identification, contributes to change. This work demonstrates that "the other" can direct the feeling and fantasy experience we create at unconscious levels within ourselves. This view has recently been given support by the identification of mirror neurons, which may be fundamental to the observation and communication of intention. These new findings can help us to understand how projective identification works and how it contributes to change at the deepest, affect- laden levels of psychic organization that involve both pre-symbolic and symbolic levels of self- organization.”

Charles, R. (2001). Is there any empirical support for Bowen’s concepts of differentiation of self? Amer. J. Family Therapy, 29 (4), 279-292.

“...the theory of Bowen that anxiety, at both the individual and family level, regulates, monitors, and manages the amount of emotional closeness or distance within the family and regulates the impact of fusion in the family of origin on the individual’s current life situations and relationships was confirmed....”

Baumeister, R.F., Dale, K., and Sommer, K.L. (1998). Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projections, displacement, undoing, isolation, sublimation, and denial. J. Personality, 66(6), 1081-1095.

“Considerable evidence indicates that people’s conceptions of themselves shape their perceptions of other people.”

[Star Man]

Dixon,

I want to add an additional comment to the one I already made to your suggestion that attributing the actions of Gingrich et al. to acting out parental introjects is probably not a helpful approach. I have already given citations from the empirical literature supporting the intergenerational transmission process. One of Freud's great contributions was his recognition of the "repetition compulsion" that is the basis of the intergenerational transmission process. Here is a citation to support my assertion that Gingrich et al. are compulsively reenacting patterns of behavior of both traumatic and non-traumatic origin.

I believe I have sufficiently demonstrated through literature citations that understanding Gingrich et al.'s actions as an intergenerational transmission of introjected parental behaviors is actually a very helpful approach. It is helpful because it suggests that Gingrich et al. could benefit from protracted, empirically supported therapy. It is helpful because it suggests that through providing universal education in the family process and through providing universal psychotherapy, we might achieve a more peaceful, more adaptively and positively functioning society. Your alternative, Dixon, suggesting that Gingrich et al.'s behavior is largely genetically determined, leaves us with no means for improving our political and social situation. My genetics professor at Stanford Medical School, the Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg convincingly demonstrated that eugenics cannot change characteristics of the human population.

Star Man

Here's the citation:

Repetitive maladaptive behavior: Beyond repetition compulsion. Bowins, Brad; The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol 70(3), Sep, 2010. pp. 282-298. [Journal Article] Abstract: Maladaptive behavior that repeats, typically known as repetition compulsion, is one of the primary reasons that people seek psychotherapy. However, even with psychotherapeutic advances it continues to be extremely difficult to treat. Despite wishes and efforts to the contrary repetition compulsion does not actually achieve mastery, as evidenced by the problem rarely resolving without therapeutic intervention, and the difficulty involved in producing treatment gains. A new framework is proposed, whereby such behavior is divided into behavior of non-traumatic origin and traumatic origin with some overlap occurring. Repetitive maladaptive behavior of non-traumatic origin arises from an evolutionary-based process whereby patterns of behavior frequently displayed by caregivers and compatible with a child's temperament are acquired and repeated. It has a familiarity and ego-syntonic aspect that strongly motivates the person to retain the behavior. Repetitive maladaptive behavior of traumatic origin is characterized by defensive dissociation of the cognitive and emotional components of trauma, making it very difficult for the person to integrate the experience. The strong resistance of repetitive maladaptive behavior to change is based on the influence of both types on personality, and also factors specific to each. Psychotherapy, although very challenging at the best of times, can achieve the mastery wished and strived for, with the aid of several suggestions provided.

[podfish]

must be the waning moon. I'm reacting as a contrarian again.. Hell if I know why. But:

The Right-Wing Id Unzipped... Their behavior in the Republican debates has caused even jaded observers to react like an Oxford don stumbling upon a tribe of headhunting cannibals. ... behaved with a single (uh, signal..) lack of dignity. ... one must leave the field of conventional political theory and enter the realm of psychopathology. (oh, no...)... these authority figures and the flocks they command are driven by a binary, Manichean vision of life and a hunger for conflict. Their minds appear to have no more give and take than that of a terrier staring down a rat hole.


... the childhoods of these religious-right celebrities and reveals a significant quotient of physical and mental abuse suffered at the hands of parents. (how's that compare to that of a control group?)

.. the obvious sadomasochistic element in Mel Gibson's films - ... - is enough to give one the creeps. (what are Tarentino's politics, for example? or the dude making the Hostel movies? where's the correlation?)


They seem tormented by demons

In the right-wing id, freedom is the emotional release that a hostile and psychologically repressed person feels when he is finally able to lash out at the objects of his resentment. Freedom is his prerogative to rid himself of people who are different, or who unsettle him. Freedom is merging into a like-minded herd. Right-wing alchemy transforms freedom into authoritarianism.


Robert Altemeyer,... describes religious fundamentalists,... as follows:

They are ... fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility.. easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason.... use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites.....


Altemeyer said:

Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds. They would march America into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result.

Etc.. nothing like a fair and balanced analysis to bring people of opposing views together! I think most people who don't consider themselves liberals would recognize themselves in that!

[Star Man]

must be the waning moon. I'm reacting as a contrarian again.. Hell if I know why. But:

Etc.. nothing like a fair and balanced analysis to bring people of opposing views together! I think most people who don't consider themselves liberals would recognize themselves in that!

How exactly is your contrarianism working for you, Pod? How is your contrarianism promoting a solution to the problem of the rampant psychopathology in America and especially among the political classes? Just asking!

Star Man

[podfish]

How exactly is your contrarianism working for you, Pod? How is your contrarianism promoting a solution to the problem of the rampant psychopathology in America and especially among the political classes? Just asking!

Star Man

it keeps me from falling into the trap of thinking that those with viewpoints I don't understand somehow have disfunctional brains. That lets me treat a large part of the population with respect. Seems to work out better that way.

[Dixon]

Star Man, thank you for providing some references to peruse. The question now is whether and when I'll get some time to read them, LOL! (Why oh why do I jump into all these discussions?)

Your alternative, Dixon, suggesting that Gingrich et al.'s behavior is largely genetically determined, leaves us with no means for improving our political and social situation.

Not true. The fact that, for good evolutionary reasons, traits that lead to behaviors such as deceit, selfishness, rape, theft, murder and war are programmed into the human genome to a considerable degree (no need to quibble about exactly what degree), doesn't mean that no progress can be made. We can learn to better control our own behavior and the behavior of others who are inclined to behave rapaciously, through education, deterrent policies, and various means of building empathy and a feeling of oneness and community.

But please note that, even if it were true that my position "...leaves us with no means for improving our political and social situation", that doesn't mean it's not true--though it does mean that people will really, really want to see it as not being true. An important principle of critical thinking--thus of truth seeking--is resisting the powerful temptation to see things in ways that increase our hope or other pleasant feelings. That's a distorting factor in our thinking. I suggest that we ought to analyze the facts as objectively, dispassionately as possible and then, upon seeing that things aren't as hopeful as we'd like, accommodate ourselves to that reality by identifying sources of real hope or, failing that, accepting that there's little hope for this or that desire to come true. It's an attachment issue, as the Buddhists might say. So let's make sure we understand that your claim that my position leaves us without hope is irrelevant to whether my position is true.

[Star Man]

Dixon wrote:

[QUOTE

Not true. The fact that, for good evolutionary reasons, traits that lead to behaviors such as deceit, selfishness, rape, theft, murder and war are programmed into the human genome to a considerable degree (no need to quibble about exactly what degree)....[/QUOTE]


Dixon, deceit is not programmed into the human genome. Neither is selfishness. Or rape, theft, murder, and war. Oh, please read some basic genetics. Deceit, selfishness, rape, theft, murder, and war are complex behaviors. I suggest you read some basic genetics text. No complex behaviors are programmed into the genome. If deceit were programmed, then honesty would have to be. If selfishness were programmed, then selflessness would have to be programmed. I hope you get the point.

The human genome, and all genomes of all animals, code for proteins. Not behavior. The genome codes for the proteins that synthesize the lipids, neurotransmitters, and that make up the membranes of neurons. The human brain is an organ of potential. The neurons and neurotransmitters give the organism the ability to be socialized, to be conditioned by experience. It is the specific quality of the early experience that conditions the brain for behavior of deceit, selfishness, rape, theft, murder, and war . . . or for honesty, selflessness, respect for women's bodies, respect for others' property, respect for others' lives, and for peace.

What the human genome codes for is not a matter of opinion, Dixon. It is a matter of scientific, empirically tested fact. I spent many years working as a molecular biologist and biochemist. I have a lot of training in understanding what the human genome does and does not do. If you can give a citation for a scientific article the demonstrates empirically the existence of genes coding for rape, please provide it.

Star Man

[Star Man]

Dixon wrote:

[QUOTE

Not true. The fact that, for good evolutionary reasons, traits that lead to behaviors such as deceit, selfishness, rape, theft, murder and war are programmed into the human genome to a considerable degree (no need to quibble about exactly what degree)....

[/QUOTE]

Dixon,

I went off on a hummer there. Reading more carefully, I do see that you wrote "traits that lead to behaviors such as . . . " You did not say that the behaviors themselves are programmed. I still question what you mean by "for good evolutionary reasons." However, I do apologize for misconstruing what you wrote.

Star Man