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From Dr. Sanity:
At least the selfish narcissist is limited in the chaos and havoc he wreaks. But, the "really destructive maniacs of this world" are the ones who do it for your own good.
The more benign form of this type of narcissism - but equally as insidious - is the left's core belief that society can and should be perfected by government regulation.
Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials. Read the entire article.
Charles Krauthammer takes a deeply searching look at Obama, attempting to ascertain from Obama's many words and few deeds just what it is Obama must see when he looks in the mirror. Krauthammer, whose column today hints at his own background as a psychiatrist, sees in Obama not mere narcissism, but delusions of granduer on a messianic scale.
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This today from Mr. Krauthammer:
What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Ronald Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final "tear down this wall" liquidation. When President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.
Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop?
. . . Does Obama not see the incongruity? It's as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)
Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself. There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?
Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.
It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.
Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.
After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: " I am the one we've been waiting for."
. . . He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, "you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish" -- a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how "embarrassing" it is that Europeans are multilingual but "we go over to Europe, and all we can say is 'merci beaucoup.' " Obama speaks no French.
. . . For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?
We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when "our planet began to heal." As I recall -- I'm no expert on this -- Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas.
The ad attacks the grandiose and vacuous "hope" and "change" themes posited by Obama, exposing them to be what they are - calls from and to unadulterated narcissim. It does so by contrasting those calls with cold reality and the spirit of service and self-sacrifice. That is what seperates McCain's attack on Obama's vacuous themes from those of Hillary, who only attacked Obama's siren song without providing the stunning contrast.
Is the ad effective? Yes, but given the situation, more is required.
To add, Obama, the chameleon candidate, is infinitely flexible depending on the expediencies of the sitution. He changes principles at the same speed that a chameleon changes colors in response to the environment of the moment. A necessary characteristic to be able to pull this off is an amoral disdain for the truth. In an earlier century, Obama would have been the penultimate snake oil salesman.
McCain is insufficiently flexible - which is a blessing and a curse. He is highly principled and thus, when he makes a decision such as on the environment, he imbues that decision with the belief that it with moral and ethical meaning and an inclination therefore to stand with the decision through thick and thin. This does not foreclose reviewing the issue in response to changing facts, but it does slow his response down immensely. Thus, when the issues of energy and the economy have come into conflict, we have seen him slowly inch off of his position against off-shore drilling and the exploitation of our natural resources.
On a grand scale, to any student of leadership and human nature, this puts McCain light years ahead of Obama in terms of fitness for the Presidency. But given that many Americans do not view these two through that prism, it gives Obama the immediate tactical advantage. Thus, as blogged below, Obama has once again lied to the public - this time on his support for welfare reform - and we are still waiting for McCain to call him on it. McCain, intent on running an "honorable campaign," has not yet responded to the lie, instead coming out with the above ad.
McCain does not seem to grasp that part of running an honorable campaign is demanding the same degree of honor from your fellow candidate. He and his campaign need to demonstrate far more tactical flexibility while still maintaining his principled stands. This should be easily accomplished, but I don't see it yet. Thus as I view the above ad, while it is good, he is ceding to Obama the ground to rewrite history into a false and utopian fairy tale. Snake oil if you will. In a campaign with only four months remaining, this could be a fatal error.
(H/T Hot Air)
. . . What about liberals? According to University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, "Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others." They also "believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference." Indeed, generations of academic scholars have assumed that the "natural personality" of political conservatives is characterized by hostile intolerance towards those with opposing viewpoints and lifestyles, while political liberals inherently embrace diversity. Read the entire article here. Interesting is it not. Those who are least tolerant and rational are projecting their paradigm on conservatives and describing the "politics of hate" as conservative's most vile trait. I have long believed that modern conservatism is the last bastion of classical liberalism, and things such as this Brooks article only reinforce that belief. It was 1968, I was 17, in Grosvenor Square and hurling mud at the police. I felt fear, and a rapid, intense thrill that I could cast off every rule I'd been brought up to believe in.
This post looks at two recent articles on the nature of the modern left. Though the word "narcissistic" appears in neither, both paint a picture of how narcissism infects our modern "progressive" left - a group that has left classical liberalism in the dust. The first, from Arthur Brooks in the WSJ, points out that the modern left is today more intolerant and less rational than today's conservative.
The second is a fascinating article by the Daily Mail columnist, Peter Hitchens. Like many of the most eloquent and incisive of today's modern conservatives, Peter started life on the other side of the fence. Like Thomas Sowell, Hitchen's had gone so far left as to embrace communism. As he entered adulthood, Hitchens was marching in support of Ho Chi Min and against British authority.
Both articles contain some very insigtful thoughts, not the least of which is this from Peter Hitchens: "Selfishness needs to attack things that demand self-sacrifice - family, marriage, duty, patriotism and faith." That statement explains a great deal of what we see in the narrcissitic left of today. It explains what otherwise seems irrational.
At any rate, this first from Arthur Brooks in the WSJ in his article, "Liberal Hate-Mongerers:"
As we are dragged through another election season, it is worth critically reviewing these stereotypes. Do the data support the claim that conservatives are haters, while liberals are tolerant of others? A handy way to answer this question is with what political analysts call "feeling thermometers," in which people are asked on a survey to rate others on a scale of 0-100. A zero is complete hatred, while 100 means adoration. In general, when presented with people or groups about which they have neutral feelings, respondents give temperatures of about 70. Forty is a cold temperature, and 20 is absolutely freezing.
In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups.
. . . [T]hose on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.
To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
This doesn't sound very tolerant to me -- nor especially rational, for that matter. To be fair, though, let's roll back to a time when the far right was accused of temporary insanity: the late Clinton years, when right-wing pundits practically proclaimed the end of Western civilization each night on cable television because President Clinton had been exposed as a perjurious adulterer.
In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.
Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.
In the end, we have to face the fact that political intolerance in America -- ugly and unfortunate on either side of the political aisle -- is to be found more on the left than it is on the right. This may not square with the moral vanity of progressive political stereotypes, but it's true.
And there is this brilliant essay from Peter Hitchens in the UK's Daily Mail. It harkens back to 1968 - and it does much to explain the mindset of our modern left:
Very soon it will be the 40th anniversary of the day I threw lumps of mud at the police in Central London. I had precious little idea why I was doing it, though I can confirm that riots are fun for those who take part in them, and that rioters usually riot because they enjoy it.
I wasn't oppressed, deprived, abused, underprivileged, poor or any of the other things people give as justifications for this sort of oafishness. I had no excuse then, and offer none now. I was a self-righteous, arrogant, spoiled teenage prig, and yes, I know quite a lot of people think I am still more or less the same, only middle-aged.
But if I am going to write about the Sixties, 40 years on, then I can only do so if I am ruthlessly honest about how awful I was, and that means admitting I was even worse than I am now. So this is not a piece of nostalgia about the wonderful Sixties. It is a shameful confession, and an attempt to explain why my generation has, in general, been so destructive and wrong. . .
. . . I can vividly remember the intense, rapid, thrilling moments as the demonstration against the Vietnam War turned nasty; the sudden, urgent shoving, the unsettling feeling of being surrounded by strangers, supposedly my allies, the clatter of hooves, the struggle to save myself from being pushed to the ground, the wordless yelling all round me, the feeling that I could cast off every rule I had been brought up to believe in, and get away with it. It was exhilarating, and wholly stupid. I was 17, the right age to be a soldier, not so much fearless as ignorant of what real pain felt like.
At the time, some newspapers claimed the violence was pre-planned. If so, nobody had told me. It was quite a respectable gathering, as opposition to the Vietnam War had by then become pretty general. Among the crowd, though not misbehaving, was an Oxford student called John Scarlett, who later wrote a letter to The Times, describing himself as 'a Conservative' and saying the police had been 'unnecessarily violent'.
This individual is now Sir John Scarlett, and head of MI6. He was wrong about the police, by the way. They behaved reasonably and with a great deal of restraint. Anybody in Grosvenor Square that day who was surprised when it turned rough hadn?t been paying attention.
We were all supposed to be escorting a then youthful Vanessa Redgrave, in a rather fetching headband, as she delivered a petition against the Vietnam War to the American Embassy. A fat lot most of us cared. We weren't pacifists. We were clueless rebels, indulging in childish shock-tactics to annoy our elders. We thought we wanted the communists to win, and I am pretty certain I carried a North Vietnamese flag and that I joined in with the moronic chant 'Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! We shall fight and we shall win!' among others.
Ho Chi Minh, for Heaven's sake. I am only glad the rhyme didn't include Pol Pot, but most of us hadn't yet heard of him. I can't claim to have been sorry when violence came. There would be other, even worse, occasions - once when I led a charge against a police line outside Oxford Town Hall and was astonished when the beefy constables broke and scattered before us. Having wantonly destroyed authority and order, we had no idea what to do next, a moment of sharp revelation that nagged at me for years afterwards, and may have helped me recover.
For I was suffering from a collective lunacy, and a particularly virulent version of it, that would eventually carry me into a revolutionary organisation just a few inches from the borders of terrorism, and at one of whose meetings I had a nasty confrontation with a man I am now certain was an IRA killer. How on earth does the privately educated son of a Royal Navy Commander end up in such company? It needs explaining. And my explanation is that millions of us went barmy. Mass insanity is much more common than the individual kind, but much less studied. Let us call it the 1968 disease.
In that year, several strands of folly came together in the happy, free, wealthy West. We had our little festival of manufactured wrath in London. French students had a far greater one in Paris. Though most of us had little idea of what we wanted, we succeeded almost completely in overthrowing the society we had grown up in, with the miserable results we now see.
Was there something in the air of that year that made us all susceptible, like the mysterious shiver that goes through the landscape in early spring ? Or was it the result of the great baby bulge that had come after the Second World War ended in 1945? Were there just too many adolescents, hormones churning, concentrated on the European landmass all at once?
For at exactly the same moment, a wave of genuine protest gathered in the subjugated, miserable East. While I was having my fun revolution, Polish students were being beaten by militiamen and put in prison for peaceful dissent, and Czechoslovakia was having its brief spasm of warmth, light and freedom, before Warsaw Pact tanks brought chilly darkness back to Prague, where it would remain for 20 years afterwards.
We, who were self-centred yahoos, succeeded in our futile cultural revolt. They, who were brave, selfless and honourable fighters for national independence and liberty, were crushed. While our good society lacked the conviction to defend itself, their evil states did not hesitate to deploy the truncheon and the boot to stay in being. We barely noticed. Their story didn't fit in our unhinged world view.
Adolescent or not, I knew better. Gently brought up in a comfortable home by loving parents, diligently taught by broad-minded teachers, cocooned in a world where crime and violence never happened, imbued with the tolerant values of Anglican Christianity, I had nothing to be revolutionary about.
So I am not trying to offer excuses when I put forward this explanation. There is nothing new about the bad causes I supported. They have flourished throughout human history - when the forces of good are weak. The Bible is full of complaints about cruel mobs, sexual licence, children rebelling against their parents, self-indulgent generations squandering peace and prosperity and bringing doom on their own nations.
Shakespeare's account of Timon's curse, already ancient when he wrote it 400 years ago, is a summary of all the nightmares of a failing civilisation. Religion, peace, instruction and manners are all to be flung aside: 'Obedience fail in children! Slaves and fools, Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench And minister in their steads! To general filths convert green virginity! Do it in your parents? eyes! . . . Son of sixteen, Pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire; With it, beat out his brains.? . . . Lust and liberty, Creep in the minds and manners of our youth, That 'gainst the stream of virtue they may strive And drown themselves in riot!? Darkness is a negative thing. It rushes in when the light is dimmed. It needs no conspiracy or organisation, though there were plenty of gleeful people around in those days, happy to hurry things along because it suited their desire to do exactly what they wanted. It was fun for them . . . for us, I ought to say. We would learn later these ideas were not so attractive when everyone else adopted them too.
This organised selfishness was the main reason behind the May 1968 riots in Paris. Selfishness needs to attack things that demand self-sacrifice - family, marriage, duty, patriotism and faith. And above all, it needs weakness and confusion among those in charge, if it is to succeed as it did then, and still does.
Leafing through the newspapers of four decades ago, I was reminded sharply of how authority seemed to have lost its nerve, and people to have lost any sense of belonging. Perhaps it was the accumulated shame and defeat of Suez, seeping into every institution. Perhaps it was the Profumo affair, after which our politicians and judges all seemed funny and deflated.
Perhaps it was the 1965 funeral of Winston Churchill, which was also the funeral of the British Empire, leaving all British people who witnessed it shaken, bereft and afraid for the future.
Perhaps it was the frenzied destruction of familiar townscapes and the appearance everywhere of hideous, howling concrete piazzas, which so many at that time - unbelievably - thought were superior to the old buildings they replaced. And I remember beginning to notice, around about the time I was 12, in 1963 and 1964, that authority had begun to lose the will to live. It was easier to get away with things - bad manners, sloppy schoolwork, lateness, laziness, breaking and above all bending the rules. I learned quickly to exploit every weakness.
That great destroyer, Lenin, advised his fellow apostles of chaos: 'Probe with the bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.' And more and more, it was mush we met. The year before my first riot, in 1967, I remember still being at school when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were arrested in the famous West Wittering drug bust.
This made a special impression on me since we used to have our family holidays each August in a rented house at West Wittering, West Sussex, in those days a profoundly conservative resort. The very idea of Jagger, Richards and Marianne Faithfull, clad only in a rug, roosting subversively in this cosy place was revolutionary in itself. Was nothing sacred? Jagger was not just a rock star, but a herald of cultural revolt.
He had recently declared, moronically: 'Teenagers are not screaming over pop music any more, they're screaming for much deeper reasons. We are only serving as a means of giving them an outlet. Teenagers the world over are weary of being pushed around . . . they want to be free and have the right of expression, of thinking and living without any petty restrictions.' Richards, even more of a Blairite before his time, had said: 'We are not old men. We are not concerned with petty morals.' Now both were in the dock, and Judge Leslie Block (a naval veteran who had genuinely fought for human freedom) sent them to prison - Jagger for three months, Richards for a year.
This was shocking. Did the Establishment still have a spine after all? Youth was not outraged - 56 per cent of people aged between 21 and 34 thought the sentence was too light.
The protest came - as so often in those days - from the elite itself. Lord Rees-Mogg, now my fellow-columnist, then editor of The Times. said the sentence was unfair and denounced as 'primitive' those who thought that the future Sir Michael Jagger had got what was coming to him. This, plus an expensive legal team, led to Jagger's rapid release - almost into the arms of Lord ReesMogg, who greeted the freed rock singer, as he stepped out of a helicopter, on live television.
I watched greedily, and concluded with absolute certainty that night that nobody was in charge, and that I could do anything I liked from now on. And I duly did.
