Clio's Psyche

Joel Markowitz

Feb 6

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Why are these many unprecedented event now happening?

Patrick:

As you quote, “ War [ is] righteous rape” deMause wrote.  Is that the case? Does that even have any useful meaning?  

Or is war,  as I believe it to be,  a major determinant of which groups survive, and of which groups did not survive  in collective natural selection?

deMause’s statement is among those which — rightly — serve to injure the reputation of psychodynamic theory in the minds of non-specialists.

He wrote an excellent book on the terrible abuse of children throughout much of history.  But he ignored thereafter the reality that almost all of those severely abused children were so occupied with trying to simply survive, that they had too little reserve to

influence history.   And that history was far-more-largely shaped by emotionally healthier people who had not been so severely abused.

Hitler will be cited as an exception.  But Hitler was the produce of a group that had been seriously damaged emotionally since the terrible Thirty Years’ War.  A group that had been damaged by its defeat in WWI. Hitler’s emotional dysfunction

largely destroyed German militarily during WWII.  That war itself defeated Germany’s cause.

It was the emotionally healthier groups, led by emotionally healthier people that eventually triumphed and shaped the history of the 19th Century— i.e., the ongoing history of Western Groups.

Joel

- show quoted text -

- show quoted text -

--

<><><>

To post to this group send to: cliospsyche@googlegroups.com

Clio's Psyche is sponsored by The Psychohistory Forum. For questions visit: cliospsyche.org

Digest is available on request and sends no more than 1 email a day.

Home: http://groups.google.com/group/cliospsyche

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clio’s Psyche" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cliospsyche+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Mark as complete

me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)

Feb 6

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Why are these many unprecedented event now happening?

But he ignored thereafter the reality  that almost all of those severely abused children were so occupied with trying to simply survive, that they had too little reserve to

influence history.  

But he does not ignore that. He argues that the several hundred thousand years of humankind doing nothing, owed to their fiddling forever with their pre-Oedipal traumas, that is, to their simply trying to maintain some kind of everyday psychic equilibrium. Nothing leftover to advance culture.

And that history was far-more-largely shaped by emotionally healthier people who had not been so severely abused.

Not ignored; this is his argument exactly.

Joel, I don't think he did any damage with this statement. All we had to do is wait until a moment arose where a generation was ready to accept that the incidences of abuse are hugely massive -- which we've seen occur now, finally, with #MeToo, however much more conservative thinkers are trying to tamp down its reverberations and keep the Al Frankens of the world safely within the realm of the innocuous and those who target them maligned as adversely motived or hysterical -- for these will be same people, unconcerned about placating the predator, who'll be ready to accept that women who've been abused constantly through life will INEVITABLY do terrible things to their children, with trauma, degradation, doing more than unsteadying you and in fact making you yourself monstrous, a predator, and that these children will become the sort of damaged people who'll personally seek some kind of displaced, riotous revenge against their mothers through war.

These type will appreciate the absence of tippy-toeing, just as they won't stand for "harassment" or "misconduct" to operate as verbal stand-ins for sexual assault and rape. Tell it as it is, and a later generation will come back to you, ready to ignore the others -- who really weren't being strategic in how they presented themselves, but aiming to establish themselves the "good boys and girls" who redirect away from "mom" --  and really listen. I feel it coming.

I hope there are some associated with Clio who are themselves on the Naomi Wolf side. Still not sure. It'd be strange if psychohistorians find themselves aligned with Frederick Crews at just the moment when he is vulnerable for the first time: not for his being exposed as ostensibly suspiciously obsessed with Freud, which I've never been satisfied as a rebuke for someone who is trying to take down someone of such powerful acclaim but who he think is, not only a charlatan, but someone who for over a century was waylaid humankind, but for over and over and over again arguing that sexual abuse is not as prevalent as it has been made out to be; not when Freud guessed it might have been, and not in the 1980s when the recovered memory movement got shut down. If we don't want to go into details with Franken and register him as a repeat predator who intended damage to female victims, we're on the Frederick Crews side of #MeToo, of widespread child abuse, that isn't going to open things up to a moment where we finally take deMausian radicalism seriously for the number of irrational, damaged subjects, the number of victimizers and victims, won't be there... most parents, most people, still somewhere in the happy range.

Not psychohistorians, but where the young progressives are -- so in Gender Studies, I guess -- will be where the flowering of deMausian studies will take place. War as righteous rape... yes, Gender Studies can certainly handle that. All it needs is a slight nudge to follow things to their logical conclusions...

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete

Joel Markowitz

Feb 6

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Why are these many unprecedented event now happening?

Patrick,

You and I are dealing with different aspects of this circumstance.  Virtually every movement will go too far; and there will always be innocent victims.   Still— ( and go back to my first, long post) the increasing empowerment of women is an important step “upward” in human

psychosexual (and other) development.

Nor has it gone far enough— to which economic statistics  and much other evidence attests.

And while some "children [ MAY ?  ] personally seek revenge against their mothers through war,” that faction must be  (you may disagree) so VERY small that it has no significant effect on the causation of war or on its course.

Human groups attack other groups for essentials the same reasons that other animal groups attack other animal groups.  Primarily for territory and other material gains. Rage — at mothers or otherwise— has nothing to do with it.

“Anger”— or, more-accurately, "rage/hate," have been blamed excessively for wars.  I served in WWII, and found other motivations to have been far more motivating to the men.  

In the marine corps— the “fiercest” (and most-effective) troops by far — the MARINE GROUP-MIND made every effort to inculcate hate into the minds of those relatively friendly men.  E.g., in their long marches during training,

they were told to say “HATE” whenever their right feet hit the ground ...

Joel

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete

me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)

Feb 6

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Why are these many unprecedented event now happening?

Men are #metoo victims too. Not just the ones that we're allowed, the 10 % of sexual assault victims who are men and who were assaulted by women, but the exact same number of them that later in life find some way to revenge themselves against women, through overt violence, or simply through substantiating the various gears of patriarchy: those, that is, who were neglected and abused by their #metoo, massively victimized, mothers. We will never hear this brought up, however, as we're all under the universal commandment to keep our mothers mostly sacrosanct, else we know in having exposed her, we've lost all chance of claiming her love. So what suffering men do is admit that #metoo has validity, that men are scum, but find some way to limit it anyway, so that some women, they know, will continue to suffer pains that will find no address.

The other thing they do is advocate populism, where women's desire for full self-actualization is covertly rendered from them as an individualistic, narcissistic concern, in a time of collective struggle. They know that some dreams thereby are shattered, that some will feel just cause to complain but find the language for justified complaint once again removed from them, and feel good over it.

The other thing they do is war, where they project both the bad mother and the bad child onto some other country, and rape them. You're right, I do stand with deMause in his arguing that this is primary reason for war, and that it absolutely determines its course.

This is where I stand, anyway. The real #metoo for men can never be acknowledged by male victims, so their struggle is actually more profound than the highly dangerous one women have found themselves involved in. They have been told that the problem was with them, that they were over-reacting -- to doubt themselves, and carry guilt over their own having been assaulted -- and that even if there was something to it that they would ruin their careers if they said anything, etc. But in confronting all of this, they nevertheless avoided having to face complete apocalypse -- picture the Sicilian mother above, but writ large in your head; picture an image that would shatter any self.

The people who'll fully source out #metoo will very likely be our most emotionally evolved women. You can already see some in trauma studies coming very close, what with their emphasis on how trauma and abuse disturbs the mind and makes one also a perpetrator and all, mothers upon their children, etc. In fact, this sounds like we're already there, only generally the whole thing is set in motion by patriarchy or colonialism... so still sorta safely pulled back, and suggesting an innocent state that "you" were removed from by patriarchy/colonialism, so some ancient mother is granted colossal tribute.     

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete

Joel Markowitz

Feb 7

Patrick:

The destructive mothers you write about certainly damage children.   We disagree on their prevalence— MOST mothers by far (however imperfect) are nurturing, loving, helpful to their kids.  The damaged kids, in my experience as a therapist, damage mostly themselves and have little influence on the

community.

But more re: hate.  Hate is almost always a reaction to threat; we hate and want to destroy what threatens us.  Thus, hate is almost always a SECONDARY emotion.

This is, ss W.H. Auden wrote, The Age of Anxiety.”  Devoid of an Afterlife for the first time and denied their prior degree of Divine protection; and exposed to an escalating rate of change and challenge, people are ANGRIER than before.  More irritable “scratchy" and impatient ...

The young male wolf, lion, baboon don’t hate the alpha male of the pack, pride, troop.  They attack him because they want to displace him, and to then mate with the females and dominate that group.  Similarly with the child.

The child will hate the same-sex parent only to the extent that he or she feels threatened by that parent.   In the child’s oedipal circumstance, he or she will repress his or her need to replace the parent. But that child will fear retaliation for its unconscious competitive-aggressive and

competitive-sexual need.  That fear may generate hatred.  The ANOUNT of hatred depends on various circumstances— on the aggression of that parent toward the child; on actual abuse; on the level of hatred or rejection of the child … imagined or real.

A collective example:  Hitler hated the Jews because he FEARED the (unconscious) existence of his inner Jew— his unconscious dark, swarthy image of self beset by unacceptable sexual needs.  To kill that image, he could attack HIMSELF; become depressed, and suicide. Or he could— and did— deal

with it, nor as a depressive, but as paranoids do.  He could project it onto the dark, swarthy Jewish RACE-- onto which he also displaced his need to have sex with German women.   He thereby externalized his inner conflict and exploited it as a means to power. He identified with his image of the pure, blond, blue-

eyed, sexually healthy German male— and determined to purify that entire group by “eliminating,” “purging” ...  anal terms were relevant in his — unconsciously— seeing the process as a physicking out of the German group — this toxic Jewish contaminant …  The result would be a super-race— pure, healthy, innocent,

powerful …  relative to those other, “contaminated" nations ...

It’s relevant that he was PERSONALLY fastidious; celibate; a vegetarian …

Joel

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete

me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)

Feb 8

Thanks Joel. This is a fascinating reply.

Hitler could only wish he had an inner Jew. This is something again thoroughly discussed by deMause, but also very brilliantly by Götz Ali ("why the Germans? why the Jews?"), that Jews were better self-actualized: they achieved in a Weimar Germany where old constellations were being unsettled and new opportunities afforded those who weren't threatened by abandonment panic when they tried new things. Hitler saw this as the sort of "self" his own mother would have abandoned for being too self-attending. It could have remained in him, and so to be projected out, or not even: it might have been absent at that point. He could just have been someone who'd switched into his Terrifying Mother alter and went to war against a race that demonstrated characteristics that registered too much independence.

About the origin of Jews being contaminated, deMause emphasizes early childhood experience, and what he directs us to is certainly not your "in your experience as a therapist therapy, most mothers are loving and providing," but rather what is implied through this:

The shortage of Lebensraum (room to live) had a second source in childhood. Upon birth, “the wretched new-born little thing was wound up in ells of bandages, from the feet right, and tight, up to the neck; as if it were intended to be embalmed as a mummy…babies are loathsome, foetid things, offensive to the last degree with their excreta…”22 Babies simply could not move for their first year of life. A visitor from England described the German baby as “a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy in yards of bandages…it is never bathed…Its head is never touched with soap and water until it is eight or ten months old.”23 Their feces and urine was so regularly left on their bodies that they were covered with lice and other vermin attracted to their excreta, and since the swaddling bandages were very tight and covered their arms as well as their bodies, they could not prevent the vermin from drinking their blood. Their parents considered them so disgusting they called them “filthy lice-covered babies,” and often put them, swaddled, in a bag, which they hung on the wall or on a tree while the mothers did other tasks.24 The fear of being poisoned by lice was daily embedded in the fearful alter of the baby, and was as an adult re-experienced as a fear of Jews being “filthy lice who attempted to infect the pure German blood and who had to be exterminated to cleanse the German bloodstream.”25 Germany, Hitler said, had to restore its 1914 borders “to get an influx of fresh blood [because] the Polish Corridor is a national wound that bleeds continuously.” Infancy in swaddling bands was re-experienced: “Poisonous bacilli” were “sucking out our blood [and injecting] a continuous stream of poison into our blood vessels.”26

He also suggests Germans felt sexually polluted, mostly owing to experiences of incest:

Mothers had “an intensive fear of the notorious smell of the small child” which made them give daily enemas “to prevent them from becoming a relentless house tyrant.”41 The ritual ‘stab in the back’ was a central fear of German children well into the twentieth century, and they learned ‘never to speak of it, but always to think about it.’”42 Enema fears, of course, were re-experienced in the “stab in the back” group-fantasy that Germans kept referring to when they imagined the Versailles Treaty was agreed to by German socialists without Germany ever having been defeated in WWI.

Sexual molestation of children was routine and considered normal. When infants were removed from their cribs, they usually slept in the family bed and either were made part of the sexual act or regularly witnessed it close up. Bloch reported the seduction of children in Germany was “very widespread,” and German doctors reported “nursemaids and other servants carry out all sorts of sexual acts on the children entrusted to their care, sometimes merely in order to quiet the children, sometimes ‘for fun.’”43 Freud’s patients (and Freud himself) said they were seduced by their nurses, who “put crying children to sleep by stroking their genitals.”44 “Little Hans” slept with his mother for four years, and told Freud his mother said if he touched his penis she would cut it off.45 Priests used children for sex then too.46 Both boys and girls regularly were raped in schools, by teachers and older students, and there were even special schools espousing “pedagogical Eros”—the benefits of teachers using students for sex “to help learning.”47 Plus, of course, most young girls and boys were sexually assaulted as servants and apprentices.48

He argues that they hated their sexual selves, because they hated everything that their mothers hated about them, even as it might ostensibly have been entirely outside their own self-experience:

Enemy nations are also imagined as Bad Boys, disobedient, disgusting, violent, sexual–everything one was accused of as a child by one’s caretakers. If the Bad Boy self can be killed off entirely, “finally mommy will love me.” This is why Hitler vowed to wipe out the “bad” nations to the east and settle “good Germans” in their place. Poles, Russians, Jews, every nation east of Germany were projected with Bad Boy imagery: “Slavs were considered subhumans, to be either murdered…or starved to death.”108 Moscow, Hitler promised, would be leveled and turned into a reservoir, and Jews would be totally eliminated. In addition, WWII would be a suicidal mission for millions of Germans, thus killing off the “Bad Boy” part of themselves, the most vital, growing, independent self. Then the “good German” self that remained would be purified and would finally be loved by mommy, the Motherland.

[Interesting that in this bit, he assumes that the "bad self" isn't entirely projected out, for if so, you wouldn't need to suicide yourself to be entirely rid of it.]

To a certain extent I may be saying this to myself. These excerpts are from "Childhood Origins of War," from his last book, and one reads it in the same way one would read later works of, say, James F. Masterson, in that the overt Freudianisms -- that were once amply there -- seem missing; in place of super-ego, is the installed alter, for instance. Terms like displacement, repression, proaction are still there, but it belongs in an oeuvre that is possibly more akin to what one sees in Trauma journals than in Psychoanalytic ones.

I think I prefer it, because as hard as it may once have been to imagine being sexually attracted to one's mother and wanting to kill one's father, somehow that seems easy in comparison to being reminded of anything in your past that might have resembled what the Germans were experiencing through their childhoods in mass in the early 20th century. If, as you argue, that most mothers are nurturing, loving and helpful -- though not perfect! -- this would not only mean an argument against #MeToo, for if they are THAT, if they nevertheless remain THAT, then all of that ostensibly hugely damaging sexual abuse didn't affect them TOO much, for they remained capable of being loving angels to their children, and so surely also, mostly loving to themselves and the rest of the world around them -- but would make psychoanalysis a clear number two in terms of its ostensible foremost virtue -- its confronting us with hard truths, that in reckoning with them, make us more adult -- to disciplines that are suggesting that are abuse/trauma-weathered mothers might have actively desired our own deaths; that our feeling sexually polluted, owed to experiences of incest, and that our hating our sexual selves, owed to our mothers hating them.

Concerning hate: I would agree with you, but obliquely: what threatens us is anything that would draw our mothers to disown us, so we hate what would give us the most joy -- our own self-actualized, independent existence.

15:17 to Paris

16 posts by 9 authors

add tags

Assign

Set as duplicate

No action needed

me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)

Feb 15

I do psychoanalytic film reviews at a sort of commons -- letterboxd.com -- where there are cranks but maybe also future Shakespeares.

Here's a link to one I just did on Eastwood's "15:17."

Click here to Reply

arniedr

Mar 6

Another view of the Academy Awards

http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/2018/03/06/90th-academy-awards-banal-conformist-and-10000-miles-from-reality/

Arnold Richards

arnoldrichards.net

internationalpsychoanalysis.net

ipbooks.net

-----Ori

--

<><><>

To post to this group send to: cliospsyche@googlegroups.com

Clio's Psyche is sponsored by The Psychohistory Forum. For questions visit: cliospsyche.org

Digest is available on request and sends no more than 1 email a day.

Home: http://groups.google.com/group/cliospsyche

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clio’s Psyche" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cliospsyche+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Mark as complete

me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)

Mar 7

Re: Another view of the Academy Awards

Quote from text: "Weinstein, who until his disgrace was numerous times a much lionized figure at such ceremonies because of the fame and income his films brought to many of those seated in the crowd on Sunday, has not been convicted of any crime. As we have noted previously, the attitude toward democratic and legal norms of the #MeToo crusaders resembles that of an expensively dressed lynch mob."

Quote from text: "Needless to say, the #MeToo culture oozed out of every open pore during the Oscars ceremony"

Comment: Psychohistory probably ought to find itself attractive to #MeToo activists (the best of the progressive young, in my judgment) before a faction moves to obliterate them. One of the things I liked about deMause is that he gives people leverage to understand that when people are complaining about a "me, me, me" culture, it could well be simply their angry maternal alters speaking, lambasting what remains truly individuated growth.

- show quoted text -

arniedr

Mar 7

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Another view of the Academy Awards

Not sure I understand what drives the far leftism too views Does anyone?

Arnold Richards

arnoldrichards.net

internationalpsychoanalysis.net

ipbooks.net

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete

arniedr

Mar 7

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Another view of the Academy Awards

far lefts me too views

Arnold Richards

arnoldrichards.net

internationalpsychoanalysis.net

ipbooks.net

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete

Joel Markowitz

Mar 7

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Another view of the Academy Awards

You’re too critical, Patrick.    Both Women’s Lib and Political Correctness were necessary and valuable correctives for a VERY long history of collective bias.   Evidence of advancing collective wisdom. Collective evolution “upwards” — which is almost always happening.

Those new movements have done a lot of good thus far.   Not surprisingly, they will occasionally overdo. Shoot themselves in the foot.

Another cliché: so don’t discard the baby with the bathwater.

I will again argue that your emphasis on the destructiveness of the angry mother is an extreme exaggeration of her influence on history.

Joel

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete

Judith Logue

Mar 7

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Another view of the Academy Awards

Hurt and anger for starters?!

Judy L

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete

me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)

Mar 7

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Another view of the Academy Awards

Joel,

I don't agree on the shooting itself in the foot. All I see is that, to date, there is no such thing as a progressive political movement that doesn't yet contain elements that some subsequent generation will end up improving upon. (This is also one of the things Lloyd suggests with his historical stages, how each stage's most progressive WERE fantastic and novel at the time, but would of course eventually be superseded by those more emotionally evolved... abandoning (better than slaughtering!) replaced by intrusive replaced by socializing [I think] replaced by helping.) Our current best still use other peoples as poison containers (i.e. the white working class); they still romanticize. Moreover, according to deMause's historical cycle thesis, we're not at a stage where the left is going to look it's very best as we're not part of the rebirth that occurs after huge sacrifice and war but at some tail-end of a "manic growth" phase, which seems, as it turns out, to require the maintenance of an elitist society where the people are a source of distrust. How this helps, this maintenance of ostensibly justified elitism... ostensibly justified suspicion of the masses, on progressives' part, is that it leads to an unconscious awareness that hope is to some extent being squashed, squelched, kept within limits, so that preying angry maternal alter that has no chance of appearing during the growth phase (for example, the 1960s), or at least appearing and actually successfully admonishing the young with the power of the scornful elder, doesn't make her sudden appearance, here. An untimely visit of a most unwelcome guest, that would kill a very tenuously kept-together party.

What we're doing when we point out #MeToo's faults (the primary one that comes to my mind is that it doesn't do the logical follow through and explore what happens to the qualitative nature of their parenting when history's #MeToo victims become mothers to boys), is not providing mature corrective, refusing to recognize ostensible minor changes as the grand changes society actually requires, but seizing upon flaws our own psyches permit us to see for their helping playing out a narrative that will delineate those who refuse least to circumscribe their freedom, as society's biggest problem... aka, what we feel in Walsh's review of the wonderful #MeToo presenters at the Oscars. We are allowed to see, because it doesn't mistake for genuine freedom, for open possibilities, on our part. What we can't do is ever see how the mature correctors themselves, the Andrew Sullivans, the Masha Gessens, the Petersons, the Crews's, the Paglias's and so on, are caught within a deeper spell of madness, are more a lost cause, that won't be pointed out, probably for a generation... unless somehow, miraculously, we slip the fate of angry mother-deference, of Nationalism/Fascism, that has completed every previous historical cycle in the past, according to Lloyd.

What would be an example of the angry mother actually helping us?

- show quoted text -

drwargus

Mar 7

Re: Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Another view of the Academy Awards

OK, Joel, so what is the baby and what is the bathwater? How do we know what to transcend and include as we evolve to a more just society? Progressive ideas have liberated minorities, but they have naively assumed that if we just liberate everyone, society will automatically adjust to an equilibrium that is more just. Progressives underestimate the impact of the changes on cultural traditions and values. Globalization has not benefited everyone equally, there have been too many winners and losers, and economic inequality is increasing.

George Bush invaded Iraq because he naively thought that democracy would simply evolve if a dictator was removed and the army disbanded. But when Obama went to Egypt to encourage the Arab Spring, he also naively assumed that public protest alone would be enough to begin the democratization of the Middle East. Both ideologies miserably failed. So how do we encourage our society to become more just without destroying it? The current degree of polarization threatens many of our democratic institutions. Attached is an interesting article about how California dealt with its extreme polarization 15 years ago and may be leading the way for us. It provides some historical context to our current dilemma.

Bill

The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War

Why there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win

By Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira

The next time you call for bipartisan cooperation in America and long for Republicans and Democrats to work side by side, stop it. Remember the great lesson of California, the harbinger of America’s political future, and realize that today such bipartisan cooperation simply can’t get done.

In this current period of American politics, at this juncture in our history, there’s no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward. The way forward is on the path California blazed about 15 years ago.

In the early 2000s, California faced a similar situation to the one America faces today. Its state politics were severely polarized, and state government was largely paralyzed. The Republican Party was trapped in the brain-dead orthodoxies of an ideology stuck in the past. The party was controlled by zealous activists and corrupt special interests who refused to face up to the reality of the new century. It was a party that refused to work with the Democrats in good faith or compromise in any way.

The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.

California today provides a model for America as a whole. This model of politics and government is by no means perfect, but it is far ahead of the nation in coming to terms with the inexorable digital, global, sustainable transformation of our era. It is a thriving work in progress that gives hope that America can pull out of the political mess we’re in. California today provides a playbook for America’s new way forward. It’s worth contemplating as we enter 2018, which will be a critical election year.

Understanding the Context of the New American Civil War

This is no ordinary political moment. Trump is not the reason this is no ordinary time — he’s simply the most obvious symptom that reminds us all of this each day.

The best way to understand politics in America today is to reframe it as closer to civil war. Just the phrase “civil war” is harsh, and many people may cringe. It brings up images of guns and death, the bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers.

America today is nowhere near that level of conflict or at risk of such violence. However, America today does exhibit some of the core elements that move a society from what normally is the process of working out political differences toward the slippery slope of civil war. We’ve seen it in many societies in many previous historical eras, including what happened in the United States in 1860.

Two Systems at Odds

America’s original Civil War was not just fought to emancipate slaves for humanitarian reasons. The conflict was really about the clash between two very different economic systems that were fundamentally at odds and ultimately could not coexist. The Confederacy was based on an agrarian economy dependent on slaves. The Union was based on a new kind of capitalist manufacturing economy dependent on free labor. They tried to somehow coexist from the time of the founding era, but by the middle of the 19th century, something had to give. One side or the other had to win.

America today faces a similar juncture around fundamentally incompatible energy systems. The red states held by the Republicans are deeply entrenched in carbon-based energy systems like coal and oil. They consequently deny the science of climate change, are trying to resuscitate the dying coal industry, and recently have begun to open up coastal waters to oil drilling.

The blue states held by the Democrats are increasingly shifting to clean energy like solar and installing policies that wean the energy system off carbon. In the era of climate change, with the mounting pressure of increased natural disasters, something must give. We can’t have one step forward, one step back every time an administration changes. One side or the other has to win.

Two Classes at Odds

Another driver on the road to civil war is when two classes become fundamentally at odds. This usually takes some form of rich versus poor, the wealthy and the people, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. The system gets so skewed toward those at the top that the majority at the bottom rises up and power shifts.

The last time America was in that position was in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. We were on the road of severe class conflict that could have continued toward civil war, but we worked out a power shift that prevented widespread violence. Franklin Roosevelt, the so-called traitor to his class, helped establish a supermajority New Deal coalition of Democrats that rolled all the way through the postwar boom. The conservative Republicans who had championed a politics that advantaged the rich throughout the 1920s and promoted isolationism in the 1930s were sidelined for two generations — close to 50 years.

Today’s conservative Republicans face the same risk. Since 1980, their policies have engorged the rich while flatlining the incomes of the majority of Americans, from the presidency of Ronald Reagan through to last December’s tax overhaul, which ultimately bestows 83 percent of the benefits over time to the top 1 percent. Make no mistake: A reckoning with not just Trump, but conservatism, is coming.

Two Cultures at Odds

The differences between two economic systems or two classes that are fundamentally at odds could conceivably get worked out through a political process that peacefully resolves differences. However, culture frequently gets in the way. That’s especially true when pressures are building for big system overhauls that will create new winners and losers.

Two different political cultures already at odds through different political ideologies, philosophies, and worldviews can get trapped in a polarizing process that increasingly undermines compromise. They see the world through different lenses, consume different media, and literally live in different places. They start to misunderstand the other side, then start to misrepresent them, and eventually make them the enemy. The opportunity for compromise is then lost. This is where America is today.

At some point, one side or the other must win — and win big. The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated — not just for a political cycle or two, but for a generation or two. That gives the winning party or movement the time and space needed to really build up the next system without always fighting rear-guard actions and getting drawn backwards. The losing party or movement will need that same time to go through a fundamental rethink, a long-term renewal that eventually will enable them to play a new game.

Today’s American Civil War

Trump is doing exactly what America needs him to do right now. He’s becoming increasingly conservative and outrageous by the day. Trump could have come into office with a genuinely new agenda that could have helped working people. Instead, he has spent the past year becoming a caricature of all things conservative — and in the meantime has alienated most of America and certainly all the growing political constituencies of the 21st century. He is turning the Republican brand toxic for millennials, women, Latinos, people of color, college-educated people, urban centers, the tech industry, and the economic powerhouses of the coasts, to name a few.

The Republican Party is playing their part perfectly, too. They completely fell for the Trump trap — and that’s exactly what America needed them to do. The Republican Party could have maintained some distance from Trump and kept a healthy check on him through Congress. Instead, they fully embraced him in a group bear hug that culminated in a deeply flawed tax law in the waning days of 2017. This mess of a law, thrown together without traditional vetting, is riddled with outrageous loopholes that benefit the crony donor class and line the pockets of many of the politicians who passed it. The law is hugely unpopular, and everyone who voted for it is marked for the election of 2018.

Perfect.

Now the entire Republican Party, and the entire conservative movement that has controlled it for the past four decades, is fully positioned for the final takedown that will cast them out for a long period of time in the political wilderness. They deserve it.

Let’s just say what needs to be said: The Republican Party over the past 40 years has maneuvered itself into a position where they are the bad guys on the wrong side of history. For a long time, they have been able to hide this fact through a sophisticated series of veils, invoking cultural voodoo that fools a large enough number of Americans to stay in the game. However, Donald Trump has laid waste to that sophistication and has given America and the world the raw version of what current conservative politics is all about.

The Republican Party is all about rule by and for billionaires at the expense of working people. Trump is literally the incarnation of what the party stands for: shaping laws for the good of billionaires and the 1 percent. His cabinet is stuffed with them.

The Republican Party is the party of climate change denial. Trump is the denier-in-chief, but there are 180 climate science deniers in the current Congress (142 in the House and 38 in the Senate), and none of them are Democrats. More than 59 percent of Republicans in the House and 73 percent of Republicans in the Senate deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening, that human activity is the main cause, and that it is a serious threat. Another way to say it is that the Republican Party is in the pocket of the oil and carbon energy industry. Trump just cut through the crap and named Exxon’s CEO as our secretary of state to unravel the United Nations climate accords. No beating around that bush for the sake of appearances — Trump burned the bush down.

The Republican Party for the past 40 years has mastered using dog whistles to gin up racial divides to get their white voters to the polls. Trump just disposes of niceties and flatly encourages white nationalists, bans Muslims, walls off Mexicans, and calls out “shithole” countries.

Trump is just making clear to all what was boiling under the surface for decades, and that’s exactly what we need him to do. Why? Because America finally needs to take the Republican Party down for a generation or two. Not just the presidency. Not just clear out the U.S. House. Not just tip back the Senate. But fundamentally beat the Republicans on all levels at once, including clearing out governorships and statehouses across the land.

The Dramatic Collapse of Republicans in California

Could such as collapse of the Republican Party really happen? Won’t it take decades of trench warfare to put the GOP on the run? Not at all. A political collapse could happen very fast, as it did in California.

California was a model of governmental dysfunction in the 1990–2005 period, with Democrats and Republicans at each other’s throats and little being accomplished. The political atmosphere became so toxic that Democratic governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003 and replaced with populist Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, who then proceeded to up the ante on polarization by pushing a series of conservative ballot initiatives in a special election in 2005. They were all handily defeated by the voters, marking the zenith of conservative Republican attempts to control California.

After that point, it was all downhill for the conservative GOP agenda in California. Schwarzenegger understood the sea change early and dumped right-wing populism and became far more moderate, going along with many progressive priorities. He soon started working with Democrats in the legislature on infrastructure, culminating in the passage of Proposition 1B in 2006 ($20 billion for roads and public transportation). Also in 2006, he and the legislature allocated an additional $150 million to stem cell research, supported a successful move to raise the minimum wage, and passed the Global Warming Solutions Act, which targeted a reduction of 25 percent in greenhouse gas emissions in the next 20 years. And in 2008, voters passed Prop 1A, authorizing $10 billion for high-speed rail.

Meanwhile, even though Schwarzenegger remained governor, the Democrats steadily expanded their majority in the state assembly. Then, in 2010, Democrat Jerry Brown was elected governor, and with the 2012 election, Democrats finally attained a supermajority in both houses of the state legislature. This was critical for overriding constant Republican filibusters and passing tax revenue laws (which still required a supermajority by Prop 13 dictates). The supermajority attained in 2012 was the first California legislative supermajority since 1933 and the first one for the Democrats since 1883. This is remarkable considering that in the dysfunctional 1990s, the state assembly and senate were closely divided between Republicans and Democrats, seemingly light-years away from the supermajority Democrats really needed to get things done.

Alongside these developments, Democratic domination of California representation in the U.S. House of Representatives steadily increased. Back in the 1990s, under Republican governor Pete Wilson, there was essentially parity between Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Today, there is almost a 3:1 split (39–14) in favor of the Democrats. Plus, they control both U.S. Senate seats and every single statewide elected office. There are no longer any Republicans able to mount a credible statewide election.

So, going from the zenith of right-wing populism to progressive domination in California did not take very long. That could easily happen in the country as a whole. The national GOP, after the 2016 election, controlled the presidency, the House, the Senate, and a strong majority of governorships and state legislatures. Since then, President Trump has become historically unpopular among American voters and the GOP Congress and its actions have become widely detested. Very quickly, their 2016 triumphs have morphed into a poisonous electoral environment where the GOP in 2018 is probably going to lose control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, lose governorships and many hundreds of state legislative seats. And while the 2020 election is still a couple years away, an early forecast from political scientist Eric R.A.N. Smith has Trump (assuming his unpopularity continues) netting only 41 percent of electoral votes in that election.

In short, political change is slow until it’s very fast. The fall of the GOP is likely to be no different.

Life on the Other Side of Democratic One-Party Rule

There is life on the other side of that Republican political collapse. There is a clear way forward in the land of Democratic, progressive supermajorities. California is thriving right now, the economy is booming, state government budgets are setting aside surpluses, and the public is happy with its political leaders (as we have laid out in other articles in this series). California is leading the world in technological innovation and creative policies to counter climate change.

What about the need for checks and balances? Many Americans might be wary of trusting a political environment where one party has complete control of political power. How does society process the range of differences in political opinions in elections and in forming policies?

Californians faced those same questions and dealt with that new reality. In 2008, voters passed Proposition 11, which created a Citizens Redistricting Commission to redraw state legislative districts that over time had been heavily gerrymandered to protect incumbents of both political parties. That commission was insulated from politics and changed districts along more rational lines that took into consideration natural geography and longstanding contiguous communities. Then, in 2010, the voters passed Proposition 20, which applied a similar logic to congressional redistricting.

Alongside that effort, voters in 2010 also passed Proposition 14, a state constitutional amendment that established a top-two primary system in which all candidates, regardless of party, are placed on the same primary ballot, and the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, head into the general election. The immediate result was to bolster competition within almost all districts. In a district populated by Democrats, the voters still got a choice between, say, a more progressive candidate and a moderate candidate.

Politics in California today still has a range of political differences that get worked out within political bodies. The city council of San Francisco is made up of all Democrats but is often trapped in fierce policy battles between supervisors who are more left of center than their colleagues who are more moderate and supportive of the tech industry. However, everyone on that city council is a Democrat and would be considered a progressive Democrat in the national context. They all embrace creating a diverse society, fighting climate change, etc. The California Legislature holds a similar range of political opinions, from very left to pro-business Democrat, but they almost all operate within a worldview that shares much common ground — a worldview that is not shared by the few remaining Republicans still in the chambers.

In short, California has a supermajority of 60 percent of the population, and thus a supermajority of elected officials, who share a common vision of a general way forward. Their differences are worked out within the confines of that general vision. California Republicans, like their conservative national colleagues, don’t share that general vision, and so they have been pushed out of serious political discourse. They were beaten, and beaten badly. And they almost certainly won’t be part of that discourse until they go through a lengthy process of reform over many years.

The Final Battle Begins in 2018

America is desperate for a functioning political supermajority that can break out of our political stasis and boldly move ahead and take on our many 21st-century challenges. The nation can’t take much more of our one step forward, one step back politics that gets little done despite the need for massive changes.

America today has many parallels to America in the 1850s or America in the 1930s. Both of those decades ended with one side definitively winning, forming a political supermajority that restructured systems going forward to solve our problems once and for all. In the 1850s, we fought the Civil War, and the Republican Party won and then dominated American politics for 50 years. In the 1930s, the Democratic Party won and dominated American politics for roughly the same amount of time.

America today is in a similar position. Our technologies, our economy, our geopolitics are going through fundamental changes. We are facing new challenges, like climate change and massive economic inequality, that must be addressed with fundamental reforms.

America can’t afford more political paralysis. One side or the other must win. This is a civil war that can be won without firing a shot. But it is a fundamental conflict between two worldviews that must be resolved in short order.

California, as usual, resolved it early. The Democrats won; the Republicans lost. The conservative way forward lost; the progressive way forward began. As we’ve laid out in this series, California is the future, always about 15 years ahead of the rest of the country. That means that America, starting in 2018, is going to resolve it, too.

This argument has been built on previous articles and will continue through more stories to come. If you want more, follow us through this series.

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete

Trevor Pederson

Mar 7

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Another view of the Academy Awards

There are good sociological reasons that the elite would rather fan the flames of identity politics instead of having people's attention go to class issues.

There are group psychology issues that concern women entering universities in larger numbers. Also, quantitative studies and approaches from CBT practitioners have made the depth psychologies appear as discredited to many, and, in a superficial environment that doesn't have deep content, people will turn to ethics because perfectionistic pursuits in the field seem phony or difficult to achieve.

There are many inputs from many different levels.

At the individual psychology level,  when one works with echoistic (masochistic) patients, one encounters certain forms of pathology that relate to intrapsychic issues that will show self-effacement, feeling like one's life is insignificant compared to the pain others have been through, along wth desires to be invisible, not appear in the spotlight, or appear as an insider. The outsiders should get attention and become insiders.

I have many vignettes that show these dynamic issues. Here's one I wrote up this morning.     

Client has a loud ringing in her ears appear. Previously, I had thought that it was related to the trauma of the memory we had worked on, but now that it has shown up with the current memory, I know it is a block. I still ask her to feel if it is part of the memory or if it feels like something different that wants to put her focus elsewhere. She is able to see that it’s the latter. I begin to help her work with the block and point out that it is showing up right when we are getting into a crucial memory. I ask her if it feels like it is here to protect her or if it feels like it’s trying to spoil her focus, even though I don’t get much of a sense at all for the latter in her reaction. Client goes with the former and adds that this sound “lets [her] distract [her]self from what [she] has to do.” We talk more about how facing the momentary pain will help her with some of her problems and bode well for her life, and she constructs this as the distracting sound is trying to protect her but it is “hurting [her] in the long run, and [she] needs to face things on [her] own.” She associates this to her father and how he paid rent for her house when she was actively using drugs and enabled her to live an irresponsible life. She also more generally associates this relation to him to her childhood and how he had “hugged her with money.” I explore the particulars with her and see if I can help her articulate whatever sense of rejection, disappointment, etc. would like to come out. However, client brings in a new block concerning how “other people had it worse than [her].” She expresses that it feels inappropriate for her to complain about her past when she had a “good dad” compared to how others had dads that beat them, raped them, or who didn’t stick around. I try to get around this cognitively and explain that things can be relative in some sense. The child who doesn’t have to focus on mere survival and dissociation will develop the agonies associated with wanting to be successful, finding true love, wanting to bring about world peace, or some other ideal. Client seems to intellectually assent to this point, but after more discussion I can see that feeling isn’t just related to this and is deeper. I ask her to imagine that the survivor of major childhood abuse was in the lobby and that I was seeing client instead of seeing her, and that this survivor knew that client’s childhood wasn’t as bad as hers. I ask client to imagine what she might be thinking about client, and client says, “she is stupid, she makes a big deal out of nothing, it would be more valuable for me to have time with you, she is an attention seeker, she is an asshole.” I ask client to say these as statements about someone from her past and she says that she thinks about herself. She tells me about how she had been “loud and obnoxious” when she had been homeless and partying. This deepens and client adds a layer regarding how she put herself out shamelessly for “sexual attention” in saying how she liked sex, "big dicks," and other provocative things. I ask her to contrast this shameless attention seeking to what she feels like now and she expresses that “being invisible would be more comfortable than being the front and center of everyone’s focus.” We return to the “blur” of her partying days in which she had to ask herself “who is this I’m waking up next to?” and when she’d declare “I don’t give a fuck!” at a party...       

Just as racism and paranoia, in the narcissistic pole, can be related to someone's individual psychology, but also be part of the dynamics of large groups, I would say that these echostic issues can show up in the large group level too.

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete

Joel Markowitz

Mar 7

Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Another view of the Academy Awards

Patrick,

We largely disagree.

I don’t see “the angry mother” as having played  ANY significant role in history relative to other forces.   We can label only a tiny percentage of mothers “angry mothers.”  Those few there have been were much more likely to have destroyed the effectiveness of their kids — and of themselves.   Thereby largely removing what influence BOTH MIGHT have had in shaping history.

It’s human nature to become angry at CURRENT excesses— e.g., people who carry political correctness too far; kids who shoot other kids in schools…..   A LONGER view of history— an overview— is not only more RELEVANT, but it actually often sees those OVERREACTORS as generating progress. Trump’s excesses will cause some problems for many people.  But REACTIONS TO that damage will drive constructive changes. Hopefully — many of them.

Progress has often depended on damage/ disaster/ wars and other bad events.  They generate problem-solving which is often more constructive and valuable than what it has cost.  Natural selection has thus far been a very rough process. But where would we be without it?

Trevor:  Case histories have less influence on history than do COLLECTIVE (i.e., group/ national/ etc.) histories.   One exception is COLLECTIVE LITERATURE. Hamlet; Macbeth; Lear; Romeo & Juliet; etc. — have been so acceptible to SO MANY COLLECTIVE MINDS-  and over so long a period— that we can consider THEM to be RELEVANT case histories. Case histories, that is, that MOST-accurately represent the human condition.

Joel

- show quoted text -

Mark as complete