The Incredible Mrs. Limbic
Found via Mary Kate Cary, Byron York asks the 3.69 trillion dollar question — and then answers it: “In time of victory, why is the left so angry?”
Garofalo linked the tea parties to what she described as a peculiar feature of the conservative brain. “The limbic brain inside a right-winger, or Republican, or conservative, or your average white power activist — the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person,” she explained. “And it is pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring.” (The limbic brain is the deep portion of the brain that mediates, controls and expresses emotion.)
Now, it’s possible Garofalo was joking; she used to do comedy. But she didn’t seem to be joking, and her comments were consistent with a long and dishonorable history of attributing political conservatism to mental abnormality. And as she spoke about the alleged anger on the right, Garofalo herself seemed visibly angry. Why were she, and Olbermann, and many others on the left, so apparently troubled by a virtually powerless opposition?
I asked William Anderson, a friend who is a political conservative, a medical doctor, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard. “They are angry, but I think they are also scared, and I think it’s because they have a sense that their triumph is a precarious one,” Anderson told me. Democrats won in 2008 in some part because of the cycles of American politics; Republicans were exhausted and it was the other party’s turn. Now, having won, they are unsure of how long victory will last.
“They see that they have a very small window of opportunity to do all the things they want,” Anderson continued. “They see the window of opportunity as small because they know in their deepest hearts that the vast majority of the American people wouldn’t go for all of the things they want to do.” So they are frantic to do as much as possible before the opposition coalesces. And the tea parties might be the beginning of that coalescence.
Then there is the question of self-image. Watching Garofalo and Olbermann discuss the tea parties, it was impossible to avoid the sense that they saw themselves as two good people talking about many bad people. “One of the things about narcissism is that it looks like people who are just proud of themselves and smug, but in fact narcissism is a very brittle and unstable state,” Anderson told me. “People who are deeply invested in narcissism spend an awful lot of energy trying to maintain the illusion they have of themselves as being powerful and good, and they are exquisitely sensitive to anything that might prick that balloon.”
Again, the tea parties could represent a threat. What if the protesters weren’t racists, weren’t violent, weren’t mentally defective? What if their point was legitimate, or even partly legitimate? Those are questions better batted down than answered.
Finally, there is the sense of anxiety and fragility that stems from the liberals’ newly-won power. They control everything in government, and some fear what the responsibility of governing is doing to them.
Their president of hope and change has chosen not to prosecute the authors of the Bush-era “torture memos.” He is escalating the war in Afghanistan. He seems determined to bail out the nation’s richest bankers. For some on the left, it can be difficult to abide those actions and still maintain the image of one’s self atop the moral high ground. So they lash out at the easy target presented by the tea parties.
And that is how political triumph can produce anger and unhappiness. Don’t be surprised if there is much more of both in the days to come.
No, that’s a given.
I think you’re right, but that there’s another aspect to their anger, which is their lack of education. I don’t mean in the formal degreed sense–although in light of O’s pathetic, even poignant, Cornell sideshow, there’s that too–but simply in their inability to understand, let alone respond, to the positions of their political opponents. If you don’t understand basic economics, how can you even begin to grapple with free market arguments? If you don’t know basic American history, and default to some dweeby, 14-year-old virgin sexual slang, but the bad people don’t weep in humiliation and go away, what can the reason be other than that they’re crazy, evil, and stupid? Of course, as a parent of teenage children, this kind of behavior is immediately familiar.
This is not new. I grew up in France, and remember distinctly being told, many times “Have you noticed that all intelligent people are either communists or socialists?”. I could only quietly say to myself “Thanks God I’m stupid!”
The arguments of the left depend on a mechanism that could be called “expiditious logic”, some kind of fast food for the limbic system, or in electrical terms, a short-circuit through the rational process. No wonder they attempt to compensate by claiming intellectual superiority, as if the various claims of moral superiority did not suffice to advertize their myopic vision.
The tea party movement is also a revolt against the glorification of ignorance, by people who normally stay quiet, but deeply know and recognize the wisdom of America’s founding principles, and are willing to defend them if necessary. The tea partiers will defeat those who are merely playing ping-pong with slogans, because they are the ones capable of thoughtful and coherent action.
Remember, the French revolution wasted its idealistic potential by turning populist, vengeful and murderous. In contrast, the tea party I attended was a perfectly civil affair, which I found very reassuring. Let’s keep it that way.
The fanatics on the left are dangerous inasmuch as they can lift a superficial charmer into the white house on the basis of cynical arguments, but by and large they mean well. They need to be enlighted, not insulted. The US constitution, when printed, is smaller than a passport, but one that gives you passage into the realm of reason it you take the time to read it. It can be used as a teaching tool.
The Gruffalo’s personal Nazi racial theory.
How charming.
The actual science shows that conservatives have normal brains, whereas liberals have the deficit. Which explains why they resort to whining and hyperemotionalism, rather than reason and logic.
But that doesn’t fit Eva Braunalo’s squirrely PMS rant.
Just to elaborate a moment on my earlier post (1), to better understand the liberal mind, imagine that you’re at the park, with your children, and the littlest throws a ball up in the air, then sees a dog and points to it, forgetting about the ball, which then falls back down on his head. He cries and you pick him up to console him. After a minute, he calms down, and you say, “Don’t forget, what goes up, must come down.”
Suddenly, the person next to you turns and begins to argue with you vociferously. “Not at all!” he says. “Gravity is only one physical option, and a very poor one.” He proceeds to lecture you about alternatives to gravity, non-gravity societies functioning much better than ours, the history of gravity oppression, a book called “Atlas Just Done Floated Off One Day,” etc.
You try to argue with the poor guy, who’s clearly not part of the reality-based community, but after awhile you conclude the guy’s crazy, stupid, or both, and have a queasy feeling that maybe you shouldn’t take your kids to the park if this guy’s around. After all you can’t really explain to a person that gravity exists; it’s obvious, anybody can see it, if they can’t, well, they’re crazy, stupid, and potentially evil.
After a lot of years in the discussion, I’ve concluded that when it comes to politics, history, economics, et al, leftists think they’re the parents on the bench, and everybody else is the guy who thinks there are alternatives to gravity.
Joe,
That brings to mind O’Brien’s discussion with Winston about gravity in a latter chapter of 1984:
“1984 — a user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us.”