23 Books for Counterculture Conservatives, Tea Party Occultists, and Capitalist Wizards
10. Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America by Ann Coulter
Publication Date: August 7, 2012
Official Description:
The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrates mobs—it is the mob. Sweeping in its scope and relentless in its argument, Demonic explains the peculiarities of liberals as standard groupthink behavior. To understand mobs is to understand liberals.
In her most provocative book to date, Ann Coulter argues that liberals exhibit all the psychological characteristics of a mob, for instance:
Liberal Groupthink: “The same mob mentality that leads otherwise law-abiding people to hurl rocks at cops also leads otherwise intelligent people to refuse to believe anything they haven’t heard on NPR.”
Liberal Schemes: “No matter how mad the plan is—Fraternité, the ‘New Soviet Man,’ the Master Race, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Building a New Society, ObamaCare—a mob will believe it.”
Liberal Enemies: “Instead of ‘counterrevolutionaries,’ liberals’ opponents are called ‘haters,’ ‘those who seek to divide us,’ ‘tea baggers,’ and ‘right-wing hate groups.’ Meanwhile, conservatives call liberals ‘liberals’—and that makes them testy.”
Liberal Justice: “In the world of the liberal, as in the world of Robespierre, there are no crimes, only criminals.”
Liberal Violence: “If Charles Manson’s followers hadn’t killed Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, Clinton would have pardoned him, too, and he’d probably be teaching at Northwestern University.”
Citing the father of mob psychology, Gustave Le Bon, Coulter catalogs the Left’s mob behaviors: the creation of messiahs, the fear of scientific innovation, the mythmaking, the preference for images over words, the lack of morals, and the casual embrace of contradictory ideas.
Coulter traces the history of the liberal mob to the French Revolution and Robespierre’s revolutionaries (delineating a clear distinction from America’s founding fathers), who simply proclaimed that they were exercising the “general will” before slaughtering their fellow citizens “for the good of mankind.”
Similarly, as Coulter demonstrates, liberal mobs, from student radicals to white-trash racists to anti-war and pro-ObamaCare fanatics today, have consistently used violence to implement their idea of the “general will.”
This is not the American tradition; it is the tradition of Stalin, of Hitler, of the guillotine—and the tradition of the American Left.
As the heirs of the French Revolution, Democrats have a history that consists of pandering to mobs, time and again, while Republicans, heirs to the American Revolution, have regularly stood for peaceable order.
Hoping to muddy this horrifying truth, liberals slanderously accuse conservatives of their own crimes—assassination plots, conspiracy theorizing, political violence, embrace of the Ku Klux Klan. Coulter shows that the truth is the opposite: Political violence—mob violence—is always a Democratic affair.
Surveying two centuries of mob movements, Coulter demonstrates that the mob is always destructive. And yet, she argues, beginning with the civil rights movement in the sixties, Americans have lost their natural, inherited aversion to mobs. Indeed, most Americans have no idea what they are even dealing with.
Only by recognizing the mobs and their demonic nature can America begin to defend itself.
Why Tea Party Occultists Should Read It:
I began my review last year of Demonic,
2 When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. 3 This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. 4 For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. 5 Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.
6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. 7 He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!” 8 For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!”
9 Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
“My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.”
-Mark 5:2-9
Ann Coulter begins her newest polemic with this quotation from the Gospel of Mark, immediately capturing the reader’s attention and setting the tone for her most elegant, sophisticated, and literary work to date. Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America is Coulter’s exorcism of the dark spirits hidden within the political Left. The bestselling author combines insights in mob psychology, the history of the French Revolution, and the theology of evil to illuminate the political challenges of the day. Even those who have studied the Left in depth will be startled by the clarity and originality of the argument she methodically demonstrates over 300 packed pages.
Coulter uses Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind as the foundation of her analysis. She notes as evidence of the book’s accuracy that both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini used the text not to understand mobs but to incite them. Throughout Demonic she returns to the influential text and applies its analysis to the union mobs of Ohio, the Obamacare mobs, the progressive conspiracy mobs, and the Bush Derangement mobs. World War II’s totalitarian dictators aren’t the only ones reading from Le Bon’s playbook to harness the power of a mob to push forward an intolerable political agenda.
In the ancient world what we now recognize as psychological disorders were once understood as demonic possessions. That metaphor deserves reconsideration. What if one understood “demon” as “a collection of chemicals in one’s brain that precipitate destructive behaviors”? Then its opposite comes into focus: the “angel” as the self-initiated, biochemical alignment of emotions that makes someone a better person.
The magical idea is that through writing and speaking we can invoke gods, angels, demons, and whatever we want as tools to change ourselves and others. Words properly applied can inspire hatred or transcendent love. Powerful speakers know how to pour either into desperate hearts and minds:
*
The most famous role of the Egytian god of writing and magic, Tahuti, is recording the weighing of the heart after death:
In our Christianity-based society we’ve come to know a reinvention of the struggle to balance one’s internal scales. The personal demon sitting on one shoulder and Holy Guardian Angel on the other:
Psychology as it relates to the development of America will emerge as one of the themes in Part IV, American Exceptionalism. (And future editions of this list will include more books by psychologists.)
My first reaction to the list is – wtf?
Depending on whatever it is that is supposed to be the unifying idea here, I might suggest anything from “Futureshock” (a bit dated by of the right genre, I think) to “Lord of the Rings”, and possibly other scifi/fantasy. Also, as object lessons rather than theoretic tomes, “The Music Man” and “Animal House”.
It doesn’t seem to be *quite* limited to purely occult plus political works, but I’ll be diddled what does connect the whole list.
It’s already probably the longest entry I’ve ever seen on PJM.
Here’s the unifying idea:
“My intent with this list is to compile an annotated bibliography of sorts — a collection of books on a variety of subjects and genres that when put side by side can manifest fresh connections and new ways of looking at the world so we as individuals can solve our problems and live happier, more fulfilling lives.”
All of them, or at least a nice chunk of them, also seem to be written by people who in the final analysis are uncomfortable with pure ideologies. This makes them “independent” books, too, which ties into your theme of improving one’s life and taking charge.
just a note: the angel and the demon on donald ducks shoulders? are from the Shepherd of Hermas. The Shepherd of Hermas is a non-canonical, but still recognized as Christian text from the early fathers of the church. They,too, are wrestling with truth, and the divine, in the same piece of real estate.
the shepherd of hermas, and most of the early church fathers are more well-known in the orthodox church. this would be greek orthodox, russian orthodox, and so on.
as well, the pre-nicene council churches- the syriac, and so on- would sound similar but not the same in their formulations. these churches suffered persecutions before rome even became a christian empire.
st anthony shows up mostly as reference for odd painters. his writings are still published. you might like. his writings and his biography- the biographer was trying to sweeten him up.
for pure oddness, really, you cannot go wrong with an orthodox church.
Like the concept, but this is incomprehensible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-prime
Dave,
You have made 2 of the first 5 comments. They are answers to comments to the effect that you have produced 19 pages of GodKnowsWhat.
Your first is, “Here is the unifying idea (delivered in gibberish).”
Your second, in answer to the word “incomprehensible,” is a link to a bizarre (is that your purpose?) Wikipedia page.
Are you attempting to communicate?
And succeeding with some of us. Dave is pointing to Korzybski’s notion that the state of being verb is a semantic trap: aclay1 says it “is” incomprehensible — but then someone else might come along who finds it perfectly comprehensible. So the assertion that it “is” incomprehensible is mistaken, but a statement like “I find this incomprehensible right now” would not be.
Correct. Many thanks, Charlie.
E’ is brilliant.
I am happy to read that Korzybski was an admirer of Wittgenstein’s. Their work appears to complements one another nicely.
RObert Heinlein, interestingly, was very involved with General Semantics, and at least ran in the same circles in LA as the OTO, Golden Dawn, and such.
It’s fun to see Crowley get his day here. So many of the occultists I know, and many of the liberals too, tend to think of his ideology as nothing but “yeah man, we can whatever we feel like.” In reality he had many conservative leanings, albeit coming to the same conclusions through alternative pathways.
And he was always a huge proponent of setting goals and working very hard to achieve them, not just waiting for someone else to take care of you. My favorite quote is another one from Magick Without Tears where Crowley was admonishing a student for being lazy and coming up with all sorts of excuses: “To advance—that means Work. Patient, exhausting, thankless, often bewildering Work. Dear sister, if you would but Work! Work blindly, foolishly, misguidedly, it doesn’t matter in the end: Work in itself has absolute virtue.”
Anyway, fascinating and eclectic mix of books, and I look forward to catching up on all of them, thought at the pace I’m going it’ll take me five years. Thanks for putting it together!
I may never finish this 19-paged article, but if nothing else I must note my thoughts on the statue of Disney & Mouse: a caption reading, “Someday, Mickey, all of this will be yours.”
Of related interest, there is a campaign to vote for Aleister Crowley for President going on this year:
“We realize that Aleister Crowley is dead. And British. And, moreover, not running for office. Nevertheless, we believe that the most effective vote you can cast in 2012 is one for Aleister Crowley.”
More at http://ac2012.com
Anyone who’s really interested in this stuff should read the Illuminatus trilogy. Bob Shea and Bob Wilson were both friends of mine, and they new amazing amounts of this stuff.
I believe Antti P. Balk’s latest, “Balderdash: A Treatise on Ethics” also covers many of these same topics (and people):
http://www.amazon.com/dp/9525700402/
I’m sorry, this is just silly.
Yeah, that was my thought, too.
But, don’t cede the field (don’t seed the feeled), because they’ve been writing in stone again, since the early 90s –and that one-world thingie is immune to negative results. Our world in terms of time is a light skiff running on the surface of a very deep pagan sea.
“They have failed to reveal one new truth, but have succeeded in repeating all the old errors,” so said William Blake, a countercultural icon, about the followers of another, Swedenborg.
Counter cultures come and they go, or as “firesign say” there’s a seeker born every minute.
As a veteren of the ashram industrial complex, I have learned there is an inherent contradiction in the “commoditization of cool,” or huckstering the Path.
Occultism is escapist obscurantism; flashlit faces in the pretend dark.
Everyone believes something but I believe you can learn more about “counter culture” from the Beatles and the Dead.
Or Orwell and Burgess.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
This was a thought-provoking and meaty article. I can see why it might be too much for some, but I enjoyed it.
Pushing people out of their comfort zone once in a while is a good thing. If I hadn’t been pushed a couple of times, I’d still be the kneejerk liberal my parents and teachers programmed me to be.
Good job, Mr. Swindle
Thank you very much. I look forward to more of your feedback as the series continues.
More drivel from Swindle. Get a life.
As an atheist and a fan of indie rock and Wes Anderson and Akira Kurosawa movies, along with being a video game and comic book nerd (most of my wardrobe is t-shirts advertising either superheroes or old 8-bit nintendo games), I think I classify as counterculture conservative. Although, mostly I’d just refer to myself as a skeptical nerdservative.
Yes, you qualify. Welcome. Perhaps in the future I’ll have to add books for Nerdservatives. Any suggestions?