October 21-27, 2004

slant

Why They Hate

Diagnosing why today's Republicans loathe liberals.

by Dr. Lawrence D. Blum

A liberal-minded friend of mine watched some of the Republican National Convention and asked me this question: "Do you, as a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, have any idea why they hate us so much?"

In fact, I do have a hypothesis. It has to do with concerns about weakness and about immorality as opposed to, say, increasing the wealth of the wealthy or amassing budget deficits. If one listens carefully to angry attacks on Democrats by such prominent Republicans as President George Bush and U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.), themes that seem related to personal emotional preoccupations start to emerge.

A favorite charge is that Democrats -- in the present instance, U.S. Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) -- are weak and indecisive in contrast to the Republicans' own purported strength and decisiveness. I see little in President Bush's behavior that brings the word strength to mind, but it impresses me how preoccupied he is with the idea and how constantly he feels obliged to use the word and to try to prove his strength through singlemindedness and readiness to action. Even his sentences must be brief and hurried, in a Hemingway style. I don't recall anyone ever publicly calling Bush's "strength" into question, but if one infers an inner doubt on his part, his behavior becomes more comprehensible. Many men struggle with similar doubts. The problem with Democrats, then, is that their willingness to think before acting, or to consider multiple viewpoints, reminds their Republican critics of secret, hidden (unconscious) doubts of their own. Unrecognized self-hatred, for not being enough of a man, is transformed into venom directed at the Democrats, those hateful, and sometimes all too willing, exemplars of weakness.

Republicans' angry charges often suggest concerns that Democrats are too "liberal." The traditional political meaning of the term as relating to individual political and economic freedom, in this view, has come to mean libertine, dissolute, amoral. The right wing has inflicted its wrath, in chronological order, on those pursuing such liberal ideas as civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights. Each idea, in turn, has brought outraged, furious charges that they would destroy the moral fabric of our society. Improper sexual impulses (between blacks and whites, women on top, between same-sex pairs) needed to be guarded against. Rather than a conservative (or liberal) defense of individual freedom, the right wing -- like the ayatollahs -- endorses government supervision in the bedroom. Sen. Santorum's speeches suggest, in fact, that he regards gay marriage as a more immediate, preoccupying threat to American society than terrorism. What is he so worried about?

Every society needs laws. In order for people to live together in a free society, some impulses need to be controlled and others permitted. It appears as though President Bush has had trouble controlling some of his less desirable impulses. For years he couldn't control his drinking. And he's been hell-bent on fighting -- albeit with the wrong enemy, without coherent justification or plan. But still, he doesn't like for people to be out of control. Waving the banner of morality covers up his own problems and shifts the accusations of immorality to others. Newt Gingrich famously championed the cause of family values while leaving his wife sick with breast cancer.

As the Republican right wing has come to dominate the party, so has anger, intolerance and fear of freedom of thought. The United States was founded as a liberal society, based on tolerance and the freedom and political equality of individuals. Freedom of speech is our civic cornerstone, but much of the vitriol directed at Democrats (and those still more evil liberals) is, on closer examination, a fearful attack on the idea of liberal society itself. In this view, the liberal, tolerant society for which our founding fathers worked, fought, and died is for weaklings and sinners. These frightened, authoritarian responses of the right wing are natural tendencies that can be found in all of us; they are what most fundamentally necessitates the eternal vigilance that is the price of liberty.

Dr. Lawrence D. Blum (www.lawrenceblum.com) is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist in private practice in Center City and Cherry Hill, N.J. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (800 words), contact Brian Hickey, City Paper interim editor, 123 Chestnut St., third floor, Phila., Pa., 19106 or e-mail hickey@citypaper.net.