Why His Haters Can’t Do Without George W. Bush
2/20/2007 8:46 PM
Destroying a president is not much of a strategy to win a war, but it's all the Democrats have….The important thing is to "keep hate alive." If hate worked in '06, maybe it will work again in '08, when the stakes will be considerably higher. — Wesley Pruden
It’s tempting to say it has been a very long time since America has witnessed animosity toward an incumbent president comparable to the hard left’s malice toward George W. Bush. But in reality it hasn’t been that long at all.
Remember what his partisan defenders called the "inquisition" against Bill Clinton? Try this on for size: The left’s monolithic crusade against anything and everything Bush is more than similar; it’s identical to the worst of the hard right’s take-no-prisoners offensive against Bill and Hillary. (Who can forget the oft-repeated claim that the Clintons ordered White House counsel Vince Foster murdered?)
True, the personalities are different. So are the political issues and circumstances of the two administrations. Still, the emotional dynamics can be viewed as interchangeable — with one important exception. Serious conservatives of the 1990s rolled their eyes at the Vince Foster allegation; whereas today's progressive movement takes as an article of faith that Bush/Cheney masterminded the September 11 attacks.
Bush’s enemies reject this analysis, of course. By viewing their vendetta as different in kind from what they considered unfair attacks against Clinton, Bush haters are able to insist that their destructive quest is motivated by the highest of principles. As opposed to driven by group psychological dynamics of the most primeval kind.
To consider that possibility might tempt them to look in mirror — never a good idea when maintaining your team’s identity as righteous and pure depends upon attributing abject evil to your opponents. Also, "owning your projections" is not a terribly useful strategy in the reflection-free zone of 24/7 cable news, which requires polarized contenders whose fingers of blame always point away from themselves.
No, it is indispensable to find a scapegoat who personifies everything that’s wrong, bad, evil; someone who does so monolithically. Only when that person is banished can order, integrity, and goodness be restored to the kingdom.
Enter George W. Bush, the “identified patient†of the left.
I first encountered this phrase at a seminar led by Carl Whitaker, an early pioneer in family therapy, or systems-oriented therapy. Like most psychologists schooled in psychodynamic methods, Whitaker had begun his career talking with individual patients about their personal problems, life challenges, goals; their “issues.â€
Over time, Whitaker noticed that his patients had something in common. They all talked a lot about people with names like Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister, Grandpa and Grandma. Whitaker got the curious idea that it might be useful to invite as many of these actual people into the therapy room at the same time, to speak for themselves and describe the family drama, tragedy, or comedy as they saw it.
Since each patient was actualy part of a “family system†with traditions, norms, rituals, and rules — spoken as well as unspoken — why not create a therapeutic framework in which the actual system could be observed in real time and space? As Whitaker began conducting multigenerational family therapy, he noticed dynamics that hadn’t been apparent with the “one patient in a room at a time†framework.
In particular: Assembled families tended to identify a particular member of the family unit as the primary source of the family’s problems!
Whitaker soon realized that this "identified patient,†or I.P. (drug-dealing son or slacker daughter; dad who drinks too much or mom who constantly complains) acted as a stand-in for some other problem that the family refused to address. Moreover, he discovered that by serving as the family’s “symptom bearer,†the I.P. permitted the other members of the family to continue their own dysfunctional behaviors.
Such a deal: one person gets to be “it,†the others get to be righteous. Sound anything like family gatherings you’ve attended?
Early on, Whitaker figured out that anything resembling family health could only be achieved by strategically taking the onus off the I.P. Not because he or she was a saint, but because no one else in the room was. Using methods sometimes indistinguishable from mischief, including making paradoxical remarks that (not always gently) nudged participants from their fixed perspectives, Whitaker became quite skilled at shifting the family’s collective gaze from the identified patients to the family system per se. He did so by expanding the symptoms.
For instance, during sessions when someone in the family pointed to the identified patient, Whitaker refused to talk about the identified patient. At such moments he sometimes literally put his arm around the scapegoat’s shoulder and said playfully said, “Hey, these folks have really got it in for you.â€
To say the least, this had the effect of distributing anxiety more equally among all family members.
This way of “perturbing†the system’s existing dynamics generally led families to behave in more intelligent, flexible, adaptive ways. The family got healthier to the extent that everybody realized their role in the “Don’t blame me†racket and took responsibility for their role in maintaining the family’s fixations.
Concerning George W. Bush, how clear does it need to be? With the fervor of castle-storming villagers and witch burners of ages past, today’s impeachment-now zealots have transformed the president into their very own “identified patient.†The hard left’s demonizing of Bush has the convenient effect (secondary or primary, you tell me) of disguising their true political agenda: slash defense spending, disable the military, annex American sovereignty to some putative global authority, restore confiscatory taxation, implement a European-style welfare state, open the borders to Mexico, continue class warfare and bitter sectarian rivalry in the name of “diversity.†This is the short list.
By blaming Bush for everything, his inquisitors keep America’s attention off that agenda — sensibly, since most of its tenets are opposed by a majority of Americans in today’s center-right political reality. Nancy Pelosi understands that Democrats captured congress by advocating a vague “new direction†that amplified the country’s ambivalence about Bush, especially his Iraq policy.
Pelosi means to stay with this approach until her party returns to the White House in 2009 — a possibility that Republicans can no longer hope to prevent simply by shouting “Hillary!†in the tone that conveys “Antichrist!â€
None of this is to say that identified patients don’t bring real problems of their own; to the contrary. In addition to serving as a screen for the family’s distorted projections, and generally as catalyst for the family’s decision to seek help, family scapegoats invariably make their own contributions to the pathology of the system as a whole. Hence, the ease with which the rest of the family targets them in the first place. “Oh, we’d be fine as a family if it weren’t for the bad stuff Jimmy does.†Or the Susie’s meth habit, or Mom’s selfishness, or Dad’s recklessness.
Or George W. Bush. The president’s errors of judgment, policy, tone, substance, style, and tactics are legion; and therefore beyond the scope of this piece. I’ll simply say that the administration’s confusion of priorities in Iraq — the attempts to establish democracy before creating order and security — represents an incalculable strategic blunder. In the “family system†that is America’s body politic, George W. Bush has his own accounting to do for the stunning mismanagement of the Iraq war.
Just as paranoids sometimes often have real enemies, scapegoats often make mistakes that leave them deserving of criticism. No disagreement from me about that.
Still, given the current dynamics, I’m taking the side of the identified patient named Bush. From a "systems" perspective, I find it telling that so many of those who despise him are also people who clearly seek to hasten — many seem to welcome — American defeat in the Middle East. That is enough to get me to take the seat next to Bush, and whisper with a nudge, ““These guys really do seem to have it in for you.â€
When a sometimes discouraging president is hated for coming late to the right policy — securing Baghdad with troop reinforcements — and when his haters are demagogues who anchor their political fortunes on the failure of that country’s fledgling democracy — hell, I’ll go with the latecomer any day. Give me a choice that’s hard.
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