Even before the Senate voted on cloture, the Democrats’
health-care legislation was already delivering benefits in the
form of a free mental-health screening delivered by Sen. Sheldon
Whitehouse: If you oppose this bill, you’re a dangerous
nut.
Such was the essence of Sunday’s
floor speech in which the junior senator from Rhode Island
quoted at length from Richard Hofstadter’s 1965 classic, The
Paranoid Style in American Politics and offered
it as a diagnosis of the health bill’s opponents.
Whitehouse paraphrased Hofstadter’s thesis, warning of “the
dangers of an aggrieved right-wing minority with the power to
create what [Hofstadter] called a political climate in which the
rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become
impossible.”
This “aggrieved” minority, Whitehouse asserted, was
responsible for the “malignant, vindictive passions” of
those who opposed the health-care bill. He compared these
opponents to the Nazi brownshirts responsible for
Kristallnacht in Germany
— “broken
glass has sparkled in darkened streets” — as well as to
the Jacobin rabble of revolutionary France and racial lynch
mobs.
“Does that sound familiar…in this health debate?”
Whitehouse asked.
Certainly this should sound familiar to conservatives, as
Hofstadter’s psycho-political theory — derived from the work of
Theodor Adorno — was analyzed and dismissed by William F.
Buckley Jr. a half-century ago.
“If you dismiss a priori the
possibility that there are rational grounds for resisting the
Liberal view of things, one necessarily looks elsewhere than to
reason for explanations,” Buckley wrote in his 1959 classic,
Up From Liberalism. Buckley observed that “one
needs no advanced degrees in clinical psychology and
psychoanalytic theory in order to penetrate the fallacy of
The Authoritarian Personality” — the most
famous work of Adorno, a leader of what has become known as the
Frankfurt
School of political theory.
Adorno claimed to have proven
scientifically that American conservatism
was rooted in psychological maladjustment, fostering a tendency
toward authoritarianism, which he asserted was the fundamental
source of European fascism.
However, as Buckley explained, Adorno’s argument was a
tautology based on the implicit presumption that all opposition
to liberalism was illegitimate and therefore irrational. Adorno’s
theory was “marvelously convenient” for liberals, Buckley said,
and it has been recycled periodically ever since.
Hofstadter was among the most shrewd, persistent and
opportunistic of Adorno’s disciples, applying his Freudian
couch-trip method whenever the conservative menace erupted during
the Cold War. In a
1954 essay, his chosen patients were “the most zealous
followers of Senator McCarthy.” A decade later, on
the eve of the 1964 presidential election, Hofstadter saw
“angry minds at work…among extreme right-wingers…in
the Goldwater movement.” This demonstrated, he said, “how much
political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions
of a small minority.”
The fact that Goldwater got 27 million votes in 1964 could
be taken as evidence that those “angry minds” were never a “small
minority,” and Goldwater’s vote might have been larger had not
Hofstadter and others so assiduously portrayed the Arizona
Republican as a maniac warmonger. The subsequent disasters of
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society — the political apogee of
20th-century liberalism — could also be viewed as vindicating
the “extreme right-wingers” who voted against LBJ.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même
chose, and so it is that Americans
opposed to the current liberal agenda were denounced in the
Senate as an “aggrieved minority,” even when the
most recent Rasmussen poll shows that 56 percent of
registered voters are against the Democrats’ health care
bill.
Senator Whitehouse attributed this anomalous state of
affairs to Republicans who, he said, had “embarked
on a desperate no-holds-barred mission of propaganda, obstruction
and fear,” waging a
“campaign of falsehood” seeking to
“terrify the public” and “whip up concerns and anxiety about
socialized medicine.”
To denounce fearmongering while simultaneously likening
one’s opponents to the murderous rabble of 1938 Germany is
a neat trick, as was Senator Whitehouse’s effort to blame Senate
Republicans for having “ruined” Christmas by delaying passage of
the health-care bill. Of course, it is Democrats who have pushed
the bill toward a projected Christmas Eve roll-call vote in order
to give President Obama a major legislative accomplishment to
tout in his State of the Union Address next month.
Senator Whitehouse’s speech elicited a lengthy but
relatively
mild rebuke from Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl. “I wonder
if my colleagues really believe that our position is animated by
hatred,” Kyl said, enumerating his criticisms of the health-care
bill before concluding, “We believe this bill will be bad for
them and it will be bad for our country. Our Democratic
colleagues have a different position. Neither their position nor
ours is malignant, nor should they be expressed
vindictively.”
Such is the state of affairs as we approach the first
Christmas of the Hope and Change presidency. Democrats rush
toward a vote on major legislation — more than 2,000 pages, its
cost to taxpayers estimated at more than $2 trillion — before
its contents can be read or analyzed, even while insisting that
it is not they, but their opponents, who are in the grip of
madness.
