Watch out for mud as
 the election heats up

The Presidential Election is still a year away and, lamentably, albeit predictably, the political mud is already flying in all directions. But if you think the partisanship is already plumbing new depths, you’d be wise to think again.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything that could equal a study of the psychological motivations of political conservatives published during the 2004 Presidential campaign in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin. Let me remind you about what it had to say:

The study was the work of Associate Professor Jack Glaser and visiting Professor Frank Sulloway of the University of California Berkeley, Associate Professor John Jost of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and Professor Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland at College Park.

And they concluded the motivations that mark political conservatives are ‘fear and aggression; dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity; uncertainty avoidance; need for cognitive closure; and terror management.’

But, actually, the report says more about the mindset of the researchers than it does about folks to the right of the American political spectrum. Their subjects were Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, former President Ronald Reagan, radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, Joseph Stalin, and Fidel Castro.

This bizarre list might lead one to conclude that the folks actually suffering from ‘fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure, and terror management’ were the researchers who put this bizarre list together.

Surely only the deranged could fail to recognise the vast moral and philosophical gulf between folks who operate within the framework of the American political system, and murderous tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and Mussolini.

In the context of 21st-Century American politics, President Reagan was unashamedly conservative, as is his ardent admirer Rush Limbaugh. He had a laissez–faire approach to the economy and generally took a constructionist approach to the constitution.

Yet, from the perspective of 19th and early-20th century political thought, both Reagan and Limbaugh would be classified as liberals. Political labels tend to be a movable feast.

At no time in world history, however, would mass murderers and torturers like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Castro have been classified as ‘conservative’ in the American or any other sense of the word. Nero, Caligula, Vlad the Impaler, and Ivan the Terrible pale in comparison with them. Aside from being mass murderers and torturers, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were (‘are’ in the case of Castro) radicals whose vision was to stand the social and economic order on its head. These men have nothing whatsoever in common with Reagan, who was plainly devoted to preserving traditional American capitalism. Ditto Limbaugh.

What’s more, the researchers’ apparent assumption that some vast ideological gulf exists between Hitler and Mussolini on the one hand and Stalin and Castro on the other is also far from the mark.

The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ were, in fact, coined by Stalin in a bid to differentiate his brand of totalitarianism from that of his Fascist rivals. Actually, their points of difference were minor.

Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party believed the state should control all economic, political, and social activity through its ownership of the means of production. Hitler and Mussolini didn’t care who owned the means production, providing the owners did what the dictators told them.

The study was a particularly baroque example of a political hatchet job. But the Left has no monopoly on the genre. The Right is similarly inclined, though rarely is it so outrageously inventive. Nor does it have same degree of access to the media as the Left.

The sad thing about the mud-slinging of this sort is that it debases the election process, and further undermines the man in the street’s already fragile trust in the body politic. GPH✠