I rather doubt it.  Don Surber makes the point rather nicely in a recent post about would be terrorist James Lee entitled, “What if he were a Tea Partier…”  When it comes to the Tea Party movement, confirmation bias on the left is running full blast.  Any bit of anecdotal evidence, any act by some deranged individual who can, however remotely, be associated with the movement is frantically seized on as “proof” that all the tens of millions of Tea Partiers are racist, facist, ultra-conservative extremists, or what have you.  In a word, they are all “evil.” 

The explanation for this phenomenon would have been obvious to Ardrey and Lorenz.  They referred to it as the Amity/Enmity Complex, described in an earlier work by Sir Arthur Keith as follows:

Human nature has a dual constitution; to hate as well as to love are parts of it; and conscience may enforce hate as a duty just as it enforces the duty of love. Conscience has a two-fold role in the soldier: it is his duty to save and protect his own people and equally his duty to destroy their enemies… Thus conscience serves both codes of group behavior; it gives sanction to practices of the code of enmity as well as the code of amity.

Enmity towards “the others” is not something we humans can “unlearn,” or turn off at the flick of a switch.  If we are to control it, we must first recognize its existence, and then proceed rationally to find ways to deal with it.  If we succeed, then perhaps it won’t be necessary to constantly repeat, over and over and over again, such horrific manifestations as the slaughter of millions of Jews by the Nazis, or millions of “bourgeoisie” by the Communists.  It will not do to cobble some fine new morality, because Enmity is a part of our morality.  It is a part of our morality that must and will manifest itself, one way or the other, and it isn’t going anywhere because leftist academics choose to ignore it.  It is a part of them, as well as the rest of us, and to see it they need only look in the mirror. 

I ask again:  Have you hugged a Tea Partier lately?

The president’s determination to transform the US into a social democracy, complete with a centrally run healthcare programme and a redistributive tax system, has collided rather magnificently with America’s history as a nation of displaced people who were prepared to risk their futures on a bid to be free from the power of the state.

Americans who have risen from poverty to become qualified tradesmen or entrepreneurs generally believe that they have a right to put what wealth they produce back into their own businesses, rather than trusting governments to spread it around among those judged to be deserving.

What is more startling is the growth in America of precisely the sort of political alignment which we have known for many years in Britain: an electoral alliance of the educated, self-consciously (or self-deceivingly, depending on your point of view) “enlightened” class with the poor and deprived.

A little later I ran across the second piece, which seemed almost purposely written to confirm Daley’s take on contemporary America.  Written, appropriately enough, for CNN (you remember, the news organization Germany’s Spiegel Magazine recently described as “non-partisan“) by Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton and a quintessential member of the elite Daley was writing about, it was entitled, “Why Obama’s poll numbers have sunk.”  Zelizer’s take:

How should we understand the fate of a president and a party who have been relatively successful at passing their agenda, yet don’t seem to be enjoying an electoral bounce?

With the unemployment rate over 9 percent, many Americans are unhappy and scared. But there is more to it than that.

The first factor has to do with President Obama’s decision to focus on controversial issues that he felt were important to the nation, even if they were not the most beneficial issues for his party. In other words, Obama selected issues such as health care and financial regulation that were sure to stimulate conservative opposition and cause concern among moderates.

At the same time, the president is a pragmatic politician who has been willing to cut deals to survive a notoriously difficult legislative process. In making those compromises, he has often angered many of his supporters on the left.

…citizens are deeply cynical. Given the large donations that private interest groups make to candidates, including the health care industry and Wall Street executives, it is naturally hard to believe that Washington would ever really pass government reform.

And so on.  In other words, the factors that Englishwoman Daley has apparently had no difficulty understanding have gone completely over the Princeton professor’s head.  He can come up with all kinds of good sounding reasons for Obama’s drop in the polls, but the one reason that is energizing the Tea Party movement and is ubiquitous above all others on every conservative and libertarian blog, not to mention talk radio and Foxnews, namely, unease at the cancerous growth of the nanny state and the intrusion of state power in the lives of average citizens, has gone completely over his head.  It’s as if the citizens of the United States could not possibly fear the growth of big government itself.  In the good professor’s alternate universe, the possibility that any of them might object to the prospect of serving as dutiful milk cows,  exploited by the state to support programs that benefit other people, whether that prospect is real or not, could not possibly even occur to them.  Based on his article, the thought has never even entered his mind.  Mind you, we’re not discussing whether the real motivations of Obama’s opposition are real or imaginary, rational or the product of some strange hysteria whipped up by Rush Limbaugh.  We’re talking about the very existence of that concern.

If members of the elites Ms. Daley refers to have not merely discounted popular unease at the growth of big government as a problem in itself, but have so insulated themselves from reality that they honestly believe that unease doesn’t even bear mention as a reason for Obama’s drop in the polls, to say they are out of touch is an understatement.  A large and growing number of the citizens in this country fear their future role will be as tax slaves to an alien state power that will milk them to support programs whose chances of ever providing them with benefits in any way commensurate with the resources they will be forced to hand over are vanishingly small.   The question about whether they are right or wrong in that surmise is not the point.  The point is that elites who pride themselves on their infallibility actually seem unaware that such concerns even exist.  The “best and the brightest” among us are, once again, suffering a remarkable disconnect with reality.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

The Stalinists were masters of the art. Their arch-villain was Trotsky, who appears in Orwell’s novels, Animal Farm and 1984 as Snowball and Emanuel Goldstein, respectively. He figured largely in the Great Purge Trials of the 1930’s. For example, from the Indictment of the trial of the “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” that doomed Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and many other once powerful Bolsheviks in 1938, the arch-villain is identified:

This (the crimes attributed to the bloc) applies first of all to one of the inspirers of the conspiracy, enemy of the people TROTSKY. His connection with the Gestapo was exhaustively proved at the trials of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center in August 1936, and of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre in January 1937.

The investigation has definitely established that TROTSKY has been connected with the German intelligence service since 1921, and with the British Intelligence Service since 1926.

and then the sub-demons are associated with him:

Thus, the accused N. N. Krestinsky, on the direct instruction of enemy of the people TROTSKY, entered into treasonable connections with the German intelligence service in 1921.

The accused K. G. Rakovsky, one of L. TROTSKY’s most intimate and particularly trusted men, has been an agent of the British Intelligence Service since 1924, and of the Japanese intelligence service since 1934.

and so on, and so on. Today, the “progressive” Left, is playing the same game with their foes in the Tea Party movement. In this case, the arch-villain is the John Birch Society. They would have us believe that there are more Birchers behind every Tea Party Bush than there were Reds infesting the halls of government in Joe McCarthy’s most fevered imagination. Examples of the ploy abound. For example, from OpEdNews.com’s “Tea Party Reminiscent of John Birch Society,”

The surge of the Tea Party as a potential shaker and mover of the American political system is reminiscent of a movement from the sixties that became particularly popular in the bellwether state of California. The John Birch Society became active and many grassroots members attached themselves strongly to the national political figure they saw as an agent for change, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

From E.J. Dionne’s “Birch and Barry,”

The reaction to Obama has also radicalized parts of the conservative movement, giving life to conspiracy theories long buried and strains of thinking similar to those espoused by the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups in the 1950s and ’60s.

From the Anti-Fascist Encyclopedia’s “Ohio: Birch Society, Racism, More Tea Party Ugliness,”

CityBeat first wrote about the Springboro Tea Party last month, detailing the agenda for a rally planned Saturday that’s heavy with speakers from the John Birch Society and movies about far-right conspiracy theories.

and so on. Google the connection, and you’ll find the meme repeated like a mantra on the websites of the left. Of course, the Right does exactly the same thing, with such worthies as Marx and Lenin in the leading role as Über-villain. The goal is the same in either case. To arouse the emotions associated with human morality by attempting to connect ones political opponents with some indubitable evil, and then use those emotions as weapons against them.  Of course, many other morally loaded tactics are employed for the same purpose. It’s interesting to consider the matter from first principles.

To begin, what is morality? The answer is that it is a term used to describe innate human behavioral traits that evolved at a time when the relations between human groups bore little or no resemblance to those between the massive political parties, nation states, and other social groups of our own time. “Good” and “evil” are constructs that exist in our imaginations for the sole reason that they promoted our survival in times now long forgotten. They have no other mode of existence, and cannot possibly be “legitimate” as objects in themselves, by virtue of the subjective nature of their existence. However, the modes of political conflict described above positively require them to be legitimate and real, else the arguments predicated on the reality of one’s own good, and one’s opponents evil, evaporate into the mist. In other words, the powerful emotions evoked in this process of mutual villification are fundamentally irrational.  Seen in this light, they emerge as what they really are; manifestations of human behavioral traits that are irrelevant to the goals pursued in terms of the reasons they exist to begin with. By evoking them in modern political struggles, one is not serving a holy cause. Rather, one is manipulating the human emotions associated with morality as political weapons.

To the extent that we consider survival an attractive goal, it would be well for us to finally climb off of this treadmill of morality. In our daily interactions with other human beings, that goal is impossible. We lack the intelligence to routinely substitute rational analysis for emotional response, or for behavior according to “human nature” at that level. However, it is to be hoped that the same is not true of political decisions involving the fate of thousands or millions of people. The history of the last hundred years has provided ample justification for this hope. Time after time, the identification of whole racial, social, or religious groups as “evil” has resulted in mass slaughter. The mayhem is still with us today, and can be expected to continue into the future. It is not to be expected that we will invariably be fortunate enough to be among “the good.” We could just as easily find ourselves among “the evil,” and share the fate suffered by millions of others in recent history. The idea that what happened so recently in such advanced countries as Germany and Russia “can’t happen here” is an illusion.

Under the circumstances, we would be wise to keep the genie of good and evil in its bottle. We should at least make an effort to substitute reason for emotion. In practice, this would imply a conscious decision to limit our judgment of the opinions of others to the categories “true” and “false,” and dispense with “good” and “evil.” As weapons, “good” and “evil” can be highly effective. If we routinely use them against political opponents, we are, in a very real sense, threatening them. They may quite reasonably conclude that they have no alternative but to wield the same weapons as the only effective way of fighting back. It would be better to refrain from using the weapons to begin with. The history of the last hundred years has amply demonstrated what is sure to follow if we don’t.

For those of you who haven’t been following this story, it revolves around the “Journolist,” described by its creator, Ezra Klein, as ” An insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another.”  It was recently hacked by someone yet unknown, revealing the details of the “smart, ongoing conversation” to the rest of us.  Among other things, David Weigel, assigned to blog the conservative beat by the Washington Post, contributed such gems as,

There’s also the fact that neither the pundits, nor possibly the Republicans, will be punished for their crazy outbursts of racism. Newt Gingrich is an amoral blowhard who resigned in disgrace, and Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite who was drummed out of the movement by William F. Buckley. Both are now polluting my inbox and TV with their bellowing and minority-bashing. They’re never going to go away or be deprived of their soapboxes.

It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.

…this need to give equal/extra time to ‘real American’ views, no matter how fucking moronic, which just so happen to be the views of the conglomerates that run the media and/or buy up ads.

In a word, Weigel didn’t exactly sympathize with the people he was supposed to be “objectively” covering.  Having been caught in flagranti, he resigned, releasing a string of groveling apologies in the process, such as,

I was cocky, and I got worse. I treated the list like a dive bar, swaggering in and popping off about what was ‘really’ happening out there, and snarking at conservatives. Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean.

We are alarmed to learn that some of Weigel’s collaborators on the left are “outraged” by what has happened.  Striking the familiar pious poses, they are rediscovering their inner H. L. Mencken, wondering how anyone can be so lacking in common decency as to leak private e-mail conversations.  Like the Paris fashions, they shrug off ridicule.  For example, from Mark Shapiro,

I do not know Weigel (and actually do not remember most of his postings on JournoList), but I am outraged over what happened to him. It is one thing to castigate a reporter for the accuracy of his journalism or to deride a blogger for the rigor of his arguments. But it is morally repugnant to heist someone’s e-mail comments — and to leak them in a way designed to embarrass him with the people whom he is covering. The obvious and odious parallel would be to secretly place a tape recorder on a table at a dinner party and then to turn the most inflammatory sound bites into a podcast.

It’s enough to bring you to tears, isn’t it?  And, yes, in case you’re wondering, Shapiro’s remarks did include the de rigueur suggestion that the remarks were ”taken out of context.”  I am not aware of Shapiro’s reaction to the hacking of Sarah Palin’s e-mail, or to the citizens who have recently assumed the right to reveal National Security Information as they see fit by virtue of their superior moral authority, but I rather suspect it was somewhat lacking in the bathos he managed to work up on behalf of Weigel.

Well, none of this can be too surprising to media connoisseurs.  We could have had more fun with the story ten years ago, when a handfull of journalists still had the chutzpah to claim that they were purely objective with a straight face, but I fear the breed has died out in the interim.  Meanwhile, in his post announcing the demise of Journolist, Ezra Klein predicts,

I’m proud of having started it, grateful to have participated in it, and I have no doubt that someone else will re-form it, with many of the same members, and keep it going.

And, sure enough, Son of Journolist has already made its appearance.  What can you say?  Chalk it up as one more data point, and leave it at that.

True, the title larded it on a little thickly. In the paper version it was “Experts say Washington is too quick to dismiss a value-added tax.” I see the Internet has toned it down a notch to the somewhat more subtle, “VAT’s benefits outweighed by politics, experts say.” In journalistic parlance, an “expert” is someone with a modicum of academic gravitas who will reliably spout a given propaganda line if the narrative of the day requires it. Any news organization worth its salt keeps a stable of them on hand suitable for any occasion. Germany’s Spiegel magazine has one of the world’s greatest menageries, including my personal favorite, “peace researchers,” (Friedensforscher), whose ostensible purpose is to promote hatred of the United States. In the case at hand, the choice of “experts” would seem to indicate that the WaPo’s editors, and therefore the Administration, have concluded that the American people need another regressive tax to go along with legalized gambling. No surprise there. Soaking the rich never works. They’re too good at fighting back.

Scanning through the first few paragraphs, we learn that the President’s press secretary, always good for a laugh, has told reporters, “This is not something the President has proposed, nor is it under consideration.” The Republicans, we are informed, don’t want to raise taxes either, even though they “howled about cuts to Medicare in the recent healthcare overhaul.” (Only Republicans “howl.” Democrats “object.”) Sure enough, the right’s movers and shakers on talk radio defended Medicare as if it were some kind of sacred cow, in the midst of their ringing denunciations of nationalized health care. Of course, we also have the Republicans to thank for the massive new prescription drug entitlement, a fact the article doesn’t even bother to mention.

Cutting to the chase, we arrive at the “zinger” paragraph at the end, where the editors always provide a pithy synopsis of the narrative for those too dense to figure it out from the rest of the text.  In this case it is provided by “expert” Bruce Bartlett, a historian, all the more legit because, as we are informed, he was a domestic policy adviser in the Reagan administration:

“I think we have to remember that low taxes or tax rates are not an end in themselves; they are the means to an end, which is higher growth and greater prosperity,” Bartlett wrote on the blog Capital Gains and Games. “In this sense, I think right wingers pay far too much attention to the negative economic consequences of taxation while essentially ignoring the negative economic consequences of exremely large deficits.”

Assuming the Democrats and Republicans are really the only players that matter, I can’t fault the WaPo’s logic here.  After all, when Republicans accuse Democrats of deficit spending, it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black.  Of course, the article studiously avoided even the slightest mention of another, seemingly significant, player, if the latest Rasmussen poll is any guide; the Tea Party Movement.  This seems a little odd, considering that the explosive growth of government and the accompanying deficits are the main reasons the movement exists to begin with.  Do the editors consider the Tea Partiers insignificant?  Why, then, have they been shaking with fear for the last month about the way the movement is “fomenting violence?”

Be that as it may, it would seem that (surprise, surprise) the Administration has changed its tune, and that with alacrity.  In fact on the very day the article appeared, the AP ran a story with the headline, “Obama suggests value-added tax may be an option.”  Robert Gibbs must have been stunned!

Well, this is a democracy, and the American people did vote for these people.   Government bennies don’t grow on trees.  Eventually, they must be paid for.  As for those who actually believed Obama when he said he wouldn’t raise taxes on 95% of us, the only advice I can give them is, “open your mouth and close your eyes…”

In other words, never accuse anyone of fomenting violence unless you’re sure they’re nonviolent.

Liberty Leading the People

The ideologues have been overwhelmed by a deluge of facts from the emerging fields of neuroscience and brain imaging. They have been forced to accept the vindication of Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, E.O. Wilson, and all the other old ethologists and sociobiologists, although they seldom have the grace to mention their names. A sea change has occurred in acceptance of the influence of innate predispositions on human behavior in the last two decades, but the old “nurture is everything” behaviorists still cling stubbornly to a few intellectual redoubts. Among these is the notion that morality, while it may be hard wired in the brain, is actually evolving towards the “real good,” which commonly includes such things as universal human brotherhood and abhorrence of anything which might injure the “rights” of any life form, whether bird, beast or “other.” Unfortunately, it ain’t so.

Human brains are wired for a dual system of morality, one that applies to those perceived as the “in-group” and a sharply different one for those in the “out-group.” All sorts of negative characteristics are reserved for the latter. They are unclean, harmful, unjust, “immoral,” and generally evil. Eventually, some bright young neuroscientist will ignore the tabus of her elders and start systematically searching for the traces of the Complex among her fMRI and CEEG scans, and she will find them, because they are there. The Amity/Enmity Complex has always been as obvious as the noses at the end of our faces, just as the influence of innate predispositions on human behavior has been obvious to anyone with reasonable intelligence and an open mind since the days of Darwin. Human history is one, long testimony to its existence. The emergence of the Tea Party movement has provided us with some particularly striking examples of the Complex in action.

Consider, for example, the reaction on the left of the political divide among the “progressives” and liberals, those great champions of the will of the “people.” We’ve just seen exactly what limitations apply to their definition of the “people.” Anyone who disagrees with them is not included.

The Tea Party phenomenon is the only instance of the emergence of genuine mass popular movement most of them have ever witnessed. According to the latest Rasmussen survey, 24% of American voters now say they are part of the movement. Unfortunately, their views do not coincide with those of their leftist opponents. The response of the “progressives” has been to excise this particular bloc of the people with a meat cleaver.

The psychological gymnastics used to accomplish the job are classic examples of out-group identification. See, for example, the “astroturfing” meme at Daily Kos, some of the many attempts to associate the movement with violent extremists here, here, here and here, the Tea Partiers as “frauds” at Huffpo, and a particularly amusing example of the many attempts to associate the movement with racism by erstwhile warmonger Jonathan Chaitt, which includes the rather striking non sequitur,

The Tea Party is not racist. But it is an almost entirely white movement, largely driven by a sense that the government is taking money away from people like them and giving it to people unlike them, with ‘them’ understood in a racial context.

Heap the numerous attempts by these professionally pious and virtuous lovers of the “people” to discredit the movement with deceptions and smears on top of the rest, and you have a textbook case of the Enmity half of the Amity/Enmity Complex.

Far be it from me to claim that the leftists’ ideological clones on the right are any different. I merely use the Tea Party movement as a particularly striking, and therefore educational, example of an aspect of human moral behavior that the recent spate of books on the subject continue to leave out. One must hope that continuing advances in neuroscience will force them to pull their heads from the sand in the not too distant future. True, the Amity/Enmity Complex is an embarrassing aspect of our behavior, but it is also a particularly dangerous one to ignore.

It goes like this: for the media, anger is only okay if its targets meet their stereotypical, romanticized criteria. Meaning: the corporation, the conservative, the daddy who never loved them.

Here’s a list of people doing angry things the media is okay with:

-People calling Bush a Nazi
-Students and non students rioting on college campuses
-Animal rights freaks dousing rich folks with paint
-Actors wishing average folks would get rectal cancer
-Bureaucrats labeling military vets as potential violent right wing extremists
-Radical environmentalists advocating violence against loggers
-Pranksters throwing pies at conservative commentators (you know, somehow they never pie Michael Moore, which makes him sad; he likes pie)

But this health care bill anger is different from all that – not just because it’s right, but because it involves Obama. And being angry at Obama is like being mad at Santa Claus. How can you be mad at Santa, when he brings us so many gifts?

And so, this anger is scary! It’s a mark of incivility! It’s deadly!

In case you’re an NPR reporter and therefore have no clue what Greg is talking about, I suggest you follow some of Instapundit’s links to accounts of threats and violence directed against people you don’t happen to agree with.  You can find examples here, here, here and here.  Now check your archives and find out how obsessive you were about reporting on those stories.  Any questions?  If you want to see what real political intimidation looks like, take a gander at what your pals in Canada have been up to.

Of course, when it comes to the health care bill, the ranting on the right has been at least as loud as that on the left.  Sean Hannity has been making Nathan Hale speeches for months about how the “Louisiana Purchase,” the “Cornhusker Kickback,” and all the related traditional wheeling and dealing in Congress make the health care bill the “most corrupt” ever.  I can only suggest that Sean get a grip and Google Teapot Dome and Credit Mobilier, or perhaps read a little about the history of the big railroads and their penchant for political manipulation in their heyday. 

Indeed, when it comes to pious posing from the moral high ground, the right seems to have achieved parity with the left.  We’ve become a mutual demonization society.  In some sense that’s a good thing, because it demonstrates that in the US, unlike, for example, in Europe, the right has regained a public voice in the form of talk radio, influential bloggers, and Foxnews.  The days when the left had such a monopoly over the public media that they could simply destroy people who criticized them the way they did Richard Nixon are long gone.  Now the right can answer tit for tat, and they are in no mood to be intimidated with the “violent demonstrators” gambit.  Who knows, perhaps cooler heads on both sides will eventually become bored with mutual villification and we will see a gradual easing of the current polarization between left and right.  I’m not holding my breath, though.

Meanwhile, we must grin and bear the burden of another massive government entitlement program.  Obama assures us that it will “cut the deficit.”  If it does, it will certainly be a historical first.  I’m not holding my breath for that, either.  On the other hand, it’s unlikely to cause the collapse of the economy the right seems so worried about any time soon.  Other countries have dealt with and continue to deal with much heavier public debts than ours, although we certainly appear to be catching up with them.  A more likely outcome than the “train wreck” expected on the right is economic malaise similar to that in Japan accompanied by gradually increasing taxation in one form or another and an increasingly discouraging outlook for anyone contemplating any kind of private economic venture.  I can’t rule out one of Nassim Taleb’s “black swans,” but I suspect that the American people will simply accept the continuing metastasization of big government and adapt to the resultant loss of liberty as best they can, just as they have accepted the gradual and continued morphing of our so-called ”system of justice” into an abomination in which the only “winners” of legal battles in the courts can be the lawyers.  The train wreck may be coming, but it’s still a long way off.