Conservatives on the Couch

It was March, 1996 and I was sitting in a television studio at the South African Broadcasting Studio in the Johannesburg suburb of Auckland Park. I was there because of my testimony before Parliament defending freedom of the press. Max du Preez was the host, and the plan was for me to debate a porn-sniffer named Horace van Rensburg.

Horace was a dyed-in-the-wool prude, a Nanny-stater from the Religious Right of South African politics who liked to pretend he was a liberal of the classical bent. The debate did not go well for him; he quite literally had a mental meltdown on the set.

Karen Bliksem’s column in the Sunday Independent said her nephews wanted to know why Horace’s head was going to explode upon watching the show:

Could their Aunty Karen explain to them that the man with the exploding head just wanted to help children, to protect them, by organizing massed book burning, like the Nazis did before the second world war?

No, but she did tell them that the man they saw probably had nightmares himself. Chief of them, surely, must be about author Jim Peron, Van Rensburg’s debating opponent.

Seldom have we seen a windbag getting slapped on national television as we saw that night.

When it was over Max and I stood up with the two cameramen and left the studio. Horace remained seated waving an angry finger and shouting at the empty chair where I had been sitting. When I said he had a mental melt-down I meant it quite literally.

Horace kept repeating the same mantra over and over. If adults were allowed to own erotic publication the inevitable result would be a wave of rapes directed at “2-year-old children.” It was quite bizarre how specific Horace was about all these rapists attacking two-year-olds. As Max and I were walking through the halls of the SABC, Du Preez said of Horace, “You can’t help but get the feeling he’s terrified of a monster inside himself that just may get out.”

I agreed.

A week later the show aired, and in spite of having an unlisted phone number about a dozen callers were able to find my phone one way or another and called to discuss the show. About half of them had observations very similar to Max’s — all of them saw Van Rensburg projecting his own personal fears onto others.

I’ve often referred to the tendency of the Religious Right in particular to indulge in rampant hypocrisy; such as when they demand special privileges for Christians under the label of “equal rights” but want to deny gay couples the same right of marriage by calling it a “special right.” What’s an “equal right” for you, but a “special right” for others, isn’t a right at all, it’s a privilege.

Another way of looking at things is through the eyes of Freud. Freud said we try to protect ourselves from unpleasant things such as anxiety or guilt. One way of doing that is various defense mechanisms, which operate at the unconscious level. One of these is psychological projection, which “involves individuals attributing their own unacceptable thoughts, feelings and motives to another person.” Simply Psychology writes, “Thoughts most commonly projected onto another are the ones that would cause guilt such as aggressive and sexual fantasies or thoughts.”

An extreme defense mechanism, which is quite similar, is “reaction formation” where the individual goes to the extreme opposite behavior of how they themselves feel, or how they fear they feel. So, a closeted gay man will become a rabid anti-gay activist. Simply Psychology: “This is where a person goes beyond denial and behaves in the opposite way to which he or she thinks or feels.” The public prude may well be the private perv.

There are many elements of Freudian theory I think wrong, but defense mechanisms are a pretty valid concept and I don’t think you can understand the modern conservative movement without understanding the role of projection and reaction formation

Consider a column by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, “The Politically Correct Presidency of Donald Trump.” He notes the multiple ways iTrump and his conservative jackboots acted precisely in the manner they damned during the election. They ridiculed the idea of “safe spaces” and then, when Mike Pence was addressed after a showing of Hamilton; Trump whined, “The Theater must always be a safe and special place.” He demanded the cast apologize to Pence.

Friedersdorf concluded:

Trump displays all the flaws attributed to “Social Justice Warriors” — thin skinned, quick to take offense, a bullying presence on Twitter, aggressively disdainful of comedy that pokes fun at him, delighting in firing people — just without any attachment to social justice. On matters as grave as counterterrorism and as inconsequential as the size of crowds, Trump is more contemptuous of the truth, and as driven by what is politically correct, than any president of recent years. That shouldn’t bother those who only complained about political correctness as a cover for bigotry. But everyone who complained on principle, knowing a country cannot thrive when disconnected from reality, should demand better.

I have argued hypocrisy is the hallmark of conservatism. Modern conservatives spends half their time attacking in others the very traits they fear most in themselves. The other half of the time they engage in the very behavior they damn in others.

Take these examples:

• Conservatives damn political correctness when others do it, but the Republican Party is built on its own form of political correctness. A Republican who wasn’t PC according to conservative ideology was called a “Republican in Name Only” and driven out of the party. Today they have abandoned principles and are now only loyal to sad wannabe dictator. They will turn a blind eye to treason and insurrection in order to prove their loyalty to their Leader. All their talk of freedom in practice turns to authoritarianism.
• Conservatives organized boycotts against various companies for such crimes as showing gay couples in their advertising. When they did they said it was “freedom of association.” When others boycotted Chick-fil-A for given millions to anti-gay hate groups it was called censorship.
• Companies that fired employees for being gay were, according to conservatives, engaged in freedom of contract but those that had to fire religious fundamentalists for harassing other employees or customers were said to have engaged in religious persecution.
• Conservatives pushed for so-called “Religious Freedom” laws which state explicitly that any Christian may discriminate against a gay person in the name of their religious freedom. But, all jurisdictions currently make it illegal for a gay person to return the favor. Conservatives want discrimination laws and “religious freedom” to be one-way streets where their right to be intolerant is protected but it illegal for anyone else to treat them as badly as they treat others
• They ridicule “trigger warnings” but were at the forefront to have movie ratings assigned to every film to warn people about the content of films. They later expanded their demands to include video games as well.
• Right-wingers have repeatedly insulted others for being “snowflakes.” As they saw it, people who complained about police harassing Black Americans were “snowflakes.” Women who complained about conservatives asserting a socialist ownership of every uterus in America were labeled the same way, as were any minority who didn’t like the bigotry thrown at them. But then conservatives worshipped a president whose term was a four-year meltdown by a narcissistic crybaby who was constantly offended by anyone who refused to worship him.

The modern conservative is a psychological wonder: a bundle of conflicts and fears hidden behind a veneer of pious hypocrisy.

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