we have something akin to a guest column today.
3 miles
However, this does not mean everyone has not felt like not writing. Michael Thomas on the Well posted an essay -- rather better thought out than your average rant -- that I liked so much I wrote him and asked him if I could reprint it here. He asked me to hold on, as he was going to re-edit it. And this morning, he sent me the new draft.
(As always, the copyright notice is there for a reason -- please honor it. If you want to send it around, please ask mthomas@well.com for permission.)
Without further ado:
- (Dis)functional Family Values -
(Why the Republican Right Needs A Fix)
Impeachment's in progress, Clinton's remarkably high public standing is unchanged, and Republican poll standings are approaching their lowest point is years. It's no wonder that uneasy speculation abounds over the possible influence of what might be called "physiological" factors: Clinton's "addiction" to untruth, for example, or the existence of some sort of Republican "death wish", all explanations suggesting that recourse to psychology is required to explain what ordinary political verities cannot.
I'd say the impression is correct, and that to really understand the motivations underlying impeachment you have to accept that this isn't politics, it's pathology.
But that to tar Clinton alone with "addiction" misses the most important way in which such factors have influenced recent events: the fact that many of the social conservatives bent on his destruction are themselves addicts, junkies craving an addictive mix of ideology and self righteousness, blinded to the results of their actions by denial, and passing the costs of their craving along to family, friends and co-workers.
At first hearing, in an atmosphere thick with discussion of moral standards, judicial process and constitutional duty, this may seem a pretty outrageous take on the matter, an attempt to trivialize questions of great import into matters of pop psychology. But a look at the actual behavior of Clinton's tormenters, and their actual results, places such questions in a somewhat different light.
Consider the accomplishments of the Republican party over the last two decades, a period during which a coalition of social conservatives and those favorable to the interests of the largest businesses and richest individuals has emerged to pursue ambitions legislative agendas with striking success.
Income tax rates for high-income wage earners, for example, are down, as are the top rates for capital gains taxation. Control of the medical system, which once seemed destined to become governmental prerogative, increasingly flows toward a shrinking number of ever larger HMO's. The regulatory environment in which business operates has been relaxed, and a systematic and widespread effort to thwart union representation has been quite effective.
These are substantial victories for Republican politicians with economic agendas, and if to date the social conservative wing of the party has profited less by this alliance than their partners, they too are finally position to win a substantial victory: relaxation of church-state separation to allow public funding of church-run schools.
Additional legislation had been bought and paid for in the last Congress, with changes in the bankruptcy laws and further deregulation of financial institutions heading the list, while last spring's Republicans could look forward to a real likelihood of achieving a "veto-proof" majority in the Senate, offering the prospect of still more dramatic achievements to follow.
Now, such hopes lie in ruins.
Republican legislative efforts are in disarray when they are not in abeyance, and other hopes and dreams (such as a fully privatized retirement system) which were recently at least within the realm of possibility have been rendered moot by strengthened Democratic resolve and eroded Republican majorities.
Week follows week in which opinion polls indicate that each further effort to impeach Clinton only strengthens his standing while reducing that of his opponents.
And week follows week in which the authors of such efforts strenuously deny the disastrous results of their course.
This sort of behavior - the willingness to squander personal, social and financial assets accumulated over a lifetime to satisfy an immediate and obsessive craving - is a hallmark of addictive behavior, the behavioral definition of an addict.
So it's not surprising that many of the individual and social effects of addiction are present as well.
For example, at the individual level, there is denial of responsibility: refusal to acknowledge that blowback from a years- long jihad increasingly disrupts the careers of the ever-widening circle of Republicans shanghaied into process, or that such efforts threaten the subversion of Republican legislative efforts.
This denial is accompanied another common features of addiction: displacement of responsibility and projection, the addict's indignation at the stupidity or moral failings of those who cannot be brought to accept the fact that it's the addict's intellectual and moral superiority, not the addict's self-destructive behavior inappropriate behavior, which keeps digging the addict (and others) deeper into the holes they are busily excavating.
Then there are the striking parallels with dysfunctional relationships of such politicians to their "families".
For example the still rational members of the Republican party (especially in the Senate and statehouses) are in the position of friends or family attempting to deny to themselves the results of a addict's cravings - even as they attempt (less and less successfully) to hide the resulting chaos from the neighbors.
Daily they twist and turn in futile attempts to limit the carnage, negotiating deal after deal in a frantic attempt to accommodate the addict's obsessive cravings and still somehow limit the resulting damage, only to find the agreement broken the following morning by the addict's need for another fix.
Of course, sooner or later, reality usually intrudes upon an addict's associates, if not upon the addicts themselves.
In this weeks NY Times, for example, William Safire breaks the code of silence and forthrightly considers the previously unthinkable (or, at least, unsayable): that outrage is not, as Bill Bennett supposes, dead, rather that it's indeed quite alive, but directed at Clinton's *opponents* by some new sort new sort of "silent majority".
But the worst (as the more astute Republicans must, by now, be realizing) is that like any other addiction this one will likely outlive whatever psychological instabilities and outside conditions were responsible for it's start, continuing on it's destructive course irrespective of changes the addict's situation or environment unless checked by outside forces.
That if Clinton is acquitted, the same self-immolating regime of unreasoningly "rational" hate will continue to fill the airwaves, web-sites and public political rhetoric of the Republican obsessed; that they will be back the next morning with more of the same sorts of self-destructive charges and programs.
That if Clinton is convicted, it many make little difference, for the focus of obsession will simply shift elsewhere, initially to Clinton's successor, to campaign financing (another areas where denial of possible consequences is dangerous) and who knows who and what else. That this sort of pathology is now so deeply embedded in parts of the social conservative right that it will continue to seriously threaten the program of the parties major contributors.
In the end, serious Republican politicians and their sponsors will have to attempt a "rescue": sit the self-destructively addicted wing of party down in a room with everyone who's lives they have spoiled and attempt to confront them, in undeniable terms, with the ruinous consequences of their actions, then give them the choice of reforming or departing.
Not that that there appears to much hope for reform - their current denial suggests that many such Republicans still have a long way to go before they hit bottom, and party moderates may well be stumbling over them in the gutter for many years to come.
If so, the study of addiction suggests it's going to be a very, very ugly divorce.
© 1997 by Michael Dodge Thomas , mthomas@well.com
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com