Category: Political Psychology
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“I Will Pray for You”
In many but not all contexts, to say "I will pray for you" to a person manifests the following passive-aggressive attitude on the part of the speaker: (a) I have strongly negative feelings toward you but I will not directly express them, either because I fear a confrontation, or fancy myself above such negative feelings,…
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The Difference between Left and Right Anti-Trump Rage
The Left's blind rage against Trump is not primarily because of the man and his personal style, but because of his threat to their agenda. If Trump had Hillary's ideas and policies, and Hillary Trump's, the Left would have overlooked Trump's personal behavior and supported him in the same way that they overlooked the bad…
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Political Hatred: A Look Back at Nixon
Has any president of the United States been the object of deeper hatred than Donald Trump? Abraham Lincoln perhaps. But in recent decades only Richard Nixon comes close. Both Nixon and Trump elicit mindless rage, and for similar reasons. The elites hate both because they have no class. That's the short answer. For nuance we…
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A Reader Weighs in on Dreher and Douthat and the Never Trump Phenomenon
Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, writes, I appreciated your critical post on Rod Dreher last week. Yesterday (Tuesday, August 6), he was at it again (“The MAGA Kahn & The Abyss’), linking Trump to cultural decline, while exalting a recent column in The New York Times by the never-Trump nincompoop Ross Douthat ("The Nihilist in Chief"),…
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Are You a Right-Wing Extremist? Take this Test!
The following is from a Salon article. The enumeration is mine; I did, however, preserve the order of the bulleted list in the Salon piece. After each item you will find brief and not-so-brief commentary by your humble correspondent. The XRW chart contains 20 examples of behavior which could indicate right-wing extremist values and suggest…
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Why are So Many Jews Democrats?
Paul Gottfried may have part of the explanation: Most Jews dislike the Republican Party because they associate it with the idea of a Christian America. And since the 1960s, as Peter Novick exhaustively shows in The Holocaust in American Life, blame for the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews has shifted in both Jewish and…
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Damon Linker on Never-Trumping Neo-Cons
Why do never-trumping neo-con nitwits such as the bootless Max Boot allow Donald Trump to live rent-free in their heads and drive them crazy? That's my formulation of the question, not Linker's, but he provides a good answer to it ( emphases added): More fully than any other faction in the American commentariat, neocon pundits…
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Norman Podhoretz on Trump and Never-Trumpers
Via Ace of Spades: Norman Podhoretz praises Trump for being a — yes — fighter, while the soft-handed crew of the S.S. Cuck all counsel surrender. One disagreement I have: NeverTrumpers are, in fact, willing to fight. They're willing to fight viciously and bitterly — so long as the opponents are conservatives. Then the knives…
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Revolutionaries Honoring Revolutionaries
To show honor and respect is a conservative practice. There is therefore something paradoxical about leftists erecting icons to iconoclasts. Or is there? Once in power, revolutionaries become conservative, conservative of their power, their unequal power.
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Robert Reich to Cloud Cuckoo Land
The more the Trumpster accomplishes, the more the victims of TDS hate him. For Robert Reich, impeachment is not enough. Nor would Trump's removal from office be enough. The formerly sane Reich, descending into a delusionality delightful to us of the Coalition of the Sane, proposes the annullment of the entire Trump administration and all…
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The Cognitive Dissonance of the Never-Trumper
Here: . . . you’ve got a guy, in the White House, rapidly working his way through every conservative’s wish list of all the good, important things that need to be done – and somehow you’ve got to ignore all that and delude yourself and your readers that Crooked Hillary would have been the vastly preferable,…
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Is President Trump Mounting an Assault on the Fourth Estate?
Obviously not. He is merely punching back at the contemptible pseudo-journalists, feculent with crypto-commie bias, who head up the lamestream media outlets. When leftists accuse us of something you can be sure that they are doing that very thing. Call it political projection. The greatest threats to free speech at the present time emanate from…
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Politics for the Leftist
Politics for leftists is an ersatz religion.* This fact helps explain both the all-consuming totalitarian intensity of their political engagement and the towering rage they feel for President Trump. They were on a roll with eight years of Obama and the assured expectation of four to eight more years of "fundamental transformation" under Hillary. But…
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Living in the Past: Is That Why You Are Still a Democrat?
To understand a person, it helps to consider what the world was like when the person was twenty years old. At twenty, give or take five years, the music of the day, the politics of the day, the language, mores, fashions, economic conditions and whatnot of the day make a very deep impression. It is…
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The Unbearable Hilarity of Hillary
Her gravitas having given way to levitas, I am half expecting her to begin levitating into Wolkenskukuheim, a word I found in Schopenhauer translatable as Cloud Cuckoo Land. In plain English, Hillary Clinton is losing her mind in a bid to establish once and for all the psychological reality of TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Her…