The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies

The Psychopathology of
Political Ideologies
Inspired by Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, this book

examines the unconscious processes shaping contemporary political
ideologies.
Addressing ten fundamental questions, Robert Samuels identifies four
basic political ideologies: liberal, conservative, Left, and Right, which are
often placed in the structure of a logical square, determined by two binary
oppositions, with a fifth structure of centrism complicating the square. He
turns to psychoanalysis to explain the unconscious defense mechanisms
that structure these political ideologies. Each chapter uses a recent, influ
ential title as a gateway to the analysis of the ideologies and structures
identified. Through this analysis, Samuels argues that belief in ideological
structures is tied to the triumvirates of institutions and ideals; conserva
tives are tied to premodern institutions of religion, feudalism, and mon
archy, while modern liberals are tied to ideals of universality, objectivity,
and empiricism. He concludes that this investment in universality shapes
the ethics of modern globalization and democratic liberalism. Unlike other
books, conclusions are reinforced through examples drawn from current
events with an integrated model of different psychopathologies.
The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies moves beyond providing
an understanding of what drives different political investments, to offer
a more rational and conscious comprehension of subjectivity and social
organization. This book will be a great resource for those interested in
politics, political science psychology, social psychology, globalization,
and ideology.
Robert Samuels is a lecturer of writing at the University of California,

Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous books, including Teaching
Writing, Rhetoric, and Reason at the Globalizing University (2021).
Psychoanalytic Political Theory
Edited by Matthew H. Bowker, Medaille College and David W. McIvor,
Colorado State University
Psychoanalytic Political Theory provides a publishing space for the high

est quality scholarship at the intersection of psychoanalysis and normative
political theory. It offers a forum for texts that deepen our understanding
of the complex relationships between the world of politics and the world
of the psyche.
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The Psychopathology of
Robert Samuels
First published 2022
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© 2022 Robert Samuels
The right of Robert Samuels to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-05883-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-05882-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-19964-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003199649
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
To the memory of Jacqueline Samuels
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Jonathan Haidt and the Five Political Ideologies 8
3 On the Psychopathology of Polarization 31
4 Understanding the Psychopathology of the Right 51
5 The Hysterical Left and the Narcissistic Center 73
6 The Anti-Ideology Ideology: Re-Discovering the

Enlightenment 88
7 Conclusion 109
Index 113
1 Introduction
Inspired by Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, this book

examines the unconscious processes shaping contemporary political ide
ologies.1 The goal here is not only to understand what drives different
political investments and structures but to also provide a more rational
and conscious comprehension of subjectivity and social organization. By
making unconscious formation conscious, this model of political analysis
reveals the roots of conservative, liberal, Left-wing, Right-wing, and cen
trist ideologies. Thus, instead of seeing our political choices as defined by
a strict polarization, I seek to differentiate among five specific political
psychopathologies.
To help define the ideologies dominant in the United States and other
parts of the world, I offer in Chapter Two a critical analysis of Jonathan
Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.2 I turn to this book because it also presents
five specific political belief systems, but his reliance on evolutionary
psychology prevents him from taking a psychoanalytic perspective on
political psychopathologies. Moreover, through its commitment to bio
logical determinism, his work unintentionally feeds a Right-wing back
lash discourse.3
Chapter Three examines Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized to deter
mine how our political culture and our everyday lifestyle choices appear
to be so divided and opposed.4 One of my central arguments is that Klein’s
text is itself an example of polarized thinking as it tries to translate the
five basic political ideologies into the simple opposition of Republican
versus Democrat. This polarizing perspective is in part due to his reliance
on social science research that often unknowingly frames its experiments
and findings through an oppositional structure; instead of being aware of
its own biases and preconceptions, this research on polarization re-enacts
what it is trying to discover.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003199649-1
2 Introduction
In Chapter Four, I look at Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind:
Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin to analyze why the con
temporary Right is often so misunderstood.5 By offering Freud’s theory
of perversion as a model for libertarian thinking, I clarify the distinction
between conservatives and the Right. What is so interesting about Robin’s
book is that in his effort to trace the intellectual roots of contemporary
Republican politics, he ends up further mystifying the content of this polit
ical ideology.
Chapter Five moves from a look at the Right to an examination of the
contemporary Left. In reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, I show
that her insightful critique of progressive racism and liberal defensiveness
is coupled with the use of a Left-wing rhetoric centered on making others
feel guilt and shame for their words and thoughts.6 Through the use of the
unconscious processes of denial, splitting, and projection, DiAngelo helps
us understand some of the problematic aspects of contemporary Leftist
thought and politics.
Chapter Six turns to Anthony Pagden’s The Enlightenment: and Why It
Still Matters to examine the relation between psychoanalysis and modern lib
eral ideology.7 In looking at the roots of science, democracy, and capitalism,
I argue that we need to defend the anti-ideology ideology of modernity. This
discourse of critical introspection is then tied to Freud’s invention of analytic
neutrality and free association.8
Theoretical Introduction: Understanding

I argue in this book that throughout the world, we often find four basic
political ideologies: liberal, conservative, Left, and Right.9 These ideolo
gies can be placed in the structure of a logical square determined by two
binary oppositions:
On the most basic level, we see here how the Right is defined in opposi
tion to the Left, and liberalism is defined in opposition to conservativ
ism. However, this structure is complicated by the way that contemporary
Introduction 3
liberals are much different from modern liberals, and so it is necessary to
add a fifth ideology, centrism to the structure:
As I will demonstrate, we should not think of centrists as a neutral

middle-ground because they have their own psychopathology that distorts
their view of themselves and the world.10
Starting with conservative ideology, this belief system still structures
many of the cultural oppositions that shape our social systems. On the
most basic level, this discourse is tied to the premodern focus on a prede
termined social hierarchy internalized through a process of unconscious
identification and masochistic submission producing the three central
premodern institutions of religion, feudalism, and monarchy.11 In con
trast, what in part defines modern liberalism is the invention of three
alternative institutions: science, capitalism, and democracy:
While premodern subjectivity is dominated by faith, belief, and the

acceptance of a naturalized social hierarchy, the modern subject is sup
posed to use reason in a neutral way to determine the truth about empiri
cal reality. Moreover, modernity itself is determined by the necessary but
impossible ideals of universality, objectivity, and empiricism.12 According
to this structure, the modern liberal subject must use the reality principle
to move beyond the biases derived from the premodern order. I argue that
this investment in universality shapes the ethics of globalization and mod
ern democratic liberalism.13
4 Introduction
In response to premodern conservatives and modern liberals, we find
Left-wing ideology that is centered on a hysterical identification with suf
fering and the use of a victim-based fantasy structure to influence others
on an emotional level.14 Part of this ideology is determined by a desire
to reverse the social hierarchies shaping premodern culture. For instance,
instead of men dominating women, women seek to gain more social
power. The postmodern period is then shaped by minority-based social
movements seeking to expand the modern system of democratic justice,
but as we will see, these movements often become fixated on a particular
group identity. Since in order to promote in-group solidarity, it is neces
sary to draw a clear distinction between the good “us” and the evil “other,”
this type of political polarization tends to create an ideology centered on
the conflict between the pure and innocent victim and the evil perpetrator.
Moreover, in this structure, the victim’s vengeance is always justified, and
the victim cannot be criticized or questioned, and so this group psycho
pathology makes it difficult to resolve conflicts and embrace the modern
ideals of neutrality, objectivity, and universality.15
In response to Left-wing politics, we are witnessing the rise of Right-
wing ideology. A key aspect of this psychopathology is a stress on the
freedom of the competitive individual who resists being shamed and
censored by the politically correct Leftist super-ego.16 Through a combi
nation of perversion, sociopathy, and borderline personality structures,
the Right-wing libertarian expresses impulses without shame or guilt
using the unconscious processes of denial, splitting, and projection.17
Furthermore, the Right often takes on its own victim identification by
reversing the postmodern reversal of premodern social hierarchies. In a
dialectical structure, the Left seeks to overcome conservative prejudices,
and the Right then strives to overcome the Left’s social movements and
censorship.
In response to the Left and the Right, we find the centrist compromise,
which itself is structured by a narcissistic and obsessional psychopathol
ogy.18 Since the narcissist wants to have its ideal ego validated by others, it
often signals its moral virtues by accepting the moralism of the Left, and yet
these obsessional centrists want to maintain the status quo, and so they seek
out slow reforms instead of the revolutions demanded by the Left. These
centrists also tend to see the political world in a polarized way as they gain a
sense of moral superiority by laughing at the “insanity” of the Right.
I realize that some people will be turned off by this effort to patholo
gize political ideologies and different groups of people; however, I
believe that it is necessary to look at politics from a psychoanalytic
Introduction 5
perspective because much of the social and subjective processes are
irrational, unconscious, and unintentional.19 Moreover, I argue that
psychoanalysis is a modern liberal discourse because it seeks to apply
the scientific method to everyday life as it develops a practice centered
on neutrality and uncensored speech. Unfortunately, not only has mod
ern democracy itself come under attack by the Left and the Right but
the analytic idea of neutrality has also been rejected by people inside
and outside of psychoanalysis.20
One reason why the modern concept of neutrality has been criticized is
that people do not accept the possibility of being unbiased and objective.
Instead of seeing neutrality as a necessary but impossible ideal, many only
point to its failures.21 For example, while we want our modern legal sys
tems to treat everyone in an equal way and judge evidence from an impartial
perspective, it is clear that the system is often biased and discriminatory.
In response to the evidence of this lack of neutrality, many people on the
Left reject the very ideals of objectivity and impartiality, and so they end up
making universal human rights impossible.22 I counter that the only way we
know a system is unjust is if we compare it to the ideals of justice, and so
even the people who appear to reject modern universality are still invested
in this standard. Likewise, the people who reject the value of reason and
objectivity still want their arguments to be understood through reason and
without bias.
As the global fight against climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic
has shown, there is no way to deal with our most pressing problems if
we deny modern science and refuse to think in global universal terms.23
As difficult as the task may be, we have to fight against all of the ideolo
gies that are preventing us from basing our public policies on reason and
empirical evidence. In other words, the cultural rebellion against reason,
science, and democracy has profound implications for our daily lives.24
It is also necessary to see that global capitalism is not the central problem
in our world because inequality, prejudice, and exploitation are even more
prevalent in the premodern culture. For many people on the Left, capitalism
is the evil Other that is responsible for all problems, but as Marx indicated,
capitalism is a driving force that overcomes all fixed premodern traditions
and beliefs.25 We thus need to find a way to regulate and control modern
capitalism, but we also have to see how this system has helped to bring bil
lions of people out of poverty for the first time in human history. Instead of
the Left-wing rejection of global capitalism and the Right-wing idealization
of the free market, we need to push for a form of capitalism that combines
individual freedom with social responsibility on a global level.
6 Introduction
Notes
1 Freud, Sigmund. Psychopathology of everyday life. Penguin Books, 1938.
2 Haidt, Jonathan. The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics
and religion. Vintage, 2012.
3 Samuels, Robert. Psychoanalyzing the politics of the new brain sciences.
Springer, 2017.
4 Klein, Ezra. Why we’re polarized. Simon and Schuster, 2020.
5 Robin, Corey. The reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to
Sarah Palin. Oxford University Press, 2011.
6 DiAngelo, Robin. White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk
about racism. Beacon Press, 2018.
7 Pagden, Anthony. The enlightenment: and why it still matters. Oxford
University Press, 2013.
8 Samuels, Robert. “Science and the reality principle.” Freud for the Twenty-
First Century. Palgrave Pivot, 2019, 5–16.
9 Karatani, Kojin. The structure of world history: From modes of production to
modes of exchange. Duke University Press, 2014.
10 Samuels, Robert. “(Liberal) Narcissism.” Routledge Handbook of
Psychoanalytic Political Theory. Routledge, 2019, 151–161.
11 Rifkin, Jeremy. The age of access: The new culture of hypercapitalism.
Penguin, 2001.
12 Arnason, Johann P. “Nationalism, globalization and modernity.” Theory,
Culture & Society 7.2–3 (1990): 207–236.
13 Samuels, Robert. “Logos, global justice, and the reality principle.” Zizek and
the Rhetorical Unconscious. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 65–86.
14 Cole, Alyson Manda. The cult of true victimhood: From the war on welfare to
the war on terror. Stanford University Press, 2007.
15 Campbell, Bradley, and Jason Manning. The rise of victimhood culture:
Microaggressions, safe spaces, and the new culture wars. Springer, 2018.
16 Samuels, Robert. “Catharsis: The politics of enjoyment.” Zizek and the
Rhetorical Unconscious. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 7–31.
17 Kernberg, Otto. “Borderline personality organization.” Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association 15.3 (1967): 641–685.
18 Miller, Joshua D., Thomas A. Widiger, and W. Keith Campbell. “Narcissistic
personality disorder and the DSM-V.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 119.4
(2010): 640.
19 Jimenez, Guillermo C. Red genes, blue genes: Exposing political irrationality.
Autonomedia, 2009.
20 Thompson, M. Guy. “Freud’s conception of neutrality.” Contemporary
Psychoanalysis 32.1 (1996): 25–42.
21 Renik, Owen. “The perils of neutrality.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 65.3
(1996): 495–517.
22 Boyle, James. “The politics of reason: Critical legal theory and local social
thought.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review133.4 (1985): 685–780.
Introduction 7
23 Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment now: The case for reason, science, humanism,
and progress. Penguin, 2018.
24 Rensmann, Lars. The politics of unreason: The Frankfurt School and the ori-
gins of modern antisemitism. Suny Press, 2017.
25 Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The communist manifesto. Penguin, 2002.
2 Jonathan Haidt and the
Five Political Ideologies
In analyzing Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People

Are Divided by Politics and Religion, I provide a framework for under
standing five dominant forms of political ideology circulating in the
world today.1 Although Haidt does articulate a way of distinguishing
among a diverse set of belief systems, his lack of psychoanalytic under
standing blocks him from fully comprehending the structure and cause
of the ideologies he discusses. Moreover, by not including unconscious
processes in his descriptions, he ends up relying on questionable assump
tions derived mostly from evolutionary psychology.2 As we shall see, a
problem with this approach is that it tends to naturalize social hierarchies
and remove subjectivity from political beliefs. It will therefore be my
argument that by replacing the new brain sciences with psychoanalysis as
an explanatory theory, we can better understand how political ideologies
function in the world today.3
The Moral Instinct

Haidt begins his book by directly tying his theory of political ideology to
an evolutionary understanding of human nature:
I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading

inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is
a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into
minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.
(xx)
From Haidt’s perspective, political ideology is grounded in natural selec

tion, and so biological determinism represents the key driving force behind
political affiliation and our desire to be righteous.4 Two things should strike
us about this interpretative frame: the first is that it derives contemporary
DOI: 10.4324/9781003199649-2
Jonathan Haidt and the Five Political Ideologies 9
beliefs and subjectivity from inherited mental programs, and the second
is that politics is determined to be guided by the desire to be righteous. Of
course, what it means to be righteous is open to debate, but for now, we
can consider it to indicate the goal of people to be seen by themselves and
others as being morally correct.
For Haidt, the desire to equate politics with morality relies in part on
the notion that we are shaped by unconscious mental programs derived
from evolution, and these intuitive reactions to the world are combined
with after-the-fact moral rationalizations: “Intuitions come first, strategic
reasoning second” (367). In this theory of the evolutionary unconscious,
which is so popular in contemporary neuroscience, behavioral economics,
and evolutionary psychology, the guiding principle is that we are not aware
of why we think or do things because most of our mental processes are
automatic programs derived from a universal, biological human nature.5
Instead of affirming Freud’s principle that the unconscious is developed
through repression and other defense mechanisms, the guiding principle
in the new brain sciences is that before we can deceive ourselves about our
own thoughts, we are already defined by inherited responses that we have
no control of and of which we are not aware.6 This evolutionary theory of
the unconscious, which itself represses psychoanalysis, is then coupled
with the deceptive nature of our own self-consciousness: since we do not
know why we do things, we have to come up with explanations after the
fact to rationalize unknown evolutionary programs.7
One of the problems with Haidt’s approach is that it relies on bio
logical determinism, and this theory itself can be considered to be a
psychopathological ideology. By eliminating the need to consider cul
tural and subjective factors, his universal model of human nature feeds
into the libertarian backlash against social regulation and the psycho
analytic unconscious.8 As I argue in Psychoanalyzing Politics of the
New Brain Sciences, evolutionary psychology is often shaped by an
underlying set of political beliefs, which happen to re-enforce many
aspects of contemporary Right-wing politics. For instance, in saying
that our human nature is universal and biological, the need for gov
ernment regulation or public education is greatly reduced. After all,
if we are programmed by our genes to act certain ways, then it makes
no sense to think about the roles played by culture, politics, history,
or language. Just as Margaret Thatcher said that there is no society,
evolutionary psychology tends to be inherently anti-social and serves
to justify a Right-wing, libertarian backlash against government regu
lation, taxes, and welfare programs.9
10 Jonathan Haidt and the Five Political Ideologies
While libertarians may argue that the only thing they want is liberty,
their desire to be free from social control can be seen as an unconscious
political project centered on the acknowledgment and then rejection of
social regulation and sacrifice. As a backlash, reactionary movement,
Right-wing ideology is obsessed with what it is trying to reject.10 For
example, the current promotion of free speech is centered on seeing the
Left as trying to censor the thoughts and words of people through the
imposition of political correctness.11 In this structure, the Right projects
the super-ego onto the Left, and then in order to protect the freedom of
its impulses (the id), it attacks the externalized super-ego and sees this
defiance as a form of freedom. Of course, this dialectic is mostly uncon
scious because it relies on the processes of denial, splitting, projection,
and projective identification.12 These defenses are not conscious, and
they do not require intentional control; rather political ideologies are
psychopathological because they are founded on a lack of self-aware
ness. Moreover, there is no need to turn to evolutionary psychology or
biology in order to understand these belief systems because they are
defined by the combination of subjective defensive mechanisms and
shared cultural content.
Anti-Science Science
To understand Haidt’s approach, it is thus important to realize that he
sees politics through his own unacknowledged Right-wing libertarian
perspective. In fact, we will discover that underlying his entire project is
a desire to use modern science to return to premodern conservative reli
gion while also rejecting the value of postmodern social movements for
minority rights.13 Importantly, a driving force behind this unannounced
desire to reconcile religion and science is that he seeks to reduce the
tension caused by the conflict between conservative and liberal ideolo
gies. As a way of realizing the pleasure principle’s goal of avoiding all
tension and conflict, he is able to rid the world of the anxiety caused by
the postmodern confrontation between the modern fight for equal justice
and the premodern reliance on a social hierarchy based on patriarchy,
prejudice, and aristocracy. This underlying desire is partially exposed in
the following passage: “When I was a teenager I wished for world peace,
but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in
balance” (xx). As a symptom of the return of his repressed awareness,
Haidt indicates that his desire for peace and balance drives his politics
and his understanding of political ideology. By seeking to find a happy
medium between liberal and conservative worldviews, he represents his
position as being centrist, but this claim to be fair and balanced hides his
investment in an underlying Right-wing ideology. Although some would
argue that what is missing in our political world today is moderates who
can balance the extremes of the Left and the Right, psychoanalysis tells
us that compromise formations often represent a hidden maintenance of
what one is trying to avoid.14 Furthermore, if one combines two wrong
perspectives, and then finds their happy medium, that does not mean
that one has discovered the truth. In fact, when people declare that they
are not ideological, and they just want to take on a fact-based perspec
tive, they are often simply hiding their own ideological biases, and in
Haidt’s case, his bias is centered on the retention of premodern religious
beliefs and a lack of sensitivity towards people who have suffered politi
cal oppression. He also follows many libertarians in attacking liberals
and academic thinkers even though he himself is an academic who at
times identifies with being a true liberal.15
What is so intriguing about Haidt’s work is that he unintentionally
exposes different aspects of his own ideological psychopathology. For
instance, in his description of moral reasoning, we gain an understanding
of how opportunists like Donald Trump and other authoritarian leaders
are able to manipulate others for their own gain without concern for
the effect they have on others: “Keep your eye on the intuitions, and
don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post
hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more
strategic objectives” (xxi). Since Haidt believes that we are driven by
unconscious mental programs derived from natural selection, our moral
reasoning can only be a social skill used to achieve our political agendas.
From this perspective, morality has nothing to do with the truth since we
cannot know the truth, but what we can know is our own way of rational
izing our actions after the fact. According to this logic, the reason then
why we should not get upset at other people who disagree with us is that
they do not really believe in the truth of their own beliefs either. Society
is reduced here to the battle between isolated individuals each seeking to
out-manipulate the other. Furthermore, since we should recognize that
moral arguments are only “post hoc constructions,” then we should not
concern ourselves with the morality of anyone’s acts or words.16 In other
words, Haidt’s focus on moral righteousness turns out to be a false per
spective since, according to his theory, moral virtue cannot be known
and because it is part of a universal human nature programmed through
evolution. Instead, from Haidt’s perspective, political ideologies must be
fictional rationalizations generated in order to justify unknown biologi
cal processes.
If we want to understand a Right-wing libertarian like Donald Trump,
then, it is helpful to see what Haidt is revealing about his own pseudo
scientific theory. In a form of borderline personality splitting, sociopaths
like Trump are pure opportunists who are not concerned with truth; rather,
they seek to manipulate others by performing moral reasoning as a social
skill.17 One reason why, then, someone like Trump appears to show so lit
tle empathy is that his relationship with other people is primarily based
on manipulation and not care or concern.18 As a pragmatic opportunist, he
only does things to further his own agenda, but we still should ask how this
psychopathology relates to evolutionary psychology? An answer to this
question is that if you believe that people are controlled by unknowable
biological factors, then you are in the same position as someone who does
not care about how their actions affect others. My argument is not that
Trump and other libertarians believe we are guided by our genes; rather,
my point is that you end up with the same ideology if you are an evolution
ary psychologist or a sociopathic opportunist; in both cases, there is no
need to think about your own motivations or to care about the feelings of
other people since these inner states are unknowable, and the only thing
we do know is how we can use our moral reasoning to manipulate other
people through the usage of post hoc fabrications.
I have been using the terms sociopath and borderline personality to point
to the same set of unconscious processes: denial, splitting, and projection.19
For Freud, these structures were often seen as perversions since they are
centered on the splitting of the mind between the super-ego (conscience)
and the id (impulses).20 While neurotics use the defense mechanism of
repression to lie to themselves in order to hide their immoral intentions and
guilty acts, perverts appear to be able to act on their impulses with little
concern for shame or guilt. However, Freud found that many of these sub
jects actually split their personalities between a moral self and an immoral
self, and instead of the immoral self being unconscious, the two halves
of the self are compartmentalized so that the person shifts between two
entirely opposed perspectives.21 This splitting creates a structure where
the self and the other are either idealized or debased, and this polarization
is necessary to avoid feelings of ambiguity, ambivalence, and complex
ity.22 For Freud, in an effort to escape symbolic and real incest, the person
in love has to separate affection from desire, and so the ones we love, we
idealize, but the ones we desire, we debase.23 As an example of what he
called the Madonna–Whore complex, men within this structure tend to
see women as either pure or corrupted, and they can only have sex with
the corrupted ones because the idealized pure women remind them uncon
sciously of their mothers. If we generalize from this theory and remove it
from the classic Oedipal structure, we see that Freud was positing that the
way certain people escape feelings of guilt and shame is by manipulating
others whom they devalue. Thus, while Trump may love his daughter, he
has virtually no problem exploiting anyone else.
In Haidt’s case, this borderline splitting is represented through the fol
lowing theoretical model: “The central metaphor of these four chapters is
that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is
to serve the elephant” (xxi). For Haidt, the human mind is split between
the conscious rational ego and the unconscious instincts derived from biol
ogy. Although it appears that Haidt is describing the Freudian distinc
tion between the unconscious and consciousness, his focus on seeing our
evolved mental programs as unconscious results in a polarized splitting.
Since the borderline personality is not centered on lying to oneself in the
process of repression, what one is dealing with instead is the idea that one
lies to others because one does not know oneself or care about other peo
ple. Due to the fact that the libertarian has externalized the super-ego, all
that is left is amoral opportunism.
Following the Leader

Amoral opportunists, therefore, only care about the power they have over
other people, but they need this power to be recognized freely by others.24
Part of this pathology requires a lack of self-reflection and the realiza
tion that when one is powerful, one can do whatever one wants. Thus,
when Trump declared that the rich and powerful can grab women wher
ever they desire, he was revealing the essence of perverse sociopaths: they
justify their behavior through post hoc moral reasoning, but their actions
are guided by the pursuit of their own pleasure, which entails suspending
feelings of guilt, shame, and empathy.25 One way to accomplish this exter
nalization of the super-ego is to follow the evolutionary psychologist who
believes that our morality is hard-wired into our unknowable brains. It is
thus not our fault if we harm others since nothing can be our fault when we
are driven by inherited programs.
While this theory of sociopathic libertarianism can help us to understand
the leaders of this political movement, the question remains of why would
people support amoral opportunists like Trump, Putin, Orban, Erdogan,
and Duterte. One possible explanation is that masochists identify with the
power of sadists since they can live vicariously through the freedom and
enjoyment of people who act without shame or guilt.26 Through a process
of unconscious social identification, followers fantasize that they have the
same power as their leaders. Trump helped to reveal this structure when he
said that he could shoot someone in public, and he still would not lose his
supporters. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this level of blind submis
sion is in part the result of people trying to escape from their own freedom
and responsibility by submitting to the will of powerful figures. However,
for Haidt, the main explanation for political identity and identification is
based on the sharing of moral rationalizations: “People bind themselves into
political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular
narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds” (xxiii). This popu
lar theory posits that our political ideologies are enabled by our tendency
to see things from the perspective of our particular social group. Similar to
Marx’s ideas that the ruling ideas come from the ruling class, Haidt affirms
that group loyalty determines the relationship between individuals and polit
ical ideologies.27 Yet, it is still unclear why people pick particular leaders to
follow loyally. Does an individual’s particular psychopathology make them
susceptible to specific leaders and ideologies? Haidt does not answer this
question because he has no real model of subjectivity since he can always
fall back on evolutionary psychology to explain everything.
Making matters worse is that Haidt adds to the confusion by not clearly
differentiating between conservatives and the Right on the one hand and
liberals and the Left on the other hand. In fact, even when he does try to
account for these differences, they quickly become muddled: “Readers
from outside the United States may want to swap in the words progressive
or left-wing whenever I say liberal” (xxiii). Since one of the aims of his
book is to clarify the differences among distinct ideologies, it is confusing
that he equates liberals with progressives and the Left. He also fails to see
the connection between libertarians and the Right, and this lack of clarity
frames his entire discourse. In fact, I will show how we should clearly
distinguish the Left from liberals and the libertarian Right from conserva
tives, and if we do not make these distinctions, we will fall into a polar
ized, split discourse pitting one extreme against the other.
Against the Liberal University

In terms of Haidt’s own theory, splitting often occurs between his theory
of evolutionary psychology and what he calls Kohlberg’s liberal cognitive
psychology: “he transformed moral psychology into a boomer-friendly ode
to justice, and he gave them a tool to measure children’s progress toward the
liberal ideal” (10). Haidt’s criticism of liberalism is interesting here because
he will describe himself as a formal liberal who had a conversion after a trip
to India, where he began to see the value of religion. Like the narrative of
a born-again Christian, Haidt relates how he turned against his former self
and began to see the wrongness of the secular liberal academic culture he
had once endorsed.28 Similar to the Right-wing attack on liberal universi
ties, Haidt will turn to religious cultures and evolutionary psychology to
reject the progressive values he once supported. This conversion narrative
not only allows him to privilege the hard science of biology over the soft sci
ence of cognitive psychology, but it also helps him to ignore the oppressive
aspects of many traditional cultures he now valorizes.
One of the things that shapes Haidt’s backlash against liberal academic
culture is the fact that sees this ideology as focused on justice and not on
other more conservative values: “by using a framework that predefined
morality as justice while denigrating authority, hierarchy, and tradition, it
was inevitable that the research would support worldviews that were secu
lar, questioning, and egalitarian” (10). Here the true reactionary nature of
his discourse is presented as he seeks to posit that modern liberalism is
biased because it does not value authority, hierarchy, and tradition, and it
is these conservative values that will determine how he defines compet
ing political ideologies. Of course, on one level, Haidt is correct to say
that modern liberalism does devalue the premodern conservative focus on
authority, hierarchy, and tradition. Since modernity is centered on replac
ing religion with science, feudalism with capitalism, and monarchy with
democracy, it privileges a particular worldview centered on universal
human rights, empirical science, and secularism.29 At its best, liberal aca
demic culture represents the movement of global progress through its reli
ance on democratic law, egalitarian principles, and fact-based knowledge,
and so it is strange that an academic like Haidt would turn on the very
discourse that makes his work possible.30 After all, he must want people to
read his work by applying reason, and since he relies on the “science” of
evolution to ground his theories, he must believe in the modern principles
of scientific research, and yet, he sees academic discourse as the problem
and not the solution. His own book thus must be read through the lens of
an ironic splitting because he wants to use modern reason to argue against
modern reason.
In looking at the work of different moral psychologists, Haidt finds the
same privileging of liberal political ideology, which he attempts to dis
credit and debase: “morality is about treating individuals well. It’s about
harm and fairness (not loyalty, respect, duty, piety, patriotism, or tradi
tion)” (12). From Haidt’s perspective, what is so wrong with this secular,
liberal academic perspective on human psychology is that it focuses on
harm and fairness as core values as it tends to deny the importance of
loyalty, duty, piety, patriotism, and tradition. Although, he will later argue
that we need to value all of these moral traits equally, what he is doing
here is concentrating on why the liberal desire for equality and the Leftist
fight against harm should be balanced by a return to traditional hierarchies
and loyalties. Like many other post-postmodern reactionary discourses
on the Right, this call to return to traditional values is insensitive to the
suffering that these premodern hierarchies have caused different minority
groups, and it also fails to clearly differentiate the modern liberal quest for
equality and the postmodern fight for minority rights.31
The Tolerance of Intolerance

At times, his criticism of secular liberalism sounds like a Christian fun
damentalist call to return to strict authority and the respect for traditional
values: “Schools and families should therefore embody progressive prin
ciples of equality and autonomy (not authoritarian principles that enable
elders to train and constrain children)” (12). In his call for elders to train
and constrain children, he appears to be going against his own belief that
morality is hard-wired into our brains, but this return to “family values”
reveals a high tolerance for conservative oppression by libertarians who
like to present themselves as being unbiased and middle-ground rational
ists. In reality, what we often find in libertarian discourse is an insensitiv
ity towards people who have suffered from premodern conservative social
hierarchies sustained by religion and patriarchy. This lack of empathy for
the suffering of others is rationalized by Haidt in seeing this concern as
just one moral value that has to be balanced with other values, like loyalty,
tradition, and authority.
At the foundation of Right-wing libertarian ideology, we find four
interacting components: a lack of empathy for the suffering of disempow
ered groups, a tolerance of intolerant conservative practices, a rejection of
modern liberalism, and an externalization of the super-ego. Haidt’s dis
course unintentionally supports these four components by hiding under
the banner of being fair and balanced, which is also the “ironic” tagline of
the Right-wing Fox News.32 In Haidt’s case, he seeks to transcend political
polarization by affirming a mythical middle-ground, but his own rhetoric
reveals a very different agenda.
The Modern Liberal Dialectic
Another related aspect of Haidt’s criticism of liberalism is that at times,
he focuses on equality, and other times, he sees individualism as the
main concern. Although universal equality and individualism are theo
retical opposites, it is true that a central dialectic of modernity is the
protection of both universal rights and individual freedom; one way that
modern liberalism is able to combine these opposite values is through
the separation of the private and the public realms; for instance, modern
democratic law implies that you are free in private, but in public, you
must submit to universal laws and norms.33 Haidt fudges his argument
by sometimes relating liberalism to pure individualism, and other times,
he equates liberalism with the sole value of equal justice (17). In fact,
the type of individualism referenced by Haidt should be equated with
libertarianism since it is centered on the needs of the isolated individ
ual. In contrast, modern liberalism places individual freedom in relation
to social restrictions and protected rights. It is also reductive to reduce
the choices societies make to two possibilities: either one focuses on
the group or one focuses on the individual. In Haidt’s simplistic, binary
historical account, premodernity is equated with society and modernity
with the individual: “The sociocentric answer dominated most of the
ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a powerful rival
during the Enlightenment” (17). One problem with this reading of his
tory is that it represses how modern liberalism was centered on the three
social institutions of science, democracy, and capitalism, and while
these social organizations helped to free people from premodern hier
archies and religious beliefs, they did not result in a pure promotion of
the individual over society. After all, science, democracy, and capital
ism are shared social systems requiring the submission of isolated indi
viduals to universalizing processes.34 Not only, then does Haidt obscure
what modernity means, but he also idealizes premodernity by seeing it as
focused on social values. Instead of addressing the role played by preju
dice, discrimination, and exploitation in premodern cultures, he wants to
emphasize the more ideal aspects of traditional hierarchies.
By playing fast and loose with his terminology and history, Haidt
reveals the way our views of ourselves and the world are shaped by
the concepts we use to frame our perceptions. This focus on the power
of ideas to frame how reality is viewed is often called social construc
tion theory because this postmodern philosophy stresses how our per
ceptions of reality are not natural and neutral since they are determined
by cultural and historical lenses.35 However, for strategic reasons, Haidt
does not want to focus on the constructed nature of discourse because he
desires to return to a biological model of the mind as he discredits the
humanities and other social sciences. At the same time, then, he has to
rely on science to makes his evolutionary theories appear credible and
correct, he also seeks to discredit modern science itself. This contradic
tory discourse is made possible in part by his repression of the rhetori
cal foundations of his analysis. Since libertarians want to be able to say
whatever they want without concern for how they are affecting other
groups, they have to deny the importance of words, and this often entails
railing against postmodern theory, political correctness, social construc
tivism, and identity politics.36
Against Modern Reason

Haidt’s anti-Left and anti-liberal biases are evident in the following that
claims European countries with strong social welfare programs are not
sociocentric because their focus is on protecting the individual (17).
Since he wants to equate liberalism with individualism and conservatism
with social welfare, he is forced to make the absurd claim that advanced
welfare programs are the product of individualism and not socialism.
Moreover, what he refuses to accept is the role played by Leftist social
movements in the expansion of social welfare programs and democratic
justice. Therefore, due to his need to demonize the Left and critique liber
als, he ends up rewriting history and misrepresenting contemporary politi
cal ideologies.
A common move that we often see in the brain sciences is to use reason
to critique reason.37 Often the goal of this strategy is to show how the pro
motion of reason over emotion in Western philosophy and culture is just
a way of making us think that we are more in control of our minds than
we really are. In fact, he calls the Western privileging of reason over the
passions the rationalist delusion (34). While Freud argued that the main
way to overcome our tendency to be deluded is to learn how to be unbi
ased through the empirical utilization of reason in the form of reality test
ing, Haidt wants to reverse this process by claiming that our investment
in reason is itself a delusion.38 Moreover, instead of seeing reason as the
path beyond religious thinking and other illusions and superstitions, he
equates modern reason with the role of the sacred in a cult. Of course,
Haidt expects his readers to interpret his words in a reasonable way, and
he expects to be treated in a reasonable fashion as he argues by using
reason, but still he wants to demonize reason and equate it with a religious
delusion.
It is very telling that in the age of fake news, alternative facts, and
conspiracy theories, we would find an academic writer devaluing rea
son and promoting emotions and intuitions as the true source of moral
understanding.39 This criticism of liberal reason is coupled with a dis
missal of what he sees as the Left-wing postmodern social sciences
(36). Since evolutionary psychologists are often being rightly accused
of social Darwinism, they must constantly defend themselves by attack
ing competing discourses and by denying the implications of their own
work.40 Like Steven Pinker, Haidt tends to dismiss the social sciences as
a form of moral relativism that does not understand biology and which
incorrectly argues that we are defined by nurture through a process of
socialization.41
Haidt manages to accuse postmodern scientists of being unconcerned
with morality while being moral relativists and strict moralists at the same
time:
The second wave of moralism was the radical politics that washed
over universities in America, Europe, and Latin America in the 1960s
and 1970s. Radical reformers usually want to believe that human
nature is a blank slate on which any utopian vision can be sketched.
(37)
Following the Right-wing attack on “liberal universities,” Haidt insists

that these institutions have been taken over by radical Left-wing political
activists who want to deny biology and evolution in order to provide the
false hope that social hierarchies can be resisted and transformed.42 This
common backlash against the academic Left is often generated through
the selection of extreme examples that are then exaggerated and taken out
of context.43 Of course, it is very ironic that Haidt attacks teachers for not
basing their analysis on truth and reason when he has just spent several
pages critiquing the use of reason. Although it should be clear that some
Left-wing thinkers and activists do deny any natural forces shaping human
life, many see a dialectic between nature and nurture.
Another rhetorical move that Haidt shares with other Right-wing think
ers and politicians is his claim that scientists like him are now the real vic
tims of society because they constantly have their free speech censored by
the radical Left: “Wilson therefore deserves to be called a prophet of moral
psychology. He was harassed and excoriated in print and in public” (38).
This reference to E.O. Wilson is based on the idea that people do not want
to hear the connections among gender and genes or race and IQ scores,
and so they attack the scientists, who are just trying to state scientific facts.
As we shall see, Haidt himself says many provocative and questionable
things, but he still positions himself as an innocent victim when he is criti
cized for some of his ideas.44 Since the libertarian Right sees their free
speech as an ultimate value, they do not think they should have to worry
about offending other people. On one level, it is true that science should be
able to follow truth wherever it goes, but when people are using pseudo
science to make oppressive statements, then they are no longer engaged
in unbiased science, and instead, they are simply presenting prejudices,
stereotypes, and hate speech under the cover of pure science. Therefore, as
the academic Left attempts to stop the circulation of oppressive premodern
conservative ideology, the reactionary Right pretends that it is just stating
the facts when it is often really rejecting liberal reason and recirculating
premodern prejudices.
Nature over Nurture

Haidt’s contradictory relation to science and reason is evident in his use of
evolutionary science, whose development he describes as presenting, “an
alternative approach to morality, one whose foundation was the emotions,
and the emotions were assumed to have been shaped by evolution” (41).
There are two different moves that Haidt makes at this point in his text:
the first is to privilege emotion over reason, and the second is to center
human emotion on evolution. Importantly, these two steps lead to a model
of biological determinism, and yet he often wants to claim that he is not
expressing this theory because he also at times takes culture into account.45
In order to define our current political ideologies, Haidt focuses on core
moral values, and he posits that these values are intuitive social judgments
and not the result of culture, language, education, or individual experi
ence. One way that he tries to prove this view is by showing how even
infants make social and moral judgments: “But when psychologists dug
deeper, they found that infants come equipped with innate abilities to
understand their social world as well” (74). Although it is extremely dif
ficult to interpret what is going on in an infant’s mind, Haidt believes
that experiments prove that our ability to make moral judgments must be
hard-wired into our brain through evolution. Of course, the reality may be
that the experimenters are simply projecting their own understandings of
social norms onto these infants, and so the tests say more about the testers
than the subjects under study.46
If we accept this notion that our morals are derived from or biologi
cal instincts, and we also agree that political beliefs are defined by these
moral traits, then we must conclude that our political ideologies are inher
ited through natural selection. People are thus born to be liberals, con
servatives, or libertarians, and at times, Haidt does appear to be making
arguments based purely on biological determinism, but at other times, he
allows for different factors to influence our inherited intuitions. In using
his model of the emotional elephant being steered by the rational rider,
he indicates that our intuitive moral judgments can be influenced by our
reasoning self: “But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please
the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider
tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments” (80). In positing
that our emotions (elephants) can be steered by other people’s emotions,
he indicates that it is not so much our rational self that influences our
emotion-based intuitions; instead, other people’s emotional intuitions can
steer our own emotional intuitions. The subtle move here is to base poli
tics and political influence on inherited mental programs; even when we
do overcome our initial moral biases, the change occurs on a purely non-
conscious intuitive level. In this structure, reason and culture are bypassed
at both ends.
If, as Haidt insists, our moral emotions are derived from instinc
tual mental programs, and even when we are influenced by others, this
social communication occurs on the level of intuitive emotions, then
Haidt’s own book should be an example of this evolutionary model. In
fact, he does argue that he did take this approach in the construction
of his work:
I threw in historical anecdotes, quotations from the ancients, and

praise of a few visionaries. I set up metaphors (such as the rider and
the elephant) that will recur throughout the book. I did these things in
order to “tune up” your intuitions about moral psychology.
(59)
Haidt’s argument here is that his use of metaphors, stories, quotations,

and praise by others allowed him the ability to access our intuitions by
communicating his own intuitive emotions. The irony here is that he
wants to posit that all of these language-based rhetorical strategies are
actually emotional intuitions determined by biological mental programs.
However, it should be clear that stories and metaphors are not biologi
cal because they define culture and the very thing that separate us from
other animals.47
What Makes Us Human

For Freud, what makes us human is that we are not driven purely by
instincts or evolution; instead, anything can be a source of pleasure, and
we often act in self-destructive ways.48 Moreover, the ability of our minds
to transcend material reality through thought indicates that our free will
comes in part by our double transcendence of both nature and reality.
Likewise, since we are linguistic beings, our words and symbols can have
multiple meanings and can serve the purpose of hiding our true intentions
and displacing our emotions through symbolic substitution. Finally, our
ability to reason enables us to go beyond our drive to pursue only our own
pleasure. In fact, Freud defines pleasure as the release of mental tension,
and this theory of the pleasure principle means that our emotions are not
centered on survival or reproduction.49
From a psychoanalytic perspective, it thus makes no sense to say that
our emotions and intuitions are purely instinctual or that they can be stud
ied by experimenting on non-human animals or infants. For human beings,
the existence of free will, consciousness, unconscious processes, and
shared reason entails a radical break with nature, evolution, and instinct.
One reason why, then, it is contradictory for Haidt to say that he turned to
metaphors and stories to prove the guiding force of instinctual intuitions
is that stories and metaphors are human symbolic constructions transcend
ing our natural impulses and empirical reality. However, in his libertarian
quest to deny the importance of culture and language, he simply denies the
content of his own discourse.
It is important to stress that this turn to a biological model of the
human mind is represented in terms of a political culture war: “the politi
cal climate was harsh for people such as Wilson who dared to suggest
that evolutionary thinking was a valid way to examine human behav
ior” (78). One reason why people respond to evolutionary psychology
in such a negative way is that it undermines the notion that we can over
come inherited social structures through the collective use of reason.
Since biological determinism tends to naturalize social hierarchies, it is
seen as a conservative ideology justifying the dominance of men over
women and the powerful over the disempowered.50 Instead of seeing that
power structures are produced and maintained by people through the use
of language, laws, punishment, and other social mechanisms, evolution
ary psychology wants to see social hierarchies as natural and inevitable,
and this is one reason why they like to refer to primates as an example
of social organization.
Naturalizing Conservative Ideology

By refusing to acknowledge the difference between humans and other ani
mals, biological theories of the mind often end up reinforcing conservative
ideologies. For example, in the following example, we see how conserva
tive views of gender differences can be derived from the study of primates:
mammals face the challenge of caring for and nurturing their children
for a long time … And human babies, whose brains are so enormous
that a child must be pushed out through the birth canal a year before
he or she can walk, are bets so huge that a woman can’t even put her
chips on the table by herself.
(153)
Since primate mothers need help delivering and caring for their children,
the traits and preferences of women are said to be shaped by this biologi
cal imperative. Here nature is used to justify gender differences, which are
then used to help structure a conservative social order where men are free
to spread their seed, while women have to stay at home and tend to their
breed.51
The evolutionary need for mothers to tend to their babies is extended to
explain why women are more caring and empathic:
Given the number of people who pool their resources to bet on each
child, evolution favored women and (to a lesser extent) men who had
an automatic reaction to signs of need or suffering, such as crying,
from children in their midst (who, in ancient times, were likely to
be kin).
(153)
Just as Aristotle posited that men should dominate women because reason
is superior to emotion, evolutionary psychologists argue that the concern
for others is primarily a female attribute, and so political ideologies based
on care must be seen as female-centered belief systems.52 From this reduc
tive perspective, it is implied that conservatives are masculine because
they focus on authority and hierarchy, while liberals are female because
they emphasize and have an ethic of care.
Perhaps Haidt would say that my criticism of his biological determin
ism is unfair because he does open up a space for other influences. In
fact, the following passage does appear to limit the scope of evolutionary
psychology:
De Waal did not claim that chimpanzees had morality; he argued only
that chimps (and other apes) have most of the psychological building
blocks that humans use to construct moral systems and communities.
These building blocks are largely emotional, such as feelings of sym
pathy, fear, anger, and affection.
(39)
This is a tricky passage because it begins by arguing that other animals

have the same moral building blocks, and so these programs can be open
to human content and change, and yet by also stating that these animals
have the same feelings of anger, sympathy, and fear, human emotions are
once again reduced to instinctual mental programs.53
A key aspect of conservative ideology has always been the process of
claiming that social hierarchies are the result of natural or divine order, and so
there is no reason to resist them or call them into question.54 Theocratic ide
ologies rely on this process of naturalizing culture because they need to make
oppression seem inevitable and fated by the will of a higher power. Moreover,
the paradox of these premodern conservative ideologies is that even the peo
ple in power have to submit to an already established social order. In fact,
the essence of conservativism is to conserve the social system and the cur
rent distribution of power, which is seen as being a product of faith, fate, and
belief. The moral attributes of loyalty, authority, and sanctity that Haidt wants
to valorize therefore belong to a conservative ideology centered on the need
to have people submit to a system that controls and oppresses them. We shall
see in later chapters that this emphasis on submission to authority points to a
masochistic foundation of conservative subjectivity.
Haidt’s Five Traits of Ideology

When Haidt finally gets to his theory of the five moral political ideolo
gies, we see that he relates conservative values to three of the moral
attributes driving these belief systems: “The five rows illustrate viola
tions of Care (hurting a child), Fairness (profiting from someone else’s
undeserved loss), Loyalty (criticizing your nation to outsiders), Authority
(disrespecting your father), and Sanctity (acting in a degrading or disgust
ing way)” (152). By structuring his analysis in this way, he stacks the
deck against liberalism since he wants to argue that the more moral traits a
political order supports, the better it must be. In other words, he sees liber
als as only concerned about care and fairness, but conservatives utilize all
of these moral emotions in their ideology.
The first problem, then, with Haidt’s model is that it is shaped to make
conservatives look good and liberals look bad because it has selected
categories that cater to conservative ideology. Moreover, the connection
between the traits and the political ideologies is highly questionable. For
instance, in his discussion of the Left, he ties this ideology to fairness and
not to the effort to protect against harm:
On the left, concerns about equality and social justice are based in part
on the Fairness foundation—wealthy and powerful groups are accused
of gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their
“fair share” of the tax burden.
(159)
The confusion here is that the fight for equality belongs to modern lib
eralism and the democratic law, while the Leftist criticism of unfairness
often derives from groups that have been excluded from modern equal
ity.55 While liberals need the Left so that more groups can be included
in universal human rights, modern liberals often reject the postmodern
radical revolutions of the Left, and so it is important to separate liberalism
from the Left just as one needs to distinguish premodern conservatives
from post-postmodern libertarians.
One reason why I have been adding historical markers to these politi
cal ideologies is that it is vital to see how each system reacts to a previous
system: thus modern liberal democracy and science counter premodern
conservative religion and monarchy, while the social movements on the
postmodern Left reject both premodern social hierarchies and modern
claims of equality, and finally, the post-postmodern libertarian Right is
primarily a backlash against the postmodern Left.56 However, it is also
important to realize that the older political ideologies are never fully
surpassed, and so they continue to circulate after their period of domi
nance has ended. Since the concepts we use to make our arguments and
experiments are essential, it is important to be aware of the constructed
nature of any analysis. Unfortunately, Haidt wants to downplay the roles
that language and culture play in our mental and social lives, and so he is
unable to fully grasp the ways his model manipulates how he perceives
reality.
While it makes sense to attach authority, sanctity, and loyalty to pre
modern conservatives, he himself calls into question the identification
of fairness with the Left: “On the left, fairness often implies equality,
but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded
in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal
outcomes” (160). This passage is so confusing because liberalism is
often associated with the notion of equal opportunity and not equal out
comes, while the Left often fights against unequal outcomes. Moreover,
the Right rarely makes claims based on fairness since they are usually
concerned for the rights of isolated, competing individuals.57 Instead of
Haidt using the scientific method to clarify the reality of our political
ideologies, it appears that he is unknowingly and unintentionally making
an argument for the value of conservativism and the Right over liberals
and the Left. Furthermore, since he does not clearly distinguish the dif
ferences among these distinct ideologies, he is able to make misleading
claims.
One of the greatest areas of distortion in his discourse is his reliance
on the conservative patriarchal ideology that he desires to represent as
being natural and inevitable: “The male mind appears to be innately
tribal—that is, structured in advance of experience so that boys and men
enjoy doing the sorts of things that lead to group cohesion and success
in conflicts between groups (including warfare)” (162). It is gender-
based arguments like this that cause the Left to protest against evolu
tionary psychology.58 In insisting that boys are more loyal and tribal, he
is explaining male dominance through natural selection and not social,
historical, and cultural factors. Moreover, since he privileges loyalty and
authority as two key moral ingredients, he is valorizing the way patri
archy has oppressed half of humankind.59 Of course, he would say that
he is just doing science and stating the facts, but it should be clear that
his science is structured by a set of reductive concepts and retroactive
rationalizations.
What Haidt does not appear to grasp is the way that modern liberal sci
ence and democracy rest on universal principles constructed by humans
that are not a result of natural selection.60 We see his blindness in regard
to universality, equality, democratic law, and reason in the following pas
sage: “Kant, like Plato, wanted to discover the timeless, changeless form
of the Good. He believed that morality had to be the same for all rational
creatures, regardless of their cultural or individual proclivities” (139).
What is correct about this explanation of modern liberal law is that it is
based on the social acceptance of abstract rules; however, these universal
laws are dynamic and change throughout history as universal human rights
continue to cover different groups previously excluded. In fact, one reason
why it is hard to directly observe these abstract rules is that they transcend
the consciousness of the isolated individual, and this is one of their main
benefits: while we may not actually sign the social contract, as members of
society, we cannot be ignorant of its rules, which should apply to everyone
in an equal manner.61 When these systems do fail to deliver equal treat
ment, it is essential for people to organize to fight for more equality: here
we see how the social movements on the Left help to expand and correct
liberal law and democratic principles. Social laws, then, have to be a priori
because they need to pre-exist the individual observer since they are social
practices transcending isolated individuals.
I have been arguing that it is essential to clearly distinguish the ideo
logical foundations of four main ideologies: conservative, liberal, Left,
and Right. Instead of seeing each of these political belief systems as
being structured by instinctual mental programs, I have turned to psy
choanalysis to show why we must consider the way humans break with
evolution, nature, reality, and their own consciousness. Thus, if we want
to understand how political ideologies function today, we need to see
them as psychopathological structures that have a cultural, historical,
and subjective foundation. In the next chapter, this argument is extended
by looking at the question of why our politics and culture seem to be so
polarized today.
Notes
1 Haidt, Jonathan. The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics
and religion. Vintage, 2012.
2 Rose, Steven, Richard Charles Lewontin, and Leon Kamin. “Not in our genes:
Biology, ideology and human nature.” The Wilson Quarterly 152 (1984): 115
3 Samuels, Robert. Psychoanalyzing the politics of the new brain sciences.
Springer, 2017.
4 Jimenez, Guillermo C. Red genes, blue genes: Exposing political irrationality.
Autonomedia, 2009.
5 Barrett, Louise, Robin Dunbar, and John Lycett. Human evolutionary psychol-
ogy. Princeton University Press, 2002.
6 Reber, Arthur S. “The cognitive unconscious: An evolutionary perspective.”
Consciousness and Cognition 1.2 (1992): 93–133.
7 Gilboa, Asaf, and Morris Moscovitch. “The cognitive neuroscience of con
fabulation: A review and a model.” Handbook of Memory Disorders 2 (2002):
315–342.
8 Rose, Hilary, and Steven Rose. Alas poor Darwin: Arguments against evolu-
tionary psychology. Random House, 2010.
9 Petersen, Michael Bang, et al. “Who deserves help? Evolutionary psychology,
social emotions, and public opinion about welfare.” Political Psychology 33.3
(2012): 395–418.
10 Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and
authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
11 Hughes, Geoffrey. Political correctness: A history of semantics and culture.
Vol. 24. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
12 Shoesmith, Sharon. Learning from Baby P: The politics of blame, fear and
denial. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016.
13 Samuels, Robert. Zizek and the rhetorical unconscious. Palgrave Macmillan,
2020, 7–31.
14 Sandel, Michael J. The tyranny of merit: What’s become of the common good?
Allen Lane, 2020.
15 Horowitz, David. Reforming our universities: The campaign for an academic
bill of rights. Regnery Publishing, 2010.
16 Strandberg, Thomas, et al. “False beliefs and confabulation can lead to lasting
changes in political attitudes.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
147.9 (2018): 1382.
17 Paris, Joel. “Antisocial and borderline personality disorders: Two separate
diagnoses or two aspects of the same psychopathology?” Comprehensive
Psychiatry 38.4 (1997): 237–242.
18 Adam, Emily L. The psychopath next door: How similar are they to those
behind bars? Criminality, executive functioning, and emotion processing in
noncriminal psychopathy. Diss. Queensland University of Technology, 2017.
19 Zanarini, Mary C., Jolie L. Weingeroff, and Frances R. Frankenburg. “Defense
mechanisms associated with borderline personality disorder.” Journal of
Personality Disorders 23.2 (2009): 113–121.
20 Gillespie, W. Hewitt. “The general theory of sexual perversion.” International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis 37 (1956): 396–403.
21 Freud, Sigmund. “A special type of choice of object made by men (Contributions
to the psychology of love I).” The standard edition of the complete psycho-
logical works of Sigmund Freud, volume XI (1910): Five lectures on psycho-
analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and other works, trans. James Strachey and Anna
Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1957):163–176.
22 Kernberg, Otto. “The treatment of patients with borderline personality organi
zation.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49 (1968): 600–619.
23 Hartmann, Uwe. “Sigmund Freud and his impact on our understanding of male
sexual dysfunction.” The Journal of Sexual Medicine 6.8 (2009): 2332–2339.
24 Lucas, Peter. Ethics and Self-Knowledge. Springer, 2011, 143–165.
25 Meloy, J. Reid. “The “polymorphously perverse” psychopath: Understanding
a strong empirical relationship.” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 66.3 (2002):
273–289.
26 Stekel, Wilhelm. Sadism and Masochism-The Psychology of Hatred and
Cruelty. Vol. 2. Read Books Ltd, 2013.
27 Chua, Amy. Political tribes: Group instinct and the fate of nations. Penguin
Books, 2019.
28 Winchester, Daniel. “Converting to continuity: Temporality and self in eastern
orthodox conversion narratives.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
54.3 (2015): 439–460.
29 Pagden, Anthony. The Enlightenment: and why it still matters. Oxford
30 Samuels, Robert. Teaching Writing, Rhetoric, and Reason at the Globalizing
University. Routledge, 2020.
31 Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights.
Clarendon Press, 1995.
32 Budak, Ceren, Sharad Goel, and Justin M. Rao. “Fair and balanced? quan
tifying media bias through crowdsourced content analysis.” Public Opinion
Quarterly 80.S1 (2016): 250–271.
33 Wagner, Peter. A sociology of modernity: Liberty and discipline. Routledge,
2002.
34 Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became
psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2020.
35 Gergen, Kenneth J. Social construction in context. Sage, 2001.
36 Samuels, Robert. “The Automodern University: The Universal Individual and
the Backlash against Social Discourse.” New Media, Cultural Studies, and
Critical Theory after Postmodernism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2009.
105–121.
37 Samuels, Robert. “Damasio’s Error: The Politics of Biological Determinism
After Freud.” Psychoanalyzing the Politics of the New Brain Sciences. Palgrave
Pivot, Cham, 2017. 9–33.
38 Freud, Sigmund. Totem and taboo: Resemblances between the psychic lives of
savages and neurotics. Good Press, 2019.
39 Emanuelson, Eric. “Fake left, fake right: Promoting an informed public in the
era of alternative facts.” Administrative Law Review 70.1 (2017): 209–232.
40 Laland, Kevin N., Gillian Brown, and Gillian R. Brown. Sense and nonsense:
Evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour. Oxford University Press, 2011.
41 Pinker, Steven. The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. Penguin,
2003.
42 Samuels, Robert. “The Backlash Politics of Evolutionary Psychology: Steven
Pinker’s Blank Slate.” Psychoanalyzing the Politics of the New Brain Sciences.
Palgrave Pivot, Cham, 2017. 35–58.
43 Wilson, John K. The myth of political correctness: The conservative attack on
higher education. Duke University Press, 1995.
44 Wodak, Ruth. The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean.
Sage, 2015.
45 Greene, Sheila. “V. Biological determinism: persisting problems for the psy
chology of women.” Feminism & Psychology 14.3 (2004): 431–435.
46 Lacan, Jacques. The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. Vol. 11.
WW Norton & Company, 1998.
47 Semino, Elena. Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008.
48 Freud, Sigmund. Three essays on the theory of sexuality: The 1905 edition.
Verso Books, 2017.
49 Freud, Sigmund. “The pleasure principle.” The standard edition of the com-
plete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (1920).
50 Ruti, Mari. The age of scientific sexism: How evolutionary psychology pro-
motes gender profiling and fans the battle of the sexes. Bloomsbury Publishing
USA, 2015.
51 Eisler, Riane, and Daniel S. Levine. “Nurture, nature, and caring: We are not
prisoners of our genes.” Brain and mind 3.1 (2002): 9–52.
52 Sahlins, Marshall David. The use and abuse of biology: An anthropological
critique of sociobiology. University of Michigan Press, 1976.
53 Haselton, Martie G., and Timothy Ketelaar. “Irrational emotions or emotional
wisdom? The evolutionary psychology of affect and social behavior.” Affect in
social thinking and behavior 8 (2006): 21.
54 Huntington, Samuel P. “Conservatism as an Ideology.” The American political
science review 51.2 (1957): 454–473.
55 Bernstein, Richard J. “Rorty’s liberal utopia.” Social Research (1990): 31–72.
56 Samuels, Robert. “After Frederic Jameson: A Practical Critique of Pure Theory
and Postmodernity.” New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after
Postmodernism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2009. 51–68.
57 White, Mark. The manipulation of choice: Ethics and libertarian paternalism.
Springer, 2013.
58 Rose, Steven, Richard Charles Lewontin, and L. Kamin. “Not in our genes:
Biology, ideology and human nature.” The Wilson Quarterly 152 (1984).
59 Crane-Seeber, Jesse, and Betsy Crane. “Contesting essentialist theories of
patriarchal relations: Evolutionary psychology and the denial of history.” The
Journal of Men’s Studies 18.3 (2010): 218–237.
60 Moyn, Samuel. The last utopia: human rights in history. Harvard University
Press, 2012.
61 Samuels, Robert. “Logos, Global Justice, and the Reality Principle.” Zizek and
the Rhetorical Unconscious. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020. 65–86.
3 On the Psychopathology
of Polarization
In looking at Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, I endeavor to expose how

the social sciences and the mass media often help to cause the phenom
enon they are studying. With the case of political and social polarization,
we will see that the complexity of our social lives and political ideologies
can be obscured through reductive binary thinking. As a form of uncon
scious splitting, polarization represents a type of psychopathology.1 In
other words, our desire to see the world in terms of extreme opposites is
derived from an unconscious need to avoid complexity, ambiguity, ambiv
alence, and ultimately reality itself. In Klein’s case, he shifts between see
ing politics as structured by the opposition of the Left and the Right to
the opposition of liberals and conservatives and ultimately to the distinc
tion between Democrats and Republicans. A core problem of his analysis,
then, is that in its obsession to see polarization, different oppositions are
utilized through unconscious processes of substitution and displacement.
Moreover, the issues that I trace in his discourse have implications for how
our society itself thinks about political ideologies.
Klein begins his discussion of political polarization by stressing the
ways we are stuck in our ideological bubbles and how hard it is for us to
consider taking a different stance or supporting a different candidate that
is not pre-determined by our ideological bias:
We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no

candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change
our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it
helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, stand
ards, persuasion, or accountability.
(xiv)
While we saw in the last chapter that Haidt traces our ideological com
mitments to our reliance on emotions and moral intuitions derived from
DOI: 10.4324/9781003199649-3
32 On the Psychopathology of Polarization
inherited mental programs, Klein centers his analysis primarily on social
science research and his own personal observations and not on evolution
ary psychology. As a journalist who runs his own media company, we shall
see that his post-postmodern discourse is shaped by the contemporary
blending of science, capitalism, and entertainment.2 While in the modern
period, there was a great effort to separate different realms, like the Church
and the state, and democracy and capitalism, in our current period, it is
often hard to see where the scientific search for empirical evidence begins
and the desire to make money through entertainment ends. Furthermore,
the need for content creators to generate profits by gaining an audience
can push them to cater to the desire for pleasure, which Freud equated
with an escape from tension and reality.3 In other words, our entertainment
culture is driven by a need to reduce conflict and deny reality, and so we
should ask how is Klein’s own discourse shaped by this imperative?
Instead of blaming nature or evolution for our political polarization,
Klein wants to focus on how the political system itself corrupts individu
als: “What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes
destructive when done collectively” (xv). According to this logic, large
social forces can get us to turn on each other by taking advantage of our
own morals and values. What is productive about Klein’s approach here
is that it attempts to articulate the relation between individual psychology
and political ideologies; since individuals acting in their own best interests
can contribute to the harm of our shared social world, it is necessary to
recognize the fundamental conflict and relation between society and the
individual. However, although psychoanalysis is also centered on examin
ing this basic conflict, we shall see that its approach to political ideology is
much different.
For Klein, social structures have the ability to transcend the interests
and knowledge of individuals, and so it is necessary to start with a sys
temic approach:
We collapse systemic problems into personalized narratives, and

when we do, we cloud our understanding of American politics and
confuse our theories of repair. We try to fix the system by chang
ing the people who run it, only to find that they become part of the
system, too.
(xvi)
While I agree that it is important not to emphasize personal stories when

one is dealing with politics, the risk with this perspective is that it can
On the Psychopathology of Polarization 33
completely erase the role played by individual responsibility in the forma
tion and support of political ideologies. What we need, then, is a theoreti
cal approach that recognizes the power of systemic structures as it also
affirms the contribution of individual subjectivity.4 Although our political
ideologies transcend individual desires and thoughts, they are sustained
through individual psychopathologies.5
In reflecting on his own writing, Klein highlights that he wants to
describe a system rather than tell a story: “What I seek isn’t a story but
a blueprint, a map to the machine that shapes political decisions” (xviii).
In seeing politics as a machine, Klein reveals that he thinks social struc
tures are essential, and the personal narratives shaped by and shaping
those structures are less important, and yet, he does seek to entertain
by telling stories and providing his audience with access to personali
ties and personal reflections. I interpret this contradiction as sympto
matic of the contemporary conflict between media entertainment and
the communication of objective knowledge: Klein wants to take a scien
tific approach, but he also wants to sell books, and so he cannot simply
describe systems from a detached, neutral perspective.6 Caught between
entertainment and science, his discourse obscures as much as it enlight
ens, and this combination of insight and blindness reflects the very prob
lem he wants to explain.
Beyond Reason
An interesting effect of Klein’s focus on the political system over indi
viduals is that he tends to remove individuals from any responsibility for
contemporary problems. For example, he argues that the American politi
cal system is full of rational actors, but the system itself is irrational: “We
are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunc
tional whole” (xvii). First of all, it is hard to see that everyone is acting in a
rational way, and second of all, by blaming the system, you absolve people
of any guilt or shame, which is one of the central goals of the pleasure
principle.7 According to psychoanalysis, people often are irrational, and
they engage in self-defeating behavior whether they know it or not. In fact,
one reason why individuals can be so irrational is that in their desperate
attempt to escape any sense of responsibility, which would lead to feel
ings of guilt or shame, they blame other people and the system itself for
their problems.8 Klein participates in this psychopathological structure by
removing individual responsibility from his analysis, which in turn, satis
fies an audience’s hunger to hear that nothing is their fault. After all, we
are only victims of a corrupt system, and the victims are always innocent.
Furthermore, you cannot criticize a victim, and the vengeance of the vic
tim is always justified.9
The type of victim psychopathology I am describing here is based on
the psychoanalytic idea that some people imagine their victimized sta
tus in order to manipulate other people on an unconscious, emotional
level.10 The goal here is not to deny that people really are victimized
and abused; rather, psychoanalysis focuses on imaginary fantasies of
victimhood that often displace our focus on the true victims. For exam
ple, when wealthy people on the Right claim that they have been vic
tims of taxes, government regulations, and political correctness, they
are not only trying to manipulate others by taking on a victim identity,
but they are also denying the suffering of people who have really been
victimized on a personal and political level.11 While the Left tends to
organize around real acts of victimization, the Right often relies on an
imagined victim identity. In Klein’s case, he generalizes harm to such
an extent that the difference between real and imaginary victimization
is often lost.
One way that his discourse feeds into this victim-based politics is
through his claim that the system is so evil that the only way to achieve
success in it is to be a horrible person who knows how to work it for one’s
advantage:
That the worst actors are so often draped in success doesn’t prove
the system is broken; it proves that they understand the ways in
which it truly works. That is knowledge the rest of us need, if we
are to change it.
(xviii)
As a mode of cynical conformity, the idea here is that the people who suc
ceed in the corrupt system are the ones who know it is corrupt. Thus, pure
amoral opportunists like Donald Trump can be successful because they
do not believe in the system they are manipulating.12 Since they know the
political structure is corrupt, they do not have to worry about how their
actions affect other people as they escape all responsibility for their acts.
Neo-Liberal Centrism
Although Klein self-identifies as a liberal, he claims that the system has
shaped his politics to such an extent that he is no longer acting on his own
beliefs: “I am motivated in part by the radicalizing realization that I am
often carrying out the biddings of a system I dislike” (xviii). In this con
fessional discourse, Klein admits that his politics and work may just be a
reflection of current American life. Instead of affirming the modern liberal
beliefs in the necessary but impossible ideals of universality, objectivity,
and neutrality, Klein reveals how Neo-Liberal centrists represent a fifth
ideology beyond premodern conservatives, modern liberals, postmodern
Leftists, and the libertarian Right. This psychopathology is centered on
cynical conformity and the combination of premodern hierarchy and mod
ern equality. Since the fundamental ideals of modern liberalism have been
compromised, the only alternative is to conform to a system in which one
no longer believes.13
My understanding of Neo-Liberal centrism stems from my experience
working at universities, which are often shaped by this political ideol
ogy. In fact, the contradiction of the contemporary university is that it
combines a desire for equality and universal access with an obsession for
hierarchy, rankings, and ratings.14 Driven by the ideology of meritocracy,
universities are supposed to promote equal opportunity, but they rely
on status, which is revealed by competitive ranking systems, constant
grading and evaluation, and professorial ranks.15 Moreover, this tension
between modern equality and premodern hierarchy is often covered by
obsessional and narcissistic virtue-signaling where one has to constantly
show that one is a good moral person committed to progressive values
as one tries to out-compete others for prestige, power, and money.16
Competitive careerism requires that one learns how to work the system
for one’s own benefit as one claims that one is performing a public ser
vice. This corruption of the public good may be systemic, but it relies on
the psychopathology of individuals to sustain it.17
In contrast to the defensive centrism described above, a key principle
of classic modern liberalism that is often ignored today is that science and
democracy are based on critical introspection so that one can become aware
of one’s own biases.18 Since the goal is to have an impartial judge of empiri
cal evidence in law and scientific observation, a mode of self-analysis is
necessary to achieve neutrality. Just as in psychoanalysis, the neutrality of
the analyst allows for the free association of the patient, modern democracy
and science begin with the ethical principle of constructed impartiality.19
Since it is not natural or intuitive to be neutral, this subjective position repre
sents a break with nature and evolution. Freud adds that scientists must also
be humble and realize the limits of knowledge as one accepts the necessities
of life and the inevitability of conflict.20 As a moral and ethical principle,
the reality principle requires suspending the pursuit of the pleasure principle
and the move beyond fantasy and delusion.21 Unfortunately, these scientific
principles are rarely taught as ethical beliefs, and so it is easy to say that
science has no morals or meaning. Thus, due in part to the repression of the
ethical nature of scientific thinking, people turn to the notion that our society
is helplessly corrupt and amoral, and so the only thing one can do is to take
advantage of a flawed structure.
For Klein, political as well as social polarization is the main defining
aspect of systemic corruption and distortion: “to appeal to a more polar
ized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more
polarized ways. As political institutions and actors become more polar
ized, they further polarize the public” (xx). In the endless feedback loop
of polarization, Klein reveals how the system uses us, and we seek to use
the flawed system to our own advantage. Polarization then undermines
modern liberal democracy because it eliminates neutrality, universal
ity, and objectivity.22 Within a structure where everyone is motivated
to see things in a binary way, the system becomes more oppositional as
people sort themselves into the extreme ends of the political spectrum.
Of course, Klein’s own discourse caters to this polarization by conform
ing to the system it critiques and by not offering a true modern liberal
alternative.
Klein also takes a very anti-modern, anti-psychoanalytic position by
claiming that every political perspective is a form of identity politics (xx).
In contrast to this universalizing of identity politics, one of the key moves
of psychoanalysis is to suspend identity as a guiding force since the goal
of the analysis is to take a neutral perspective on oneself and on others, and
this is only possible if one does not base one’s views and perceptions on
identity and identification.23 Lacan was fond of showing how the subject
of the unconscious has no identity, and what one finds in a dream or verbal
slip is a loss of self-control.24 In terms of modern liberalism, equality and
universality require treating everyone the same regardless of their identi
ties and identification, and science is only possible if it is not guided by
self-interest or cultural identity.25
Polarizing Social Science

The focus on identification and identity in Klein’s book is evident in
the surveys and social science research he presents. For example, the
following reference seeks to detail the level of American political polari
zation based on specific identity groups: “Democrats and Republicans
are now sharply distinguished by a set of basic psychological disposi
tions related to experiential openness—a general dimension of personal
ity tapping tolerance for threat and uncertainty in one’s environment”
(43–44). In a rare nod to individual psychology, Klein’s source seeks to
divide Democrats and Republicans according to their level of openness
to new experiences.26 The first thing I want to point out about this study
is that it frames the analysis of political ideologies by the binary oppo
sition between the two main parties, and as we see throughout Klein’s
book, the binary logic of party affiliation is often conflated with opposed
political ideologies and distinct demographic and lifestyle patterns.
The overall argument is that just as the two main political parties have
becomes more extreme and opposed to each other, so have our belief
systems and our life choices. However, a problem with this perspec
tive is that instead of seeing the two parties fighting over five distinct
political ideologies (Left, Right, Liberal, Conservative, and Centrist), it
tends to reduce ideological differences to a polarized binary, and then it
relates this binary to demographic patterns and consumer tendencies.27
One reason why this reductive analytic lens is possible is that a basic
dynamic of American politics is obscured, and this dynamic concerns
the way the Republicans have formed a coalition between conservatives
and the Right, while Democrats have tried to combine Neo-Liberal cen
trists and the Left. Each party then caters to more than one ideology, and
making matters more complicated is that most Americans usually do not
vote, and many declare that they have no party affiliation. It is therefore
unclear how one can jump from party voting to lifestyle choices if most
people are excluded from the central lens of the party binary.28 By falling
back on party affiliation as the structuring opposition, Klein’s analysis
and the sources he cites make it virtually impossible not to find high
levels of polarization: if you are only giving people two choices, they
are going to be seen as having only two perspectives. Therefore, identity
politics here is really party affiliation, and this is a very limited way of
understanding political ideology.
Another example of this confusion among different analytic lens can be
found in the following passage regarding Marc Hetherington and Jonathan
Weiler’s Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions
Explain America’s Great Divide:
Different studies categorize people in different ways, but the com

mon thread is that openness to experience—and the basic optimism
that drives it—is associated with liberalism, while conscientiousness,
a preference for order and tradition that breeds a skepticism toward
disruptive change, connects to conservatism.
(44)
Here the defining opposition is liberal versus conservative, but this dis
tinction leaves out the Left and the Right.29 It is also unclear if fear
fulness and openness align with party affiliation, political ideology, or
underlying psychological motivations related to surveys structured to
only give participants a binary choice.
It can be quite entertaining to learn that liberals and conservatives like
different foods and shop at different stores, but these consumer trends may
hide a more complex diversity of political ideologies. As we shall see in
Klein’s uncritical use of these surveys, there is little consistency in the
categories used to frame the research:
People who score high on openness, for example, tend to like envelope-
pushing music and abstract art. People who score high on conscientious
ness are more likely to be organized, faithful, and loyal … This is why
Whole Foods and Cracker Barrel locations track deep partisan divisions.
(45)
As this passage skips from biology to psychology to consumer choices to

political ideology, it provides a totalizing view of a wide range of influ
ences and responses.30 Even if we are sure that self-identified liberals shop
at Whole Foods and are open to trying new things, but conservatives like
Cracker Barrel because they believe in traditional values, we have to ask
how is liberal and conservative being defined here and how do these two
political ideologies relate to the five different ideologies I have articu
lated? There is also the question of how biology relates to culture and psy
chology. At times, Klein is jumping from biological determinism to social
determinism to psychological determinism, and each approach contradicts
the other two. Instead of being presented with a coherent, multi-variable
theory, we are shown a combination of distinct perspectives that are then
re-packaged as a coherent whole.
Much of the research cited by Klein relies on self-reporting, and here
we run into another difference with psychoanalysis. A fundamental prin
ciple of psychoanalysis is that people lie to themselves and they lie to
others in order to present a positive self-image.31 Moreover, if people
have unconscious motivations, it is unclear how they will be able to
access them in simple survey questions, especially questions that have
been constructed to give people limited response options.32 These surveys
take on an air of being scientific, but they usually are not validated by
the same criteria required by academic research. In fact, currently, many
academic studies in the social sciences have failed to be replicated, and
this flaw is often due to the way that the researchers let bias define their
analysis.33
One problem with much of the surveys and research on political pref
erences stems from the fact that most Americans have no real preference
or political involvement (48). Since most Americans do not vote in most
elections, and even when they do vote, they often do not have clear policy
preferences, our conception of the polarization of politics must be in part
due to the fact that some of the people who do vote have strong opinions
and strong party preferences, but these people do not make up the major
ity.34 The political scientists and people doing political surveys simply
exclude the majority of people, and then they focus on the extremes, which
creates a strong sense of polarization.
I think that Klein may like presenting this questionable data because
it provides a clear and entertaining picture for his audience to consume.
However, a side-effect of this discourse is that people begin to see the
world in a much more polarized way, and this perspective can lead to
more actual polarization. Returning to the psychoanalytic understanding
of binary thinking, the unconscious processes of denial, splitting, and pro
jection are driven by a desire to escape tension and complexity, and this
escape from anxiety satisfies the goal of the pleasure principle.35 In the
case of centrists, their desire to see themselves as good and knowledgeable
makes them seek out sources of information that support their worldview
and which draw a clear line between the good us and the evil other. The
discourse on polarization, then, feeds this need for splitting between good
and evil as it divides the world into extreme opposites.
Like Haidt, Klein’s political ideology often combines a use of reason
with a rejection of reason. In other words, he makes reasonable claims
about the inability of reason to shape our perceptions of the world and our
selves: “What if our loyalties and prejudices are governed by instinct and
merely rationalized as calculation?” (50). As a form of liberal irony, one
has to rely on the rationality of one’s audience in order to convince them
that they are not guided by reason.36 One benefit of making this argument
is that if reason cannot control our emotions and instincts, then we are not
responsible for what we do and say since these emotions are unconscious
biological responses. It is also unclear why Klein would be writing this
book if he did not believe that people will accept his reasons as being
reasonable and not just some post facto rationalizations. This contradic
tion points to the idea that ironic centrists have to always come down
squarely on two sides of every issue since they want to be free individuals
as they conform to social norms. By taking an ironic stance on their own
positions, they are able to conform from a position of distance.37 They
therefore cannot be held responsible for what they say or do because they
do not directly identify with their own words or actions. As Descartes
revealed, when we conform to others, we are able to escape feelings of
remorse or anxiety because we are no longer responsible since we are just
copying someone else.38 One reason then why centrists might have a hard
time with Leftists is that people on the Left often fully identify with what
they are saying and doing.
It should not be surprising that extreme views result in polarized poli
tics, but it is also important to remember that most people do not have
extreme political views, and many have no clear view at all.39 Maybe cen
trists want to see extreme polarization because they desire to clear a space
for the moderate middle, but this center often ends up being defined by an
ironic and cynical combination of two opposing perspectives. The middle
then does not represent neutrality or universality since the combination of
two extreme ideas does not result in the production of an open perspec
tive. On a fundamental basis, modern liberal neutrality is not based on
finding a common ground between two extremes: it is about suspending
the extremes in an effort to look at facts in an impartial way. Since Klein
believes that that system is helplessly corrupt and polarized, there appears
to be little chance for real democracy, and yet he does use reason to articu
late the failure of reason.
The Rhetoric of the Good Self

This centrist desire to see problems as located in systems and not in our
selves is foreground in Klein’s discussion of Barak Obama’s rhetoric:
“Even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us,”
he said, “the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the
politics of anything goes.” Notice the rhetorical move Obama makes.
We are not divided. We can only be divided. The polarizers are out
there. We are their victims, our disagreements their product.
(65)
In saying that we are the victims of polarization, the self remains inno
cent as the other is seen as being corrupted. This protection of the pure
self and the demonization of the evil other plays a key role in contempo
rary centrist irony. For instance, many centrists love to watch late-night
comedy shows that mock politicians and the political system. Humor is
used here to create a space where suffering can be turned into pleasure
as the comedian escapes criticism by claiming that it is just a joke.40 In
this structure, the self can remain pure as the outside world is critiqued;
since the fault is outside, the subject remains a pure and innocent victim.
For ironic narcissistic centrists, this protection of the pure self is the
essential driving force and pushes them to seek to have their intended
virtue recognized by others.41
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this post-postmodern type of lib
eralism relates to the way we demand to have our ideal ego recognized
by an ideal Other.42 Through this obsessional narcissistic transference,
the subject wants to be seen as being good by an approving other, and
this relation to an imaginary ideal helps to repress feelings of guilt and
shame. One reason, then, why some people think that Democrat politi
cians are fake and manipulative is that their efforts to do good appear
to be forced and based on ulterior motives. In fact, Freud went as far
as saying that behind every good intention, there is an unconscious evil
desire.43 Lacan added that altruism often comes coupled with a desire to
control and debase the other.44
It is important to note that I have been forced to use the term “cen
trist liberal” to indicate that there is a liberal form of Neo-Liberalism, and
this type of liberal centrism is very different from classic modern liber
alism. While we tend to think of contemporary Neo-Liberalism as only
a Right-wing libertarian attack on the welfare states, taxes, postmodern
minority-based social movements, and political correctness, there is also a
liberal version of this reaction to postmodern identity politics.45 Instead of
simply being insensitive to discrimination and prejudice, post-postmodern
centrists usually offer education as the meritocratic solution to social and
economic inequality.46 This investment ignores that our current systems of
education often enhance economic inequality and reduce social mobility,
but since liberal centrists believe that education can resolve all social prob
lems, they refuse to see how it can make things even worse.47 Moreover,
since centrists are so focused on being seen as doing good by others, they
are unable to use science and reality testing to acknowledge the harm done
by their own beliefs and policies. These centrist liberals love to say that
they are good people and they intend to do good things, but this idealiza
tion of the self acts to repress the reality of their underlying aggression and
the real effects of their actions.
If we look at how education functions in many countries today, it
often works to socialize people to compete for a scarce resource (grades,
degrees, ranks) from a position of cynical distance.48 Since people know
that these rewards and ratings are themselves corrupt and corrupting, they
compete in a system in which they no longer believe. For example, uni
versities know that college ranking systems are simplistic and misleading,
but these same schools spend a great deal of money and time trying to
out-compete other schools.49 Likewise, students may not care about what
they are learning, but they still want to get the highest grade. The ultimate
goal, thus, of the centrist form of Neo-Liberalism is to train people to be
competitive capitalists who do not believe in what they are doing. This
system can be seen as beneficial to society because it accomplishes the
dual goal of motivating people to work as it renders them disinterested in
changing the system. Since these centrist liberals no longer believe in the
foundations of modern liberalism, they are able to conform from a position
of cynical distance.
We can also understand the centrist tendency to compromise and seek a
middle-ground as the effect of the lack of belief in modern liberal democ
racy and science. This compromising desire is seen in Klein’s further analy
sis of Obama’s speech: “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative
America—there’s the United States of America” (65). This desire to see a
middle-ground by affirming both extremes and denying the truth of their
differences makes Obama appear good and reasonable, but the result of this
rhetoric is to simply repress the truth of the situation. In what has been termed
“obsessional compliance,” liberal narcissists often conform to the demands
of others and work as hard as they can to do what the other wants, but this
compliance is coupled with a lack of belief.50 In Obama’s efforts to combine
premodern religion with modern democracy, he ends up making a superficial
call for unity: here polarization is denied as an imaginary unity is proclaimed.
Klein adds that in response to a question about polarization that he
asked Obama, the president told him that everyone has a friend or rel
ative from the opposite end of the political spectrum, but we still love
them. However, as soon as politics becomes a point of discussion, they
exclaim: “I can’t believe you think that!” (66). Obama’s Neo-Liberal cen
trist response here is to say that on an everyday level, we can all get along,
but it is the political system that makes us feel polarized. However, I have
been arguing that political affiliation is driven by ideology, and ideology is
itself structured by particular psychopathologies, and so it is hard to sepa
rate how people act on a daily basis from their ideologies and ultimately
their party affiliations.
The model I am presenting here is centered on the dialectical relation
between culture and subjectivity. Just as people with certain personal
ity types are drawn to certain political ideologies and parties, these social
organizations and belief systems are themselves structure by particular
psychopathological forces. Moreover, in a mutual feedback loop, culture
shapes individuals and individuals shape culture, and so we need to think
about polarization as both a subjective unconscious process and as a cultural
framework. In seeing this dialectic, we can avoid the centrist desire to just
wish away polarization or to blame it on others. In fact, another quote from
Obama shows that he believes we can move beyond polarization by just
choosing a different media strategy: Obama argued that polarized media,
gerrymandering, and the flood of political money tended to balkanize us into
our political identities.
“So my advice to a future president,” he said, “is increasingly try to

bypass the traditional venues that create divisions and try to find new
venues within this new media that are quirkier, less predictable.”
(68)
While it is very popular now to blame the media for our polarization, it
should be clear that our systems of social communication tend to amplify
unconscious processes located in all of us. Even if one follows Obama and
seeks to find a new media that is less predictable, it is hard to see how this
effort will result in a change in the psychopathology of everyday political
ideologies. Since these cultural systems take advantage of our own desires,
fears, and defense mechanisms, a change in how the media presents politi
cal information will not fundamentally alter how we see the world.
Beyond Identity Politics

Klein’s response to Obama’s strategy returns to the topic of identity poli
tics, which Klein believes is the key to both our subjective and political
beliefs and actions:
he was too optimistic in believing that our nonpolitical identities could

become our political identities, that they were somehow a truer reflec
tion of our essential selves, and thus strong enough to overwhelm our
partisan divisions. In practice, our political identities are polarizing our
other identities, too.
(68)
From Klein’s perspective, since political polarization is also polarizing our
everyday perceptions of the world and our own selves, then it is impossible
to seek out a politics that is not divided by identities. What I think this per
spective gets wrong is that it does not allow for the necessary but impossible
ideals of modern democracy and science, which are founded on the effort
to suspend all personal bias and identity.51 Since our identities represent
conscious and unconscious identifications that have become fixated, the
only way to affirm the reality principle is to seek to suspend these fixations
through critical introspection. In other words, we do not need more identity
politics; rather, we have to find a way outside of this structure. In order
to promote universal human rights, we have to suspend the importance of
particular identities in favor of universal equality. However, we also should
recognize that the only way to make sure that all people will be protected by
democratic rights is if we also enable social movements based on particular
identities to expand who is covered by universal human rights.52 There is
thus a necessary dialectic between modern democratic equality and post-
modern identity politics, yet, problems arise when the postmodern social
movements become fixated on their identities and no longer direct their
attention towards the goal of equality. Unfortunately, too many centrists do
not understand the necessity of this dialectic, and so they simply take for
granted the results of social movements without understanding the need for
the constant expansion of universal equality.
When we do not see the limitations of identity politics, and we fail to
affirm the modern liberal goal of unbiased equal judgment, then we end up
like Klein seeing the world as hopelessly polarized and polarizing: “A single
vote can now indicate a person’s partisan preference as well as his or her
religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, and favorite grocery store”
(68). On the one hand, I think Klein is right to show how our political affili
ations can be traced to our identities just as our identities can be related to
our political ideologies, but what he does not do is to clearly distinguish the
five separate ideologies I have been describing (conservative, liberal, Right,
Left, and centrist), and the result is a world shaped purely by a polarization
of identity politics.53 Moreover, by not offering modern liberal democracy
as a viable alternative, he becomes trapped in a hall of reflecting mirrors
where thoughts about polarization only cause more polarization.
As an example of the limits of identity politics in everyday life, we can
look at the educational argument that students should only be taught by
people that come from the same demographic group. Many Neo-Liberal
universities have adopted this Left-wing perspective by trying to make
their faculty more diverse and by trying to make their student body more
reflective of local demographics.54 Although there is nothing inherently
wrong in this desire to correct social disparities through social structures,
in the case of education, the entire idea of using knowledge and shared
methodologies to access the truth of the world and our own selves is under
mined by the idea that education is determined by identity and identifica
tion. Although it is still important to have identity-based social movements
fighting for social justice, when these movements become incorporated
into educational and scientific institutions, they can become a distorting
force.55 If we do not want our scientists to be making their discoveries
based on their identities or the identities of others, then we should not be
basing our educational decisions on demographic factors. Many activists
on the Left and centrist moralists will find this argument offensive, but it is
vital to understand how modernity developed out of the process of separat
ing the state from the church, the private from the public, the subject from
the object, and science from capitalism. These separations are key to the
modern liberal social contract, and when we base science and education
on identity politics, we lose the fundamental separation between objectiv
ity and subjectivity. Moreover, we need to understand that the core idea
behind modern democracy is the ideal of equality, and this ideal has to be
determined by an impartial judge.
In their rejection of neutrality, centrists either deny conflict or they
see the world in polarized terms. This avoidance of tension is one of the
reasons why they generally reject revolution or violent protests: they ulti
mately do not want to push for radical transformations, and they prefer
slow reform over major changes. However, it is vital not to see the center
as some rational, non-ideological fact-based discourse. Since the center is
a reaction to two ideological extremes, it is shaped by these extremes, and
so it remains highly ideological. Although centrists may say they are just
promoting common sense, they are ruled by unconscious processes that
function to misrepresent the truth. Moreover, since identity plays such
a large role in the subjectivity of people who are trying to present and
maintain a positive self-image, these identities are easily politicized.56 In
fact, Klein insists that everything can now be seen through the lens of
political identities:
Living in a city, being a liberal, shopping at Trader Joe’s, and dab

bling in Zen meditation may not have much to do with one another in
terms of public policy, but they reinforce a singular identity, and that
identity is political, or at least easily politicized.
(69)
Since every identity is subject to politicization, there appears to be no
social or subjective space outside of the political.
One result of the apparent politicization of every aspect of human life
is that the modern liberal ideal of impartiality is lost. The spread of ideol
ogy throughout our culture also means that people do not trust others since
everyone is seen as just supporting their own team and rejecting the other
side. Centrism does not resolve this problem because it does not clear a
space for the non-ideological, which is a necessary but impossible ideal
of modern democracy. A paradox, then, of the original model of mod
ern liberalism is that it sought to create a politics beyond political bias or
self-interest. Even if this ideal is never fully attained, it still functions to
structure many of our social institutions, and when it fails to live up to its
own standards, it can always be corrected by being compared to its ideal
principles. When we are unable to envision this neutral space, then all we
can see is partisan alternatives, and even if it looks like moderate centrists
do provide an impartial perspective, we have seen that this is clearly not
the case.
As Klein argues, a related issue of our polarized identity-based politics
is that people are not voting for particular public policies; instead, they are
basing their votes on their identities:
Interestingly, it turns out that there’s only a weak relationship between

how much a person identifies as a conservative or liberal and how
conservative or liberal their views actually are—to be exact, in both
cases it’s about a .25 correlation.
(74)
Although Klein does not clearly define what he means by identity, it appears
to be centered on the way people see themselves through a limited set of cul
tural signifiers. This conception of identity is itself highly narcissistic since
it is centered on the identification with preferred social values in a structure
where the outside world acts as a mirror containing ideal representations of
the self and the other.57 Unfortunately, Klein’s analysis tends to avoid any
explanation of subjectivity and completely avoids some of the key princi
ples of psychoanalysis, which are that we often are not aware of our own
intentions or investments, and even our identities can be unconscious or
self-deceiving. Moreover, since our ego is formed out of internalized iden
tifications with traits we see in others, we are often unaware of our own
beliefs or desires.58 A problem then with his focus on identity politics is that
identity is understood as a simple form of conscious self-awareness.
In a revealing moment, Klein confesses that his research on polarization
and identity-based politics has forced him to give up his previous belief in
the role of reason in politics:
My whole career—and much of politics more generally—is based

on the idea that gathering good information helps us understand hard
policy issues and that putting the two together can change minds and
lead to a better world. But once our political identities and interests
push themselves in front of our cognition, that model of reasoning
falls to pieces.
(102)
According to this perspective, the fact that we are guided by our identities
and not by factual information means that there is little reason to try to be
scientific or rational when discussing or analyzing politics. As I have been
arguing, this replacement of reason with bias is exactly what undermines
our ability to pursue modern science and democracy.
What clearly differentiates modern liberalism from current centrism is
that contemporary centrists no longer believe in the value of trying to pro
mote the principles of impartiality, universality, objectivity, and reason.
However, while at times, Klein does dismiss the role of reason in politics
and political identities, at other times, he appears to defend its importance:
“the fact that our capacities for rationality seem to have evolved as a by-
product of other capabilities, like language—underscores how precious
the ability to reason is and how attentive we must be to its development”
(102). Here, reason is valorized as Klein insists that we must understand
its limits, but we should also see it as a precious gift. It is thus strange
that for most of his work on polarization and identity, reason is dismissed
since it cannot compete with our intuitive identification and motivated
cognition.
By focusing on politicized identities, Klein falls into the trap of suspend
ing reason by focusing on superficial demographic identity markers: “A use
ful rule of thumb is that political power runs a decade behind demographics,
with older, whiter, more Christian voters turning out at higher rates” (111).
Just as Left-wing social movements can become fixated on their own iden
tity and not the goal of universality and equal justice, the obsession with
demographic traits undermines the desire for universal human rights. In a
polarizing discourse about polarization, politicized identities prevent us from
pursuing impersonal universal law. Since we want everyone to be equal in
front of the law, then we have to suspend our demographic identities to
achieve this universality. In fact, in later chapters, I will stress how we can
think of globalization itself as the politics of the universal, and this politics
requires transcending polarizing identity politics.
Notes
1 Kramer, Ueli, et al. “Beyond splitting: Observer-rated defense mechanisms in
borderline personality disorder.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 30.1 (2013): 3.
2 Samuels, Robert. “Auto-modernity after postmodernism: Autonomy and auto
mation in culture, technology, and education.” Digital youth, innovation, and
the unexpected. Ed. Tara McPherson. MIT Press (2008).
3 Samuels, Robert. “Catharsis: The politics of enjoyment.” Zizek and the
4 Roy-Chowdhury, Sim. “Is there a place for individual subjectivity within a
social constructionist epistemology?” Journal of Family Therapy 32.4 (2010):
342–357.
5 Žižek, Slavoj. The sublime object of ideology. Verso, 1989.
6 Hennig-Thurau, Thorsten, and Mark B. Houston. Entertainment science.
Springer Books, 2019.
7 Doherty, Brian. Radicals for capitalism: A freewheeling history of the modern
American libertarian movement. PublicAffairs, 2009.
8 Tennen, Howard, and Glenn Affleck. “Blaming others for threatening events.”
Psychological Bulletin 108.2 (1990): 209.
9 Cole, Alyson Manda. The cult of true victimhood: From the war on welfare to
the war on terror. Stanford University Press, 2007.
10 Freud, Sigmund. “The aetiology of hysteria.” April 21 (1896): 251–282.
11 Marcks, Holger, and Janina Pawelz. “From myths of victimhood to fantasies
of violence: How far-right narratives of imperilment work.” Terrorism and
Political Violence (2020): 1–18.
12 Magill, R. Jay. Chic ironic bitterness. University of Michigan Press, 2009.
13 Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of cynical reason. Trans. Michael Eldred.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
14 Samuels, Robert. Educating inequality: Beyond the political myths of higher
education and the job market. Taylor & Francis, 2017.
Allen Lane, 2020.
16 Samuels, Robert. “(Liberal) Narcissism.” Routledge handbook of psychoana-
lytic political theory. Routledge, 2019, 151–161.
17 Hedges, Chris. Death of the liberal class. Vintage Books Canada, 2011.
18 Pagden, Anthony. The enlightenment: And why it still matters. Oxford
the rhetorical unconscious. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 65–86.
20 Freud, Sigmund. Totem and taboo: Resemblances between the psychic lives of
savages and neurotics. Good Press, 2019.
21 Rieff, Philip. Freud: The mind of the moralist. University of Chicago Press,
1979.
22 Talisse, Robert B. Overdoing democracy: Why we must put politics in its place.
Oxford University Press, 2019.
23 Samuels, Robert. Zizek and the rhetorical unconscious: Global politics, phi-
losophy, and subjectivity. Springer Nature, 2020.
24 Miller, Jacques-Alain, ed. The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1: Freud’s
papers on technique 1953–1954. CUP Archive, 1988.
25 Rozin, Paul. “The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of the future of
the world.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33.2–3 (2010): 108.
26 Johnston, Christopher D., Howard G. Lavine, and Christopher M. Federico.
Open versus closed: Personality, identity, and the politics of redistribution.
Cambridge University Press, 2017.
27 Wetherell, Margaret. “Beyond binaries.” Theory & Psychology 9.3 (1999):
399–406.
28 Powell Jr, G. Bingham. “American voter turnout in comparative perspective.”
The American Political Science Review (1986): 17–43.
29 Hetherington, Marc, and Jonathan Weiler. Prius or pickup?: How the answers to
four simple questions explain America’s great divide. Houghton Mifflin, 2018.
30 Hibbing, John R., Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford. Predisposed: Liberals,
conservatives, and the biology of political differences. Routledge, 2013.
31 Freud, Sigmund. “Repression.” The standard edition of the complete psycho-
logical works of Sigmund Freud, volume XIV (1914–1916): On the history of
the psycho-analytic movement, papers on metapsychology and other works.
Eds. James Strachey and Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1957: 141–158.
32 Fryer, Luke K., and Kaori Nakao. “The future of survey self-report: An experi
ment contrasting Likert, VAS, slide, and swipe touch interfaces.” Frontline
Learning Research 8.3 (2020): 10–25.
33 Shrout, Patrick E., and Joseph L. Rodgers. “Psychology, science, and knowl
edge construction: Broadening perspectives from the replication crisis.”
Annual Review of Psychology 69 (2018): 487–510.
34 Callander, Steven, and Catherine H. Wilson. “Turnout, polarization, and
Duverger’s law.” The Journal of Politics 69.4 (2007): 1047–1056.
35 Freud, Sigmund. “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning.”
The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud,
volume XII (1911–1913): The case of Schreber, papers on technique and other
works. 1958, 213–226.
36 Renegar, Valerie R., and Stacey K. Sowards. “Liberal irony, rhetoric, and femi
nist thought: A unifying third wave feminist theory.” Philosophy & Rhetoric
36.4 (2003): 330–352.
37 Samuels, Robert. “Beyond Hillary Clinton: Obsessional Narcissism and the
failure of the liberal class.” Psychoanalyzing the left and right after Donald
Trump. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 31–59.
38 Descartes, René, and Donald A. Cress. Discourse on method. Hackett
Publishing, 1998.
39 Strandberg, Thomas, et al. “Depolarizing American voters: Democrats and
republicans are equally susceptible to false attitude feedback.” Plos one 15.2
(2020): e0226799.
40 Contu, Alessia. “Decaf resistance: On misbehavior, cynicism, and desire in
liberal workplaces.” Management Communication Quarterly 21.3 (2008):
364–379.
41 Samuels, Robert. “Transference and Narcissism.” Freud for the twenty-first
century. Palgrave Pivot, 2019, 43–51.
42 Lacan, Jacques. The ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoa-
nalysis, 1954–1955. Vol. 2. WW Norton & Company, 1991.
43 Freud, Sigmund. “Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis.” The stand-
ard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, volume
X (1909): Two case histories (‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’). Eds. James
Strachey and Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1955, 151–318.
44 Lacan, Jacques, Alan Sheridan, and Malcolm Bowie. “Aggressivity in psy
choanalysis.” Écrits: A selection. Routledge, 2020, 9–32.
45 Aalbers, Manuel B. “Debate on Neoliberalism in and after the neoliberal
crisis.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37.3 (2013):
1053–1057.
46 Marsh, John. Class dismissed: Why we cannot teach or learn our way out of
inequality. NYU Press, 2011.
47 Samuels, Robert. Educating inequality: Beyond the political myths of higher
education and the job market. Taylor & Francis, 2017.
48 Samuels, Robert. “Ethos, transference, and liberal cynicism.” Zizek and the
49 Michael, Steve O. “The cost of excellence: The financial implications of insti
tutional rankings.” The International Journal of Educational Management
19.5 (2005): 365–382.
50 Salkovskis, Paul M. “Obsessional-compulsive problems: A cognitive-behav
ioural analysis.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 23.5 (1985): 571–583.
51 Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and socialist strategy:
Towards a radical democratic politics. Verso Trade, 2014.
53 Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil agreement: How politics became our identity.
University of Chicago Press, 2018.
54 Michaels, Walter Benn. The trouble with diversity: How we learned to love
identity and ignore inequality. Macmillan, 2016.
55 Samuels, Robert. Teaching writing, rhetoric, and reason at the Globalizing
56 Stout, Christopher T. The case for identity politics: Polarization, demographic
change, and racial appeals. University of Virginia Press, 2020.
57 Lacan, Jacques. “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as
revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture.
A Reader. London: Routledge, 2014, 287–292.
58 Freud, Sigmund. Mass psychology. Penguin UK, 2004.
4 Understanding the
Psychopathology of the Right
Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund

Burke to Donald Trump endeavors to trace the intellectual history of
Right-wing political ideology from the early modern period to the
current age. However, in his effort to provide a connection between
conservative thought and Donald Trump, he ends up mystifying both
conservativism and the libertarian Right. We shall see that due to his
lack of understanding of the psychopathology of these discrete political
movements, he is unable to explain how someone like Trump became
president.1 Interestingly, by focusing on the history of ideas, he is blind
to the role played by unconscious forces shaping both subjectivity and
cultural formations.
The Difference between Conservatives and the Right

Due to Robin’s desire to connect current Right-wing politics to conserv
ative ideology, he has to separate conservativism from its roots in pre
modern religion. For instance, in the following passage, we see how he
confuses conservativism and the Right-wing backlash against progressive
social movements:
many of the characteristics we have come to associate with contem

porary conservatism—racism, populism, violence, and a pervasive
contempt for custom, convention, law, institutions, and established
elites—are not recent or eccentric developments of the American
right. They are instead constitutive elements of conservatism, dat
ing back to its origins in the European reaction against the French
Revolution. From its inception, conservatism has relied upon some
mix of these elements to build a broad-based movement of elites and
masses against the emancipation of the lower orders.
(xi)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003199649-4
52 Understanding the Psychopathology of the Right
What is so misleading in this summary of his own work is that he does
not distinguish between, on the one hand, the premodern belief in a rigid
social hierarchy based primarily on religion, and on the other hand, the
post-postmodern backlash against revolutions, minority-based social
movements, and the creation of the welfare state.2 On a fundamental basis,
conservatives seek to conserve an already existing social hierarchy, while
Right-wing reactionaries reject the results of progressive social revolu
tions. Moreover, a key aspect of the French Revolution is the promotion
of the modern break from premodernity, and this break is centered on the
democratic and secular ideals of universal justice.3 It is vital to make these
historical distinctions because there is a tendency to confuse different
political ideologies. Although premodern conservatives did use a form of
racism and social prejudice to justify the exploitation of the lower classes,
it would be wrong to see this ideology as being anti-elite or anti-institution.
One reason why I think it is so essential to clearly differentiate between
conservative and Right-wing ideology is that we have to understand that
the current Republican coalition is based on a contradictory combination
of opposing forces. For instance, not only is Trump clearly not a religious
conservative, but his lack of respect for the law and other social institu
tions places him at odds with the foundations of conservative ideology.4
The question, then, becomes how is he able to receive the support of con
servatives when he so clearly does not represent their values? The short
answer to this question is that American conservatives have simply taken
the pragmatic choice of using Trump to achieve their agenda, and as many
conservatives have said, sometimes the messenger conflicts with the true
message.5 While Robin does not spend much time on the religious foun
dation of most conservative ideologies, it should be clear that religious
fundamentalism around the world and throughout history is often centered
on conserving a social hierarchy that privileges men over women and the
powerful over the disempowered.6 From this perspective, conservativism
has always been about social power, and so it should not be surprising if
conservative ideologues would use someone like Trump to realize their
agenda. Not only is Trump an amoral opportunist who can be motivated
to endorse any ideological position if it helps him to gain and maintain
power, but conservative Christians themselves often use religious beliefs
to hide their true motivations, which is to impose their will on others.7
From this perspective, conservative ideas are just a post facto rationaliza
tion of power dynamics.
While in the previous chapter, I focused on the problems that ensue
when centrists debase the role of reason in politics in order to focus on
Understanding the Psychopathology of the Right 53
identity and polarization, in this chapter, I want to examine how the
focus on ideas and philosophy can blind us from understanding how
power functions to determine the psychopathology of conservative and
libertarian politics. Furthermore, the conservative quest to maintain
inherited social hierarchies is very different from the libertarian desire to
be free from all social constraints, and yet the two ideologies are able to
work together because they are both centered on issues concerning social
power.8 From a psychoanalytic perspective, a key aspect of conservative
ideology is the paradoxical combination of authority and submission.
On one level, it should be clear that premodern societies are determined
by social hierarchies functioning to give certain groups of people power
over others, and yet on another level, even the people with power see
their social position as determined by faith, fate, and belief.9 Since the
social hierarchy is inherited and predetermined, everyone must submit to
a cultural hierarchy that is already there. This submission can be seen in
terms of masochism since people have to identify with a structure that is
outside of their control as they turn their suffering into pleasure and their
amorality into a moral rationalization.10
Conservative Moral Masochism

To understand the masochistic psychopathology of conservative ideology,
we can look at Lacan’s theory of the discourse of the master, which posits
that even the master is subjected to a pre-existing social order, which is
itself structured by a set of symbolic social oppositions.11 A clear example
of this discourse can be found in Aristotle’s Politics, where he seeks to
justify the master’s rule of the slave:
For the soul rules the body with a despotical rule, whereas the intel
lect rules the appetites with a constitutional and royal rule. And it
is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and
the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient;
whereas the equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always
hurtful. The same holds good of animals in relation to men; for tame
animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame animals are bet
ter off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved.
Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and
the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity,
extends to all mankind.
(19)12
Aristotle, here, lists a set of oppositions and hierarchies that still function
to structure conservative ideologies today: men over women, the mind
over the body, reason over emotions, humans over animals, and the tame
over the untamed. This series of symbolic binary oppositions sets up a
system of structured hierarchies that reinforce each other, and as Lacan
argues, we see here how the discourse of the master is constituted through
the use of symbolic differences and analogies that are then taken to be
natural and therefore inevitable.13
Although we may believe that we have moved past this premodern
structure, it should be clear that many of these oppositions still shape
our world today, and what in part makes people conservative is that they
are dedicated to conserving predefined social hierarchies.14 Ultimately,
the driving force behind this ideology is the desire of men to control
other people by getting them to submit to a structure that oppresses them.
While Aristotle stresses the way this system is sustained because it is
natural and therefore inevitable, it should be clear that this philosopher’s
rationalization of oppression hides the role played by the threat of sym
bolic violence in motivating people to accept the social hierarchy.15 For
psychoanalysis, this threat is called castration, and it is important to view
it as an imagined bodily dismembering, even though actual violence often
plays a role in sustaining the system.16 As a fundamental form of patriar
chy, this privileging of men over women is generated in part by the threat
of violence that forces all subjects to submit to the structure.17 Moreover,
since this threat has to be internalized on a subjective level, it must be
symbolic even if it is the result of a real event.18
In utilizing this psychoanalytic theory of the conservative discourse of
the master, we will see that Robin also ends up idealizing and distorting
this ideology. Not only does he confuse conservativism with libertarian
ism, but he misses the role played by internalized violence in the main
tenance of conservative ideology. An example of this confusion can be
found in the following passage:
Rooted in its opposition to the Soviet Union, the labor movement, the
welfare state, feminism, and civil rights, conservatism had achieved
most of its basic goals as set by the benchmarks of the New Deal, the
1960s, and the Cold War.
(xii)
What Robin is describing here is clearly the backlash against the postmod
ern welfare state and Left-wing social movements, but these reactionary
movements should not be considered to be conservative.19 Although some
on the Right may say that they are seeking to return to a conservative
order where everyone knows their place, for the most part, reactionaries
are defined by what they are against, while conservatives focus on pre
serving a social order that is structured by a set of internal oppositions.
Moreover, the Right’s ideology is focused on individual freedom, while
conservatives stress the need for everyone to submit to a predetermined
social hierarchy.20 Furthermore, for this social hierarchy to be conserved,
it has to be structured by clear symbolic oppositions enforced through the
traumatic threat of bodily harm.21
According to Freud’s theory of the castration complex, the male child
responds to a parental threat by identifying with the source of the threat.22
Moreover, the super-ego is thus formed through the internalization of
authority with an identification with the aggressor.23 This model of moral
masochism means that one submits to the social hierarchy by turning
violence into obedience.24 Likewise, within the structure of a gendered
hierarchy, women become the object of social exchange, which further
organizes the social order, and their submission is also fortified through
real and symbolic violence.25 One reason then why most religions are also
highly patriarchic is that gender oppositions are a clear way of structuring
and policing seemingly natural differences.26 Just like men, women have
to submit to their subordination, but women are doubly submitted since
they not only have to accept the pre-existing social hierarchy, but this
hierarchy places them in a position of inferiority.
True conservative ideology, therefore, has to be seen as a form of
patriarchy and gender discrimination.27 Moreover, this naturalization of
the gender hierarchy is coupled with the internalization of a set of racial,
class, and ethnic prejudices reinforcing the conservation of the discourse
of the master. It is thus very telling that Aristotle seeks to justify slavery
by looking at gender, which is itself related to the privileging of humans
over animals and the mind over the body. Since Aristotle is a free wealthy
white male, he believes that his attributes are superior, while the opposite
attributes are inferior.28 Furthermore, due to the fact that we structure our
social systems through the process of splitting and denial, the polarized
division between the superior master and the inferior slave points to the
way that the people in power project their own debased traits onto others,
and then they attack these others for being inferior.29 It is vital to stress
that this theory of the premodern discourse of the master predates modern
capitalism, and so it is misleading to tie the origins of racism and sex
ism to capitalism. In fact, Marx insisted that what in part defines modern
capitalism is the melting away of premodern traditions and patriarchy.30
From this perspective, once exchange value replaces moral values, con
servative ideologies are also undermined. In fact, we shall see that one of
the things that differentiate conservativism from free-market libertarian
ism is that the latter ideology is determined by amoral opportunism and
not a moral hierarchy.31
The Right Trump Card

Robin’s failure to clearly comprehend the psychopathology of conserva
tive and Right-wing ideologies blocks him from understanding how some
one like Trump could have become president. However, at times, he does
see that Trump is in actuality a clear product of the libertarian Right:
Trump ran on a similar set of anti-establishment themes—he was not

tied to the old regime; he had the populist touch; he would thumb his
nose at the Republican pooh-bahs and liberal elites; he would van
quish the demons of political correctness; he would bust up the con
straining norms of feminism and anti-racism.
(xiii)
As a backlash against Left-wing ideology, Trump appealed to the counter

revolutionary desire to reject postmodern, minority-based social move
ments, and while his reactionary rhetoric could be seen as a return to
conservative ideology, it should be clear that his discourse is defined purely
in opposition to the Left.32 In other words, to understand Trump’s ideol
ogy, you have to understand the Left’s ideology, which itself is centered
on trying to reverse premodern conservative hierarchies and prejudices.33
For example, Trump’s sexism is not based on his commitment to religious
patriarchy; instead, he seeks to counter the women’s movement for equal
rights by showing that he will not conform to their progressive ideals.34
By focusing on political correctness, Trump feeds the libertarian desire for
freedom from social constraint and censorship, but this liberation is a lib
eration from the Left and not a submission to the conservative discourse of
the master.35
Since Robin does not have a psychoanalytic and historical model of
political ideology, he does not see how Trump embodies the libertarian
Right (xiii). While Robin thinks Trump has been unable to accomplish the
political goals of the Republican party, the opposite is actually the case: no
contemporary Republican president has been better at realizing the goals
of both conservatives and libertarians. Not only has he supplied conserva
tives with two conservative Supreme Court justices and hundreds of other
federal judges, but he has also provided huge tax cuts for the libertarians
as he has also fed premodern prejudices through his racist and anti-immi
grant rhetoric.36 Moreover, he unintentionally displayed that what the con
servative religious movement is really about is power. By having a devout
Christian as his vice president, he was able to show on a daily basis that in
their effort to impose their will on others, these conservatives will tolerate
an amoral capitalist as their leader.37 Mike Pence is then a walking sym
bol of Christian humiliation and submission, and his born-again narrative
shows that in the process of submitting his will to the lord, he has chosen
submission over his own reality testing and subjectivity.38
What is so scary about Pence for many people is that he appears to
really believe in his beliefs, and this level of fundamentalism has the per
verse effect of freeing him from any real morality or rationality.39 Thus,
even though he has submitted to Christian moral ideology, this morality
allows him a level of predetermined self-righteous certainty placing him
in a superior position to all others.40 As Zizek has argued, one reason why
we have so many Catholic priests who are pedophiles is that the belief in
the moral value of one’s mission frees oneself to do as one pleases.41 The
reason why many conservative politicians, therefore, end up being guilty
of the very things they rail against is not only that their politics is a reac
tion to their own guilt and shame, but they feel that their moral superiority
gives them the right to abuse people who are seen as being inferior. We
see this same dynamic when Islamic fighters rape women or burn down
their places of worship: the people who submit to a higher power tend to
believe that they do not have to conform to conventional morality.42 Pence
and other Evangelical Christians can support someone like Trump because
their focus is on imposing their morality on others as they unconsciously
identify with amoral opportunism.
This focus on power in conservative ideology is highlighted by Robin
when he traces the movement of this political belief system:
Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency

of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and pro
found argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to
exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to
govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, and
agency the prerogative of the elite.
(7)
From Robin’s perspective, conservative ideology is focused on getting the
subordinate classes to submit to the elite by convincing them to give up
their independent will. What this interpretation misses is that elites them
selves have to submit to a higher order, and this submission is generated
out of a threat of violence and the pleasure of conformity. Thus, even if the
conservative elites reap the benefits of their position in the social hierar
chy, they are socialized to see the world in terms of faith, fate, and belief,
which means that they are not using reason or testing reality; instead,
through the adherence to a predetermined social order, these conservatives
are freed from any real sense of responsibility since everything has already
been decided by a higher power and a natural order.43
Freud attempted to explain this conservative dynamic by comparing hyp
nosis to passionate love and the formation of religious and military groups.44
What he found in all of these diverse relationships is that one submits to
the will of other by suspending one’s own ability to test reality. By handing
over all responsibility to the other, one is free to engage in criminal acts.
From this perspective, love is not only deaf and blind, but it also can lead to
social transgressions since the lover will do whatever the beloved wants.45
It is therefore not by accident that there have been so many religious wars
and violent acts committed by religious people; just as members of a cult or
gang will commit crimes if they are told to do so, when people are put in a
social relationship of submission, they are able to deny their own freedom
and responsibility, and this liberates them from underlying feelings of guilt
and shame.46 Although we are used to seeing religion as inducing high levels
of guilt, these authoritarian structures also allow people to displace guilt and
sin onto others. After all, Christians believe that Jesus was sacrificed so that
he could pay for the sins of others. As a fundamental mode of transference,
religion can give people the ability to transfer their own responsibility and
sinful feelings onto an idealized Other.47
Revisiting the Five Ideologies

Robin not only often fails to distinguish religious conservatism from Right-
wing libertarianism, but he also tends to confuse the Left with liberalism:
Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the
right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement
between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored lib
erty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders.
(8)
It should be first pointed out that modern liberalism is focused on equality,
while the Left is often centered on building solidarity around a minority
group that has been oppressed by conservative hierarchies.48 Likewise, the
Right does focus on the freedom and liberty of the individual in response to
the demands of the Left, but it would be incorrect to equate this desire for
freedom to the conservative rejection of equality. For true conservatives,
equality is not even in the picture since their worldview is structured by a
set of inter-linking social hierarchies.49 Furthermore, the libertarian Right
often sees freedom as a constant-sum game where one’s group increased
liberty means a decrease in someone else’s; in contrast, conservatives are
more concerned about submission than freedom.
One reason why I am focusing on how Robin misrepresents these
ideologies is that his misconceptions reflect the way many other people
fail to understand the underlying structures of political ideologies. By
trying to see these belief systems as both subjective and social psycho
pathologies, I seek to clarify how they work and how they come into
being because if we do not understand their structures, we will continue
to misunderstand how political ideologies function in the world today.
Since political ideologies have a subjective aspect, our comprehension
of these shared belief systems can also help us to better see our own
internal unconscious processes. Ultimately, the hope is that by making
unconscious processes conscious, we can make our relation to ourselves
and our world more rational.
By not delving into the underlying psychological processes supporting
people’s commitments to particular ideologies, Robin is able to view the
movement from conservatism to Right-wing libertarianism as an intellec
tual continuum based on the ideas of early modern thinkers, like Edmund
Burke: “‘The levellers,’ he claimed, ‘only change and pervert the natu
ral order of things’” (8). What should be clear from this interpretation of
Burke is that this early modern philosopher was reacting to the modern
liberal goal of equality. Since he wanted to protect the natural order of
things by insisting that people respect authority and the commands of the
higher ups, his discourse points to the conservative desire to maintain the
premodern social hierarchy, and yet he also focused on reversing the revo
lutionary demands of the working class.
For Robin, an underlying aspect of conservative ideology is the
desire to control private relationships: “Behind the riot in the street
or debate in Parliament is the maid talking back to her mistress, the
worker disobeying her boss” (10). Robin reveals here the close rela
tionship between patriarchy and conservative ideology; according to
this view, what really drives the desire for social order is the desire
of men to control the women in their homes and the workers in their
workplaces.50 The discourse of the master is then really a discourse of
private power, which relies on the pre-established social hierarchy to
rationalize the exploitation of others, but as I discussed above, even the
master is subordinate to the system.
Robin adds that the master was so identified with his social position of
being a master that any resistance by slaves and subordinates was seen as a
threat to the master’s identity: “Living every day with his mastery, he became
entirely identified with it. So complete was this identification that any sign
of the slave’s disobedience—much less her emancipation—was seen as an
intolerable assault upon his person” (12). Here we see how subjectivity and
social structure meet through the construction and maintenance of identity.
Since the master’s identity is in part defined in opposition to the slave’s sub
ordination, the master is reliant on the slave not demonstrating any individ
ual freedom, but this does not mean that the master’s identity is defined by
the slave’s recognition of the master’s identity since the master sees the slave
as lacking reason and freedom.51 After all, how can someone without the
freedom to judge and think affirm the identity of anyone?52 The conserva
tive discourse is thus not based on reciprocity, reason, or freedom; rather,
this discourse of power and submission circumvents rationality and reality
testing, and so when we seek to see conservativism as a part of progres
sive intellectual history, we are often further obfuscating its true foundation.
Since conservative ideas are only after-the-fact rationalization of exploita
tion, submission, power, and violence, it becomes difficult to discuss the
discourse of master using the tools of modern reason.53
Even though Robin lacks a psychoanalytic understanding of the struc
tures supporting conservative ideology, he is able to locate the role of
private power in this discourse:
Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and

liberty—or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or
a politics of virtue … When the libertarian looks out upon society, he
does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical,
groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.
(16)
This effort to equate conservative and libertarian ideology ends up misrep

resenting both. While conservatives do believe that power structures have
to be maintained to keep private and social order, libertarians seek to be free
from these constraints, and so they are fundamentally opposed to conserva
tives, and yet the Republicans have found a way to united both groups.54
One of the ways that conservatives and libertarians have both been able
to support someone like Trump is that both groups are motivated out of
their hatred for liberals and the Left. In fact, Republicans want to collapse
the difference between liberalism and Left-wing politics so they can unify
their coalition around the shared rejection of the opposition.55 On one level,
this structure makes sense because modern liberalism was generated out of
a rejection of premodern conservative ideology, while the postmodern Left
has sought to reverse the hierarchies structuring premodern conservative
ideology. However, as we have seen, the conservative–libertarian coalition
is not only defined by its opposition to the Left-liberal coalition but also
unified by its focus on a pragmatic consideration of power. Conservatives
and Right-wing ideologies realize that they need each other to gain power,
and so even if their fundamental beliefs are in conflict with each other, they
can accomplish both of their goals by uniting.56 In contrast, the Left-liberal
coalition should have a much harder time because they often value moral
ity over pragmatic power considerations.57 Many times, it appears that cen
trist liberals and people on the Left would rather be seen as being morally
pure than imposing their will. The paradox here is that the hyper-moralistic
conservatives are willing to sacrifice their morals to gain power, while the
Left often refuses to give up its sense of being morally superior.58 Likewise,
centrist liberals want to avoid conflict and desire to be seen as having good
intentions, and so they are also resistant to seek power for power’s sake.
Rewriting History
Since Robin desires to connect early modern conservative ideology to
current libertarian politics, he has to rewrite history and locate the birth
of conservatism in the modern period: “From the moment conservatism
came onto the scene, it has had to contend with the decline of ancient
and medieval ideas of an orderly universe, in which permanent hierar
chies of power reflected the eternal structure of the cosmos” (18). One of
the problems with this version of history is that it separates conservative
ideology from premodern religion, feudalism, and monarchy, which in
turn obscures the foundations of modern liberalism.59 I believe it would be
more correct to say that contemporary conservatives are derived from the
premodern belief in the divine and natural order, while libertarians have
little need for a higher power since they are focused on freedom and lib
eration from authority. Moreover, the liberal response to the premodern is
to replace religion with science, monarchy with democracy, and feudalism
with capitalism, and so it makes no sense to see conservatism as located in
the downfall of the Ancient or Medieval worldviews.60 In fact, I have used
Aristotle’s Ancient Greek discourse of the master to show the origins of
conservative ideology, which is the dominant belief system from Ancient
to Medieval times. When we get this history wrong, we are unable to see
the importance and power of modern liberalism as we obscure the differ
ence between conservative and libertarian ideologies.
Once again, I want to stress that this history is not a purely academic
debate since it helps us to understand our own politics and identities.
However, this effort at understanding is blocked when people like Robin
misrepresent the foundations of distinct ideologies. For example, in the fol
lowing passage he seeks to convince his audience that conservatism is not
founded on traditionalism: “Conservatism ‘becomes conscious and reflec
tive when other ways of life and thought appear on the scene, against which
it is compelled to take up arms in the ideological struggle’” (23). The argu
ment here is that conservatism is always a backlash movement, but this
logic equates conservative ideologies with libertarian ones, which is exactly
what the Republican party is trying to accomplish through a combination
of opposites. In other words, Robin’s critique of the Right actually rational
izes the Republican coalition by replacing power relations with post facto
moral reasoning. Just as centrists and Leftists want to see the world in terms
of the conflict between the good us and the evil other, Robin translates the
pragmatic opportunism of the Republican party into a consideration of the
intellectual foundation of the movement. Since he does not take into account
the irrational and unconscious factors shaping the Right, he ends up seeing
this movement as guided by rational and conscious intentions.
One possible reason for this repression of the psychopathology of political
ideology is that academic thinkers like to pretend that there must be a moral
order to the universe where justice ultimately will prevail. Instead of seeing
justice as the product of necessary but impossible ideals housed in social
institutions, the academic mind wants to believe that there is a natural moral
order. As a form of magical thinking and obsessional superstition, the desire
to escape from contingency and unknowability pushes thinkers to imagine
that there is a secret order to things.61 Thus, correlations must have causation,
and justice must prevail through some hidden force. Rather than affirming
the modern realization that we must make justice happen through the social
construction of democratic institutions, a type of moral karma underlies the
centrist ideology. Similar to the belief in meritocracy, there is a desire to
imagine a just system that rewards people for their knowledge and hard work,
and in this way, the role of luck, power, and privilege are repressed.62
One place where Robin uses psychology to distinguish political ideolo
gies is in his discussion of what separates conservatives from traditionalists:
Where the traditionalist can take the objects of desire for granted—he
can enjoy them as if they are at hand because they are at hand—the
conservative cannot. He seeks to enjoy them precisely as they are
being—or have been—taken away.
(23)
The first problem with this analysis is that it claims that there is an oppo
sition between conservativism and tradition, while it should be clear that
a defining aspect of conservative ideology is the effort to conserve tradi
tional values and social hierarchies.63 The second problem is that his argu
ment is centered on the notion that traditionalists can directly access their
objects of desire, but conservatives only desire objects that are taken away.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, desire is always based on the loss of
objects since one only desires what one does not have.64 Furthermore,
for humans, there is no direct access to reality since everything is medi
ated by language and consciousness. Unlike other animals, we are only
partially shaped by inherited programs directed towards specific objects,
and so our desires and drives are always open and mediated. As Lacan
insists, pure innocent bliss is impossible for the speaking being because
language and society are based in part on the separation from nature and
reality.65 Robin’s insistence that traditionalists have some direct access to
the objects of their desire must be seen as an idealized fantasy of some
original state of human unity with the world.
In contrast to this mystification of traditional desire, Robin does relate con
servative desire to the conflict between language and the real: “But as soon as
those objects enter the medium of political speech, they cease to be items of
lived experience and become incidents of an ideology” (23). Although Robin
wants to argue that traditionalists can somehow directly access the objects of
their desire but conservatives cannot, it should be clear that all social beings
have to mediate their desires through cultural ideologies. In fact, a defining
aspect of ideology is that it not only tells us what objects we should not pur
sue, but also informs us about what objects we should desire.66 Since, as Freud
insists, societies are founded on the need to regulate sexuality and violence,
they are centered on the mediation of our natural impulses.67
One reason why Robin may fantasize that traditionalists have direct access
to the objects they desire is that contemporary centrist liberals love to imag
ine that their cultural others have the privilege of unmediated sexuality and
violence.68 Thus, the centrist form of racism often involves idealizing the
other as one who has escaped from the necessary sacrifices caused by being
civilized. We see this type of racism when moderate liberals idealize black
men as being great at sports and sex.69 Driving this idealizing fantasy is the
repression and then projection of sexual and violent impulses onto others. In
contemporary liberal popular culture, this process can be seen in the constant
depiction of criminals and gangsters who are able to live outside of the law.70
Many successful television series allow the audience the vicarious pleasure
of identifying with someone who has direct access to enjoyment. Similar
to the investment in pornography, the idealization of violence relates to the
unconscious fantasy of instinctual gratification without social guilt or shame.
My argument then is that in order to make a false distinction between
conservatives and traditionalists, Robin creates an imaginary version of
a pre-premodern society where people experience their impulses directly
through tradition. Similar to a return to the Garden of Eden, this invest
ment in a time before loss, guilt, and shame allows people to imagine
that at least someone has direct access to unmediated enjoyment.71 It is
possible that Robin has to posit the mythical traditional period before pre
modern conservative ideology so that he can equate conservatism with
reactionary post-postmodern libertarian Right-wing politics. Thus, he will
state that conservative ideology is founded on the desire to recover a lost
tradition: “They get wrapped in a narrative of loss—in which the revolu
tionary or reformist plays a necessary part—and presented in a program
of recovery” (23). Instead of seeing conservative ideology as based on
the conservation of social hierarchies and traditions, he represents it as
a politics of recovery, and this move enables him to equate it with the
contemporary backlash culture embodied in the idea of “Making America
Great Again.”72 It should be clear that this program for recovery does not
have a clear set of values that are being sought; instead, Trump’s call for
a return to greatness is mostly a reaction to the postmodern Left. After all,
he never says when America was great and what period he would like to
return to. His desire for recovery is therefore an empty gesture shaped by
the fantasy that things must have been better before.
While Trump often likes to represent himself as representing law and
order and a return to conservative values, it should be clear that he only
makes these gestures to gain and sustain political power. As Robin posits,
conservative ideology has had a close relation to social order: “The conserva
tive defends particular orders—hierarchical, often private regimes of rule—
on the assumption, in part, that hierarchy is order” (24). Although Trump’s
call for order is more of a political ploy and a backlash against the disorderly
Left, true conservatives desire social order because this type of discipline
serves to protect the social hierarchy by keeping the masses in check. Of
course, the great ideological trick of the Republican party has been the effort
to convince the working class to support the billionaire class, and this pro
cess has been made possible in part through a shared hatred for liberals and
the Left coupled with the use of racism, sexism, and homophobia to pit the
masses against each other.73 In this weaponizing of premodern prejudices, the
desire to return to a previous era before the postmodern social movements for
justice is shaped by the retention of offensive rhetoric seeking to put women,
minorities, and other oppressed groups back in their place.74
Unlike the centrist racist fantasy that idealizes the other’s access to
unmediated enjoyment, the Right sees the debased others as cheating
and stealing enjoyment through acts of violence and unlawful behavior.75
While the libertarian Right fantasizes about their own access to total free
dom and enjoyment, contemporary centrists fantasize that the other is
able to escape the restraints of civilization. Moreover, since libertarians
are invested in a fundamental fantasy of total freedom and enjoyment,
the political correctness of the Left is experienced as a violent threat to
personal liberty.76 Therefore, when Trump attacks the liberal media or
the politically correct campus activists, he is seeking to defend access
to pleasure beyond any social constraint. Here we re-find Robin’s claim
that, unlike the conservative, the traditionalist has direct access to the
objects of desire.
For Robin, the combination of conservative and libertarian ideology
can best be understood through the notion that due to the loss of conserva
tive values in the dominant culture, the only way to return to those values
is to promote a counter-revolutionary backlash:
The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the
left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending on who’s counting,
the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he
values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is.
(26)
The idea here is that conservatives cannot simply fight to conserve their
values in a culture that has gotten rid of those values, but as I have shown
in my analysis of the premodern discourse of the master, it is unclear if
these conservative values and prejudices have actually been lost. It might
be more accurate to say that premodern conservative ideology still func
tions as the underlying structure of society and culture, and while moder
nity seeks a separation from this discourse, conservatism still has a great
deal of influence in the world today. In fact, even if social movements
on the Left seek to reverse the hierarchies generated from conservative
ideology, this revolutionary reversal is structured by the categories and
hierarchies produced by the discourse of the master.
The Anti-Elite Elite

In terms of the relation between the contemporary Right and the old conserva
tive order, the key move is to get the masses to support the social hierarchy on
a voluntary basis: in other words, in an effort to combine together the premod
ern discourse of the master with the modern emphasis on freedom and equal
ity, it is necessary to motivate people to freely choose their subordination.77
Robin describes this ideological magic trick in the following way:
the right has grown increasingly aware that any successful defense
of the old regime must incorporate the lower orders in some capacity
other than as underlings or starstruck fans. The masses must either be
able to locate themselves symbolically in the ruling class or be pro
vided with real opportunities to become faux aristocrats in the family,
the factory, and the field.
(31)
Through the unconscious processes of idealization and identification, the

masses are taught to desire inequality so that they can identify with their
idealized masters. One way that this ideology is accomplished is through
the use of nationalism as a shared form of idealization: thus even if you are
poor or suffering, you are part of a greater power.78 This nationalism strat
egy is often coupled with the use of prejudice, sexism, and racism to create
social hierarchies so that the disempowered masses can feel empowered in
comparison to debased social groups.
However, one strategy for motivating the disempowered to identify with
those in power that Robin does not stress is the way that the Right gets the
working class to identify with the rich and the powerful through a shared
sense of victimhood.79 Therefore, when wealthy white Christians represent
themselves as victims of taxes, government regulations, political correct
ness, and immigration, they can use their victim status to bond with people
who are really being victimized by the economic structure. The reason, then,
why someone like Trump spends so much time talking about the politically
correct Left and the oppressive mainstream media is that he can represent
himself as a victim of the elite establishment, when in reality he is the estab
lishment. Here, we see that instead of simply trying to impose the discourse
of the master through real or symbolic violence, the main technique is to
hide one’s power in order to bond with the disempowered.
Trump also feeds this upside-down populism by portraying himself as
real, unscripted, and anti-elite.80 Just as our popular media now focus on
reality-based media, Trump appeals to the masses by signaling that he is
not a fake, scripted politician; instead, he is just like them.81 Moreover, by
refusing to be censored by the politically correct Left, he feeds into the lib
ertarian desire to be free from social control. As the primal father who has
total freedom and direct access to enjoyment, he also becomes a source of
vicarious pleasure.82 Similar to the way Christian leaders now show off
their wealth, the elite have learned that they can best protect their power
if they show it off so other people can imagine attaining the same level of
freedom and enjoyment.83 Of course, our current media-saturated culture
helps to enable this structure because people have so much access to the
representation of others.
Since Robin lacks a model of psychopathology, he is only to describe
part of the reason why the rich and powerful have been able to gain the
support of the working class:
One cannot perceive this affinity by focusing on disagreements of

policy or contingent statements of practice (states’ rights, federalism,
and so on); one must look to the underlying arguments, the idioms and
metaphors, the deep visions and metaphysical pathos evoked in each
disagreement and statement.
(32)
Without psychoanalysis, one is left analyzing deep visions and metaphysi

cal pathos instead of the unconscious mechanisms of identification, ideali
zation, and victimhood. In fact, the pathos of the Right is often generated
by the political appropriation of postmodern Left-wing social movement
strategies.84 For example, the fights for women’s rights, civil rights, work
er’s rights, and gay rights all organized around a shared trauma that helped
to divide the world between the good, innocent victim and the evil per
petrator.85 As Freud explained in his analysis of what he called hysterical
identification, people often bond over a shared sense of suffering.86 Freud
also added that this suffering can be real or imaginary, but what matters
is how suffering is used to manipulate other people. Since the suffering
victim is always innocent and pure, and the victim cannot be criticized,
aggression towards the other is always justified. Moreover, due to the fact
that social movements have to create internal solidarity as they clearly
mark the difference between the good us and the evil other, they organ
ize over shared victimhood as they represent their other as the victimizer
who must be attacked.87 The Right has taken this structure and reversed its
content, and now you have the people with the most social power acting as
if they are the victims of the disempowered.
For Robin, this backlash appropriation of Leftist tactics by the Right
is called conservatism, but as I have been arguing, it would be better to
equate it with libertarianism since it is founded on the dual process of
getting the masses to identify with the elite aggressors as one sees the
disadvantaged as the true source of inequality. Without a psychoanalytic
understanding of how ideology functions in the world today, Robin is left
confusing conservatism with the Right: “Unlike the feudal past, where
power was presumed and privilege inherited, the conservative future envi
sions a world where power is demonstrated and privilege earned” (35).
While contemporary centrists rely on the myth of a fair meritocracy to
maintain power and to justify inequality, the reactionary Right relies on
capitalist competition as the main proving ground for individual value.
The idealization of the free market, then, is in actuality an idealization of
the competition of isolated individuals who have repressed their aware
ness of larger social structures shaping our everyday interactions.88 Since
the market is never really free, the ideology of the free market obscures
the way we are constrained and shaped through a system of laws, con
tracts, currencies, and social practices. However, because the Right wants
to replace class war with a culture war, it has to hide economic determin
ism behind a battle over words and representations.
As we shall see in the next chapter, one of the great failures of the
contemporary Left is to play into the hands of the Right by also focusing
on cultural representations and not on social power and economic class.
While it is still vital to counter racism and sexism in society and subjec
tivity, it is necessary to see how these premodern prejudices are utilized
by modern capitalism to rationalized and maintain economic and social
inequality.
Notes
1 Samuels, Robert. “Trump and sanders on the couch: Neoliberal populism on
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2 Minkenberg, Michael. “The new right in Germany: The transformation of
conservatism and the extreme right.” European Journal of Political Research
22.1 (1992): 55–81.
4 Hunter, James Davison. American evangelicalism: Conservative religion and
the quandary of modernity. Rutgers University Press, 1983.
5 Gorski, Philip. “Why evangelicals voted for Trump: A critical cultural soci
ology.” Politics of meaning/meaning of politics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019,
165–183.
6 Peek, Charles W., George D. Lowe, and L. Susan Williams. “Gender and God’s
word: Another look at religious fundamentalism and sexism.” Social Forces
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7 Harris, Harriet A. Fundamentalism and evangelicals. Oxford University Press
on Demand, 1998.
8 Vopat, Mark. “Is a Libertarian-Christian an oxymoron?” International Journal
of Religion & Spirituality in Society 2.2 (2013).
9 Fromm, Erich. Escape from freedom. Macmillan, 1994.
11 Lacan, Jacques. The other side of psychoanalysis. WW Norton, 2007.
12 Newman, William Lambert, ed. The politics of Aristotle: With an introduction,
two prefactory essays and notes critical and explanatory. Vol. 3. Clarendon
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13 Bracher, Mark. Lacan, discourse, and social change: A psychoanalytic cul-
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14 Cummins, Denise. “Dominance, status, and social hierarchies.” The handbook
of evolutionary psychology. John Wiley & Sons, (2005), 676–697.
15 Althusser, Louis. On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological
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16 Žižek, Slavoj. “Invisible ideology: Political violence between fiction and fan
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17 Taylor, Gary. Castration: An abbreviated history of western manhood.
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ence. John Wiley & Sons, 2017.
19 Rhoades, Gary. “Backlash against ‘others’.” International Higher Education
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20 Keckler, Charles, and Mark J. Rozell. “The libertarian right and the religious
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21 Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs. Deceptive distinctions: Sex, gender, and the social
order. Yale University Press, 1988.
22 Freud, Sigmund. “The dissolution of the Oedipus complex.” The standard
edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, volume XIX
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Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press, (1961), 171–180.
23 Freud, Sigmund. “The ego and the id.” The standard edition of the complete
psychological works of Sigmund Freud, volume XIX (1923–1925): The ego
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24 Freud, Sigmund. “The economic problem of masochism.” The standard edi-
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26 Etengoff, Chana, and Tyler G. Lefevor. “Sexual prejudice, sexism, and reli
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27 Powell, Brian, and Lala Carr Steelman. “Fundamentalism and sexism: A rea
nalysis of peek and brown.” Social Forces 60 (1982): 1154–1158.
28 Smith, Nicholas D. “Plato and Aristotle on the nature of women.” Journal of
the History of Philosophy 21.4 (1983): 467–478.
29 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. The anatomy of prejudices. Harvard University
Press, 1998.
30 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The communist manifesto. Penguin, 2002.
31 Reiman, Jeffrey H. “The fallacy of libertarian capitalism.” Ethics 92.1 (1981):
85–95.
32 Inglehart, Ronald F., and Pippa Norris. “Trump, Brexit, and the rise of pop
ulism: Economic have-nots and cultural backlash.” Harvard JFK School of
Government Faculty Working Papers Series (2016): 1-52.
33 Whittier, Nancy. “The consequences of social movements for each other.” The
Blackwell companion to social movements. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule,
and Hanspeter Kriesi, eds. Oxford: Blackwell: (2004), 531–551.
34 Valentino, Nicholas A., Carly Wayne, and Marzia Oceno. “Mobilizing sexism:
The interaction of emotion and gender attitudes in the 2016 US presidential
election.” Public Opinion Quarterly 82.S1 (2018): 799–821.
35 Samuels, Robert. “Trump and Sanders on the couch: Neoliberal populism on
the left and the right.” Psychoanalyzing the left and right after Donald Trump.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 61–76.
36 Yglesias, Matthew. “What Trump has actually done in his first 3 years.” Vox,
December 2 (2019).
37 D'Antonio, Michael, and Peter Eisner. The shadow president: The truth about
Mike Pence. Thomas Dunne Books, 2018.
38 Sanders, Steve. “The cultural politics of Dan Quayle and Mike Pence.” Indiana
Law Review 52 (2019): 69.
39 Zizek, Slavoj, and Slavoj Žižek. Welcome to the desert of the real: Five essays
on September 11 and related dates. Verso Trade, 2013.
40 Falbo, Toni, and James A. Shepperd. “Self-righteousness: Cognitive, power,
and religious characteristics.” Journal of Research in Personality 20.2 (1986):
145–157.
41 Žižek, Slavoj. “The rule of law between obscenity and the right to distress.”
Zizek and Law. Bottomley, A. and Moore, Nathan (2016) Sonorous law II:
the refrain. In: de Sutter, L. (ed.) Zizek and Law. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
(2015): 220.
42 Esposito, John L. Unholy war: Terror in the name of Islam. Oxford University
Press, 2003.
44 Freud, Sigmund. Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. WW Norton
& Company, 1975.
45 Jacobson, Edith. “The ‘exceptions’: An elaboration of Freud’s character
study.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 14.1 (1959): 135–154.
46 Whyte, Glen. “Diffusion of responsibility: Effects on the escalation tendency.”
Journal of Applied Psychology 76.3 (1991): 408.
47 Murray, Kelly, and Joseph W. Ciarrocchi. “The dark side of religion, spiritual
ity and the moral emotions: Shame, guilt, and negative religiosity as markers
for life dissatisfaction.” Journal of Pastoral Counseling 42 (2007): 22–41.
48 Handler, Joel F. “Postmodernism, protest, and the new social movements.”
Law & Society Review 26.4 (1992): 697–731.
49 Cummins, Denise. “Dominance, status, and social hierarchies.” The handbook
of evolutionary psychology (2005), 676–697.
50 Bendroth, Margaret. “Last gasp patriarchy: Women and men in conservative
American protestantism.” The Muslim World 91.1/2 (2001): 45.
51 Cole, Andrew. “What Hegel’s master/slave dialectic really means.” Journal of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.3 (2004): 577–610.
52 Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and nothingness: An essay in phenomenological
ontology. Citadel Press, 2001.
53 Foucault, Michel. The order of things. Routledge, 2005.
54 Perrin, Andrew J., J. Micah Roos, and Gordon W. Gauchat. “From coalition
to constraint: Modes of thought in contemporary American conservatism.”
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55 Leege, David C., et al. The politics of cultural differences: Social change and
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56 Clifton, Brett M. “Romancing the GOP: Assessing the strategies used by the
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57 Layman, Geoffrey C., et al. “Activists and conflict extension in American
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58 Lasch, Christopher. The agony of the American left. Knopf, 2013.
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60 Gergen, Kenneth J. The Saturated Self. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
61 Bolton, Derek, et al. “Magical thinking in childhood and adolescence:
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Allen Lane, 2020.
63 van der Toorn, Jojanneke, et al. “In defense of tradition: Religiosity, conserva
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64 Boothby, Richard. Death and desire (RLE: Lacan): Psychoanalytic theory in
Lacan’s return to Freud. Routledge, 2014.
65 Cho, Daniel. “Thanatos and civilization: Lacan, Marcuse, and the death drive.”
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66 Foucault, Michel. The history of sexuality: An introduction. Vintage, 1990.
67 Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its discontents. Broadview Press, 2015.
68 Samuels, Robert. “Simon Clarke and the politics and psychoanalysis of rac
ism.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 25.1 (2020): 108–112.
69 Mills, Charles W. Black rights/white wrongs: The critique of racial liberalism.
Oxford University Press, 2017.
70 Berleant, Arnold. “Reflections on the aesthetics of violence.” Contemporary
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71 Frank, Thomas. What’s the matter with Kansas?: How conservatives won the
heart of America. Picador, 2007.
72 McMillan, Chris. “Make America great again: Ideological fantasy, American
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73 Frank, Thomas. Pity the billionaire: The hard-times swindle and the unlikely
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74 Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and
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75 Hook, Derek. “Racism and jouissance: Evaluating the “racism as (the theft
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ness. Guilford Press, 2002.
5 The Hysterical Left and
the Narcissistic Center
This chapter examines the relations between the psychopathologies of

the Left and liberal centrism. In reading closely Robin DiAngelo’s White
Fragility, I will employ psychoanalytic concepts to clarify what is miss
ing in most accounts of contemporary politics.1 Of special concern will
be the narcissistic structure of contemporary liberalism (centrism) as it
relates to the political strategies of the Left. I will also seek to distinguish
among premodern conservative racism, Right-wing reactionary racism,
and the modern suspension of race. However, unlike DiAngelo, I want
to retain a space for universality and neutrality in the law and politics in
general.2 While DiAngelo sees universal claims as necessarily a tool of
white supremacy, I argue that it is impossible to have global human rights
and democratic institutions if we do not affirm the necessary but impos
sible ideals of equality and impartial justice.3 Even when it is shown that
these ideals are not lived up to, and we see the role played by racism in our
criminal justice system, we have to realize that the problem is only detect
able because it is being compared to the ideal of equal justice.4
The five-part model of ideology I have presented in this book can help
us to frame the discussion of DiAngelo’s book. Since her main focus is
on the ways progressive liberals (centrists) refuse to acknowledge their
own racism and white privilege, she tends to take on the position of the
Left, and so it is important to recognize this difference between liberals
and the Left. She also focuses on the reason why the modern investment
in universality, objectivity, and neutrality are actually products of white
supremacy as she ties the birth of racism to modernity and not to the pre
modern period of conservative ideology. This displacement of the origins
of racism results in a series of theoretical and practical problems that will
be examined here. Related to this lack of historical clarity is her tendency
to equate the centrist repression of racism to the Right-wing libertarian
DOI: 10.4324/9781003199649-5
74 The Hysterical Left and the Narcissistic Center
backlash against race-based politics and policies. Once again, these seem
ingly academic issues have very important real-life consequences, and
since she does not have a psychoanalytic understanding of the ideologies
she discusses, there is also a tendency to over-generalize and polarize. One
of the effects of her discourse is to place her readers in the uncomfortable
position of having to admit their guilt and shame, while she retains a posi
tion of disavowed moral superiority.
Divisive Rhetoric
The divisive nature of her work starts with her representation of American
history as a battle between the ideal of universal legal equality and the
reality of violence and inequality:
The United States was founded on the principle that all people are
created equal. Yet the nation began with the attempted genocide of
Indigenous people and the theft of their land. American wealth was
built on the labor of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their
descendants. Women were denied the right to vote until 1920, and
black women were denied access to that right until 1965. The term
identity politics refers to the focus on the barriers specific groups face
in their struggle for equality. We have yet to achieve our founding
principle, but any gains we have made thus far have come through
identity politics.
(xiii)
This struggle between the goal of equal justice and the actuality of
inequality marks the relation between modern liberalism and the social
movements on the Left. From the perspective of modernity, the law has
to apply to everyone on an equal basis, and universal human rights have
to be protected equally, but as postmodern social activists have stressed,
throughout history, particular groups have been excluded from these
rights and laws.5 One role, then, of the Left is to help expand universal
human rights, but a problem often arises when instead of fighting for
equal justice, a group focuses only on their own identity as it relates to
suffering injustices.6
It is vital to acknowledge that little progress would be made in the
expansion of human rights if it was not for the organization of oppressed
people around shared grievances and identities. We thus need these move
ments, but we also have to realize their limitations and when they can
The Hysterical Left and the Narcissistic Center 75
become counter-productive. As we shall see in the analysis of DiAngelo’s
work, the dialectical relation between the postmodern social movements
on the Left and the modern ideal of equality is undermined when the goals
of neutrality, universality, and objectivity are dismissed because they are
seen as tools of white supremacy.7 Instead of accepting the idea that these
necessary but impossible ideals structure scientific reason and democratic
institutions, many postmodern critics posit that there can be no impartial,
universal perspective because the concepts of universality and impartiality
were invented by white European males, and so they really represent the
vested interests of this particular group.8 However, I have been arguing
that science and democratic justice begin with a bias against bias that is
enacted through critical introspection, and while these ideals may never
be fully attained, they do produce the standards we use to judge both their
success and their failure.
The first way that DiAngelo dismisses the modern ideals of neutrality
and equality is by highlighting that everyone is biased, and so all of our
social institutions must also be biased:
While implicit bias is always at play because all humans have bias,
inequity can occur simply through homogeneity; if I am not aware of
the barriers you face, then I won’t see them, much less be motivated
to remove them. Nor will I be motivated to remove the barriers if they
provide an advantage to which I feel entitled.
(xiii)
On one level, I would not disagree with this notion that we all have
biases, but on another level, the problem with this perspective is that it
does not allow for the effort to suspend bias in social institutions. Just
as the psychoanalyst seeks to stop judging the patient so the patient
can say whatever comes into his or her mind, we have to realize that the
artificial position of neutrality can be pursued if one actively seeks to
work against bias and prejudice by creating systems where everyone is
treated the same.9 Fundamentally, if we do not have this goal of equal
treatment, then it is hard to see how universal human rights can be
promoted.10
Instead of pushing for more equality and impartiality, DiAngelo seeks
to show how the very idea of universality is a form of white supremacy
and racism: “Not naming the groups that face barriers only serves those
who already have access; the assumption is that the access enjoyed by the
controlling group is universal” (xiv). The problem with this Left-wing
perspective is that it does not allow for any solution beyond the recogni
tion of the problem: since DiAngelo wants to equate universality with
white supremacy, all she can do is to point to the examples of inequal
ity, injustice, and racism without providing solutions to the conflict.11
One possible reason for this tendency on the Left is that people identify
with the suffering of members belonging to their own group, and they
are invested in identifying themselves as victims as they accuse their
social others of being evil perpetrators. From a psychoanalytic perspec
tive, the problem with this structure is not that all victimization is imagi
nary; rather, the issue is the way suffering can turn into a fixated identity
blocking change and awareness.12 Thus, if there was ever a discourse
that was in conflict with identity politics, it is clearly psychoanalysis,
which is focused on helping people change by giving up their destruc
tive fixations and identifications.13 While it is essential not to deny the
real suffering of people, psychoanalysis looks at how suffering is used
unconsciously to attain pleasure, deny responsibility, and project aggres
sion onto others.14
Although DiAngelo spends little time examining the underlying psy
chological structures shaping Left-wing identity politics, she does ana
lyze some of the unconscious processes circulating in liberal centrist
ideology:
Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we

either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become
highly fragile in conversations about race. We consider a challenge
to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good,
moral people.
(2)
Here we see how white fragility stems from the centrist’s desire to main
tain a positive self-image by repressing any feelings of guilt and shame
that could be generated through recognizing inequality and racism.15
Since liberal narcissists want to be seen as being good people with good
intentions, they do not want to admit their own prejudices and privileges.
Moreover, when someone points out to them their failures to be just and
good, they often respond with defensive anger.16 As Lacan highlights, in
the structure of narcissism, the subject wants the ideal ego to be recog
nized by an ideal Other, and when this recognition is not forthcoming,
the subject feels empty or attacked since this subject is defined through
the eyes of an approving Other.17 Furthermore, since the ego is formed
by identifying with similar others, the liberal narcissist is doubly alien
ated because this subject is an other for the Other.18 One reason then why
contemporary liberal politicians can come off as being fake is that they
are very concerned with being loved and liked by others, and so they end
up pretending to be people they are not.19
Beyond Individualism and Universality

This effort to maintain an image of being seen by the self and others as
good helps to define white fragility for DiAngelo. Moreover, the focus on
good intentions and the maintenance of a positive self-image is shown to
be in part based on a denial of racism and other prejudices:
For example, many white participants who lived in white suburban

neighborhoods and had no sustained relationships with people of color
were absolutely certain that they held no racial prejudice or animos
ity. Other participants simplistically reduced racism to a matter of
nice people versus mean people. Most appeared to believe that racism
ended in 1865 with the end of slavery.
(3)
The problem with this analysis is that it does not clearly distinguish among
the different ideologies of the Right, centrists, and conservatives: while
the premodern conservative discourse of the master helps to structure soci
ety through prejudice, racism, and stereotypes, the Right-wing attack on
affirmative action is better understood as an attempt to counter the poli
cies caused by the postmodern Left.20 Likewise, the contemporary centrist
denial of race and racism should be separated from the modern democratic
goal of acknowledging and then suspending biases. If we do not make
these categorical distinctions, then we are left with a confusing set of prob
lems and no clear solution.
Since DiAngelo equates universality and objectivity with racism and
white supremacy, it is difficult to know how she can even attempt to com
municate with others. After all, the only reason that we try to share our
ideas with different people is that we believe they will try to objectively
understand what we are intending and how our words relate to reality.21
Just as science and democracy are based on necessary but impossible
ideals, so too communication and education rely on the ideals of reason,
objectivity, and universality; to communicate, we have to at least pretend
that the meaning of our words can be understood and that our audience
will engage in a good-faith effort at processing our ideas in an objective
and rational way.22 Yet, DiAngelo wants to claim that universality and
objectivity are simply the tools of white privilege:
We make sense of perceptions and experiences through our particular

cultural lens. This lens is neither universal nor objective, and without
it, a person could not function in any human society. But exploring
these cultural frameworks can be particularly challenging in Western
culture precisely because of two key Western ideologies: individual
ism and objectivity.
(9)
Her first point is that since our perceptions and understanding are all
shaped by culture, it is impossible to have a universal or objective view of
the world. On one level, this notion of the cultural framing of thought and
perception is correct, but on another level, it is wrong because it does not
allow for critical introspection and the application of what Freud called the
reality principle.23 Thus, through critical self-awareness, we can attempt
to overcome our cultural and personal biases by first acknowledging and
then suspending our prejudices, but this is not a natural or inevitable pro
cess. Luckily, modern society has produced many social institutions and
structures that help to suspend bias because these systems go beyond the
power of separate individuals.24 Although universities, research institutes,
and legal systems can fail to live up to their ideals, they do have the poten
tial of pursuing universality and objectivity, and while these defining prin
ciples may not actually exist in a pure state, they do function to structure
modern social practices.25
Not only does DiAngelo desire to see objectivity as an oppressive tool
developed by Western ideology, but she also criticizes the modern con
ception of individualism. One reason for this critique is that she wants
people to see racism as a system and not the result of the actions of
isolated individuals.26 She also desires to convince her audience that our
sense of seeing the world as separate individuals is an illusion blocking
our ability to understand how our perceptions are framed by cultural
influences:
Individualism is a story line that creates, communicates, reproduces,

and reinforces the concept that each of us is a unique individual and
that our group memberships, such as race, class, or gender, are irrel
evant to our opportunities. Individualism claims that there are no
intrinsic barriers to individual success and that failure is not a conse
quence of social structures.
(10)
While it is clear that a problem with contemporary centrist liberalism is

that it often focuses on the individual as the locus of perception and power,
we also find the same problem in the Right-wing emphasis on individual
liberty.27 From this perspective, both ideologies fail to grasp the power of
culture and society to shape us as individuals, but for the Right, the goal
is to reduce or eliminate social mediation, whereas, for the liberal centrist,
the desire is often to conform to the social system.28 Moreover, both of
these conceptions of individualism block us from seeing that modern lib
eralism functions by protecting the rights and freedom of each individual
by having everyone submit to the same set of rules and norms.29 The para
dox of this structure is that individual freedom is gained through social
submission, but unlike the submissive subjectivity required by premodern
conservativism, modern liberal democracy seeks to maintain two opposite
forces at the same time: the impersonal public law and the personal free
dom of the private individual. It is therefore the separation of the public
realm from the private realm that is one of the defining aspects of moder
nity itself.30
I have been arguing here that DiAngelo’s analysis of how to teach cen
trist liberals about racism often suffers from its inability to clearly distin
guish among different ideological structures, and this conceptual problem
also results in the undermining of any possible social solution since the
ideals of the solution are themselves criticized and dismissed. DiAngelo
not only wants to associate universality, objectivity, and individualism
with white racism, but she also rejects efforts to overcome bias through
verbal discourse:
In addition to challenging our sense of ourselves as individuals, tackling

group identity also challenges our belief in objectivity. If group member
ship is relevant, then we don’t see the world from the universal human
perspective but from the perspective of a particular kind of human.
(11)
As I have been arguing, there can be no science or human rights with

out universality and objectivity, but like many other Leftist critics and
activists, DiAngelo sees these social concepts as the problem and not part
of the solution.31 Since she is focused on how group identities shape our
perceptions of the world, she rejects the modern call for an impartial judge
of empirical evidence.
In one telling moment, DiAngelo acknowledges that her own discourse
can be seen as a contradiction because her criticism of universal gener
alizations is countered by her tendency to generalize about white people:
many white people, the mere title of this book will cause resistance
because I am breaking a cardinal rule of individualism—I am general
izing. I am proceeding as if I could know anything about someone just
because the person is white.
(11)
According to her own definition, DiAngelo does appear to have a racist

view of white people, since she does represent them as all being the same,
but she also argues that only people without power can be the victims of
racism.32 Yet, this conflict of over-generalizing about one groups’ ten
dency to over-generalize does reveal the way her own discourse relies on
the same tools she seeks to reject.33
The Leftist Super-Ego

While all human thought requires abstraction and generalization, what
defines modernity is the application of empirical reality testing, and this
form of the reality principle requires working against passionate attach
ments and fixed identities.34 Neutrality, universality, and objectivity are
different names for the same process, and when this process is simply
dismissed as bias, there is no way to advance the goals of science or
democratic law. It therefore becomes important to examine why some
one like DiAngelo would seek to expose the social problem of racism but
undermine any possible resolution. Is it more important for people on the
Left to suffer and be right than to pursue true justice?35 I believe that only
psychoanalysis can help us understand this self-defeating behavior that is
centered on making others feel guilty and ashamed for their thoughts and
actions, while no real solution is made possible. Part of this psychopathol
ogy entails identifying with the super-ego by projecting guilt and shame
onto others as one maintains the position of the innocent and pure victim.36
There is thus a passionate attachment to one’s victim identity, and this
unconscious attachment blocks advancement.37
As Freud discovered in his work with both male and female hysteri
cal patients, they were often fixated on real and imaginary scenes of
victimization and suffering.38 He also noted that suffering can be used to
manipulate other people to do what the subject wanted, but this manipu
lation was often repressed and unconscious.39 Although Freud’s theory
can appear to be blaming the victim, what he tried to do was to see how
people used their sense of suffering as a way of influencing others. For
instance, as we see in many aspects of DiAngelo’s Left-wing politics,
she wants to employ the suffering of specific minority groups to make
white people feel guilt and shame, and by triggering these unconscious
affects she seeks to change their behavior.40 From this perspective, we
see how Left-wing social movements often take on the role of the super
ego as they try to fight injustice by activating guilt and censoring words
and actions they consider to be immoral or offensive.41 In turn, Right-
wing movements respond to the Leftist super-ego by rallying against
censorship or political correctness.42 As a way of defending their drives
and id, the libertarian Right rebels against the censorship of the Left.
Furthermore, the activists on the Left seek to deny their own aggression
by projecting it onto the Right.43
Anti-Reason Reason
In fact, it is notable that when DiAngelo seeks to justify her own use of
generalizations, she turns to science to remove herself from any guilt or
blame:
As a sociologist, I am quite comfortable generalizing; social life is

patterned and predictable in measurable ways. But I understand that
my generalizations may cause some defensiveness for the white peo
ple about whom I am generalizing, given how cherished the ideology
of individualism is in our culture.
(12)
By pointing to the ways social science measure their generalizations,

she indicates that the modern discourse of reason, objectivity, impar
tiality, and universality is necessary to her project, and yet these are
the very conceptual tools she wants to critique and reject. Her dis
course has to be thus considered to be ironic and contradictory since
it is divided against itself. Here we encounter the ways that progres
sive academic discourse sometimes attempts to combine conformity to
modern science with an investment in Left-wing activism.44 Since the
ideology of social movements requires a biased perspective through
the affirmation of fixated identities and identifications, it is at odds
with the modern scientific need to be objective, neutral, universal, and
empirical.
The main way that DiAngelo seeks to avoid recognizing the contra
dictions of her own discourse is to make a universal claim about racism:
“None of these situations exempts you from the forces of racism, because
no aspect of society is outside of these forces” (13). In insisting that there
is no escape from racism, she refuses to accept the modern fight against
bias as she both blames and absolves her own bias; since everyone and
everything is racist, then no one is really responsible, and there is no way
beyond this problem. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the theory of
hysteria helps us understand how the use of exaggeration and emotional
hyperbole functions to remove any sense of proportion as one imagines a
world of extreme oppositions.45
Moreover, what tilts her project to the hysterical Left is that instead
of seeking to recognize and reject discrimination, she strives to make
others feel guilt and shame for a system she has represented as being
inevitable: “The racial status quo is comfortable for white people, and
we will not move forward in race relations if we remain comfortable.
The key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort” (14).
She wants people to feel uncomfortable because she wants them to feel
guilt and shame, and while this awareness may be a step in the right
direction, it is only part of the solution if it is also pointed to a transfor
mation that breaks with fixated identity and emotion. Without this sec
ond step, the presentation of racism and suffering caused by oppression
ends up being used to manipulate others by making them feel ashamed
and guilty for their role in discrimination.46 Furthermore, as DiAngelo
illustrates, centrist liberals want to escape feelings of guilt and shame
related to accusations of racism, and so they repress their awareness of
how they are part of the problem. None of these ideological responses
lead to overcoming the problem because they are all centered on their
own defense mechanisms.
It is my hope that part of the solution is for us to have a greater
understanding of the unconscious processes shaping our ideological
psychopathologies. This mode of education has to be coupled with an
increased awareness of how our modern institutions of science and
democracy can function by producing social practices centered on rea
son, universality, and reality testing.47 However, this call for empiri
cism is often blocked by the way ideologies function through group
processes centered on identification and the suspension of the reality
principle.48 On the level of the hysterical group identity and identifica
tion, it is necessary to imitate the ideas and actions of others in order
to build group solidarity, and one of the results of this process is often
the submission to the impulses of others. As Freud articulated in his
analysis of the state of being in love and hypnosis, the follower is often
blind to the irrationality and immorality of the Other, and so just as the
lover can become blind to the faults of the beloved, the follower of a
political movement can give up the ability to judge the truth and moral
ity of the movement itself.49
Political Splitting
One of the main ideological tactics that we find in social movements on
the Left and the Right is the process of splitting where a clear opposition
is formed between two extremes. In DiAngelo’s discourse, this type of
polarization is presented in the following statement:
Every aspect of being white discussed in this chapter is shared by

virtually all white people in the Western context generally and the
US context specifically. At the same time, no person of color in this
context can make these same claims.
(51)
According to this binary logic, only white people can have power and
privilege, and people of color are by definition excluded from these social
attributes.50 It should be evident that this is an absurd and exaggerated
claim, but it does serve the purpose of creating a clear split between the
evil perpetrators and the good victims, and since the victims can never be
criticized, all of the blame and shame is projected onto the evil Other. In
this hysterical structure, not only is the in-group projected against being
examined critically by people outside of the group, but the in-group also
protects itself against inner criticism, and therefore the modern process of
critical introspection is suspended.51
As we have seen, there is also a tendency in these polarized groups
to create a hysterical sense of pathos and extreme emotion through the
rhetoric of hyperbole.52 In DiAngelo’s case, a key way that she seeks
to manipulate the emotions of her audience is by using the term “white
supremacy” to describe both actual white supremacists (Nazis, Klan
members, Neo-fascists) and modern social practices that seek to deny or
suspend considerations of race.53 Due to the lack of proportion in equat
ing people who want a colorblind society and real white supremacists,
DiAngelo tends to efface important historical differences: “I am often
asked if I think the younger generation is less racist. No, I don’t. In
some ways, racism’s adaptations over time are more sinister than con
crete rules such as Jim Crow” (50). There should be a clear difference
between the institution of segregation enforced by the law and current
forms of racism, but in order to make an extreme argument, DiAngelo
has to efface historical differences and signs of social progress.54 We see
here an underlying fatalism to her discourse, and this fatalism feeds into
a premodern conservative ideology, which insists that we are fated to
submit to our social positions.55
Psychoanalyzing Society
If psychoanalysis has taught us anything, it is that we can rarely get people
to change by making them feel guilty or ashamed. Through the process of
free association, people have to discover on their own, their faults and con
flicts, and then they have to want to change them.56 However, if we want
to make society less racist or structured by bias, we cannot simply require
everyone to undertake long psychoanalysis, so we must ask how can we
use psychoanalysis on a social level? The first part of the solution is to
help people to understand the underlying unconscious processes shaping
their thoughts and their actions, but this effort will only take us so far. The
next stage that I have been promoting is to clarify the values and principles
shaping modern democratic and scientific practices. One reason why this
type of education is necessary is that we need to understand how modern
liberal institutions and practices work and what differentiates them from
other ideological structures. We also need to spread these modern ideals
to other aspects of our personal and social lives, and so it is essential to
comprehend what values they represent.57
I believe that one reason we are seeing a political backlash against
modern institutions is that we have failed to teach people about the moral
principles underlying modernity itself. Since we do not understand the
value of the necessary but impossible ideals of universality and neutral
ity, we are prone to dismiss them or react against them. Even Leftists like
DiAngelo show a strong tendency to attack the very values that make her
discourse possible. Since she sees universality and objectivity as tools of
white supremacy, she is unable to provide an effective counter to rac
ism. To help correct this problem, I will turn to Anthony Pagden’s The
Enlightenment: Why It Matters Now in order to further define the modern
ideology of universal reason.
Notes
1 DiAngelo, Robin. White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk
about racism. Beacon Press, 2018.
2 Wrange, Pål. “Impartial or uninvolved? The anatomy of 20th century doctrine
on the law of neutrality.” The anatomy of 20th century doctrine on the law of
neutrality. Vallingby: Elanders, 2007.
4 Rakowski, Eric. Equal justice. Clarendon Paperbacks, 1991.
5 Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. “The critical legal studies movement.” Harvard
Law Review, 96 (1983): 561–675.
6 Alcoff, Linda Martín, and Satya P. Mohanty. “Reconsidering identity politics: An
introduction.” Identity politics reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 1–9.
8 Inoue, Asao B. Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assess-
ing writing for a socially just future. WAC Clearinghouse, 2015.
9 Portuges, Stephen. “The politics of psychoanalytic neutrality.” International
Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 6.1 (2009): 61–73.
10 Donnelly, Jack. Universal human rights in theory and practice. Cornell
11 Minow, Martha. “Beyond universality.” University of Chicago Legal Forum
(1989): 115.
12 Arlow, Jacob A. “Unconscious fantasy and disturbances of conscious experi
ence.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 38.1 (1969): 1–27.
13 Nicol, Bran. “As if: Traversing the fantasy in Žižek.” Paragraph 24.2 (2001):
140–155.
14 Lacan, Jacques. “Intervention on transference.” In Dora’s case: Freud—
Hysteria—Feminism. Eds. C. Bernheimer. London: Virago, 1985, 92–104.
15 Samuels, Robert. “Transference and narcissism.” Freud for the twenty-first
16 Miller, Joshua D., W. Keith Campbell, and Paul A. Pilkonis. “Narcissistic
personality disorder: Relations with distress and functional impairment.”
Comprehensive Psychiatry 48.2 (2007): 170–177.
17 Lacan, Jacques. “Remarque sur le rapport de Daniel Lagache: “Psychanalyse
et structure de la personnalité.” Écrits. Edited by Jacques-Alain-Miller. Paris:
Le Seuil. (1966): 647–684.
revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture.
A Reader. New York: Pearson, 2006: 287–292.
19 Lander, Christian. Stuff white people like: A definitive guide to the unique taste
of millions. Random House, 2008.
21 Habermas, Jurgen, Axel Honneth, and Hans Joas. Communicative action. Vol.
1. MIT Press, 1991.
22 Moscovici, Serge. “Social representations and pragmatic communication.”
Social Science Information 33.2 (1994): 163–177.
23 Samuels, Robert. “Science and the reality principle.” Freud for the twenty-first
24 Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest people in the world: How the west became
psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2020.
25 Readings, Bill. The university in ruins. Harvard University Press, 1996.
26 Feagin, Joe. Systemic racism: A theory of oppression. Routledge, 2013.
27 Barry, Norman. On classical liberalism and libertarianism. Springer, 1987.
28 Bunge, Mario. “Ten modes of individualism—none of which works—and
their alternatives.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30.3 (2000): 384–406.
29 Brennan Jr, William J. “State constitutions and the protection of individual
rights.” Harvard Law Review 90 (1976): 489.
30 Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid modernity. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
31 Chatterjee, Partha. Our modernity. No. 1. Rotterdam: Sephis, 1997.
32 Goldberg, David Theo. Anatomy of racism. University of Minnesota Press,
1990.
33 Chambless, Dianne L. “Beware the dodo bird: The dangers of overgeneraliza
tion.” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 9.1 (2002): 13–16.
34 Hunt, Shelby D. “A realist theory of empirical testing resolving the theory
ladenness/objectivity debate.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 24.2 (1994):
133–158.
35 Fraser, Nancy. “Social justice in the age of identity politics.” In Geographic
thought: A praxis perspective. Ed. George Henderson. London: Routledge.
(2009), 72–91.
36 Leys, Ruth. From guilt to shame: Auschwitz and after. Princeton University
Press, 2009.
37 Stone, Lawrence. “Passionate attachments in the west in historical perspec
tive.” Passionate attachments: Thinking about love. New York: Free Press,1988,
15–27.
38 Menaker, Esther. “The masochistic factor in the psychoanalytic situation.” The
Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11.2 (1942): 171–186.
39 Freud, Sigmund. Dora: An analysis of a case of hysteria. Simon and Schuster,
1997.
40 Ellison, Julie. “A short history of liberal guilt.” Critical Inquiry 22.2 (1996):
344–371.
41 Levitt, Cyril. “Roots of radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the new left.” The
Canadian Journal of Sociology. Summer 1984: 350–357.
42 D’souza, Dinesh. Illiberal education: The politics of race and sex on campus.
Simon and Schuster, 1991.
43 Robins, Robert Sidwar Robins, Robert S. Robins, and Jerrold M. Post. Political
paranoia: The psychopolitics of hatred. Yale University Press, 1997.
44 Lindblom, Charles Edward, and David K. Cohen. Usable knowledge: Social
science and social problem solving. Vol. 21. Yale University Press, 1979.
45 Burt, Andrew. American hysteria: The untold story of mass political extrem-
ism in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
46 Snyder, Jack. “Backlash against naming and shaming: The politics of status
and emotion.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22.4
(2020): 644–653.
47 Samuels, Richard, Stephen Stich, and Luc Faucher. “Reason and rationality.”
Handbook of epistemology. Springer, 2004, 131–179.
& Company, 1975.
49 Holowchak, M. Andrew. Freud: From individual psychology to group psychol-
ogy. Jason Aronson, Incorporated, 2012.
50 Brunner, José. Freud and the politics of psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2018.
51 Carser, Diane. “The defense mechanism of splitting: Developmental origins,
effects on staff, recommendations for nursing care.” Journal of Psychosocial
Nursing and Mental Health Services 17.3 (1979): 21–28.
52 Samuels, Robert. “Pathos, hysteria, and the left.” Zizek and the rhetorical
unconscious. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 33–47.
53 Gillborn, David. “Rethinking white supremacy: Who counts in ‘WhiteWorld’.”
Ethnicities 6.3 (2006): 318–340.
54 Ray, Victor, and Louise Seamster. “Rethinking racial progress: a response to
Wimmer.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39.8 (2016): 1361–1369.
55 Gregersen, Niels H. “Theology and disaster studies: From ‘acts of God’ to
divine presence.” Disaster research. Routledge, 2015, 48–62.
56 Kris, Anton O. Free association: Methods and process. Routledge, 2013.
57 Samuels, Robert. “Science and the reality principle.” Freud for the twenty-first
6 The Anti-Ideology Ideology
Re-Discovering the Enlightenment
A central argument of this book is that we need to understand the psycho

pathologies of liberal, Left-wing, Right-wing, conservative, and centrist
ideologies as we affirm that the alternative to these social and subjective
structures derives from the modern conceptions of liberalism, universal
ity, neutrality, and empiricism in science and law. To help clarify what
I mean by modern liberalism, I will read closely Anthony Pagden’s The
Enlightenment.1 I turn to this work because it is my belief that we are cur
rently witnessing a global political backlash against modernity, and part
of this reactionary politics is derived from a fundamental misunderstand
ing of how the philosophy of the Enlightenment helped to shape essential
social institutions that still structure our world today.2 I will provide a psy
choanalytic understanding of modern reason to explore some of the more
hidden and complicated aspects of this cultural perspective.
Defining Reason
On the most basic level, Pagden defines the Enlightenment by the notion
that universal reason can make society more equal and just. As a way of
overcoming the premodern reliance on faith, fate, prejudice, and social
hierarchy, the modern investment in universal reason is positioned to
free humans from their submission to a predetermined social order.3
Thus, according to the early modern thinker Condorcet, the end result
of this ongoing process of enlightenment and liberation will be a world
without prejudice and inequality: “All peoples should one day approach
the state of civilization attained by the most enlightened, the most free,
and the most free from prejudices, such as are the French and the Anglo-
Americans.” It is important to stress that the desire for a more perfect
form of civilization required overcoming prejudice and the previous
forms of social inequality.4 Of course, this move towards perfection
DOI: 10.4324/9781003199649-6
The Anti-Ideology Ideology 89
could only be a continual work in progress, but what is important is that
our actions are guided by the necessary but impossible ideals of equality,
freedom, and universality. In fact, I believe that universality is another
word for equality and globalization, and from this perspective, modern
liberalism is the ideology of a globalized world.5
As Pagden himself points out, people have become critical of the
Enlightenment and modern liberalism because they see its globalizing forces
as eliminating cultural and individual differences: “Condorcet understood it
not as some undifferentiated cultural and political state that all peoples should
be compelled to adopt but what he called an ‘equal diffusion of enlighten
ment’” (3). The central idea here is that modern universality does not make
everyone the same; instead, it seeks to give everyone the same mental tools
so that they can use reason to understand the world around them.6 While this
quest for a more educated and reasonable global civilization may seem overly
optimistic, the actual truth is that we are witnessing a constant increase in all
of the global indicators of progress.7 Not only are people living longer, but
they are more educated, and they have never had more rights protected. While
the Right-wing and Left-wing reactions to globalization get most of the atten
tion, the reality is that on the whole, religion is dying out, and the number of
people who base their life decisions on science and not superstition continues
to grow.8 As people become healthier, wealthier, and more literate, they turn
away from premodern belief systems, and this transformation often occurs
without revolution or even the awareness of most people.
One of the strangest things about our global progress is that people
think we are actually regressing, and few people understand what is really
happening. This lack of awareness introduces a philosophical problem
since we have been taught by the Enlightenment itself that social progress
is driven by conscious knowledge. The question then is how has modern
reason been able to restructure the world when most people appear to be
ignorant of this process? The central answer is that progress has been main
tained by social institutions and practices that transcend the consciousness
of individual people. In other words, we have created shared systems that
can function without most people understanding how they work.9 The next
question is if these social formations get the job done without our aware
ness, why do we need to learn about them, and the two main answers are
that we have to defend these structures against countering forces, and we
have to continue to build new structures that are shaped by these ideals.
The understanding of the ideology of modern liberalism is thus essential
to both of these tasks, and this need to understand and defend modernity is
the driving motivation behind this book.10
Beyond Religion
While many early modern thinkers believed that we should take on reli
gion directly in order to clear a space for science, reason, and democracy,
others have insisted on separating religion from the state in a form of a
permanent cease-fire.11 Not only has the latter option proved to be more
peaceful, but it also has functioned to allow for progress to occur in a more
subtle and unconscious manner. However, there were some early mod
ern thinkers like Condorcet who did insist that only a direct confrontation
between modernity and premodern religion could enable reason to flour
ish (4). For Condorcet, religion had to be overcome because it kept people
in slavery and ignorance, and so the only way to allow people to be free
and rational was to reject the illusions generated by premodern magical
thinking.12 However, in reality, modernity has extended its influence not
predominantly by a violent confrontation with the premodern but through
the very tools of modernity itself: reason, universality, individual freedom,
and critical introspection.
However, as Pagden points out, the more modernity actually suc
ceeds in shaping our world, the more people seem to not believe in its
ideals or achievements (5). One reason why the success of the modern
Enlightenment has been repressed is that as we develop more international
democratic institutions, we also see a rise of reactionary nationalism, and
the increased visibility of the Right-wing backlash gets most of the media
attention.13 Part of the cause of this problem is that the media feed off of
immediate negative stories, and they have a hard time discussing slow
global progress.14 Moreover, humans have a tendency to take progress for
granted as they quickly adjust to the new normal.15 For example, many
women in college say that they dislike feminism, but they would not be
in school if it was not for the previous women’s rights social movement.16
Since we are blind to global progress and the ideals that shape our
world, we are unable to believe that we can fix problems like climate
change or dire poverty. However, the only way that we will gain confi
dence in our ability to overcome huge global problems is if we recognize
what we have done successfully in the past. It is therefore essential to
understand the history and philosophy of global progress, and here we
see why the humanities still matter in education.17 If we do not study our
history or the ideas shaping our history, we will be blind to ourselves and
the world around us. As Pagden insists, the Enlightenment was an age of
philosophy, and this type of philosophical thinking was grounded on the
combination of doubt and shared logic: “It was a period that sought to
overturn every intellectual assumption, every dogma, every ‘prejudice’
(a favorite term) that had previously exercised any hold over the minds
of men” (11). As Kant argues, a key aspect of reason is that it must be
held to public criticism; thus, any idea or belief should be open to public
scrutiny, and this definition of reason makes it both social and undog
matic.18 Not only must one learn to critique the ideas of others, but one
has to critique one’s own ideas, and here we see how Freud’s theory of
the reality principle comes into play.
Freud and Neutrality

Freud thought that because people are so driven by the pleasure principle
to avoid all tension and conflict, it is not natural or inevitable for people
to accept the reality of their lives.19 Since our minds can transcend reality,
we are prone to magical thinking, and we have a hard time differentiating
between our desires and actuality.20 Moreover, humans are prone to submit
to the ideas of others, and so they are often ignorant of their own beliefs. It
is thus a challenge for people to use reason and test reality, but they need
to learn how to separate their own self-interest and bias from how they
see themselves and the world around them, and the main way this type
of advancement occurs is through a slow process of mourning and dis
investing in previous thoughts and feelings.21 Furthermore, the analytic
process helps motivate this process by creating an artificial relationship
where the analyst refuses to judge the patient, and the patient learns how
to speak without judging himself or herself.
The psychoanalytic notions of analytic neutrality and free association
dovetail with the modern ideal of critical introspection and scientific and
democratic impartiality.22 Since these are human ideals constructed out
of social negotiation, they do not occur naturally through the process of
natural selection. As a practice of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis
begins with Freud’s own self-analysis in his Interpretation of Dreams,
and yet Freud’s own work was limited by the fact that he was not ana
lyzed by someone else.23 The reason why every psychoanalyst needs to
be analyzed is that not only does the analyst have to become aware of
his or her own prejudices and biases, but it is necessary to work through
how we transfer responsibility onto other people and entities.24 Just as
the scientist or politician needs to be open to public scrutiny, the psycho
analyst has to be analyzed by another person, but this person cannot act
as the one who knows because one can only discover one’s truth through
experience.25
Global Institutions
In terms of contemporary politics and ideology, modern liberalism requires
a self-critical global perspective based on reason and universal human
rights, and yet currently we see little evidence of this type of politics.26
After all, there is no global party, and even politicians in global institu
tions, like the United Nations, tend to be centered on national perspec
tives; however, if we want to deal with global issues like pandemics and
climate change, then we have to realize that all politics is global now, and
so we have to move beyond the limits of the nation-state.27 In fact, we are
seeing an increase in international organizations, but we still do not have a
politics to match this globalizing process.
For many people, globalization is still equated with the spread of
multinational corporations, and this economic version of universality is
often seen in a negative light because any and every social problem can
be blamed on this amorphous, all-encompassing system.28 While I do not
want to deny many of the negative effects of contemporary global capi
talism, it is also important to realize that the average global standard of
living has never been higher, and more people have been lifted out of the
dire period in the last 50 years (1970–2020) than in the entire history of
humankind.29 Unfortunately, this important history is repressed behind
the focus on the concentration of wealth and disruptive events like the
COVID-19 pandemic, and so most people do not know the positive aspects
of global capitalism. From the perspective of modernity, capitalism is a
necessary social institution because it allows for an increase in social and
geographical mobility and interdependence.30 As Marx himself insisted,
modern capitalism melts away all traditional beliefs and structures as it
spreads around the world connecting diverse people together.31 Since the
three main social institutions of modernity are science, democracy, and
capitalism, it is important to understand how they relate to each other and
what they share in common. However, many academic historians and poli
ticians have a Left-wing ideological response to global capitalism, and so
they have limited our comprehension to this vital issue.32
Modern Ideology
Returning to Pagden’s historical account of the Enlightenment, we see that
he tends to separate discussion of modern capitalism from his analysis of sci
ence and democracy, but what connects all three of these modern institutions
is that according to Condorcet, they offer an alternative to the premodern
way of seeing the world: “they possess a truth which was independent of the
dogmas of religion, of fundamentals, and of sects.” While modern thinkers
sought to replace religious dogma and prejudice with a new morality based
on reason and critical self-analysis, they ran into the problem of how to build
an ideology that was itself anti-ideological. Thus, even if we say that science
is grounded on the bias against bias, this principle is itself a type of bias, and
so there is no way of completely escaping from the realm of ideology.33 The
question then becomes what ideology is best for all of humankind.
A paradox of modern ideology, then, is that it wants to produce a shared
social order, but it also needs to provide freedom of thought to individu
als. The solution to this problem is centered on a dialectical process where
critical introspection is coupled with social institutions that are themselves
open to scrutiny and continual revision.34 In fact, the most apparent aspect
of this modern dialectic is evident in the way modern liberalism counters
premodern conservative ideology:
For MacIntyre, all that the Enlightenment project had aimed at was the
application of the rational intellect to the murky reaches of the human
mind, wherein lurked the menacing, disruptive forces of prejudice,
religion, superstition, uncontrolled and unimagined emotions, eve
rything that conspired to deprive the autonomous individual of self-
knowledge and self-control.
(11)
Since the only way to have public institutions that are non-dogmatic is to
make sure that they are open to criticism, this is only possible if people
are provided with rights protecting their freedom of speech and thought.35
Moreover, if we want people to be able to judge these institutions, we have
to educate them and motivate them to use reason and not magical think
ing. Many of the world’s democratic institutions are based on this logic,
but it is clearly a work in progress to get people to use reason to fairly and
accurately judge themselves and their social institutions.
From this perspective, education and parenting are essential in training
democratic citizens, but due to its commitment to individual freedom, a
democracy cannot tell its people how to raise their children or what to
teach their students.36 Therefore, an essential conflict of modernity is the
need to allow for both individual freedom and rational social organiza
tion at the same time. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this conflict
can never be resolved, and the real problem occurs when we attempt to
repress it or solve it on an imaginary level. Since we will never transcend
the fundamental conflict between society and the individual, we have to
learn how to acknowledge it and accept it.37 This process requires also
accepting complexity, ambiguity, and ambivalence, which goes against
the pleasure principle’s drive to escape any tension or conflict. In fact,
for psychoanalysis, anxiety is a necessary sign of the inescapable con
flicts shaping human existence, but that does not mean that we should
give up trying to make our world more just and understandable.38 As
Pagden insists, the key to the Enlightenment is the role played by con
tinual doubt, which should fuel our desire to improve by never accepting
anything without scrutiny (12). From this perspective, education should
not be about memorizing facts and information; rather, education should
be focused on critical analysis, and nothing should be protected from
public scrutiny.39
In contrast to this promotion of modern reason, a problem with the
current Left-wing ideology is that it often seeks to shut down discus
sions of issues because they may offend someone, but if we want to
pursue liberal globalism, then we have to make sure that any and every
idea can come into question.40 From this perspective, identity and iden
tity politics have to be suspended so that truth can be discovered, but
this does not mean that everyone is entitled to their own facts or that
educators should spend time discussing opinions.41 The solution to this
contemporary educational problem is to concentrate on the analysis of
facts and the methodologies used to examine those facts. Moreover,
instead of engaging in opinions and political beliefs, students should
study how opinions and ideologies are constructed and maintained. As
I have argued throughout this book, his process requires using the con
cepts of psychoanalysis to clarify the unconscious processes shaping
our beliefs and emotional responses.42 However, what we are currently
seeing is the attempt to base human thought on inherited mental pro
grams, and this ideology not only robs us of our freedom, but it also
blocks us from seeing the role culture and subjectivity play in con
structing social institutions.43
The Morality of Modern Science

From a conservative perspective, what is wrong with the modern liberal
world view is the focus on science (12). Since conservatives do not see
how modern science and democracy have their own moral virtues and
principles, they argue that a world based on modernity will be void of
any ethical judgments.44 Yet, as I have been arguing, modern ideology
is structured by the principles of equality, empiricism, autonomy, and
impartiality, and these ideals are moral virtues, but the problem is that we
rarely teach these ideals from the perspective of ethics.45
Since few people understand the meaning and the effects of modern
liberalism, this ideology is often rejected and attacked for its lack of mean
ing or morality:
What had once been looked upon as a means to liberty was now
described as a form of enslavement; what had once sought to expose
intellectual confusion and the deceptions perpetrated by religion and
the uncritical adherence to custom was now seen as itself a form of
deception.
(12)
From the perspective of many conservatives and Right-wing reactionar

ies, the modern world is a soulless place void of meaning and purpose, but
these ideological views must be seen as predicated on a radical misunder
standing of modernity itself.46 Since modern institutions are often able to
function effectively with few people understanding what they are or how
they work, they are easily attacked and dismissed. In fact, most of the criti
cisms of modern reason use modern reason to make their arguments, and
here they reveal the power of the very discourse they seek to reject. Since
we would not even try to communicate with others if we did not think that
they were capable of reason, the very act of writing to a public implies an
endorsement of modern values and processes.47 Likewise, if we assume
that everyone will interpret whatever we say based on their own prejudices
and magical thinking, then we would have no reason to say anything at all.
Underlying modernity, thus, is a commitment to the principles of social
communication, and once a person tries to be understood by others, one is
living under the logic of modern rationality.
Even if we misunderstand each other, and we do not even fully under
stand ourselves, we cannot help but play by the ideals of reason when
we communicate with other people. In a process of pragmatic idealism,
we assume that our words relate to a shared reality and that our intended
meanings will be understood by ourselves and others, and through a pro
cess of approximation and trial and error, we manage to make things hap
pen in the world through our communications.48 This process is never
perfect or complete, but it often gets the job done, and just like the ideals
shaping modernity are necessary but impossible, our social interactions
require an unstated belief in pragmatic idealism. Not only do we expect
others to rationally process our words in good faith, but we also open
our own discourse up to the possibility of criticism whether we like it or
not. As psychoanalysis teaches us, behind every request to another per
son, there is a fundamental demand for unconditional recognition, love,
and understanding, but there is also an awareness that any demand can be
rejected.49 Modernity takes this conception of communication and uses it
to structure our social institutions so that our social worlds can be open to
scientific understanding and equal justice.
Rejecting Modernity
Since very few people understand the values and principles supporting our
social structures, they often reject the systems that make our lives possi
ble. One form of this rejection has been to tie the Enlightenment to every
historical tragedy that has happened during the modern period:
any belief in any species of universalism could only lead down the
road that Europe itself had supposedly traveled, from the delusions
of Enlightenment to nationalism, imperialism, and pseudo-scientific
racism to the mass mobilization of “scientific socialism” and finally,
inexorably, to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
(13)
The main problem with this common criticism of modernity is that it fails
to distinguish between the Enlightenment and the reactions to this philoso
phy.50 Since modern liberalism is an ideology promoting universal human
rights, it is hard to connect it to imperialism, fascism, or Stalinism.51 These
political ideologies are most often a reaction to modern and postmodern
calls for justice and equality; the post-postmodern Right-wing ideology
then should be seen as a direct response to postmodern social movements
for minority rights.52 However, many ideologues on the Left seek to reject
global modern liberalism because they see it as a fake form of equality that
only protects special groups and often serves to promote imperial expan
sion, totalitarian thinking, and the rejection of premodern cultures.53
As Pagden points out, one critique of modernity that continues to circu
late today is the Romantic argument that a society based on reason alone
is a society without any values or morality:
All the intellectual revolutions of the nineteenth century, to which the

Romantics themselves had unwittingly contributed, the rise of nation
alism, the collapse of the human sciences created by “the inflexible
Encyclopedists” into Positivism and racism—that “self-assertion of
the bourgeois individual integrated within a barbaric collective”—and
finally neo-Darwinism, eugenics, and the like; all of these and many
more were, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, but the inevitable out
come of the eighteenth-century bid to live by reason alone.
(14)
In response to this effort to equate modern reason with totalitarianism, I have

focused on the way that the Enlightenment offers a counter to a premodern
order based on social hierarchy, prejudice, and authoritarianism. From this
perspective, when modern nations seek to exert their will on others, they
are combining modern science and knowledge with premodern ideology.54
In other words, it is the failure of modernity to achieve its own ideals that
pushes leaders and followers to return to a system of strict social inequality.
Moreover, I have stressed that there is a morality to modern science, and
this involves the necessary but impossible ideals of equality, impartiality,
and empiricism. Although some on the Left would like to connect modern
capitalism to the invention of racism and slavery, it should be clear that these
social formations are derived from premodern ideology.55
As Pagden highlights, another criticism by the Left of modernity is that
science and reason lead to dehumanization and the treatment of others as
merely objects to be calculated and used:
Postcolonialists and the more radical opponents of “globalization”

have cast the Enlightenment, as Adorno and Horkheimer cast it, as the
apotheosis of a rationalism that scorns difference and, in the name of
science, devastates the environment; strips indigenous peoples of their
moral dignity, legal rights, and if possible their cultural identities; and
condemns more than two-thirds of the population of the world to penury
and misery in order to supply the excessive wants of the other third.
(15)
As Pinker shows, a major problem with this criticism is that it is the com
bination of modern science, capitalism, and democracy that has helped to
bring billions of people out of dire poverty, and while climate change does
threaten our existence, there is no way to counter this problem if we do
not turn to science itself.56 While the Left is correct in pointing to wealth
inequality as a major global issue, it is vital to focus on the eradication of
global poverty instead of simply demonizing the rich.57 Furthermore, glo
balization does produce a conflict between premodern cultures and mod
ern science and democracy, but it should be clear that we are moving away
from premodern systems structured by social hierarchy, prejudice, faith,
fate, and religious authority.58 It is simply an empirical fact that fewer
people are defining their lives through religion, and as the world becomes
more globalized, local prejudices and discriminations are reduced. One
problem is that we tend to focus on the failures of global modernity and
not its successes.
My argument is not that we should simply ignore the real social and
subjective issues in the world today, but we need to put them in a long-
term global perspective so that we can detect important trends, and many
of these trends move in the direction of increased health, wealth, literacy,
and human rights. Yet, from the ideology of the Left, global progress is
often equated with Western imperialism:
Empires may be no more, but the universal spirit of the Enlightenment

that had made those of the nineteenth century so successful did not
vanish with them. It merely changed its language. Enlightenment sup
poses, in the words of the English philosopher John Gray, a “univer
sal emancipation and a universal civilization.” But in reality, this is
merely another name for “western cultural imperialism.”
(15)
Pagden presents here the typical Left-wing criticism of Enlightenment

universality and globalization; instead of realizing the incredible progress
that has been made in the world over the last two hundred years, Left-
wing ideology is often predicated on taking on a victim-based perspective
where capitalism and other global institutions are seen as evil perpetrators
bent on hiding their destruction under a veil of good intentions.59 Although
I have been also critical of the way liberal centrists often promote their
good intentions, while they hide the negative effects of their actions, the
Leftist critique of globalization and the Enlightenment is predicated on a
repression of empirical evidence indicating global progress. Not only have
we never had fewer wars in the world, but the extension of human lifes
pans must be seen as an indication that something is working.60
Just as we are seeing a global Right-wing backlash against democracy
and democratic institutions, we also find in many Left-wing criticisms a
similar turn against the Enlightenment institutions of science, capitalism,
and democracy:
The project that had begun in the eighteenth century as a bid to free
every individual from his or her dependence upon the rigid social and
moral codes by which the powers, secular and religious, of the old
regime had kept their subjects in check and to create a fit social world
in which all human beings might flourish had, by the twentieth century,
evolved into little more than the attempt by a self-convinced European
elite to impose its own will and its own image upon the entire world.
(15)
From a postmodern perspective, we must respect the values and practices

of every culture and society, and so the push for a globalized world can
only be a source of oppression. This form of moral relativism prevents us
from taking any hard stand on universal human rights because it privileges
the particular over the universal.61 However, since we are seeing both the
increase in human lifespans and a decrease in religious authority in the
daily lives of people all over the world, then it should be clear that there
are moral principles that should be affirmed by all people and cultures.
In other words, if we take the extension of lifespans as a founding moral
good, then we have to determine what has caused this good to occur, and
as Pinker convincingly shows, it is the modern mixture of science, democ
racy, and capitalism that has been responsible for this progress, and these
modern institutions can be traced back to the necessary but impossible
Enlightenment ideals of universality, empiricism, and objectivity.
Promoting Modernity
Our world, therefore, has been improved by a group of ideas that have
restructured our lives and have countered a set of conservative ideals cen
tered on the premodern conservation of social hierarchies through faith,
fate, and belief. Thus, instead of seeing reason as a Eurocentric form
of tyranny, we need to think of this way of thinking as the surest path
for global human progress. Turning to Kant, Pagden seeks to define the
Enlightenment as a new mode of society centered on freeing individuals
from premodern social hierarchies: “It was, as Kant argued in the most
famous of the many replies that Zöllner received to his troubling ques
tion, reason that would allow the still infantile person to exit from its
‘self-incurred minority’” (16). Just as Freud posits that humans develop
by replacing their dependency on others with the freedom of their own
thought and speech, Kant believed that the key to social progress was the
autonomy of thought, but we should not confuse this promotion of free
thinking with the libertarian backlash against society.62 Instead, for Kant,
individual freedom is protected by universal social laws and norms that
are the result of human intervention and not some natural or divine order.63
Of course, a limitation of Kant’s own thought is that he excluded certain
groups, like women, from being part of the universal law, yet, his phi
losophy has helped to build a social system that transcends the premodern
investment in prejudice, predetermination, and a naturalized social order.64
Similar to the way Descartes places doubt at the heart of science, Kant
realized that the only way for people to pursue reason was for them to
question all previous knowledge and authority:
Enlightenment would allow the individual to walk by himself. It would

liberate him (and increasingly her) from the constraints that had been
placed upon him. But to achieve this end, he had to question what his
pastor, his doctor, the books he had read, even his ruler had to say.
(16)
I have tied this process of enlightenment to psychoanalysis because at the
center of analytic practice is the principle of free association, which tells
the patient to say whatever comes to his or her mind without any type of
judgment.65 By speaking without censoring, one learns how to suspend
one’s dependency on the judgments of others, and this suspension is made
possible through the neutrality of the analyst, who must also learn to stop
relying on knowledge that is already there.66 As a bias against bias, mod
ern Enlightenment thus issues in a cultural order where all authorities have
to be called into question, and yet people still need something in which to
believe.67 From the perspective of global modernity, individual autonomy
must be combined with the acceptance of the ideals of reason, which as I
have stressed are necessary but impossible to fully achieve.
As a modern thinker, Freud defined science and the reality principle by
the acceptance of the limits of our knowledge.68 Instead of seeing psychoa
nalysis as providing a total view of the self and the world, Freud followed
Kant in affirming that not everything can be known, and we get in trouble
when we believe that total knowledge is possible.69 The paradox, then, of the
Enlightenment is that that a culture focused on knowledge ends up discover
ing what is unknown and unknowable. Freud called this acceptance of the
limits of knowledge, humility, and unlike current evolutionary psycholo
gists and neurosciences, he affirmed that even our own self-knowledge is
highly limited.70 However, our lack of knowledge fuels a desire for more
knowledge, and this quest to know the truth drives our science and should
be the heart of our educational systems. Sadly, much of the way people are
taught today emphasizes the memorization and assessment of knowledge
that is already there, and so the desire to know is often effaced.71 We have
therefore created modern institutions that undermine modernity itself.
Throughout this book, I have argued that we need psychoanalysis to
understand the main political ideologies, and in the case of what I am call
ing modern liberal globalism, we see that not only does psychoanalytic
theory and practice help us to understand the meaning of reason in our
daily lives and social structures, but as Pagden insists, the Enlightenment
is itself based on the need to define human nature:
For at the core of the “Enlightenment project” was an attempt to dis

cover a new definition of nothing less than human nature itself. And
this required far more than the simple application of unfettered rea
son. It required, first, an understanding of the “passions,” in particular
those passions that in the eighteenth century were referred to as “sen
timents.” It required a complete revaluation of the sources of human
sociability.
(16)
The modern break with the conservative premodern ideology and social
hierarchy not only required a new set of social institutions but also a new
way of understanding human subjectivity. It turns out that if you want to
change the social order, you also have to develop a theory of how the mind
works, and psychoanalysis can help us to think about this process since
much of our ways of being are unconscious and irrational. Not only is it
important to comprehend how reason works in our minds, but we also have
to think about emotions, intersubjectivity, and passionate attachments.
Pagden argues that the Enlightenment promotes the idea that our
human nature has nothing to do with divinity, and it must be consid
ered to be universal: “The ‘science of man’ was to be, as the natural
sciences had now become, resolutely secular. The second was that there
exists a universal ‘human nature,’ which could be understood wherever
it was found” (17). This focus on the universality of the human mind
still remains highly controversial because it appears to hide Eurocentrism
under the cover of global equality. Just as psychoanalysis has been criti
cized for not taking into consideration larger social, historical, and cul
tural factors, it has been argued that the Enlightenment’s investment in
universality blinds it from seeing important differences.72 However, I
have been arguing that like psychoanalysis, the model of the human mind
presented by modernity combines together an understanding of the inter
action among nature, culture, and subjectivity through the application of
the shared ideals of objectivity and empiricism. It is vital to stress that
these ideas create an open system that is constantly being transformed,
but its key principles remain intact. For instance, in psychoanalytic prac
tice, each case is unique, but the same technique is applied in most cases,
and this technique is derived from a set of universal principles: freedom,
neutrality, and introspection.73 Since the reality principle tells us that our
knowledge is always incomplete, and we can never fully escape reality
or our own memories, the universal method of free speech results in an
acknowledgment of the limits of our knowledge coupled with a desire to
know more. Once again, while the process is universal, the experience
and content are always unique and singular.
From the perspective of modern democracy, each vote should be equal
to the next, and everyone should have equal access to the law through the
same due processes and the same equal treatment.74 What some people on
the Left object to this aspect of Enlightenment universality is that the law
is never fully equal, and there are always prejudices and biases shaping
the system.75 I have argued that these biases come from premodern social
hierarchies, and it is the desire of modern reason to escape bias through
critical introspection, yet, this process does not always work. Likewise,
psychoanalysts are supposed to be analyzed, in part, so they can overcome
their own bias as they become committed to analytic neutrality. However,
some critics of Freud have argued that this notion of neutrality is cold
and impersonal and serves to block important social factors.76 However,
what this criticism misses is the idea that psychoanalysis is based on the
construction of an artificial social relationship that counters our everyday
experience of ourselves and our social worlds. This break from the every
day is necessary because people have to suspend their usual way of seeing
themselves and the world around them.77
Like psychoanalysis, then, modern democratic reason requires a break
from our natural and learned modes of thinking and speaking, and this
break is founded on the artificial ideal of neutrality. To be neutral is to
treat everything the same without bias, which is the core of universality,
equality, and globality.78 Although impartiality can be accused for being
impersonal and indifferent, modern law has actually proven to be the best
protection for individual rights.79 Moreover, the need to provide equal
treatment for all people under the law helps to fight against the influence
of prejudice, discrimination, and bias, and yet the current backlash against
modern democracy continues to come from the Left and the Right. As we
have seen, according to the ideology of the Left, the quest for universal
human rights continues to fail because there always remain injustices and
biases. Likewise, the Right often sees modern institutions as undermining
a desire for social hierarchy and a return to a premodern mode of social
order. However, since it is impossible to kill an idea, Pagden insists that
even with all of the reactions to the Enlightenment project, it continues
to expand and shape our world: “Enlightenment was a continual process
that might never be completed. But what all those who participated in it
were certain of was that it could not now be reversed” (21). Just as our
knowledge is never complete, the project of the Enlightenment is never
completed, and this makes the universal dynamic and pragmatic. As many
commentators have argued, it is rare for a country to go from being a
modern democracy to some other non-democratic form, and it is also rare
for two democracies to go to war with each other, even though there have
been important exceptions.80 Furthermore, once people have a taste of
individual freedom, it is hard for them to go back to a state of enslavement
or social control. It is also difficult to repress a new technology or scien
tific discovery, and so the path of history might not be in a straight line,
but it always moves in the same direction.
Pagden highlights how most of the modern revolution has been peace
ful and imperceptible even though it did require a series of violent wars
between different Christian sects. Once, the hold of Catholic social organi
zation lost its grip, even the growth of non-Catholic forms of Christianity
did not lead to the return of theocracies in most parts of the world.81
However, as Pagden admits, this break with religious determinism did
result in a sense of a loss of meaning and purpose for many Europeans:
Europeans who had once lived in a world of theological certainty and

who had, at least at the level of belief, all shared a common culture
now found themselves adrift. And since theology had provided the
basis not only of their understanding of their relationship with God but
also of their moral and even their physical worlds, they were driven to
reexamine not merely all the old certainties but, more significantly, all
the older methods of inquiry.
(30)
From a conservative ideological perspective, modernity is a destructive

force because it removes the source of meaning and purpose from peo
ple’s lives, and yet, we have seen that what the Enlightenment brings is
the combination of individual freedom and a new set of democratic and
scientific values centered on equality and neutrality. One problem is that
we rarely see science as having a set of moral ideals, and so it is easy to
see reason as a meaningless social force. It is also important to emphasize
that when people are taught to question all prejudices and authorities, they
may at first feel lost and full of anxiety.82 There is also a risk that the ethic
of doubt will spread to science itself, and so we have to understand that
with the reality principle and the scientific method, doubt is coupled with
empiricism and the use of shared methods and concepts of analysis.
The Reason of Unreason

One of the paradoxes that Freud discovered in relation to free association
was that even when you tell people to just say whatever comes into their
mind, their thoughts do follow a specific logical order.83 Likewise, when
Freud studied irrational human thoughts, he was always quick to show
that there was a reason to the unreason, and therefore, even when we are
the most free from social constraint, our thinking does follow certain laws
and patterns.84 Since our mind is structured by a network of memories, the
movement between our thoughts travels according to specific connections
and possibilities.85 Through psychoanalytic treatment, we discover that we
are both free and determined by relationships we cannot control. Central
to this type of enlightenment is the acceptance that we will always have to
deal with the conflict between freedom and predetermination, and so there
is no reason to try to escape this inevitable tension.
Even though psychoanalysis is a modern discourse based on universal
reason, it has often been attacked for not being scientific.86 One possible
reason for this dismissal of psychoanalytic practice and theory is that peo
ple misunderstand the core aspects of science itself. Through its combi
nation of neutrality, empiricism, transparency, and critical introspection,
science should be thought of as the application of the reality principle to
all aspects of the self and society. Although some people would like to
separate the humanities from the sciences in an effort to base our under
standing of humans on biological determinism, I have argued here that
the humanities and psychoanalysis help us to see the ways our world is
shaped by certain moral ideals, which often function without our con
scious awareness.
Since global progress often happens behind our backs, it is easy to take
it for granted and not to think about the ideals shaping this belief system.
However, as I have argued throughout this book, we need to defend mod
ern reason by understanding the psychopathology of everyday political
ideologies. If we do not understand the ways people react to universal
human rights, then we will be unable to sustain our move to a more perfect
social organization. Of course, true perfection will never be achieved, but
this lack of achievement fuels our desire for more enlightenment.
Notes
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7 Conclusion
Throughout this work, I have returned to Lacan’s interpretation of Freud’s

theory in order to present a systemic understanding of the ways differ
ent political ideologies relate to each other. On the most basic level, this
structure helps us to understand how the premodern conservative protec
tion of cultural ideals through an investment in faith, fate, and hierarchy
was undermined by the modern focus on reason, universality, empiricism,
and neutrality. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this history represents
the gradual replacement of the ego-ideal with the reality-testing ego.
However, since this process of Enlightenment is never complete, we are
still dealing with the ongoing conflict between premodern social hierarchy
and the modern quest for universality and individual autonomy.
One way then of understanding the contemporary postmodern Left is to
realize that it is driven by minority-based (women, people of color, LGBTQ
social movements seeking to reverse premodern hierarchies and realize the
goal of modern universal human rights. The central way that these postmod
ern protests and resistances respond to injustice and inequality is by identi
fying with the censoring and shaming super-ego: thus, in order to promote
progressive social change, progressive social movements try to get others to
feel guilty, ashamed, and responsible for exploitation, abuse, and inequality.
In turn, the contemporary Right is driven to defend their fantasy of total free
dom and enjoyment, and so they perceive the politically correct Leftist super
ego as a form of castration threatening to limit and control their impulsive ids.
On a schematic level, we can understand this structure in the following way:
DOI: 10.4324/9781003199649-7
110 Conclusion
In re-purposing Lacan’s Schema L, I have focused on how the Leftist
super-ego is in a conflicted relationship with the Right-wing id, while the
conservative ego-ideal is countered by the modern liberal reality-testing
ego.1
An additional aspect of my argument has been that moderate, centrist
ideology is structured by an obsessional and narcissistic need to repress
conflict and to signal one’s virtue to others.2 This new form of liberalism
should be placed in the middle of the previous diagram because it is cen
tered on overcoming the difference between the premodern hierarchy and
modern equality through a double alienation where one becomes an other
for the social Other:3
On one level, we can think of these middle-ground moderates as trying

to find a compromise solution to the conflicts generated by the opposi
tion between the other ideologies. For instance, someone like Joe Biden
likes to preach a message of unity and bi-partisan negotiation. However,
on another level, it is essential to point out that this desire for harmony is
often driven by the repression of conflict and the presentation of a false
ideal self-recognized by a false imaginary other. Since two wrongs do not
make a right, when you try to combine two opposed ideological distor
tions, what you often end up with is a lost ability to address reality in an
impartial and empirical way.
Instead of the liberal center being the ideology of science and democ
racy, it often ends up catering to the demand to have others recognize one
as being good, innocent, and knowing.4 This demand for recognition ends
up repressing feelings of guilt, shame, and responsibility as one engages in
a public display of morality in order to prove to oneself and others that one
is full of good intentions. Thus, one reason why people on the Right often
see centrist liberals as being hypocritical, fake, and patronizing is that the
centrist ideology is driven by the imaginary relation between an ideal ego
and an ideal Other.5 This double idealization represents an escape from
reality through the repression of conflict, guilt, shame, and individual
responsibility. However, as psychoanalysis teaches us, we can never fully
escape reality or the return of our own thoughts, feelings, memories, and
Conclusion 111
impulses. Since the repressed always returns, the moderate centrists are
doomed to repeat the same missed encounter between truth and justice.6
It is my hope that this understanding of the psychopathology of politi
cal ideologies will help us move to a more rational and universal model of
politics. This transformation is necessary because, in order to fight global
problems like pandemics, climate change, and financial panics, it is vital
to turn to the modern Enlightenment and an understanding of human sub
jectivity based on psychoanalysis. Instead of repressing our conflicts and
signaling our virtues, we have to perceive empirical reality with an open
mind and a willingness to be corrected. We also have to stop relying on
faith and fate or some higher power to resolve our conflicts as we work
through our transferences and idealizations. Rather than pursuing our own
pleasure and escaping from difficult problems, we need to give up the
fantasies of unlimited enjoyment and freedom. This process also entails
breaking with the polarized structure of the innocent victim opposed by
the evil perpetrator. While we should not deny the importance of counter
ing all forms of exploitation and abuse, we have to resist the temptation of
using suffering as the justification for vengeful aggression. These changes
in our politics will only occur if we not only understand the unconscious
processes shaping our ideologies, but we also need to act by giving up our
passionate attachments to destructive impulses.
Notes
1 Lacan, Jacques. “On the possible treatment of psychosis.” Écrits: A selection
(1959).
2 Saltman, Kenneth J. “‘Privilege-checking,’ ‘virtue-signaling,’ and ‘safe
spaces’: What happens when cultural politics is privatized and the body
replaces argument.” symplokē 26.1–2 (2017): 403–409.
3 Samuels, Robert. “Transference and narcissism.” Freud for the twenty-first
4 Lander, Christian. Stuff white people like: A definitive guide to the unique taste
of millions. Random House, 2008.
revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” Reading French Psychoanalysis
(1949): 119–126.
6 Freud, Sigmund. “Repression.” The Psychoanalytic Review (1913–1957) 9
(1922): 444.
Index
Aalbers, Manuel B. 50 binary 2, 17, 31, 36–38, 54, 83

academic discourse 6, 10, 14–16, 19, 39, biological determinism 1, 8, 9, 20–22, 24,
62, 74, 81, 92 29, 38, 104
Adam, Emily L. 28 Bolton, Derek, et al. 71
Alcoff, Linda Martín, and Satya P. Boothby, Richard 70
Mohanty 85 borderline personality 4, 6, 12, 13, 28, 48
Alexander, Franz 108 Bowler, Kate 72
Althusser, Louis 69 Boyle, James 6
ambiguity 12, 31, 94 Bracher, Mark 69
ambivalence 12, 31, 94 brain science 6, 8, 9, 18, 27, 29, 49,
anti-social 9 71, 105
anxiety 10, 39, 40, 94, 104 Brennan Jr, William J. 86
Appadurai, Arjun 105 Brenner, Charles 106
aristocracy 10 Brunner, José 87
Aristotle 23, 53–55, 62, 69, 70 Budak, Ceren, Sharad Goel, and Justin M.
Arlow, Jacob A. 85 Rao 29
Arnason, Johann P. 6 Bunge, Mario 86
Aune, James Arnt 72 Burk, Edmund 2, 6, 51, 59
authority 15–16, 24, 26, 53, 55, 59, 61, Burks, Arthur W. 107
98–100 Burt, Andrew 86
automodern 29
Callander, Steven, and Catherine H.
backlash 1, 9, 10, 15, 19, 25, 28, 29, 51, Wilson 49
52, 54, 56, 62, 64, 65, 68–71, 74, 84, 87, Campbell, Bradley, and Jason Manning
88, 90, 99–99, 102, 107 6, 85
Barrett, Louise, Robin Dunbar, and John Campbell, Mary B., et al. 108
Lycett 27 capitalism 2–3, 5, 6, 15, 17, 32, 45, 48, 55,
Barry, Norman 86 56, 62, 68–70, 92, 97–99, 106
Bauman, Zygmunt 86 Carser, Diane 87
behavioral economics 9, 49 censorship 4, 56, 81
belief 1, 3, 5, 8–11, 16, 17, 21, 23, 24, centrist 1, 4, 11, 37, 40–45, 61–65, 73,
27, 28, 35–37, 41–43, 46–47, 52, 53, 76–82, 88, 110
57–62, 79, 88, 89, 91–92, 94–96, 99, Chambless, Dianne L. 86
103, 104, 108 Chatterjee, Partha 86
Bendroth, Margaret 71 Cheah, Pheng 107
Berleant, Arnold 72 Cho, Daniel 71
Bernasconi, Robert 107 Christian 15, 16, 47, 57, 66, 69, 71, 103
Bernstein, Richard J. 30 Chua, Amy 29
bias 1, 3, 5, 11, 15–21, 29, 31, 35, 39, 44, Clifton, Brett M. 71
46–48, 75–82, 84, 91–93, 100, 102 cognitive psychology 14, 27, 50
114 Index
Cole, Alyson Manda 6, 48 Enlightenment, the 2, 6, 17, 29, 48, 68, 84,
Cole, Andrew 71 88–109, 111
compromise-formation 11, 106 entertainment 32–33
Conservative 1–4, 10, 14–15, 21, Epstein, Charlotte 107
23–27, 29, 31, 35, 37–38, 42, 45, 46, 49, Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs 69
51–68, 71–73, 77, 84, 88, 93–95, 99, equality 5, 16–17, 25–26, 35–36, 41,
101, 103, 109 44–45, 58–59, 68, 73–76, 88, 94, 96–97,
conspiracy theories 19 101–103, 108, 110
Contu, Alessia 50 Esposito, John L. 70
COVID–19 5, 92 Etengoff, Chana, and Tyler G. Lefevor 70
Coward, Rosalind 108 ethics 3, 30, 94
Crane-Seeber, Jesse, and Betsy Crane 30 evolution 9, 11, 19–23, 32, 35
Cresswell, Tim 106 evolutionary psychology 1, 8–10, 12, 14,
critical introspection 2, 35, 44, 75, 78, 83, 19–24, 26, 27, 29–30, 32, 35, 60, 69, 71,
90, 91, 93, 102, 104 100, 107
culture war 22–23, 68 exploitation 5, 17, 52, 60, 109, 111
Cummins, Denise 69, 71
cynical conformity 34, 40, 42, 48 fairness 16, 24–26
Falbo, Toni, and James A. Shepperd 70
D’Antonio, Michael, and Peter Feagin, Joe 86
Eisner 70 Featherstone, Mike, ed. 107
delusion 18, 36, 96 feudalism 3, 12, 51
democracy 2–3, 5, 15, 17, 25, 26, Fink, Bruce 69
32, 35–36, 42, 44–47, 49, 62, 77, 79, Foster, Hal 72
82, 90, 92–94, 97–99, 102, 103, 105, Foucault, Michel 71
108, 110 Frank, Thomas 72, 85
Democrat 1, 41 Fraser, Nancy 86
denial 2, 5, 7, 10, 39, 55, 77 free association 2, 35, 84, 87, 91, 100,
Descartes, René 40, 49, 100 104, 108
desire 4, 8, 10, 12, 13, 16, 21, 26, 28, free market 5, 56, 68, 72
31–33, 35, 39–43, 45–47, 50–51, 53–54, free speech 10, 19, 20, 102
56, 59–67, 71, 76, 78, 79, 88, 91, 94, free will 22
100, 102, 104, 107, 110 Freire, Paulo 106
dialectic 10, 17, 19, 43–44, 93 Freud, Sigmund 6, 12–13, 18, 28, 29, 32,
DiAngelo, Robin 2, 6, 73–84 35, 41, 49, 50, 58, 67, 70–72, 78, 80,
discourse of the master 53–56, 60, 62, 83, 85, 86, 91, 99, 100, 102–106, 108,
65–66, 77 109, 111
discrimination 17, 41, 55, 82, 102 Fromm, Erich 69, 70, 108
Doherty, Brian 48 Frosh, Stephen 108
D’souza, Dinesh 86 Fryer, Luke K., and Kaori Nakao 49
fundamentalism 52, 57, 69, 70
Eagleton, Terry 106
egalitarian 15 Gannon, Linda 107
ego 4, 13, 41, 46, 76, 109, 110 Gantt, W. Horsley 108
ego-ideal 109–110 Gellner, Ernest 108
Eisler, Riane, and Daniel S. Levine 30 gender 20, 23, 26, 30, 44, 55, 69,
Ellison, Julie. 86 70, 78, 107
Emanuelson, Eric 29 Gergen, Kenneth J. 29, 71
emotion 4, 18–24, 28, 30, 31, 34, 39, 54, Giesen, Bernhard, and S. N. Eisenstadt 60
70, 82–83, 87, 93, 94, 101 Gilboa, Asaf, and Morris Moscovitch 27
empathy 12, 13, 16 Gillborn, David 87
empiricism 3, 82, 88, 94, 97, 99, 101, Gillespie, W, Hewitt 28
104, 109 globalism 5–6, 15, 30, 73, 85, 89–107, 111
enjoyment 6, 14, 48, 64–65, 67, 72, 109 Goldberg, David Theo 86
Index 115
Gorski, Philip 69 imaginary 34, 41, 42, 64, 67, 76, 80,
Greene, Sheila. V. 29 93, 110
Gregersen, Niels H. 87 individualism 17–18, 77–81
guilt 2, 4, 12–14, 33, 41, 57–58, 64, 71, 74, Inglehart, Ronald F., and Pippa Norris
76, 80–82, 84, 86, 109, 110 28, 70, 72
Guyer, Paul 107 Ingram, David 107
Inoue, Asao B. 85
Habermas, Jurgen 107 intuition 9, 11, 19–22, 31
Haidt, Jonathan 6, 8–27, 31, 39, 106 irony 39–41, 49
Hallin, Daniel C., and Paolo Mancini 105 irrational 5, 6, 27, 30, 33, 62, 83, 101,
Handler, Joel F. 71 104, 108
Harris, Harriet A. 69
Hart, Roderick P. 72 Jacobson, Edith 70
Hartmann, Uwe 28 Jimenez, Guillermo C. 6, 27
Haselton, Martie G., and Timothy Johnston, Christopher D., Howard G.
Ketelaar 30 Lavine, and Christopher M. Federico 49
hate speech 20
Hedges, Chris 48 Karatani, Kojin 6
Heimann, Paula 106 Keckler, Charles, and Mark J. Rozell 69
Hennig-Thurau, Thorsten, and Mark B. Kernberg, Otto 6, 28
Houston 48 Kitch, Sally L. 105
Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Klein, Ezra 1, 6, 31–48
Norenzayan 71 Kohlberg, Lawrence 14
Hetherington, Marc, and Jonathan Weiler Kohn, Alfie 108
37, 49 Kris, Anton O. 87
Hibbing, John R., Kevin B. Smith, and Kymlicka, Will 29
John R. Alford 49
Hoffer, Axel, and Virginia R. Lacan, Jacques 29, 36, 41, 49, 50, 53, 54,
Youngren 108 63, 69, 71, 76, 85, 107, 109–111
Holowchak, M. Andrew 87 Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe 50
Hook, Derek 72 Laland, Kevin N., Gillian Brown, and
Horkheimer, Max, Theodor W. Adorno, Gillian R. Brown 29
and Gunzelin Noeri 97, 107 Lander, Christian 85, 111
Horowitz, David 28 Larmore, Charles 108
Houvouras, Shannon, and J. Scott Lasch, Christopher 71
Carter 105 Laudan, Larry 105
Hughes, Geoffrey 28 Layman, Geoffrey C., et al. 71
human nature 8–9, 11, 19, 27, 29, Leege, David C., et al. 71
30, 101 Left-wing 1–2, 4, 5, 14, 15, 18, 19, 25–27,
humor 41 29, 34, 37, 40, 44, 47, 49, 54, 55, 58,
Hunt, Shelby D. 86 61, 64–65, 68, 69, 72, 73–88, 94, 96–98,
Hunter, James Davison 68 102, 107, 109
Huntington, Samuel P. 30 Leider, Robert J. 106
hysteria 72, 82, 85, 86–87 Levitt, Cyril 86
Leys, Ruth 86
id 10, 12, 83, 109 liberalism 2–3, 15–18, 25–26, 35–37, 41,
ideal ego 4, 41, 76, 110 42, 46, 47, 50, 58–59, 61, 62, 72–74, 79,
idealization 5, 41, 64, 66–68, 110 86, 88–89, 91–97, 105, 107, 110
identification 3–4, 10, 14, 26, 36, 45–47, libertarian 2, 4, 9–14, 16, 20, 22, 25, 30,
55, 60, 66, 67, 82, 83 35, 41, 48, 51, 53, 56, 58, 60–61, 67, 69,
identity politics 18, 36, 37, 41, 43–48, 50, 70, 73, 81, 99
74, 76, 85, 86, 94 Lindblom, Charles Edward, and David K.
ideology 2–4, 8–12, 15, 23–27, 32, 35, Cohen 86
37–39, 42, 46, 48, 51–69, 72, 73 Long, Scott 107
116 Index
Lucas, Peter 28 Obama, Barak 40–43
Luhmann, Niklas 105 objectivity 3–5, 35, 36, 45, 47, 73, 75,
Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt 106 77–81, 84, 86, 99, 101
obsessive-compulsive 35, 41, 42, 49, 50,
Magill, R. Jay 48 62, 110
Maguire, Steve, and Cynthia Hardy 106 Ogden, Thomas H. 105
Makdisi, Saree 107 Oryan, Shlomit, and John Gastil 106
Marcks, Holger, and Janina Pawelz 48
Marsh, John 50 Pagden, Anthony 6, 29, 48, 68, 88–105
Marx, Karl 5, 7, 55, 70, 92, 106 Paris, Joel 28
masochism 28, 53–56, 69 patriarchy 10, 16, 26, 54–56, 59, 71
Mason, Lilliana 50 Peek, Charles W., George D. Lowe, and L.
mass media 29–33, 43, 65, 66, 90 Susan Williams 69
McGilchrist, Iain 107 Perrin, Andrew J., J. Micah Roos, and
McMillan, Chris 72 Gordon W. Gauchat 71
Meloy, J. Reid 28 perversion 2, 4, 12, 28
Menaker, Esther 86 Petersen, Michael Bang 28
Meritocracy 35, 62, 68 Pinker, Steven 7, 19, 29, 97, 99, 105–107
Michael, Steve O. 50 pleasure principle, the 22, 30, 33, 36, 39, 91
Michaels, Walter Benn 50 polarization 1, 4, 6, 12–14, 16, 27, 31–50,
Miller, Jacques-Alain 49, 85 53, 55, 74, 83, 111
Miller, Joshua D., Thomas A. Widiger, political correctness 10, 18, 28, 29, 34, 43,
and W. Keith Campbell 6 56, 65, 66, 72, 81
Miller, Joshua D., W. Keith Campbell, and Porter, Roy 105
Paul A. Pilkonis 85 Portuges, Stephen 85
Mills, Charles W. 72 Post, Robert 108
Minkenberg, Michael 68 postmodern 4, 5, 10, 16, 17, 19, 25, 32, 35,
minority-based social movements 4, 41, 41, 44, 52, 54, 56, 61, 64, 67, 74, 77,
52, 56 96, 99
Minow, Martha 85 post-postmodern 16, 25, 32, 41, 52, 64, 96
modern 1–6, 10, 15–18, 25–26, 29, 32, poverty 5, 90, 97
35–36, 40–48, 51, 52, 55, 59–62, 66, 68, Powell, Brian, and Lala Carr Steelman 70
69, 71, 73, 74, 77–79, 81–85, 88–104, Powell, Jason L. 107
106, 109–111 Powell Jr, G. Bingham 49
modern liberal democracy 2–5, 15, 16, pragmatic 12, 61, 62, 86, 95, 103, 107
25, 35, 36, 40, 42, 44–46, 79, 84, 94, prejudice 5, 10, 17, 20, 39, 41, 52, 55,
101, 110 56, 65–68, 70, 75–78, 88, 91–98, 100,
Mondon, Aurelien, and Aaron Winter 105 102–103
Moscovici, Serge 86 premodern 1–5, 10, 15–17, 20, 24–25, 35,
Moyn, Samuel 30 42, 51–55, 59–61, 64–65, 68, 73, 77, 79,
Murray, Kelly, and Joseph W. 84, 88–90, 92, 96–102, 109–110
Ciarrocchi 71 projection 2, 4, 10, 12, 39, 64
psychoanalysis 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 27, 32–36,
narcissism 6, 35, 41, 46, 73, 76, 85, 38, 46, 50, 54, 67, 69, 71, 76, 80, 84, 87,
110, 111 91, 94, 96, 100–104, 108, 110, 111
neo-liberalism 34, 37, 41–42, 44 psychopathology 1–4, 6, 9–12, 14, 27, 28,
neuroscience 9, 27 31, 33, 35, 42, 43, 51, 53, 56, 59, 62, 67,
neutrality 2–6, 35–36, 40, 45, 73–75, 80, 73, 80, 82, 88, 104, 111
84, 85, 88, 91–92, 100, 102–104, 106,
108, 109 Quigley, Jared 72
Newman, William Lambert 69
Nicholls, William 105 race 20, 44, 73, 76–78, 82, 83, 86, 107
Nicol, Bran 85 racism 2, 6, 51, 52, 55, 63–66, 68, 71, 73,
Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart 28, 70 75–84, 86, 96, 105, 107
Index 117
Rakowski, Eric 85 Sartre, Jean-Paul 71
rationalization 9, 11, 14, 26, 40 Schapiro, J. Salwyn 105
Ray, Victor, and Louise Seamster 87 Schmitt, Carl 107
Readings, Bill 86 science 1–6, 10–13, 20–21, 25–26, 31, 33,
reality principle, the 3, 6, 30, 35, 44, 35–36, 39, 42, 44, 45, 47–49, 62, 75, 77,
48, 50, 78, 80, 82–83, 85–87, 91, 100, 79–81, 86, 88, 89, 92–105, 107, 108, 110
102, 104 secular 15–16, 52, 99, 101, 105, 108
reality testing 18, 41, 57, 60, 80, Semino, Elena 30
82–83, 109 Seth, Vanita 107
reason 3, 5, 6, 15, 18–23, 26, 29, 33, 39, shame 2–5, 12, 13, 33, 41, 57, 58, 64, 71,
47, 48, 50, 52, 54, 57, 60, 75, 77, 81–82, 74, 76, 80–84, 86, 109, 110
84, 85, 87–106, 109 Shoesmith, Sharon 28
Reber, Arthur S. 27 Shrout, Patrick E., and Joseph L.
Reiman, Jeffrey H. 70 Rodgers 49
religion 3, 6, 8, 10, 15, 16, 25, 27, 29, 42, Skolnick, Jerome H. 108
44, 51, 55, 58, 61, 68, 71, 89, 92, 95, 98, Sloterdijk, Peter 48
105, 108 Sluhovsky, Moshe 106
Renegar, Valerie R., and Stacey K. Smith, Nicholas D. 70
Sowards 49 Snedeker, George 105
Renik, Owen 6, 108 Snyder, Jack 87
Rensmann, Lars 7, 69, 85 social construction 17, 29, 62
repression 9, 12, 13, 18, 36, 49, 62, 64, 73, social Darwinism 19
98, 110, 111 social hierarchy 3, 10, 16, 22, 35, 52–56, 58,
Republican 1, 31, 37–38, 50, 52, 56, 59, 64, 66, 88, 97, 98, 101, 102, 109, 110
61–62, 65, 71 Solum, Lawrence Byard 106
Rhetoric 2, 16, 40, 42, 49, 56, 65, 72, 74, 83 splitting 2, 10, 12–15, 31, 39, 48, 55,
Rhoades, Gary 69 83, 87
Ridley, Matt 107 Stekel, Wilhelm 28
Rieff, Philip 49 Stereotypes 20, 77
Rifkin, Jeremy 6 Stiglitz, Joseph E. 106
Right-wing 5, 9–12, 15, 16, 19, 29, 41, Stone, Lawrence 86
51–52, 56, 58–64, 73, 77–79, 81, 88–90, Stout, Christopher T. 50
95–96, 98, 110 Strandberg, Thomas 28, 50
Robin, Corey 2, 6, 51–68 subjectivity 3, 8, 14, 24, 33, 43, 45, 46, 48,
Robins, Robert Sidwar Robins, Robert S. 51, 57, 60, 68, 79, 94, 101, 111
Robins, and Jerrold M. Posidwa 86 super-ego 4, 10, 12, 13, 16, 55, 80, 109
Robinson, William I. 106 symbolic 12, 22, 53, 55, 66
Rose, Hilary, and Steven Rose 28 symptom 10
Rose, Steven, Richard Charles Lewontin, Sztompka, Piotr 72
and L. Kamin 27, 30
Roy‐Chowdhury, Sim 48 Talisse, Robert B. 49
Rozin, Paul 49, 105 taxes 9, 34, 41, 66
Rubin, Gayle 70 Taylor, Charles 105
Ruti, Mari 30 Taylor, Gary 69
Tennen, Howard, and Glenn Affleck 48
Sahlins, Marshall David 30 Thatcher, Margaret 9
Salkovskis, Paul M. 50 Thompson, M. Guy 6
Saltman, Kenneth J. 111 tradition 5, 15–18, 38, 43, 56, 62–65,
Samuels, Richard, Stephen Stich, and Luc 71, 92
Faucher 87 transference 41, 50, 58, 69, 85, 106, 111
Samuels, Robert 6, 27, 29, 30, 48–50, 68, Trump, Donald 11–13, 28, 34, 49, 51–52,
71, 72, 85–87, 106, 107, 111 56–57, 61, 64–70, 72, 107
Sandel, Michael J. 28, 48, 71 truth 3, 11, 12, 19, 21, 45, 83, 89, 91, 92,
Sanders, Steve 68 94, 100, 111
118 Index
unconscious 1–2, 5, 8–13, 22, 31, Wagner, Peter 29
34, 36, 38–43, 45–46, 51, 59, 62, Wallerstein, Roberts 108
64, 66, 76, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87, 90, 94, Weart, Spencer 108
101, 111 Weitzer, Ronald, and Charis E. Kubrin 105
Unger, Roberto Mangabeira 85 welfare programs 6, 9, 18, 28, 41, 52, 54
universal human rights 5, 15, 25, 27, Wetherell, Margaret 49
44–45, 47, 74–75, 85, 92, 96, 99, 102, White, Mark 30
104, 107, 109 Whittier, Nancy 70
universality 3–5, 26, 35–36, 40, 47–48, Whyte, Glen 71
73–81, 84, 85, 88–92, 98, 101–102, Williams, David 105
108, 109 Wilson, E. O. 19, 22
universities 14, 19, 27, 35, 44, 78 Wilson, John K. 29
Winchester, Daniel 29
Valentino, Nicholas A., Carly Wayne, and Wodak, Ruth 29
Marzia Oceno 70 Wrange, Pål 85
van der Toorn, Jojanneke 71
victim identity 4–6, 19, 34, 48, 66–67, 72, Yglesias, Matthew 70
76, 80, 83, 98, 111 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 70
virtue-signaling 35, 111
Voeten, Erik 108 Zanarini, Mary C., Jolie L. Weingeroff,
Vopat, Mark 69 and Frances R. Frankenburg 28
Voye, Liliane 108 Zizek, Slavoj 57, 69, 70, 72, 85

The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies

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The Psychopathology of

Inspired by Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, this book

Robert Samuels is a lecturer of writing at the University of California,

Psychoanalytic Political Theory provides a publishing space for the high­

Recently Published Books

The Lucid Vigil

Individuality and Ideology in British Object Relations Theory

The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

2 Jonathan Haidt and the Five Political Ideologies 8

3 On the Psychopathology of Polarization 31

4 Understanding the Psychopathology of the Right 51

5 The Hysterical Left and the Narcissistic Center 73

6 The Anti-Ideology Ideology: Re-Discovering the

Inspired by Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, this book

Theoretical Introduction: Understanding

As I will demonstrate, we should not think of centrists as a neutral

While premodern subjectivity is dominated by faith, belief, and the

In analyzing Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People

The Moral Instinct

I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading

From Haidt’s perspective, political ideology is grounded in natural selec­

Following the Leader

Against the Liberal University

The Tolerance of Intolerance

Against Modern Reason

Following the Right-wing attack on “liberal universities,” Haidt insists

Nature over Nurture

I threw in historical anecdotes, quotations from the ancients, and

Haidt’s argument here is that his use of metaphors, stories, quotations,

What Makes Us Human

Naturalizing Conservative Ideology

This is a tricky passage because it begins by arguing that other animals

Haidt’s Five Traits of Ideology

In looking at Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, I endeavor to expose how

We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no

We collapse systemic problems into personalized narratives, and

While I agree that it is important not to emphasize personal stories when

Polarizing Social Science

Different studies categorize people in different ways, but the com­

As this passage skips from biology to psychology to consumer choices to

The Rhetoric of the Good Self

“So my advice to a future president,” he said, “is increasingly try to

Beyond Identity Politics

he was too optimistic in believing that our nonpolitical identities could

Living in a city, being a liberal, shopping at Trader Joe’s, and dab­

Interestingly, it turns out that there’s only a weak relationship between

My whole career—and much of politics more generally—is based

Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund

The Difference between Conservatives and the Right

many of the characteristics we have come to associate with contem­

Conservative Moral Masochism

The Right Trump Card

Trump ran on a similar set of anti-establishment themes—he was not

As a backlash against Left-wing ideology, Trump appealed to the counter­

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency

Revisiting the Five Ideologies

Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and

This effort to equate conservative and libertarian ideology ends up misrep­

Psychoanalytic Political Theory provides a publishing space for the high

From Haidt’s perspective, political ideology is grounded in natural selec

Different studies categorize people in different ways, but the com

Living in a city, being a liberal, shopping at Trader Joe’s, and dab

many of the characteristics we have come to associate with contem

As a backlash against Left-wing ideology, Trump appealed to the counter

This effort to equate conservative and libertarian ideology ends up misrep

Without psychoanalysis, one is left analyzing deep visions and metaphysi

As I have been arguing, there can be no science or human rights with

A central argument of this book is that we need to understand the psycho

From the perspective of many conservatives and Right-wing reactionar

For at the core of the “Enlightenment project” was an attempt to dis