FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM
NATI O NA L
A President Weeps For Sociopathy
Among many, this was President Obama’s finest hour. His clearly heartfelt and passionate 37 minutes of remarks from the White House Tuesday left a nation dumbstruck and spellbound. Even though his gun control reforms are minimal and without a doubt do not restrict the ability of any law abiding citizen to purchase or own a firearm, the mere fact that the president went to the limit of his executive powers in a resolute effort to curb, even if only a little bit, the descent of the nation into behaviors of gun violence should be seen as an epochal turning point. Either the nation now seizes upon this singular moment to begin the heavy lifting task of wresting the corridors of power in America away from the blackmail of the gun lobby and its big monied FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS backers who enjoy chaos, or, if nothing really changes, this could be the inflection point spelling the end to the viability of our democratic experiment altogether. Earlier, a similar moment arose from the unspeakable horror of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre three years ago, but when nothing happened as a result – nothing happened as a result! – President Obama, invoking that slaughter of innocents with tears rolling down his face, gave the nation one more chance Tuesday. It exposes once again what is the singular mental illness bedeviling American culture in 2016. The experts call it “Antisocial Personality Disorder,” and it produces what is common known as “sociopaths.” These are people who, at the heart of it, are incapable of experiencing empathy with respect to other persons, pain inflicted upon them, or remorse. According to Dr. Matha Stout’s bestselling book, The Sociopath Next Door, the Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, the condition afflicts “one in 25 ordinary Americans” who “secretly have no conscience and can do anything at all without feeling guilty.” “Stout details the havoc sociopaths wreak on unsuspecting individuals, marrying for money, backstabbing co-workers, or simply messing with people for the fun of it,” wrote Sara Eckel of Salon. Taking a broader look at what has become of American culture, however, it is as if the inmates, the sociopaths, have taken over the asylum, or that our culture has become predisposed to reward sociopathic behavior such that it is spreading its influence to infect the behaviors of many more than a mere four percent of the population. Does this explain Donald Trump? Perhaps, but only as one manifestation of what has sadly taken over much of the leadership and rankand-file of an entire major political party in this country. The enemy of the sociopath is empathy. The preferred victim of the sociopath is a highly empathetic person. The sociopath knows almost instinctively how to spot such persons and feed on them. As the “personal empowerment” movement of the 1970s was unleashed upon American culture to subvert the potent civil rights, feminist, gay liberation and anti-war movements of the 1960s, varieties of cultish brands of ideologies arose aimed at rooting out empathy as a personal weakness in favor of an alternative sense of self rooted in a form of fantasized Nietzschean emotion-free “superman.” After World War II, it became paramount among the circles of the elites in this land to stamp out the residue of the Roosevelt presidency’s social and labor reforms and turn the nation away from a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union in favor a “Cold War.” This effort took the form of assailing Hollywood script writers and playwrights, to effectively unleash a reign of terror against empathy, itself, as the target. The FBI singled out the 1947 film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the Hollywood, 10 were blacklisted, and the campaign spilled over into Washington, D.C. itself with the McCarthy hearings. In the wake of this came the continued crusade to insist as acceptable overriding themes in TV and the movies only family-centered or localized morality, on the one hand, and a sociopathic self-centered individualism and rejection of empathy, called “postmodernism,” on the other. This is the cultural sickness that President Obama’s exhibition of empathy Tuesday has now challenged us all to take on.
JANUARY 7 – 13, 2016 | PAGE 19
Nicholas F. Benton
Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.
Confessions of a Columnist Every New Year’s, in a spirit of self-examination, I try to catalog my worst blunders from the preceding year. But this year, like almost every pundit in America, I have one mistake that overshadows all the others, one confession that makes my other faults seem venial by comparison. I underestimated Donald Trump. To really make a clean breast on this issue, I have to reach back earlier than 2015 (some forecasts take more than a year to be disproved), to a column I wrote in the far-off days of the 2012 campaign, when Mitt Romney flew to Vegas, baby, to accept an endorsement from the Donald. This struck me, at the time, as a needless move by Mitt, because it left him sticky with the tar of Trump’s birther nonsense while delivering little in return. The idea that Romney needed the kind of voters excited by Trump’s flamethrower style, I wrote, confused “the existence of a fan base (which Trump certainly has) with the existence of a meaningful constituency (which he almost certainly does not).” And even if there NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE were real Trumpistas, Romney would win their allegiance eventually: “Anyone who thrills to Trump’s slashing attacks on the president probably isn’t sitting this election out.” As a third-party candidate, I went on, Trump might pose some danger to Romney’s general-election chances. But Trump’s “third party rumblings are like his birther bluster – sound and fury, signifying only ego.” And Romney would risk little with conservatives by giving him the stiff arm. “Trump isn’t Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin: His conservatism is feigned, his rightwing fans are temporary admirers with no deep commitment to his brand or cause, and hardly anyone in the conservative media is likely to rise to his defense.” Now, if I were the sort to engage in special pleading, I would note that this may not have been technically wrong as an analysis of the status quo in 2012. I still don’t think Trump would have run third party if Romney had stiffed him, for instance, and I’m quite sure that right-wing talk radio wouldn’t have backed him if he had. But don’t let the technicalities fool you: I sold Trump wildly short, and his entire campaign to date has proved it. First, Trump has had a very easy time turning his celebrity fan base into a meaningful constituency. Exactly how meaningful remains to be seen, but for
Ross Douthat
months, far more Republicans have told pollsters that they intend to vote for him than have rallied to any other banner. They may not all be Trump voters in the end, but that there is a significant Trump faction in our politics no sane observer can deny. Second, that faction has turned out to include precisely the kind of voters Romney needed in 2012 and who stayed home instead: Blue-collar whites with moderate views on economics and a weak attachment to the institutional GOP. These “missing white voters” might not have put Romney over the top, but they certainly would have helped his chances in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan – all places where Trump is running strongly at the moment. Third, even as he’s wooed the disaffected and nonideological, Trump has also won over or at least neutralized an important segment of the conservative media. He isn’t Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin, sure, but they’ve both been covering for him, as have a raft of performers who like to portray themselves as keepers of True Conservatism’s flame. And this cover has enabled Trump – no True Conservative himself, to put it mildly – to put together an unusual coalition, a mix of hard-right and radical-center voters, that’s unlike anything in recent politics. Now, if I wanted to avoid giving Trump his due, I could claim that I didn’t underestimate him, I misread everyone else – from the voters supporting him despite his demagoguery to the right-wing entertainers willing to forgive his ideological deviations. I certainly overestimated poor Jeb Bush, whom I wrongly predicted would profit from Trump’s rise. But for the rest – no, I had a pretty low opinion of the right-wing entertainment complex to begin with, and I’m not remotely surprised that the white working class would rally to a candidate running on populist and nationalist themes. I am very surprised, though, that Trump himself would have the political savvy, the (relative) discipline and yes, the stamina required to exploit that opening and become that populist. And for that failure of imagination, I humbly repent. Of course, I’m not completely humbled. Indeed, I’m still proud enough to continue predicting, in defiance of national polling, that there’s still no way that Trump will actually be the 2016 Republican nominee. Trust me: I’m a pundit. (And I’ll see you in the confessional next year.)