Unbecoming American: The Nihilists at Prayer
The Democratic-Republicans at prayer
Those who may recall, if only vaguely, the early chapters of their secondary school history books, may recognize- if not remember- that the original name of the “party of Jefferson” was the Democratic-Republicans. In the first years of the American Empire, the government was in the hands of the Federalist Party, led by the Boston Adams dynasty and the New York mercantile-adventurers for whom Alexander Hamilton had become spokesman. The Federalists became extinct in the term of Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic-Republican POTUS from Virginia. The party base was essentially the Southern landowning oligarchy which opposed its creditors in New York and Boston. The westward extermination of the indigenous and expansion of the empire gave rise to the Whig party. Imperial politics and finance was fought until 1860 by the mercantile – colonizers of what was then the Northwest Territories (a region now considered part of the “mid-West”, basically extending from the River Ohio to the Mississippi and the Great Lakes).
The determination of the mercantile oligarchy from Boston to Chicago to extract from the Southern oligarchy the costs of the 1857 economic crash intensified the divisions within the settler republic. Those textbooks to which reference is made above also erroneously simplify the conflicts that led to the only serious war ever fought on US territory– the civil war from 1860 to 1865. School pupils are taught that this fraternal war was fought for the liberation of African slaves or for the preservation of constitutionally enshrined “states’ rights”– depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line one went to school. I recall terms like “the war of Northern Aggression” and “the war between the States” prevailing in the American South while Northern schools taught the “Civil War” and the fight to abolish slavery. The past decade of attacks on memorials to the Confederate States of America and thus the distractive erasure of a complex period in US history by the congenitally ignorant (aka the awakened “Woke”) has been aggravated by other systemic language perversion. It is beyond the scope of such modest essays as this to remedy the institutionalized dementia which passes for social justice activism in the US. However just like sewage treatment is an ongoing process, responsible users of public language ought to regularly skim at least the upper layers of mendacious slime from the reservoirs that supply potable thought.
In this sense it might be helpful to restore some clarity of definition to the political topography.
What I have called elsewhere the Fourth Awakening (“Awakenings” are the Protestant equivalent of the Latin Crusades– both of which are directed toward the extermination of dissidents and “brown people”) has become the moral equivalent of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). The Establishment, constituted in the Democratic Party (with its Republican component- hence Democratic-Republicans), has created, since the early 1980s, a domestic armed propaganda movement, drawing conceptually on elements of the NSDAP Sturmabteilung (SA) and the counter-insurgency organization created by the CIA in what would be called the Phoenix Program. Since ideological consistency is not essential in a society controlled entirely by daily marketing and advertising campaigns, the combination of anti-racist and egalitarian rhetoric with support of the most violently imperialist and anti-humanist government policies should not surprise. An accurate understanding of the German NSDAP would include the fact that “national socialism” absorbed strong anti-capitalist and petty bourgeois democratic tendencies in the service of cartel capitalism (and surreptitiously the Anglo-American Empire). The original fascist party, was created by the faux socialist Benito Mussolini while on the payroll of British secret intelligence services. Just like it was never necessary for everyone in the Manhattan Project or the NASA Space Program to know what the real objectives of their work was, there is no need to impugn the motives of thousands of young people who have been recruited directly or indirectly into today’s “Children’s Crusade”.
While it is helpful to examine and understand the underlying ideology, that is insufficient. All ideologies are inherently incoherent by themselves. It is really impossible to enforce, short of death, uniform responses to ideological instructions even among those who consider themselves true and loyal believers. Hence it is essential, while giving weight to ideological analysis, to examine the organizational mechanisms by which ideology is transformed into action and action is absorbed within ideology. Although the claims by the wokie-dokies to be latent or active social justice warriors cannot be taken at face value, the behavioral consequences of such explanations must be taken seriously. In fact it is possible to believe in racial equality and act in ways that exacerbate inequality. Does one judge the attribute of belief or the results of the act? Hypocrisy is a natural condition of language in part because it is impossible to act in a way which is utterly and absolutely consistent with any verbal explanation of the act in question. There is always a statement which can be uttered that qua statement is consistent with other statements of the same type and yet inconsistent with the nonverbal actions attributed to it. We judge statements to be appropriate or not as statements (verbal acts) and as instructions for how to respond to other statements or non-verbal acts. Philosophy and ethics are largely concerned with the generation of statements that ought to be used as explanations for assessing other statements or nonverbal behavior.
The question can be restated. Based on assumptions and values as to what behavior is appropriate for maintaining social relations governed by “democracy”, “equality”, or even the DIE criteria or “diversity, inclusion and equity”, is it the language or the results that count? The answer to that question requires that one include language as action and results of actions at the empirical frontier as distinct categories. Moreover language in its passive sense, contemplation and scholarship, ought to be considered in relation to the actions generated rather that as some quasi-mathematical equation on the blackboard.
So let us return to the party terminology with which we began. The Democratic Party is the lineal descendant of the Democratic-Republican Party. It was historically the party of the North American slavocracy and landed oligarchy. After the “war of Northern Aggression” it became the party of resistance to the Republican Party (aka GOP or the party of Lincoln) which replaced the Whigs and for strategic reasons absorbed the third awakening (abolitionism) in an alliance with Northern creditor interests. Whatever one may have thought of chattel slavery in the 19th century, the Republican Party was not the anti-slavery party but the party of the slave merchants and usurers whose abolition of the slave system and much of the agricultural asset base of the latifundistas would render the South the poorest part of the United States to this day. African-Americans– Negroes in the 19th century– were admitted to political power during the so-called Reconstruction period as Republicans, not as Democrats. These Reconstruction governments created the first wide-ranging free public primary and secondary education for the poor agricultural workforce, whites as well as freed slaves. In other words Black Reconstruction was an attempt to remedy the class inequalities inherited from the Anglo-American antebellum regime. It was ultimately torpedoed by the reconciliation of creditor and debtor, whereby the Southern elite agreed to industrialize in the textile industry for example in return for power-sharing again. This reconstitution of the Anglo-American elite in 1865 also gave birth to the industrial and financial trusts associated with the so-called Robber Barons (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, et al.) and the prison-industrial complex, whereby freed slaves and poor whites were sent to prison to perform “involuntary servitude” pursuant to the loophole in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. Unlike Britain that used Australia and other colonies for labor discipline, the Americans had space to incarcerate bonded labor at home.
The Fourth Awakening/ Crusade is identified by its opponents as a Democratic Party project. Per corollary the Democratic Party is condemned for its “leftist” or “socialist” policies based on the largely unchallenged assumptions that the ideology and the actions are consistent and that both have some vague root in “socialism” or even “communism”. Absurdly the more reasonable assessment is that they are a product of covert Zionist psychological warfare strategy, one which is only being admitted as police bludgeon students on elite universities for protesting the mass murder perpetrated by the settler-colonial state occupying Palestine. The absurdity is that adherents to a traditional oligarchy identified as “white” and “nativist” attack or defend themselves from crusaders they claim to be foreign in every sense of the word. However the Democratic Party has always been tightly controlled by an anti-communist/ anti-socialist elite. Even its “immigrant” party machines were ultimately “nativist”. However the Democratic Party in the North managed the immigrant labor just like its brethren in the South managed the former slaves and sharecroppers. The paragon of “left” Democratic politics, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would have been unelectable without the Southern vote. The moral degenerate who dropped the first atomic bombs, Harry S. Truman, and his 1993 Arkansas successor, were products of Southern Democratic machine politics.
The bipolarity produced by American politics leads opponents of the Democratic Party machine, actually the result of a merger between the Bush Republicans and the Clinton Democrats, brokered by the principals of the national security state, to huddle behind the mast and sails of the Goodship Ronald Wilson Reagan, slinging insults like broadsides of grapeshot– whereby the shot is only made of grapes rather than something more deadly. Thus the wholly transitional hordes of Wokism and the Democratic faithful are incited to ever escalating violations of what formal democratic practices and procedures survived the hundred-year corporatist onslaught– marketed as “public-private partnerships”. The most recent travesty are the quasi-autistic orgasms and Vitus dances performed by solipsistic Trump haters after his bureaucratic lynching before a New York Superior Court. (What would Joseph E. Davies have said about that, one can only imagine?) Clearly it is impossible for those engaged in the destruction of the United States of America, as an inhabited nation rather than a special purpose entity of its finance capitalist oligarchy, to articulate themselves in terms both empirically verifiable and linguistically/ ideologically coherent. The party of Lincoln, the party of Kennedy, the party of peace, the party of the New Deal, the anti-slavery party, the party of civil rights (was there ever such a party?), the party of Reagan, the party of Clintons, chose your epigraph. Since 2020 it is even impossible to say that these are the parties of electoral representative democracy. For better or worse, if a woman’s beauty pageant can be won by a man dressed in woman’s clothes, then why not an election decided in favor of someone who is not even alive? Voting dead has a long tradition in US electoral politics.
Were these all merely anecdotes from Tierra del Fuego or Fiji, it would be comic. However these are the conditions prevailing in the most belligerent and homicidal state on the planet. A minority consensus is emerging in the United States and among its vassals that the West is managed by the insane. Intuitively the vast majority of ordinary people throughout the world have known this for decades. That majority of ordinary humans, who have been kept in senseless poverty since the US helped crush the revolution in Haiti with financial warfare in 1803, understand that the only way to escape the US was under its shadow by immigrating there. The American Dream was to escape the Anglo-American nightmare. Yet the armed propaganda units of the Fourth Awakening (the latest corporatist crusade) are simply too ignorant to grasp these details. That is also what makes them unwitting instruments of Democratic Party– in reality Democratic-Republican– terror. After the real socialists and revolutionaries were exiled or killed (by the end of the 1970s) and replaced by academic androids, who produced a similarly chimeric ideology– combining e.g. postmodernism, transgenderism and CRT, there were no alternatives for the justifiably dissatisfied. This has been an established strategy for recruiting terrorists, whether in Vietnam to neutralize the NLF or in Iraq– destroy real opposition and then recruit the unwitting into synthetics run by opportunists.
The language of US American politics is powerful. It has been crafted by the best psychological warfare (propaganda) experts corporate money can buy. Edward Bernays was merely the most self-important of the lot. There are also squadrons of academics like the late Dr Heinz Kissinger and his Democratic counterpart, Zbigniew Brezinski. Then there is the Hollywood regiment of congenital propagandists who expand their operations beyond the silver screen to share the stage of misanthro-capitalism e.g. by promoting covert operations throughout Africa for “humanitarian” reasons. Underlying it all is the religion of Business by which the population is constantly told that some clown in the Executive Mansion makes decisions– while all his bills are paid by his corporate donors, a euphemism for masters. Because Business is the measure of all virtue, anything the State does which benefits Business is good. Moreover Business virtue is enhanced by the degree to which government serves it. Since corporations (and offshore trusts in secrecy jurisdictions) are “persons” in terms of the law and upper class persons too, they deserve the full protection and promotion of the State. Therefore neither a Republican partisan nor a Democrat– especially a bought-and-paid-for wokie dokie— will dispute the right and dignity of oligarchs who buy state, national and intergovernmental legislatures and executives for their “personal” benefit. They will all agree that if the business plan, like they learned to produce at Wharton, Harvard or LSE, is realistic and the income projections are plausible, then killing a billion or two with genetic engineering or atomic weapons, is just an unavoidable expense on the liabilities side of the balance sheet.
While those who are doing their best to find solutions to this insanity and evil try to sort the language and the behavior, there are confronting even greater forces whose conviction is beyond rational argument. These legions are armed not only by the State with its democidal mission. These legions are also irradiated with the toxins of nearly 80 years. They believe that the atomic bomb was created for liberation. They are the crusaders for death as freedom. When in they go marching, with their saints, then the number to which we are to belong is nil. When the Democratic-Republican saints go marching in, oh when those saints go marching in– it will be over the billions of corpses without number– oh when those saints go marching in.
Dogmatic Neoliberal Democrats
An Authoritarian Party and Their Upper-Middle Class Loyalists
Orientation
How dare you!
- How can you write an article against the Democratic Party less than six months before the election? You must be a Trump supporter!
- We must keep Trump out of office no matter what!
- Vote Blue no matter who! (Or now, Vote Biden no matter what!)
- Only a privileged person would consider voting for the Green Party!
- You must be a dupe of the Russians!
- If you don’t vote for the Democrats, you must be antisemitic!
- This election is the most important in history!
Anyone who is critical of the Democratic party from the left will be greeted by these slogans, warnings and accusations.
What is dogmatism?
A little over a year ago I wrote an article titled The Dogmatic Personality. In it I attempted to show fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking and contrasted it to open-minded thinking. Please see the table at the end of this article. As in my previous article, I will follow Judy J. Johnson’s book What’s So Wrong with Being Absolutely Right: The Dangerous Nature of Dogmatic Belief.
Which social class is dogmatic?
When we think of a dogmatic personality, we are likely to imagine a conservative “Archie Bunker” type, a lower middle-class or working-class man. The open-minded person seems likely to be a well-educated middle-class or upper middle-class liberal, and probably someone who votes for the Democratic Party. But times have changed. For the last 50 years, the Democratic Party has shifted from a center-left party to a right-wing Neoliberal party which has been increasingly embattled and compromised through its involvement in overseas wars, a deindustrialization process, financial debt accumulation and austerity programs for working class and poor people. I will describe in this article that, in fact, the Democratic Party has become a dogmatic, authoritarian party whose leaders and loyalist followers can easily be characterized as dogmatic in all fourteen characteristics.
What is the relationship between dogmatism and authoritarianism?
Now that you have reviewed the fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking in the table, we need to clarify what its relationship is to authoritarianism. Johnson sees authoritarianism as a subcategory of dogmatism. According to Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarian Specter, authoritarianism means the principle of blind submission to authority, as opposed to individual autonomy in thinking and acting. He defines authoritarianism as the co-variation of three kinds of attitudes:
- Authoritarian submission to established authorities
- Authoritarian aggression against anyone the authorities target
- Conventionalism adhered to by society and established by the authorities
The first nine characteristics of dogmatism plus characteristic number 14 are all psychological or social psychological qualities. Authoritarianism is more sociological involving the relationship between groups (characteristics 10-13). In terms of personality, Judy Johnson says that 6 out of the 14 characteristics of dogmatism would qualify a personality as dogmatic. While it is hard to imagine an authoritarian personality with characteristics 10-13 would not have the other dogmatic qualities as well, it is not too far-fetched to imagine a dogmatic person minding their p’s and q’s when it comes to large groups.
My claim
My aim in this article is that the Democratic Party and its upper middle class loyalists have all of these dogmatic and authoritarian characteristics.
Five Cognitive Ingredients in Dogmatic Thought
The Five Characteristics of Dogmatic Cognition are:
- Intolerance of ambiguity (either/or thinking) due to anxiety
- Defense cognitive closure
- Rigid certainty
- Compartmentation (sealing off contradictory beliefs)
- Lack of self-reflectiveness
Intolerance of ambiguity
The Neoliberal Democrats insist that there are only two choices: Democrats or Republicans. Any votes outside the Democratic Party are a vote for Trump. Under these conditions, the Democrats cannot imagine that people voting for a third party do so in the hopes of building a third party over time. For them a vote for a third party can only be a vote for a second party. But what about the people who don’t vote? In any given election, over the past fifty years between 40-50% of the population do not vote. For Neoliberal Democrats this is not a problem. Why? Because they treat people who don’t vote as if they are the ignorant, stupid or apathetic lower classes. What Neoliberal Democrats cannot comprehend is that the reason people do not vote is because there are no candidates that represent their interests. They think the uncommitted are weighing between them and a Green party, when what is really going on is the uncommitted weighing between voting Green and not voting at all.
Defensive cognitive closure
The Neoliberal Democratic candidates act like they are entitled to the vote of anyone on the socialist left. They don’t think they have to work to get it, or that they might be expected to answer to potential voters for their past failures. They insist they are the only game in town for “reasonable” people. Only a privileged person can afford to vote for the Green Party. In other words, racial minorities are all voting Democrat and as a white person you would be voting against them. The problem with this argument is that Trump is gaining more and more support of African American and Latino voters. Just as large numbers of working-class people left the Democratic Party decades ago, so now their much-vaulted race base is starting to break ranks.
Rigid certainty (cannot state the conditions for admitting they are wrong)
As many of you know, the philosopher of science Karl Popper claimed that a good scientific theory must insist on stating the conditions under which they can be proven wrong. It is also a good rule in argumentation classes to state the conditions under which your claim could be wrong. Do the Democratic Party politicians or their loyalists do this when they solicit new voters? No, they don’t. To be fair, the entire politician system in Mordor is not set up for parties to actually account for the contradictions between their promises and what they deliver. But if you talk to an upper-middle class loyalist and ask them what are the conditions under which they would give up on their loyalty to the Democrats they look like deer caught in the headlights. Next to no one has traced the relationship between promises and deliverance. Though well-educated, they have not thought seriously about what their liberal beliefs really are and how well the party has been faithful to them. No matter what the Democrats have done or not done over the past four years, they expect you to wipe the slate clean and simply say we have to vote for them.
Cognitive compartmentalization – sealing off contradictory beliefs
My hunch is that a large number of people who consider themselves liberal today believe the following:
- The state should provide for pensions, and unemployment.
- There should be universal healthcare.
- The minimum wage should be raised to keep up with inflation.
- Women should make the same amount of wages or salary as men for the same kind of work.
- Everyone should be able to go to college without being tens of thousands of dollars in depth.
- Unions should be supported because they protect working class people.
- Capitalist profits should be reinvested in society in the form of infrastructural building and repair and mass transportation.
- Internationally the United States should not be at war and meddling in the affairs of other countries. Investment in the military has only a defensive role to play.
I could go on but you get the idea. The problem is that when the Democratic Party has gained power over the last 50 years they have not done any of these things. It takes a great deal of cognitive internal gyrations to know these things and still vote for Neoliberal Democrats.
Lack of self-reflectiveness – refusal to bend back and analyze themselves
Hillary Clinton, with all the Deep State wealth and the Neoliberal capitalists behind her, managed to lose to Donald Trump. In a political party that was sensitive and self-reflective, they would say “where did we go wrong? Why did so many people not vote? We used to depend on working class votes. How can it be that many working class people are Republicans? What is wrong with our candidates? What population demographics were weak?”. They did none of this. Instead, in true paranoic style they blamed the Russians. Since 2016, whenever the Democratic Party failed it was the Russians. This is a powerful change in party affairs. For 15 years the Democratic Party mocked and dismissed the 9/11 Truth movement for its tinfoil, paranoic conspiracy theory. For the past eight years the Democratic Party has so little understanding of its right-wing 50-year drift that its answer to all its problems are now “the Russians”.
The Four Emotional Disorders
Although Neoliberal Democrats, being upper middle class, have more control over their minds than working class dogmatists they can still reify their emotions, making them “rigid states” rather than processes that can be changed by cognitive changes in interpretations, explanations or assumptions. Neoliberal Democrats, like everyone else, has a need for social connection, but as an upper-middle person they are surrounded by most people who are not like them. Yet they must find commonality with them became they want them to join the Democratic Party. Because they are more or less oblivious of the social class distinctions, they find ways to avoid talking about them. They are most emotionally sensitive to race relations, since most African-Americans and Latinos are not upper middle class.
The four kinds of emotional issues that arise, according to Judy Johnson are:
- Anxiety and fear
- Lack of a sense of humor
- Oversensitivity to unintended infringements which result in anger
- Excessive pessimism and despair
For Neoliberal Democrats the anxiety and fear they have centers around:
- What will happen if a Republican, specifically Trump, wins the election?
- What will the mass of Trump followers do?
Anxiety and fear
Faithfully, like clockwork, the only claim to winning voters over is fear of is what will happen if a right-winger like Trump gets in. Over the past 4 years with the Democratic Party in power, we have billions of dollars wasted in Ukraine followed by a massacre of Palestinians funded by the Democratic Party. How much worse can it be than this? The Neoliberal fears know no bounds. They never state the conditions under which they are willing to admit there really is not much difference between the two parties, let alone to say there is only one party, capitalism, with two wings.
Secondly, Neoliberal Democrats fear the great unleashing of the great unwashed Trump followers. These folks are imagined to be goosestepping Gestapos terrorizing these liberals when they decide to have an outdoor brunch. It will be too late for liberal Karens to call the police! In reality the laughable power of Trump’s followers came about over a temporary “take-over” of the White House in 2021. Did his followers block the roads, seize the radio and TV stations and begin broadcasting like what would happen in a real coup? No, they simply wandered around, perhaps breaking a few things before being taken over by the police. For Neoliberal Democrats, this is the end of civilization. As for their treacherous fascist leader, Trump, he was nowhere to be found.
Lack of a sense of humor
Having a sense of humor means you can step out of situations and see them in perspective. Humor allows for a break in being serious before returning to serious endeavors. Lack of humor (being humorless) means you are serious all the time. This comes out most clearly in the Neoliberal attempts to control people’s vocabulary so they are “politically correct”. Up to a point it is reasonable to expect people to upgrade their vocabulary to be more sensitive racial and sexist issues. But past a certain point, as communication grinds to a halt because every word is dissected, the situation becomes laughable. But for the Neoliberal Democrat, this is no laughing matter. The combination of self-righteousness mixed with completely unrealistic expectations makes it understandable why the right-wingers get fed up at best and full of hatred at worst.
Oversensitivity to unintended infringements which result in anger
At the same time, the Neoliberal Democrats are terrified of being called a racist.
After all, they work so hard to “understand” the history of racism and the conditions of Blacks and Latinos today. They feel betrayed when they themselves are called out on some racism. This is where accusations of being a “snowflake” really come from. For example, liberals are only dimly aware of their racism when it comes to Black politicians. For them, any Black man or woman who is well-educated must be liberal. Lo and behold, when presented with people like Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell or Barak Obama it comes as a great surprise they could be so right-wing. No, Obama was never FDR in waiting. He is a Harvard lawyer, trained in the Chicago School market fundamentalism and his political actions were consistently right-wing. But to this day Neoliberals refer to him as a great liberal. Their racism comes in when they do not grant the full political spectrum to any minority politician.
Excessive pessimism and despair
As I’ve pointed out in other articles, the beginning of Neoliberalism came about through the Rockefeller orchestrated Club of Rome report followed by a book called the Limits to Growth. Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission was founded around the same time. This was a clarion call to let Americans know that the days of abundance, a high standard of living, more leisure time and a better life through science was ending. Instead, we were told that people needed to tighten up their belts and do with less (Jimmy Carter). Why? Because nature was limited. Secondly, there were too many people on the earth and the population problem would soon be out of control. Thirdly, there was global warming caused, according to them, by the industrial revolution. Lastly, thanks to all our high living we have polluted the earth. This systemic attack on the values of the Enlightenment by the Rockefellers, together with their control over Think Tanks and Universities and mass media has been the methodical message of Neoliberal Democrats for 50 years. Ironically, the countries of the multi-polar world like China, Russia and Iran are carrying on the Promethean tradition of the Enlightenment with their infrastructure projects, harnessing of many forms of energy.
Five Behavioral Characteristics of Dogmatism
Dogmatism is not just what is going on cognitively and emotionally inside of people. Dogmatism is also about how people behave and act. The five behavioral characteristics of dogmatism are:
- an arrogant, dismissive communication style;
- preoccupation with power and status;
- glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group;
- dogmatic authoritarian submission to authorities; and,
- dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities.
An Arrogant, dismissive communication style
Because Neoliberals usually make their living from speaking and writing, like lawyers and academic professors, they are at home in stressing the importance of language. Compared to them, both Trump and his supporters are at a disadvantage. Neoliberals are at their worst when it comes to attempting to control language. Secure in their tenured college professions Neoliberal professors control their classroom by making them open forums for every possible identity politics group to have their say. At the same time they insist that other members of the class learn to use the right words while addressing an identity politics group from gender pronouns on down the line. In their drive to inclusivity, they imagine they are liberating humanity and winning new people for the Neoliberal Democrats. The problem is that the largest sector of the population is unaffected by these battles about identity politics on college campuses. Some of the most interesting hypocrisy within Neoliberal Democrats is that the arm-twisting that takes place on college campuses never reaches the upper echelons of the party. Are Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer or Joe Biden going to be corrected by Kamala Harris when they refer to a non-binary man as “he” when he prefers to be addressed as a “they”?
Preoccupation with power and status in form
Neoliberal Democrats are snobs. A very simple comparison which brings this out is the difference between how they react to Obama vs how they react to Trump. Obama above all has all the formal qualities they look for. First of all, he is Black, but not too black, not Marshawn Lynch black. He is tall, slender and graceful in mannerisms. He is articulate, seems easy-going and reasonable. He doesn’t seem to get angry and he plays basketball. He went to the right schools and did well for himself as a Harvard lawyer. As Neoliberal Democrats swoon over the lure of his appearance and his rhetorical skills the way he acted as a president – the wars started, his failure to stem the economic tide of 50 years of decline, his failure to help working class Blacks economically – go unnoticed.
On the other hand, Trump is viscerally hated. He is a loud blowhard who neither knows nor cares about political protocol or diplomacy. He is fat, with a ridiculous wig along with orange face makeup. He looks like the worst lower middle-class used car salesman you can imagine. He knows nothing of history and bullies his way through press conferences. He has a string of unsuccessful business disasters under his belt and his behavior towards women infuriates Neoliberal feminists. He prides himself in mocking the politically correct. He has the attention span of a gnat and has no coherent foreign policy. But if you ask Neoliberals about his political actions, whether domestic or international they usually don’t know. What matters is they find him disgusting on a personal and psychological basis and that is enough for them and unsuited to be the President of the United States.
The same class contempt is visited upon his followers. For Neoliberals, Trump followers are “deplorables”. They are uneducated, don’t care about facts and do not know how to reason logically. They think dualistically and more are likely to be some kind of ignorant, fundamentalist Christian. They know nothing about history, or geography and could care less. They are fat, have teeth missing and don’t dress properly. They watch too much TV and are preoccupied with the worst types of entertainment from World Wrestling to Reality Shows. This class contempt blinds Neoliberal Democrats from being sympathetic to the fact that Trumpsters are overworked and underpaid, have insecure jobs and are living from paycheck to paycheck. Secure in their own professional jobs, Neoliberals are too proud to visit the Trumpeters where they live and come electoral campaigns, deal with their own discomfort. Trump did next to nothing for working-class or lower middle-class in his four years, but he did visit them, unlike Queen Hillary or Bernie Sanders who stayed close to the college campuses.
Glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group
For this category let’s turn from domestic to international affairs. For Neoliberal Democrats Russia has been their enemy even after the break-up of the Soviet Union. When you hear the name Vladimir Putin the Pavlovian response is “evil dictator”. There is normal reasoning about his political leadership with its pros and cons. Neoliberal Democrats who get on their hobby horses of “Putin”, “Putin” usually have no understanding of what Putin has meant for the recovery of Russia after being left for dead by Obamas buddies the Chicago boys in the 1990s. The same dualistic sloganeering treatment is metered out for Syria, Iran, Lebanon, North Korea and Venezuela.
In the case of the glorification of an in-group let us turn to Israel. “The only democracy in the Middle East” has just massacred over 40,000 Palestinians and yet the Democratic president supplied the Zionists with billions of dollars in weaponry. “Israel has a right to defend itself”! What are you, antisemitic?” Then there is the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainians fascists became “freedom fighters” for Neoliberals against the evil Putin. It never occurs to these Neoliberals that the money spent on arming Ukraine could have been spent on infrastructure repairs at home, building low-cost housing, supporting the growth of unions and upgrading the minimum wage. Since the working class is invisible to Neoliberal Democrats this alternative way of spending money never occurs to them.
Thanks to the work of Matt Ehret and Cynthia Chung, the British Empire has been exposed as at the root of imperialism in the Western world. The British Empire sided with the South in the American Civil War. All along the line, this Empire tried to prevent the United States from industrializing because it feared the competition. In the 20th century the British Empire was supporting the growth of fascism in Europe long before Mussolini or Hitler. After the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis, the British Empire helped arrange to have Nazi scientists and political bigwigs safely transported to the Western world where they were never prosecuted. Yet England is naively seen by Neoliberal Democrats as some kind of benign “liberal democracy” worthy of a “special relationship”.
Dogmatic authoritarian submission to authorities
To understand this let us look at the manner in which the Democratic Party dictated that there will be no competing candidates in the 2024 primaries. This is an attempt at totalitarian control of the party. “No” you might say, “the other candidates agreed not to run a campaign”. Was that a real democratic process? During the Moscow Purges, members of the Communist Party willingly confessed their guilt before the Central Committee and were purged. “No” say the anti-communist Democrats. There must have been some ‘sinister psychological brainwashing’ on the part of the evil Stalin”. But when it comes to the dictates from on-high, Powers that Be within the Democratic Party saying that there will be no party competition, where is the outcry from the Neoliberal Democrats? Why aren’t we permitted to imagine there must have been some sinister psychological brainwashing on the part of the Democratic Party elite to keep other candidates from running. No Neoliberal Democrat would dare point the finger at AIPAC, the most powerful Israeli Lobby in the United States. That would be antisemitic!
There is also passivity of liberal Democrats to leaving their own party and building another one. Upper middle-class Neoliberals make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. There is no reason why they couldn’t pool their money and start a new party closer to an FDR model. Sure, it would take maybe 12 years to become a force to be reckoned with. However, upper-middle class people are trained to think long-term in their work. They are well-educated and can envision a long-term trajectory, not just within Mordor, but internationally. Since liberal Democrats support capitalism, surely they are smart enough to notice that finance capital and wars are not productive for capitalism in the long-run. Why is there no movement to leave the Democrats? To do so would be disobedient to the leaders of the Democratic Party and those capitalists’ national and international interests that stand behind them.
Dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities
If the Neoliberal Democratic Party lived up to its name, it would welcome competition from a third party, especially from the left. They would say “let us compete! Your program will teach us some things and the competition will be good for our ‘democracy’”. Instead, faithfully every four years it spends a great deal of money on lawsuits attempting to keep the Green Party off the ballot. It rigs the debates so the Green Party candidate cannot compete with the Republican and Democratic candidates on the stage. The Democratic Party would scream “totalitarianism” if there were only one party to vote for. Somehow the addition of one more party makes the political system go from totalitarian to democratic. But if you add a third or fourth party wouldn’t that make it more democratic? Not for Neoliberal Democrats. A third or a fourth party would make things chaotic and confuse people. Besides, authoritarian Democrats know what’s best for the people even though two thirds of the Mordor population wants more than two parties.
Conclusion
When Judy Johnson wrote her book on dogmatism it appeared that the targeted population were the lower middle-class and the working-class people. Middle-class and upper middle-class people could breathe easy since dogmatism was not really much about them. In fact, liberals like these were probably the model for fourteen characteristics of open people. My argument has shown that Neoliberal Democrats could be just as dogmatic in these fourteen characteristics. The following is a summary of how the Neoliberal Democrats and how their loyalists stack up against fourteen characteristics of dogmatism.
Intolerance of ambiguity
You cannot vote for a left-wing party. There are only two parties, you have to pick one.
Defensive cognitive closure
We are entitled to your vote regardless of past failures. Only privileged people vote for third parties.
Rigid certainty (cannot state the conditions under which they are willing to admit they are wrong)
Past failures are ignored. The Party’s 50 year slide to the right is ignored. No matter how bad they are, the Republican party (Trump) is worse.
Cognitive compartmentalization
Both the DNC and their loyal followers act like social-schizophrenics. They pretend to be following tried and true liberal principles while, in fact, they fund wars all over the world, blow up pipelines, support fascist Ukraine and support right wing Jewish fundamentalism against Palestine.
Lack of self-reflectiveness: refuse to bend-back and analyze themselves
The Democratic Party blames Russia for its losses, rather than examine its internal failures. They become paranoid and see the “evil” Putin everywhere.
Anxiety and fear
The Democratic Party and their loyalists know no limits to how the horrible things can be if Trump or any Republican wins an election. Similar fear of what the Trumpster followers will do if Trump wins. Yet their ineptitude shows in the pathetic political theater of January 2021.
Lack of a sense of humor
They have a seriousness and moralistic policing of people’s vocabulary to the point of failing to recognize the humor in trying to change people’s vocabulary all at once.
Oversensitivity to unintended consequences which result in anger
They imagine that they could never behave in a racist way, not realizing that Black politicians can be extremely right wing: Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell and Barak Obama are examples. Their racism is not granting blacks the full political spectrum of commitment that they grant to whites.
Excessive pessimism and despair about the future
By buying hook, line and sinker the anti-Enlightenment Rockefeller program of austerity, global warming, overpopulation and pollution.
Arrogant, dismissive communication style to the lower classes
The war of college professors and their loyalists in the public and students who do not care about identity politics and gender pronouns. They silence students in their communication unless it conforms to their standards. They have a double standard since the heads of the Democratic Party do not have to adhere to these standards.
Preoccupation with power and status of appearance and rhetoric
Their obsession with good form and rhetoric skills in politicians like Obama. Hatred of the bad form, appearance and personality weaknesses in both Trump and his followers. They downplay the political content in their political performance.
Glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group
In international affairs the out-group, the evil Russia (Putin), Iran, North Korea and Syria can never do anything good. Meanwhile in Mordor, their European vassals along with Israel carry on the great tradition of liberalism, democracy and human rights. For this in-group these Neoliberals always find extenuating circumstances for all coups, assassinations and imperialistic pillaging.
Dogmatic authoritarian submission to the authorities
This has to do with the Neoliberal Democratic, upper-middle class loyalists’ acceptance that there will be no competition in the Democratic primaries. This authoritarian move has been meekly accepted. Neither do serious New Deal liberals have the nerve to break with their own party and found a new party which is closer to an FDR model.
Dogmatic authoritarian aggression to minorities
This is found in the repression of the Green Party to block their access to getting on the ballot and for controlling the ground rules for the Green Party for getting into the debates.
Dogmatic vs Openminded Thinking
| Dogmatic Thinking | Open-minded Thinking |
| 1) Intolerance of ambiguity Black and white Either/ Or Thinking | Tolerance of ambiguity Can suspend judgment |
| 2) Defense cognitive closure (Having barbed wire around declarations) | Open, inviting a response |
| 3) Rigid certainty
Cannot state conditions of being proven wrong | Flexibility Qualifying statements Falsification—stating conditions where you could be proven wrong |
| 4) Compartmentalization Sealing off contradictory beliefs | Dialectically using contradictions to create new knowledge |
| 5) Lack of self-reflectiveness Refusal to bend-back and analyze themselves | Self-reflective of one’s own part in creating problems |
| 6) Belief associated with anxiety or fear (they underestimate their ability to cope) | Curiosity and confidence in their ability to cope |
| 7) lack of a sense of humor to keep perspective If humor is used, it is sarcasm to undermine the gravity of the situation | Uses humor to keep things in perspective |
| 8) Belief associated with anger Oversensitivity to unintentional infringements | Does emotional work Gives people the benefit of the doubt |
| 9) Excessive Pessimism | Moderate optimism, not pollyannish |
| 10) Pre-occupation with power and status | Is aware of, but not preoccupied with, status and power |
| 11) Glorification of in-group Vilification of out- group | Critical of in-group Welcoming of out-group |
| 12) Authoritarian aggression towards minorities
| Assertive, not aggressive Sympathetic to minorities |
| 13) Authoritarian submission Excessive obedience and blind trust of authorities | Critical of the authorities |
| 14) Arrogant, dismissive communication style | Open to what is strange or what appears to be a problem |
• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
