national myths, national psychoanalysis

We need to grasp why the more progressive side of mainstream politics utterly failed in challenging this appeal. I will suggest it was based on an inability to acknowledge harming, to admit that such destructive anti-democratic forces are and have always been part of our legitimated political structure. That is, we can think about how this inability to fully face and work through the history of slavery and genocide is related to the inability to admit that economic exploitation—the use of others to make a profit—involves harming, especially when unchecked. No doubt, this inability to admit harm and the need for checking it must bear on the fact that in America, the class struggle to meet basic needs has been delegitimated and therefore economic democracy and social safety net are so tenuous. We could say that this mystification regarding harm is directly related to the denial of human needs that do not serve the instrumental god of profit. (472)I find it interesting that, when we consider the leadership of Lincoln and Roosevelt, the willingness to identify and call out enemies was a crucial action that contemporary neoliberals seem unable to engage. I will argue that such action requires not a defensive denial in the face of the opponent’s splitting between Us and Them—a denial that perpetuates the splitting—but precisely the belief in a Third that unifies Us and Them. (473)What gets lost in such struggles around blame is the position that I think of as the basic lawful Third: the position in which we recognize the general idea that not just some, but all, individuals are entitled to dignity, to have their rights and their suffering respected. However, the problem is subtler and harder to manage when it is necessary to recognize wrongdoing and resulting suffering. The creation of the Third requires acknowledging or pointing to wrongdoing all the while still offering and opening up to possibilities for reparation and restoring goodness—without the retaliation and punishment common to our culture. (476)The truth, speaking psychoanalytically, is that the fearful, self-protective position that drives the wolf’s need to dominate—i.e., the idea that if I do not overpower you, you will overpower me—is one held by most people some of the time, even those who modulate it with a more generous, less fearful position. I call this position “Only one can live.” The fear, the core fantasy “only one can live” operates in projecting vulnerability, based on terror of annihilation. The “One” could be us, our tribe or nation, or simply the self, but the point is that when we are organized by this fantasy, we are living in a kill-or-be-killed world. In order to extricate ourselves from a doer–done-to relation with those in the grip of this worldview it is necessary for everyone to face and work through the position of political imaginary, the fantasy of “only one can live.” For some human beings—a Trump or a Bannon—this fantasy is reality. There is no other world. For others, this is a feeling state that is activated in moments of threat and fear of annihilation, rather than accepted as obvious truth. If one sees the world as a place where only one group—some—can live, the fundamental division is not only between those with power and those who are helpless, but also between those whose suffering matters and those whose suffering doesn’t, or between those who matter and those who don’t: the dignified and the discarded. (477)