The Wolf's Dictionary

"What concerns us, then, is not only the ascendance of a right-wing demagogue but also the failure of the institutionalized liberal forces in the media and politics to properly acknowledge and resist attacks on our democracy, to name and call out the "wolf"" (472)"combining contradictory appeals to the working-class resentment toward the elite and its shame-induced submission to austerity and deprivation of social security. 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 have 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 the economic exploitation - the use of others to make a profit - involves harming, especially when unchecked... in America, the class struggle to meet basic needs has been delegitimated and therefore economic democracy and social safety net are so tenuous" (472)"In the words of Lincoln (1864) cited above, the struggle then was joined between those who viewed liberty as the right to dispose over the bodies and labor of others, and those who believed in the liberty of all to dispose over their own bodies and labor. Viewed in this way, the struggle against slavery and the struggle against the oppression and exploitation of all labor as well as the right to control our own bodies could all be seen - although the conceptualization is loose and unwieldy - as part of one war" (473)"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" (473)"Thus, I will argue that real conviction about the real conviction about the Third does not take the form of shunning conflict and refusing to face dangerous opponents of liberty and equality" (473)"Although there are many differences between historical fascism (Germany, Italy, Spain) and the current union of oligarchic ruling class interests and white supremacist movement that supports Trump, there are also important similarities... In my view, Trump and much of the Republican Party make use of this movement, which is properly named as fascist, even though America as a nation has not succumbed to fascism. And Trump himself employs many of the techniques and ideas of fascist leaders, who we admires" (473-474)"It is frightening to consider identifying with those who do fight against the wolves - who might look a bit ragged and battle-scarred, or associated with the powerless and nonelite. In this way, one might be no longer dissociated from those who are discarded, deprived of dignity, and yes even spat upon when they try to stand up for their rights (as John Lewis and other black officials were spat upon by members of the Tea Party). To admit that the South has been winning the Civil War for the last nearly 50 years because a legitimated political party has used racism to defend the unchecked expansion of profit and concentration of wealth and power would require both uncomfortable struggle and identification with the downtrodden Other" (474)"I believe it has to do with projections of badness, and teh threat of being cast out of the "Us." As deployed by the right, we have seen an invocation of nationalism, austerity, and self-reliance, the expulsion of the contaminating and parasitic "Other," and the glorification of images of whiteness and power, all with a fervor that has been hard for the liberal left to counter. Against this splitting in the service of power, we observe how ineffectual were Obama's nostrums of bipartisan cooperation, conciliation, and reasonable compromise, or Hillary Clinton's insistence that America is great because it is good" (474)"Liberal ideology could not combat this splitting of our society by insisting we are all one people since in fact we are fractured - with two mutually exclusive "definitions" of democracy and freedom. It is paradoxical that defending democracy requires an understanding of its boundaries, of what it cannot include" (475)"this psychological inability to "fight" and call their opponents to account for depriving the very people they claim to support seems, more than any other factor, to have led to the victory of Trump" (475)"My own psychoanalytic perspective has been shaped in considering the intersubjective meaning of creating third spaces - the Third - that contain and transform the complementary oppositions between self and other: especially oppositions then manifest socially as "Us versus the Other." Such oppositions assume the form of doer and done to, mimicking the basic structure of oppositions like perpetrator and victim, powerful and subjugated, oppressor and oppressed, violator and violated (Benjamin 2004; Benjamin 2017). One lesson we've learned over time is that this relationship is reversible; that in doer-done-to relationships both sides may come to feel blamed and accused by, and thus symmetrically mirror, each other. Insofar as an Us-Them opposition has been become part of political discourse, it is important not to be shaped defensively by those who attack or accuse us, launching us into the ping pong match, the back and forth of blame" (476)"What would it take to deconstruct this opposition? How can we reopen a space for democratic, civil conflict we believe has been foreclosed by our opponents who, as we see it, break the rule of law at every step? It is not only that those who have currently gained power in our government actually believe that winning is everything and must be achieved at all costs; it is important for us to create awareness of how they use their power and their ideological efforts explicitly to deny and cover over the harm they inflict by winning. The problem we are exposing is the lack of a social orientation to reparation. Lacking the depressive position or a notion of a socially mediated Third that allows for repair, they also, thus far, lack a conception of taking responsibility and trying to repair that harm" (477) responsibility without blame"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 "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" (477)"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)"The fantasy that only one can live is embedded in the economic and nation system. For many people who would not operate this way in personal relations, this fantasy is projected into the social realm: for instance, the nation, which is seen to be threatened by the outside world" (478)"The fear of being among the socially discarded instead of the deserving, visibly diminished and left to perish, leads to feelings of helplessness and anger. And, as long as people accept the system as legitimately being what it is, they tend to blame themselves for bieng among the discarded" (478)"A classic move to deal with contradiction through projection informs their strategy. Republicans have successfully created a narrative that affirms that the weak and vulnerable deserve no help, yet reassures the white working class that they are not rightfully among the discarded: "forgotten white men" are not shameful and weak; they are not to blame for their condition, hence still deserving. The blame is projected onto the Other who cheats and takes from them: that is blacks, immigrants, women, and the liberal elite who pretend to champion them" (478)"The turning of tables, the reversal, the certainty that the done to only want to become the doers, is a powerful psychological structure... The dilemma for those who choose to identify upward with the powerful to avoid shame is now the risk of absorbing the powerful's guilt" (480)"So, to truly step out of the doer-done-to complementarity with our opponents means that this battle needs to go beyond the political correctness in which we deny the fear of retailiation and further punishment associated with having harmed. That is, in defending victims' claims, we cannot simply assign all rightness and goodness to ourselves: rather, we need to hold a position that realizes the one group feels endangered by the others' protest. How do we - in order to purify ourselves - avoid projection of that form of badness into the right wing that triggers an unconscious fear of becoming the bad, undeserving other? Our actions should not proceed from or restimulate the fear that we don't deserve to live if we have been complicit in a social order that harms, an attitude I saw in far too many of my comrades back in the 1960s" (481)"Association manliness with aggressive power is an important part of our psychology, i.e. associating white purity with subjugating and segregating people of color" (482)"According to George Lakoff (2016), whose conclusions parallel the earlier Frankfurt critical theorists, the decisive difference between adherents of liberal and right-wing world views is family style and child-rearing, i.e., right-wing parents may be more authoritarian in demanding that their children not challenge parental authority... continuing to be organized around punishment (not necessarily corporal but withdrawal of approval), obedience, and good behavior, rather than self-reflection, responsibility, and empathy. In many cases, the paternal figure must be idealized as powerful and seen as good by the child, no matter how erratic, frightening, or painful the behavior: it is dangerous to accuse the powerful one. However, internally, as Fairbairn (1952) showed, it is more frightening to live in a chaotic world ruled by the devil than to be judged as a sinner in an orderly world ruled by God. This jibes with the idea that children are afraid to face that they live in an unsafe world where a dangerously selfish, narcissistic primal father is in control" (483)"In this family style, disobedience or failure to live up to the norm is met with shame and possibly punishment rather than understanding... Showing weakness and vulnerability in response to painful experience often leads to further shame or rejection, especially for boys. Trump's success is based on his identification with his paternal figure who shames and repels all vulnerability. But crucially, at the same time, he displays, with impunity, the defiance of moral norms and good behavior that resentful rebellious boys long to express" (482)"In the United States, for instance, whites who have been manipulated as part of the Southern strategy have had great difficulty admitting the harm that blacks suffered, and continued to suffer, without imagining they will be blamed and thus deserving retaliatory deprivation or even annihilation (deprivation for the smug deniers, annihilation for the traumatized supremacists)... The recognition that all suffering matters is thus perversely turned back into part of a competitive struggle around who is denying recognition to whom - one of the most powerful strategies of the right" (483)"Our aim cannot be simply holding onto the moral edge of being the true victims. That is a trap. If we have a moral edge, it is to end victimization by demonstrating the agency involved in making reparation and in embracing the position of the Third. On the other hand, this position requires acknowledgment of harm and, on the other, requires transformation of the struggle for recognition of the need to live into a form of legitimate political conflict. Our actions should not proceed from or restimulate the fear that we don't deserve to live if we have been complicit in a social order that harms, an attitude I saw in far too many of my comrades back in the 1960s" (484)"The link between the two lies in rejecting the compulsion to dissociate our own harming and complicity, or rather to use such admission of complicity to place ourselves in the imaginary position of always representing the good, always on the side of the victims. We - however, we define ourselves as "We" - simply are not and cannot be all good, at least, no in terms that are set up as a power struggle, where the good side wins and takes all" (484)"The wolf also lies within, and the inability to confront that one's own self-interest feeds that wolf. I believe this inability has to do with the culturally sanctioned dissociation of the fact that in capitalism there really is harming, and that only a struggle can prevent Capital (as in the class that owns the means of finance and production) from generating an impossibly unequal society. In other words, there has been a dissociation, rather than a conflict between self-interest and social solidarity, where the "good guys" dissociate their own complicity in harm and self-aggrandizement" (484-485)"I believe an obstacle to contesting "only one can live" with all can live is the way that powerful forces deny the destructive aspects of the American project by exalting individual self-interest. Especially since Vietnam, we have foundered on the problem that white America must never be seen as the one responsible for harming the Other to advance its own self-interest. Radicals will not and have not solved this impasse merely be asserting that the destructiveness of our government's service to the interest of the capitalist oligarchy and the elevation of white America are destructive, without offering a vision of repair and of legitimate conflict. Lacking this vision, the critique arouses tremendous annihilation fear that we then do not deserve to live. However, lacking the critique, the vision becomes not one of reparation, but of denial that our claim to goodness is at least problematic. This is the impasse that developed through splitting the acknowledgment of harming and the need for an ideal" (485-486)"Regarding repair I will add that in recent years, my political imagination has been seized by the ideas of reconciliation in postconflict societies. These are societies that have looked for ways out of the dilemma of protecting the people without creating more violence, by reversing the violence against the oppressors or perpetrators. In many of these intergroup struggles in societies riven by violent conflict, both sides were liable to see themselves as the being "done to," victims, the injured parties. The problem is how to go beyond having the struggle for recognition of one's own injuries (one's own group, nationality, or race) go beyond the competition of one against the other, to create a path for acknowledging harm without forfeiting one's own needs" (486)"In our case, perhaps, we might think how to begin a national conversation to find new ways to frankly acknowledge the history of harming and oppression while envisioning repair. I believe we must oppose inequality and injustice even as we simultaneously - radically and insistently - maintain the Third, the principle that everyone has a right to live, but not by exploiting, oppressing, or harming others... we need to develop a moral Third, a position in which it becomes possible to acknowledge our history of harming without attaching this to blame and retribution" (487)