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IV

Who Was the King of All Moral Narcissists?

Jeopardy question: “bearded writers.” He wrote his most famous works in the library of the British Museum.

While moral narcissism is frequently an ally of the Right, it is quite often the Left’s best friend. Big government of the socialist or democratic socialist sort adores moral narcissism, for it is, in a sense, the creator of big government. Karl Marx himself was one of history’s great moral narcissists—a man who definitely knew best, sitting by himself in the library of the British Museum, dictating to the human race at some length how it should order itself. “The ends justify the means” is almost the perfect catchphrase for all moral narcissism. If you have what you think are the correct ideas, you can do anything. In retrospect, it should be no surprise that the results of Marx’s then untested ideas were catastrophic. The number of corpses traceable to them in the Soviet Union, China, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere is finally uncountable, although low estimates for Stalin—twenty million deaths—and Mao—forty million—should be sufficient to make the case even for diehards of the Left. Obviously, it didn’t and doesn’t.

To find myriad examples of Marxism’s dismal outcomes being obfuscated by moral narcissism, look no further than Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. The self-described democratic socialist Vermont senator touts the economic success and social justice of Scandinavian countries to adoring crowds even as those same nations abandon socialism for capitalism for their own survival or, in the case of Sweden, to avoid fiscal collapse.¹ Margaret Thatcher encapsulated the logical inconsistency of Sanders’s ideology with her oft-quoted statement: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” But the evident accuracy of her statement is easily overridden by the emotional needs of a group, as Sanders’s eager audiences have shown. As Sophocles put it nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, “What people believe prevails over the truth.”

The current fashionable attraction to multiculturalism and its quasi-fascist forebear cultural relativism is also supported directly by this same morally narcissistic impulse. Indeed, liberalism and progressivism themselves, as presently constituted in our society, would not exist without moral narcissism. They are all about the self as viewed by the self. Without self-approval, liberalism would disintegrate. It holds it together.

That’s where the influence of the Least Great Generation comes in. We members of the LGG obviously did not originate moral narcissism, which is undoubtedly as old as our species. Some version of early man thumped his chest and brayed about how he, and only he, had solved once and for all the problem of the saber-toothed tiger and should be rewarded accordingly. History is in part a tale of individuals and groups adhering to maximalist ideas and ideologies, occasionally for the better but far more often with disastrous ends. Communism, measured by those exponential mortality rates as well as by the emotional suffering and poverty of vast populations under its rule, was the worst of them. Immediately post-World War II, despite the revolt against McCarthyism and pleas for the supposedly innocent Rosenbergs, people were gradually beginning to understand the horrors of scientific socialism and Stalinism. Tales of the Gulag and the purge trials, the mass starvation of the Ukrainians, had filtered through, leaving the then young Least Great Generation bereft of its first inspiration, the Soviet Union.

Many chose Maoism instead. I can remember attending performances by the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the early seventies in which the audience was led in a doo-wop style community sing, chanting “Papa Mao M-Mao Mao . . . Papa Mao Tse Tung.” As we clapped to the beat and sashayed in a conga line, we felt oh-so-modern and oh-so-hip. What did we know? China was so far away and exotic. The slogans of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were unexamined idealistic rallying cries for causes we had only barely heard of. Who didn’t want a good harvest? And fighting Lin Biao (whoever he was) and Confucius (he was so old-fashioned) seemed like the intelligent and politically correct (before we had even heard the term) thing to do. Few of us had any idea of what it all meant or what was actually happening in China. And by the time we did, when the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were made manifest to the world and the Tiananmen tanks were on our television screens, most of us had moved on anyway. It didn’t matter. Our moral narcissism was focused elsewhere—climate change or the campus rape epidemic, whatever the latest imaginary outrage might have been. Moral narcissism, like the proverbial finger, having writ, moves on. It’s not the subject. It’s the feeling.

This doesn’t mean that old traditions were not reinvented as needed. The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society—written in 1962 by Tom Hayden and arguably the founding document of the Least Great Generation—attempts to restart socialism by painting Stalin as an unfortunate aberration. There were better ways to utopia and we knew how to find them. We wouldn’t make the mistake of Stalinist excesses (although years later moral narcissist in extremis Oliver Stone did his best to erase those Stalinist excesses from the record altogether with his television series Untold History of the United States).

Others followed in Hayden’s footsteps or ran parallel with him, attempting to reconstitute leftism, to give it a new “humanistic” life in the face of its detractors. Writers like Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, heroes to us at the time, are exemplars of this type of distraction cum rehabilitation, adopting Freud, Gramsci, and other psychological and sociological thinkers to breathe life into moribund nineteenth-century Marxism. The Frankfurt School as well was a united front of moral narcissists dedicated to that end—deliberate obfuscation through art, literature, and obscurantist philosophy aimed at creating “socialism with a human face” or a face that was hidden altogether.

This approach had the desired impact. The Gulag and similar atrocities were largely forgotten and a new generation of leftists was born through the offices of the Least Great Generation. The culture and political theory were mixed together in a confusing stew, sometimes deliberately. Marcuse’s most notable concept “repressive tolerance”—the theory that free expression as practiced in Western liberal democratic societies like the United States is actually a form of oppression, hence essentially intolerant—was a masterpiece of doublespeak, negating almost every possible act of criticism or distinction. This paved the way for the ironically gay French philosopher Michel Foucault’s impassioned defense—under the equalizing banner of cultural relativism—of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran; the “ironically gay” description earned by the well-known repeated hangings of homosexuals from telephone poles under the ayatollah’s rule. But still, all cultures were equal. Marcuse’s essay on “repressive tolerance” appeared in 1965 and created a sensation in intellectual circles. Not long thereafter (1968) the Beatles were channeling the Beach Boys with “Back in the USSR,” playfully establishing an easily swallowed moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union. Everyone got up and danced, that equivalency message seeping into an entire generation and leaving a vacuum easily filled by the feel-good mentality facilitated by moral narcissism. Aren’t we hot? Aren’t we good? Bebop-alula.

By the time that generation grew up, most of those views had been adopted by the left wing and ultimately the mainstream of the Democratic Party as unspoken givens. William Voegeli in his recent book The Pity Party explains how this turned the Democrats into a party of fake, postured compassion, in other words, pity. In a sense, he was being charitable. For many, particularly those in leadership positions, compassion was never the point. Power was. Compassion became a masquerade for selfishness, a way for elites to feel good about themselves while conniving to rule and gain financially. Some of this was conscious on their parts, some unconscious, some undoubtedly a mixture of the two. In the end it didn’t matter because an immense power structure, buoyed by a moral narcissism that had trickled down to a large portion of the public, making them especially gullible, was in place. And it was oh-so-profitable to the unquestioned elites who did the trickling. Bill Clinton was already receiving $500,000 for a single speech to oil sheiks in Kuwait.² He had previously earned $600,000 for two speeches in Saudi Arabia, no doubt to “progressive” groups, and $200,000 for a speech to a Chinese real estate group. Hillary Clinton received a $14 million advance for her book, surpassing her husband’s previous record of $10 million. Neither book came close to earning out those advances or was probably even read much beyond page ten. Perhaps the public recognized they were just a collection of liberal bromides laced with self-justifications. But that didn’t matter. The advances did not need to be returned.

These and other financial boondoggles might have been the envy of Boss Tweed, but they provide a certain risk to the elites and to Hillary’s presidential ambitions. Well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, American society is at a turning point in that a significant part of the population has rebelled against these ruling elites. An increasing number are becoming repulsed by immensely wealthy public figures like George Soros and Michael Moore telling them what to do and how to live while enjoying lifestyles radically at odds with their prescriptions. And it has reached a point where fewer and fewer believe the masquerade anymore or are cooperating with it. At the same time that the country is trying to work through all the issues mentioned above, a crisis in race relations has risen suddenly to the forefront after seeming to have been improving for decades. This is not by accident. When the public starts to rebel against elites, the focus almost always shifts to a new crisis, providing a deliberate distraction and preserving the ruling class. The role of moral narcissism in manufacturing these crises is crucial.

This book will take each of those issues and demonstrate how they have been infected by moral narcissism and how that worked to the benefit of elites. Later I will try to show how moral narcissism has allowed the Democratic Party to become a hidden party of the rich, thus wounding the middle class and the American dream—and what can be done about it.

I will begin with the issue of climate because I believe it to be paradigmatic. Recently, Barack Obama delivered a speech at UC Irvine (as he did later to the Coast Guard and at West Point) excoriating so-called climate deniers with no reference whatsoever to actual science of any sort, only to what in his morally narcissistic view a citizen is supposed to believe. The coming climate catastrophe was a given, a premise on which all educated and reasonable people must perforce agree. Otherwise, they were barbarians, yahoos out of a Sinclair Lewis novel like Babbit or Dodsworth. The contradictory details of climate research were beneath mention by Obama, even irrelevant. A “good” person wants to save the earth and is willing to spend billions to do so, even if that means impoverishing the lower classes further, with no discernible evidence that there would be an improvement of any sort to the environment or a true determination as to whether warming is a positive or a negative. The audience, equally infused with moral narcissism and feeling especially good about themselves, gave the president a standing ovation for his pronouncements. As we used to say in the sixties, the personal had become political—or was it vice versa?

That sixties slogan is worth rethinking. More accurate might be that the personal yields the political or, in other cases, that the personal hides us from the political. In the end, for all of us as human beings, the personal is ultimately just that, the personal. We live in our own skins with our own feelings, our joys and pains, reacting to our own friends, family, and coworkers. For most of us, that is our world, at least the most important part of it. The ability to exist comfortably within a social sphere is a significant measure of our sanity. If that ruptures, our peace of mind and that social sphere begin to disintegrate.

That has been the outgrowth of moral narcissism in our culture. It has divided us almost as no other phenomenon. America is a nation emotionally divided because it is ideologically divided and quite rigidly so. Our families are split, many of our lifelong friendships damaged or destroyed. This is particularly true since the events of September 11, 2001, when, for a few months, our country drew together before it inexorably drifted apart to an extent it had not for decades, perhaps since the Civil War itself. Terrified to think anew, people retreated to the traditional views they had had for decades, in many cases since childhood. Now we often live in silence with each other, unable to speak about the most significant things for fear they will cause the situation to get worse, that we will alienate each other further and cause the social fabric to explode.

Almost all of this is because moral narcissism has made us adhere so closely to our ideas, even to identify our entire personalities with them in the most precise manner, when that would not be necessary at all. Bret Stephens, in his America in Retreat, speaks of an “overdose of ideals.” Perhaps that is what we suffer from. Of course, those ideals come from somewhere. At some point we attached ourselves to them, as I did as a high school student, paging through The Communist Manifesto. The question is how to detach our minds from this narcissistic identification to see the world with clarity.