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.
Good versus Bad Narcissism: Henrik Ibsen versus Jonathan Gruber
Which works better and will last longer—A Doll’s House or Obamacare?
I have painted us all as narcissists, but narcissistic identification is not entirely bad. There’s narcissim and narcissism. Some narcissists are indeed better than others. “Healthy” or good narcissism exists, as Freud, among many others, has told us. A rational amount of self-love makes a necessary contribution to our lives. It motivates us, sometimes even makes us happy. I wouldn’t be writing this book without it—or have done much of anything with my life. Most wouldn’t have. More significantly, many of the advances in our science and culture wouldn’t exist without a dab of narcissism, often more than a dab. The history of extraordinary achievements in the sciences and the arts can be viewed from one angle as the history of a kind of narcissistic megalomania. Henrik Ibsen is said to have kept a mirror at the end of a stovepipe hat that he would stare down at for hours, admiring himself and his genius while sitting at a cafe table. He wasn’t the only one. Well, he may have been the only one with a mirror at the bottom of his hat, but metaphorically he certainly wasn’t alone. Tooting your own horn, at least to yourself, may be a prerequisite for success.
An operative difference exists, however, between this healthy, or normally neurotic, narcissism and the moral narcissism under analysis here. One way to look at it is the difference between Henrik Ibsen and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who putatively was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s healthcare reform that has been so heavily criticized. It is perhaps unfair, even absurd, to compare Gruber—a seemingly intelligent though essentially routine academic—with a genius of world literature who helped revolutionize playwriting and the theatre, but it does highlight the difference between healthy, albeit
