What causes Bush Derangement Syndrome?

"A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character" by Charles J. Sykes helps explain BDS

I've been thinking a lot about the causes of Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS). So many educated and intelligent people simply cast aside critical thinking when it comes to President Bush. Not that there isn't plenty to criticize, but criticism of Bush is more often hysterical. The ecent MSM feeding frenzy on Bush's metaphorical reference to Nelson Mandela is typical. That hysteria carries over to reactions to highly qualified conservatives (John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Samuel Alito, to name a few off the top) and major policy initiatives (social security reform, border and immigration reform, and of course, the war against radical Islamic terror). I've been told to my face that I am a victim of right-wing vicious propaganda. (Having read through some of the information emerging from the Holy Land Foundation trial, you'd have to be in complete denial to ignore the threat to the way we live.)

I came across a book a week or so ago, titled "A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character" by Charles J. Sykes. It is timely, and I was astonished to see that is was published 15 years ago, in 1992. It's a quick read (289 pages including index and end notes), and there are a couple of reviews at Amazon.

I found the following extracts important in understanding what's going on with the those with BDS, liberal guilt, and a refusal to acknowledge the existential threat against our way of life:

Sykes quotes some of the post-WW2 theorists who promoted the definition of a true liberal. The true liberal

cannot stand any outside interference with his personal convictions and beliefs, and he does not want to interfere with those of others either .. One of his conspicuous features is moral courage, often beyond his rational evaluation of a situation. He cannot 'keep silent' if something wrong is being done, even if he seriously endangers himself. ... He is little repressed and even has certain difficulties in keeping himself under 'control.' ... [The true liberal] has 'a critical attitude toward all forms of authority, faith in science, relaxes and non-punitive child-rearing practices and flexible conceptions of sex roles.'

The rise of the politics of "otherness" was a direct attack on the ideology of assimilation represented by the belief that America could be a "melting pot." In the service of that vision, various groups had set aside many of their differences and merged their aspirations into a distinctively egalitarian and democratic polity. Whatever their origins or original group loyalties, individuals submitted themselves to common norms and a shared system of justice. The politics of difference, however, revolted against such a melding. Aligned closely with the politics of victimization, group repudiated the notions of shared history and culture. On college campuses, students resegregated themselves into African, Asian, Hispanic, Jewish, and foreign houses. Each group demanded that it sown suffering endowed it with an ineffable and untranslatable set of claims on the world.
...
Only the most virulent of rednecks would argue that violence, criminality, drug abuse, and illegitimacy are "quintessentially black"; Only a bigot would insist that blacks are "different' and cannot be expected to compete on a level playing field with whites; only a racist would object to demands for literacy among black children. At the extremes, however, racism becomes indistinguishable from the compassionate embrace of victimization. Finally, both -- by different routes -- arrive at the same point; both deny the essential humanity of victims and declare it inevitable and immutable.
...
Anti-poverty programs have not raised up the impoverished, nor have attempts to eliminate inequalities in education snuffed out ignorance. On the contrary,. poverty has proven far more intractable than either liberal or conservative savants would have predicted.
...
Victimization's power to set the social agenda is based on its ability to be both prescriptive and proscriptive. Victimist ideology determines not only the shape of remedies but sets rigid limits to the sort of question that can be asked, lest we engage in the primal sin of "blaming the victim." It creates an elaborate protocol of taboos [i.e., p.c.] while simultaneously offering a theory whose potency derives from its remarkable ability to explain. Once begun, the explanatory power of victimism is endless. Any act can be explained as the fruit of racism, sexism, capitalism, mental disorder, addiction, codependence, or what have you.

Thu Sep 20, 2007