posted last week on huffingtonpost
Deepak Chopra
Obama and the Palin Effect
Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche
even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the
rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention
inMinneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President
Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in
the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000
residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running
one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering
international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her
forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.
She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his
idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological
terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight,
countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed
to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the
other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they
don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher
selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind.
(Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact
that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his
arrival on the scene.) I recognize that psychological analysis of politics
is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can
be helpful here to understand Palin's message. In her acceptance speech Gov.
Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to
change and a higher vision.
Look at what she stands for:
-- Small town values -- a denial of America's global role, a return to
petty, small-minded parochialism.
-- Ignorance of world affairs -- a repudiation of the need to
repairAmerica's image abroad.
-- Family values -- a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for
social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to be
heeded.
-- Rigid stands on guns and abortion -- a scornful repudiation that these
issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
-- Patriotism -- the usual fallback in a failed war.
-- Reform -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out
corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn't
fit your ideology.
Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has
been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that
minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure American types,
can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a
foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of "I'm all
right, Jack," and "Why change? Everything's OK as it is." The irony, of
course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time.
She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty
years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of
women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are
voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national
elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to
change, and narrow-mindedness.
Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The
shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a
shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces
of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive
appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin
is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate
honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona
was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the
demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without
disguise.
