Diagnosing progressivism and its narcissist agenda

OPINION:

Why are progressives so hard to negotiate with? They fight tooth and nail against any dilution of their views. They never compromise.

When they lose, they do not accept defeat but return to the purity of their position. When they win, they come back with ever new demands. They seem never to be satisfied.

We might get a clue about progressives by looking at their language. Consider the current debate over voting rights legislation.

Progressives do not see their favored legislation as one of many competing views, each of which might have some merit. On the contrary, they describe Republican state legislatures’ reform proposals as an “unparalleled wave of voter suppression laws.”

This, even though no state legislature is advancing legislation that is more restrictive than any voting law in America before 2020. The temporary voting procedures adopted in 2020, often on the fly and without state legislatures’ support, were justified solely by the special circumstances of COVID-19.

Progressives allege that the future of democracy itself is at stake; without H.R. 1, the country will revert to “the days of Jim Crow.” They say the Senate faces a stark choice between “saving democracy and saving the filibuster.”  

No thoughtful person believes any of this. Not one single American citizen cannot easily and freely vote under any state’s proposed voting reforms. To add to this, the grotesque claim that Blacks will somehow be uniquely disadvantaged subtly impugns the ability of Black Americans to carry out the simple task of voting.

Hyperbolic rhetoric is not unique to voting rights but characterizes progressives generally. Whatever one believes about the degree and danger of global warming, this is a complex subject that requires thoughtful analysis. But for progressives global warming is “an existential crisis;” it requires immediate and comprehensive legislation. Without progressive legislation — none of which, by the way, will make the slightest dent in global warming — the world will end in, fill in the blank, 10 years, 12 years or 20 years. The old fundamentalists with their sandwich boards declaring “the end of the world is nigh” had nothing over today’s progressives.

Progressives assert that ending the expanded child credit will impoverish and jeopardize one-half of all American families, families which somehow functioned for 232 years until the expanded tax credit was adopted a mere six months ago as a temporary COVID-19 related expedient. And so it goes.

Psychologists employ a concept called “grandiosity.” By this is meant an unrealistic sense of superiority, in which people consider themselves better than others. Grandiosity is a kind of narcissistic personality disorder.

Here is the connection: The more cataclysmic the stakes of a political issue, the more important progressives become in their own eyes. Where would the preening self-importance of progressives be if political issues were understood as trade-offs, where pros and cons are debated in terms of their cost-effectiveness?

In wildly exaggerating the stakes of political disagreements — the very future of the American family, of democracy in America and of the planet itself — progressives fashion a world in which they are uniquely important. And of course, it is also far easier to see their political rivals not as worthy opponents but as ignorant, racist, anti-science and generally evil. Politics becomes not the art of compromise but a Manichean contest between good and evil.

So long as progressives display this kind of narcissism, they will be very difficult to work with. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have found this out the hard way. In an honest moment, perhaps Nancy Pelosi would acknowledge this too.

There is no good way and no good reason to accommodate the agenda of a narcissist. Were progressives to achieve every single item on their current agenda, they would surely advance new and more expansive demands; without ever new demands, the progressive sense of self-worth would collapse. Their demands, to use one of President Biden’s favorite words, must inevitably grow “exponentially.” It is no way to govern to accommodate the narcissism of political opponents.

• Jeff Bergner served in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.