When Barry Met Shelly: Authoritarian and Totalitarian Psychology of the Obamas

Deborah C. Taylor:

Why are the American people shuffling like sleepwalkers to the authoritarianism of Michelle Obama, and helplessly submitting to the totalitarianism of the president and his lying cohorts?  The fundamental psychological explanation is the irresistible appeal of either submitting to oppression or imposing it on others, due to the false guidance of egoism.

Authoritarianism and totalitarianism manifest differently psychologically and politically.  But both arise from ego defense mechanisms.  And both are more virulent in groups because individual responsibility is diffused.

Individual and collective egos tend to look for a footpath to slavery, because the ego functions under the sway of defense mechanisms that block anxiety, shame, and guilt.  Their function is to provide excuses to the ego to avoid self-insight while grabbing what it wants.

Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism rules vertically by maintaining a monolithic, subservient society from the top down.  Because authoritarianism is non-ideological, it engenders public submission but often causes private resentment.

The ego defense underlying authoritarianism is the conscious and unconscious rationalization of superiority and inferiority among people.  This enables power-grabbers to believe they are more deserving, important, valuable, brilliant, and worthy than others, while coercing the “lessers” to be satisfied with their pittance.

The authoritarian favors conformity and obedience, “sameness and oneness,” for the masses.  Authoritarians believe themselves the proper rulers and that it is best for the masses to do as they are told.  They believe they deserve wealth and adulation from their underlings, and they become outraged by anything resembling criticism.

Authoritarianism does not involve a guiding ideology.  It is a direct seizing and maintaining of power through the use of carrots and sticks to bring the mass of the people into submission.

Since the 1990s, the ego model of authoritarian personality has been largely replaced by social dominance theory (SDT).  Because of left-wing bias in American psychology, SDT has developed not to understand universal mental attributes, but rather to expose the usual suspects – racists, sexists, and homophobes.  American psychological theory itself has become so rigidly ideological that RWA (right-wing authoritarianism) is an accepted term.  There is no left-wing authoritarianism in this ideology, despite the fact that government authoritarianism is imposed by the left in America.

SDT, and its formulation of a personality trait termed social dominance orientation (SDO), fit Michelle Obama like a designer glove.  From Wikipedia:

Individuals who score high in SDO desire to maintain and, in many cases, increase the differences between social statuses of different groups, as well as individual group members. Typically, they are dominant, driven, tough, and relatively uncaring seekers of power.

Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” and her  $300,000-a-year job at a public charity hospital in Chicago are instructive “tells.”  Her 64-page thesis uses the term “Black lower class” 23 times.  And it is unlikely that in her high-paid, politically connected sinecure she lunched with the wretched of the earth.  These examples are the natural order of things for a person with a high SDO score based on an innate sense of superiority.

When Michelle Obama said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country,” she was also saying that in becoming first lady, she will finally be in a position worthy of her greatness.  A first lady capable of gratitude, and a sense of her place in history, would be appalled at the idea of closing the White House to the American people.  But it is natural for a person with very high SDO to assume she has a special entitlement to the White House, that it is best to keep the riffraff out.  As with a banana republic, during the time the White House was closed to the masses, it remained open for expensive entertaining of the regime’s wealthy peers.

Mrs. Obama’s “cause” is to tell everybody what to eat for lunch.  Sameness and oneness.  The American people are too stupid to feed their own kids.  Exhibiting the sine qua non of the authoritarian, Michelle Obama is famous for becoming outraged if she is publicly challenged or even questioned.

It is no coincidence that SDO chart-topper Michelle chose to have those special family times in communist China.  For an authoritarian personality, communist China would be the favoritest place in the whole wide world.  Much more comfortable than a speech-dysregulated democracy.  Finally, someplace got it right!  All those billions of underlings know how to behave.  What a place!

Totalitarianism

As harmful as the rationalization of superiority and inferiority is, the collective ego defense that underlies totalitarianism is worse.  Totalitarian control of public and private behavior is based on mental conditioning of unquestioning acceptance of an all-encompassing religion-substitute ideology.  It is the dreadful byproduct of the unconscious, primitive, and destructive ego defense called splitting.  In splitting, negative and positive impulses are “split off” and unintegrated by the ego.  Unconscious negative qualities feared in oneself are not faced and surmounted, but rather projected onto others.  This psychodynamic underlies the fact that the voices of racism, sexism, and religious intolerance in America today are from the left, not the right.

The ideological mind shelters in an idealized version of itself and its identity “in-group” while projecting phobias and other negative traits onto “out-groups.”  This enables the ideologue to view society as composed of noble, valued groups who are wholly good, and ignoble, devalued groups who cause the world’s problems.  This is the fundamental mental disorder of socialist totalitarianism, including Obama’s.  It is being rigorously enforced by his attorney general.

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