ANAL RETENTIVE REPUBLICANS
By Ted Baiamonte Comments: bje1000@aol.com (02/02/06)
It is a fact that liberalism always hates and resists what they see as the anal retentive rigidity, simplicity, and style of Republicans. If you look at Nixon, Ford, Bush 1, Bush 2, William Buckley, George Will, and Pat Buchanan, to name a few, they do all seem to evidence an intellectual and interpersonal rigidity. They lack the obvious warmth that Bill Clinton for example, does not, and this is probably a direct manifestation of the limited choices and experiences to which they avail themselves as conservatives.
Yes, Clinton and the Democrats are more open, tolerant, friendly, experimental and perhaps caring, than Republicans. Clinton, for example, was tolerant of Monica, homosexuality, welfare, and Bin Laden, but this is not because he was a warm, open, friendly, tolerant explorer and liberal social scientist, but rather because he was a spoiled child (anal expulsive, to be Freudian) who thought he could reinvent the wheel and history. Actually that may be too kind since it merely allows him and them a psychological problem. Perhaps it is not that he and the liberals think they are entitled and able to reinvent the wheel, but that they don't appreciate history enough to know that the wheel already has been invented. Conservatives do know history, and what has been invented. Whether the liberal failure is more intellectual or psychological weakness, one can't really be sure.
Liberals persist though with Freudian based pop psychology, but only as it applies to Republicans: "A recent liberal study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism, and the intolerance of ambiguity." The Guardian further writes about the study: "As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the right-wing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction. All of them "preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality."
"The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out, surprise, to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance."
"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.
The study authors don't want to trivialize themselves with too much pop culture Freudian terminology, but Freud did start it all; so he is unavoidable really. "He said that people with "anal character" were meticulous, parsimonious, and obstinate. Though it's not clear who first used the term "anal retentive," in 1924 a student of Freud's named Karl Abraham distinguished A-Rness from anal expulsiveness. The latter is pretty much what it sounds like, the predisposition to experiment, (to ignore history and to make a "liberal" mess), while parsimony and obstinacy are thought to be A-R traits.
So the next time a liberal pop psychologist or rank amateur accuses a Republican of being anal retentive you can say, "but isn't that better than being an anal expulsive Democrat who neither knows nor understands history?" And, you further might say that while in 100 years the oral/anal psychosexual development concept was never proved to have scientific merit, today it certainly has even less merit given that capitalism had produced enough toilet bowls to go around. Whereas when Freud formulated his silly theory he had share his with 10 other family members which apparently gave him the "issues" which he has tried to resolve at our expense for the last 100 years, and this in not to mention that his subjects were largely experiencing toilet training not in a crowded house with a shared but bowl but, even worse, in outhouses and chamber pots at the hands a very poor, rigid, pre Nazi Germanic parents.
The next time President Bush makes you uncomfortable as you watch him straining to get a few words to flow from his seemingly paralyzed mouth, remember, Bill Clinton was the exact opposite. He could and still does effortlessly share himself with anyone at anytime. Perfectly conjugated verbs and precisely pronounced nouns flow from his educated and experienced mouth like soft ice cream. You might say he is as open, comfortable, and experienced about sharing himself in public as, well, a prostitute. Bush, and many Republicans, on the other hand, are far more fearful, closed, cautious, and self conscious. In public, Bush has the interpersonal manner, shyness, and awkwardness, of someone who has, with humility, respect, and intelligence, accepted the wisdom of history and limited his primary interpersonal experience to primarily his wife and family. And that is more the model on which civilization has been based.
Perhaps if the great; larger than life post war Democratic leaders (FDR, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton), not to mention the great liberal leaders throughout history who our Framers framed against, had shut up, stayed home and not beguiled our support for their great and deadly liberal schemes to create their brave new worlds, we would have been spared the deadly ordeals we endured at their hands. Republicans, from Jefferson forward, have been looking for freedom; not to be lead around by great, anal expulsive, charismatic, and Democratic leaders who have failed to understand and conserve the wisdom of history.
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