Politics: do emotions precipitate actions?

Politics is not a mere intellectual exercise. It is the art of the possible, practiced by emotion-driven human beings. One of my blog posts, originally published on March 31, 2006, is about this subject. A number of site visitors have read it since then. Thus it deserves some attention. What drew these readers? Originally I wrote that,

All over the world people run for elective office. They do not walk, they run. Women and men have political ambitions upon which they act. My post today will explore one of the drivers of these actions, human emotion. And this entry will explore it within a gender framework. Noting my biases at the beginning, they include being a female, a senior, a Westerner, a psychotherapist, and a progressive Democrat.

All of this is still true. It will not be long until the 2006 mid-term elections. And emotions among both voters and candidates are running high and low. U.S. Representative Chris Shays, R-Connecticut, is probably feeling anxiety about his very close race. Senator George Allen is perhaps still embarrassed about his language gaffe, "macacaa." Senator Clinton may be feeling ambivalence about a presidential race in 2008. Many voters are feeling anger at the state of the nation. Others fear that their party will lose power and control is the election goes the wrong way. Consumers, who may vote their pocketbooks, according to USA Today, are pessimistic about the economy. To quote,

Consumer confidence fell in August to the lowest in nine months as concerns about the job market and the overall state of the economy weighed on people's moods.
The consumer confidence index fell 7.4 points to 99.6, the Conference Board said. That was the biggest drop since September, the month after Hurricane Katrina hit. The level in August was the lowest since November.
"Looking ahead, the glass remains half-empty as consumers are growing increasingly more pessimistic about the short-term outlook," Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, said in a statement.
The drop came as the percentage of consumers who said jobs were "not so plentiful" rose to 54.5%, the highest since November. And the portion who said they expected there would be "fewer jobs" in the economy in six months rose to 18.3%, highest in six months.
"It appears the labor market is mainly to blame for consumer woes in August," says Gina Martin, financial economist at Wachovia.

Anxiety, shame, fear, anger and sadness are all normal emotions. Do these feelings drive behaviors? You bet they do. I included the following quotation in my original post. It makes my points about presidential politics. From MSNBC and Newsweek comes this great piece by Jerry Adler about Sigmund Freud. To quote,

March 27, 2006 - We stand now at a critical moment in the history of our civilization, which is usually the case: beset by enemies who irrationally embrace their own destruction along with ours, our fate in the hands of leaders who make a virtue of avoiding reflection, our culture hijacked by charlatans who aren't nearly as depraved as they pretend in their best-selling memoirs. As we turn from the author sniveling on Oprah's couch, our gaze is caught by a familiar figure in the shadows, sardonic and grave, his brow furrowed in weariness. So, he seems to be saying, you would like this to be easy. You want to stick your head in a machine, to swallow a pill, to confess on television and be cured before the last commercial. But you don't even know what your disease is.
And Freud: the great engine of an ongoing middlebrow bull session that has engaged our culture for a century. Without Freud, Woody Allen would be a schnook and Tony Soprano a thug; there would be an Oedipus but no Oedipus complex, and then how would people at dinner parties explain why the eldest son of George Bush was so intent on toppling Saddam? (This is a parlor game Freud himself pioneered in his analysis of Napoleon, who'd been dead for a century when Freud concluded that sibling rivalry with his eldest brother, Joseph, was the great drive in his life, accounting for both his infatuation with a woman named Josephine and his decision—following in the footsteps of the Biblical Joseph—to invade Egypt.) . . . . .
Yes, it's Sigmund Freud, still haunting us, a lifetime after he died in London in 1939, driven by the Nazis from his beloved Vienna. The theoretician who explored a vast new realm of the mind, the unconscious: a roiling dungeon of painful memories clamoring to be heard and now and then escaping into awareness by way of dreams, slips of the tongue and mental illness. The philosopher who identified childhood experience, not racial destiny or family fate, as the crucible of character. The therapist who invented a specific form of treatment, psychoanalysis, which advanced the revolutionary notion that actual diagnosable disease can be cured by a method that dates to the dawn of humanity: talk. Not by prayer, sacrifice or exorcism; not by drugs, surgery or change of diet, but by recollection and reflection in the presence of a sympathetic professional. It is an idea wholly at odds with our technological temperament, yet the mountains of Prozac prescribed every year have failed to bury it. Not many patients still seek a cure on a psychoanalyst's couch four days a week, but the vast proliferation of talk therapies—Jungian and Adlerian analyses, cognitive behavioral and psychodynamic therapy—testify to the enduring power of his idea. . . In the id-driven worlds of politics, athletics and business, Freud is the ultimate non-bottom-line guy; he pays off five years down the road in the non-negotiable currency of self-knowledge. When President George W. Bush told an interviewer in 2004 that he wouldn't "go on the couch" to rethink his decisions about the Iraq war, it so outraged Dr. Kerry J. Sulkowicz, a professor of psychiatry at NYU Medical School, that he wrote a letter to The New York Times protesting this slur on analysis, with the implication "that not understanding oneself is a matter of pride." Sulkowicz knows this attitude firsthand as a consultant to corporate CEOs and boards of directors, where he struggles daily to beat some introspection into his clients' heads. "There's so much emphasis on 'execution' and 'action' in the business world," he says. "I try to convey that action and reflection are not mutually exclusive." Freud's insights into the irrational and the unconscious find application in the corporation, where even high-level executives may bring transference issues into the office, seeking from their boss the approval they once craved from their parents. Freud's writings on group dynamics and sibling rivalry can serve the thoughtful CEO well, Sulkowicz adds. It helps, though, if the source is somewhat obscured. "I hardly ever talk about Freud by name," he says.

That emotions drive actions was true in March; it is still my belief. I quote from my earlier post:

Wars happen when political action does not solve the problem and emotions take over. War is a form of organized violence within and between political systems. Think about the war in Vietnam. We were eventually drawn into that conflict because of cold war fears. John Foster Dulles' domino theory convinced politicians that Communism would dominate the world if South Vietnam were the first of many Southeast Asian countries to fall. Of course we absolutely could not let that happen. But we lost that war; in fact we were humiliated in the eyes of some. And that loss has colored the United States' international politics ever since. The emotions of fear and humiliation, in my opinion, drove the 9/11 terrorists. And it is my view that those feelings also influenced the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Later in 2006 what emotions drive the decision to stay in Iraq, in the midst of their civil war and beyond all reason? Sociologist Thomas Scheff provided some insight on how such things might happen. The question was, do emotions drive violent behavior? Scheff explores this in, "Male Emotions And Violence," by Thomas Scheff-Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara. © 2001 from the Journal of Mundane Behavior. To quote,

Men all over the world have been socialized to be strong, brave and competent. In my case, and I think many others, that has meant being shamed into suppressing vulnerable emotions, especially fear, grief, and shame. Stating the matter simplistically, for brevity, most male adults are not conscious of these emotions. Therefore they don't often shake with fear, sob and tear with grief, and hang their head in shame (and are humorless in a crisis) when these reactions are appropriate (for a fuller treatment of the issue of catharsis, see Scheff 1979).

Quoting what I said in my earlier post,

Scheff writes about his experience as a man, what his feelings and actions might indicate about being a man. This leads me to wonder about leadership because I am a woman and a political activist. When we elect our leaders we expect them to be strong, brave and competent. Can women also be seen as strong, brave and competent? Or are women more socialized to be "the vulnerable emotional ones."

Both women and men must become part of the solution. Acting upon indignation springing from the current administration's outrageous attempts to curb dissent, we must join the Democrats' goal to take back the U.S. House. And maybe regaining Senate control is also possible. According to the Washington Post, OCP (our current president) is going to be busy campaigning because of his failures of leadership. Quote,

Bush previewed some of the themes he will strike at an address Thursday in Salt
Lake City at the American Legion's national convention.
Terrorism and Iraq loom large in the coming midterm elections, and the GOP majorities in both chambers of Congress are at risk. In many of the most competitive races, Republicans are still hoping the public trusts them more to defeat terrorism, . .

The nation's health demands that our side, the side of patriotic dissent in both parties, has a powerful platform from which to act. Think Progress guest writer, Joe Cirincionne puts it this way,

The worst case, however, is that the president will act on his vision. He expressly abandons decades of bipartisan efforts to manage world events and contain disruptive forces. “For a half-century, America’s primary goal in the Middle East was stability,” he says contemptuously, embracing the neoconservative notion that we use the U.S. military for serial regime change to force a new world order.
If so, this could be not just the political posturing of an election campaign but the unveiling of a new phase in the president’s long war. A war, he says, in which the “fighting there can be as fierce as it was at Omaha Beach or Guadalcanal.”
A grim prediction, a bizarre campaign platform, and a future we must reject.

And the time for healthy debate about Iran is also right now. A "defiant" Iranian president's stance on his nation's nuclear program does not need to be seen by OCP as a threat to his own manhood. This is about two nations with millions of citizens involved. It cannot be about the threatened emotions of the two men. Find out how your candidates feel about this question. And then work and vote for the ones who have it right.

Tags: politics Bush gender psychology Freud 2006 election Democrat war Middle East