a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Every once in a while, a psychological process that is having enormous influence in our national political life is noted in the newspaper, explicitly, and even given the proper name.  This morning, Friday the 13^th of May, that happened in a New York Times editorial entitled “Mitt Romney in a Time Warp.”  The moment of illumination was brief, however, and by the second half of the editorial darkness had descended.

The day before, Mitt Romney had given a speech on health care in which he defended the program he helped institute in Massachusetts while he was the liberal Republican governor of that predominantly liberal state. The Times noted that he did not repudiate the Massachusetts plan, as he had done when he was running of President in 2007. Rather, he said “it wouldn’t be honest” to repudiate something he believes is right: you should mandate that people buy health insurance, otherwise they will get a free ride by using emergency rooms, at huge cost to everyone else.

But, then, Romney went on to argue that mandated insurance is good policy for states, but not for the nation. President Obama’s version of the same policy was “a power grab by the federal government.”  If he were President, Romney said, he would immediately repeal the “government takeover of health care” that Obama is trying to bring about. The Times commented on the argument that what is good for states is not good for the Federal government: “That distinction makes no sense, and the disconnect undermines the foundation of Mr. Romney’s candidacy.”  With his spurious distinction, Mr. Romney “went off the rails.”  There you have it: a piece of good judgment and truth-telling.

The editors had clearly marked two things. First, Mr. Romney’s hypocrisy in 2007 and his hypocrisy now. He is blowing in the wind; he is doing what the Republicans (very effectively) named “flip-flopping”  in 2004 as they assassinated the character of John Kerry, allegedly a great flip-flopper and liar about his Vietnam service. And second, the editors marked a  “disconnect” in Romney’s argument about whether mandating health insurance is good for the nation. Romney simply asserted that the proposed federal policy is bad, while the evidence of Massachusetts’ policy is that the more people who have health care insurance the better it is for all. (Sharing the risk widely is, after all, the principle behind insurance.)

But trouble was already coming in this editorial. Our national debate about healthcare is a debate about the scope and mechanism of private health insurance. But the Times is so disconnected from any other way of debating healthcare that it could not note that Romney is only talking about whether mandating private insurance is good or bad. To many people, myself included, it seems obvious that private insurance as the sole modality of health insurance is not good for anybody except private insurers, who make billions of dollars from being the middlemen between the citizens and healthcare institutions. Allowing the scope of private health insurance to expand is ultimately not a good idea, even if it increases the number of insured: it supports an industry, but it does nothing for the great majority of people who need healthcare but cannot afford private insurance not matter what its cost. Allowing public or governmental insurance to expand so that no one is without on-going (and hopefully prevention oriented) healthcare, not only serves the people, but saves the huge expense of uninsured people going to emergency rooms for care on an emergency basis. It allows healthcare institutions to concentrate on finding effective and cost efficient treatments for all.

Nations that limit private insurance and are themselves the main or sole insurers of their citizen’s health spend less on healthcare than America does and are healthier and do not face the problem of the “free riders” Romney worries about at all. In a society where health care is free, there are no free riders. Attention can be concentrated on making sure that citizens do not abuse the system in other ways, that the system stays uncorrupt, and that those who provide care are fairly compensated, have good working conditions, and apply independent science.

But this matter of what seems to me the obvious and demonstrated superiority of “socialized medicine” does not come up, as I noted, in the minds of the Times editors, for they are themselves in a timewarp that they do not recognize: fifty years of experimentation with various types of “socialized medicine” in Canada, Europe and elsewhere means nothing to them, as they –like Romney– are fixated on the idea that America is not a socialist country, period.  Private health insurance is good, period.  (I would recommend to them the experience I had two years ago when I landed in a “socialized medicine” Canadian rural hospital with galloping pneumonia and got the most amazingly quick and competent life-saving treatment –and never paid a nickel or saw a piece of paperwork. This is the concrete reality I refer to in my memory when I think about what is good for people in the domain of healthcare. I wish this type and quality of care for all Americans.)

The Times editorialists say Romney is in a timewarp because they are. And the fact that they are disconnected from reality allowed them, alas, to undo the good work they did with the first part of their editorial. They went right off the rails themselves as they got psychological and explained to their readers: “At heart, he is still the kind of old-fashioned northeastern Republican who believes in government’s role while trying to conceal it [his belief?] under a thin, inauthentic coating of conservative outrage.”  The new illiberal Republicans and Tea Partyers are completely outraged at Obama, and Romney is just “pandering” to them, hiding his heart as he joins them in anger. “He is trapped not only between the poles of his party but between eras, a candidate caught in an electoral timewarp.”  You are absolved, Mitt Romney, you are not a hypocrite after all, you are just a good little Republican boy lost in a dark forest of bad Republicans…

The Times editorialists could not carry through on the truthful observations they made in the opening of their editorial. They could not say, dear readers, we live in a culture of hypocrisy. We are surrounded, day in and day out, by statements from hypocritical politicians that “make no sense.” The new normal of daily political discourse is just the kind of disconnection apparent in Romney’s speech. This is very troubling.

“Culture of hypocrisy” is my name for the trouble. First, it needs to be said that, in psychological terms, “disconnection” that is persistent and resistant to demonstrations of reality is called psychosis. But psychosis is not what we are dealing with here. We do not live in a lunatic asylum, although sometimes it feels that way. What we live in is a culture in which hypocrisy is pervasive to the point where it is seldom remarked and, if remarked, immediately accepted or rationalized. The Times remarked it and even went so far as to say that Romney’s candidacy was undermined by his hypocrisy and his “disconnect” from reality. But then the Times editorialists retreated and absolved the hypocrite. Why?

Interestingly enough, they had been in retreat the day before, too. Up Newt Gingrich had stepped to test whether the citizens are ready to bestow the presidency on him.  As all producers and consumers of the news know, this would-be president had engaged for years in a behavior (adultery, philandering, self-absolution when his religion calls for absolution from his church or his God) before he turned to prosecuting a president (Bill Clinton) for doing the same. Gingrich expected then and expects now to be allowed to absolve himself of his hypocrisy because his intentions at the time were (at heart) good: he worked so hard that he did foolish things, he is smarter and a better historian than everyone else so his country needs him, and so forth.

In a culture of hypocrisy, of course, lots of people do rush forth to absolve hypocrites. Most do so because they are hypocrites themselves and fear a culture in which hypocrisy is criticized and they could be exposed.  But there are also some who are thrilled by the opportunity, common in cultures of hypocrisy, to watch a monumental hypocrite just ruthlessly play out his hypocrisy and make money from it. Thus we have The Donald spouting this crazy thing he had learned from “birthers” about Obama not being born in his birthplace.  The Great Pretender, a meagalomaniac completely unqualified to be president, says the President is a pretender.

It is, of course, a basic fact of human life that if you want to know what a person is really like, you see what that person chronically accuses others of being and doing, and there is your answer, written in the accusation. Gingrich says Clinton is a womanizer. Romney says Obama is a power-grabber. The Donald says Obama is unqualified for his office. People project their faults onto others. And that is the basic growth principle of cultures of hypocrisy: there is so much projection going on –so much blame and counter-blame and more blame—and so little sense of responsibility for being truthful or speaking the truth, that a miasma of hypocrisy thickens.

The miasma alienates ordinary citizens, who are not chronic liars (choosing  to make diconnective statements) any  more than they are psychotics (who cannot help themselves from uttering disconnected statements).  Many –hopefully, most–readers of the newspaper find their heads swimming all the time as politicians say one thing one moment and the opposite  the next, as they contradict themselves continuously, as they swap canards they know to be untruths, as they do anything to get elected, as they abuse their offices and ask to be absolved because their intentions were good.

I really believe (not naively, I hope) that most sane people realize that a person who is chronically, continuously hypocritical ends up unable to judge what is and is not real, what is and is not the truth. Incessant hypocrisy is a slow, lie-by-lie slide in the direction of  psychosis. But this is such a scary prospect that many who understand it are reluctant to acknowledge it.  That seems to me to be the case of the editorialists at the Times, who prefer to believe that Mr. Romney is “at heart”a liberal; he is just temporarily doing this pandering to the right because the poor man is stuck in a timewarp.  So, what the Times editorialists have given us with one hand –a clear statement that this little Emperor has no clothes, he is disconnected from reality while being anxious for the crowd to think he is a well-dressed family man, ready to be the president of our country—they have taken away with the other. Oh, he is just an everyday liar who, at heart, is a liberal. (Do you find this reassuring? I find it hypocritical)

It is scary enough to have so many chronic liars and hypocritical panderers in politics, people who can easily end up lost in their own minds, but the really scary thing is what this phenomenon means:  we are not living in a democratic culture. When people have very little shared sense of reality, when every little news item that comes up is immediately interpreted and reinterpreted in completely opposing and contradictory and politically motivated ways by troops of hypocrites, we have no reason to think that being  entitled to your opinion and free to express it is giving us any protection against  “disconnection.”