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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Can't recall if I posted this when it first came out, but since I'm K-racing myself to the holiday:

The most significant development in the past 30 years of liberal self-conception was the replacement of politics understood as an ideological conflict with politics understood as a struggle against idiots unwilling to recognize liberalism’s monopoly on empirical reason. The trouble with liberalism’s enemies was no longer that they were evil, although they might be that too. The problem, reinforced by Daily Kos essays in your Facebook feed and retweeted Daily Show clips, was that liberalism’s enemies were factually wrong about the world. Just take a look at this chart …

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I am not qualified to make, nor do I want to make, any claims about the psychological character of any particular American liberal. And I am not at all convinced that Freudian psychoanalysis constitutes the most useful way to do so, in any case. But the superego as a metaphor for the collective operation of the liberal world order throws a great deal of much-needed light on what we are observing in the wake of the 2016 election. When history is meant to be over and a single political faction begins to conceive of itself as the permanent manager of a static world, then that faction ceases to be political in the ordinary sense. Politics, in its classic incarnation, is the art of deriving an is from an ought; the point, as Marx famously said, is not to describe the world but to change it. But if the world is as it ought to be already and the essential task is to maintain it — that is, to police the circumscribed boundaries of permissible behavior and ideas — then those tasked with that maintenance must conceive of themselves as acting above politics itself. They become a superego, beyond the libidinal whims of any faction and dedicated not to some alternative vision of the world but to resisting all impulse toward alternatives. Possibility goes in, correction comes out. The End of History suggests a perfectly healthy mind; thus, any attempt to alter this situation is dangerous. But the trouble with superegos is that, once they have taken on this role, they cannot cease to perform it. When the id can be kept in control, all is well. But when it can’t, then the result is not the superego’s surrender — it is repetitious, manic dysfunction. It becomes the blathering superego at the end of history.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/...d-of-history/#!