Projection

In his critical and philosophical work about fellow writer Jean Genet, Saint Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre tells an anecdote about meeting a friend after the second world war from whom he had been long parted. While they were delighted to see each other at first, Sartre relates, they subsequently fell out over politics. This led to some heated exchanges, in the course of which his friend would slip into a repeated linguistic error. The third time this happened, claims Sartre, "he looked at me irritably and asked [...] 'Why do you keep making that exasperating mistake?'" (Frechtman trans.)

Sartre uses the story to illustrate the concept of "projection." That is, when a person discovers something in themselves that they are not willing to tolerate—some socially-unacceptable impulse, temptation, or plan—they turn around and attribute it to the other. "You are the one doing that, not me!" Hence the need of righteous society for scapegoats—outcasts and the underclass—to whom they can attribute their own worst impulses; hence the tendency for political adversaries to accuse one another of doing what they are plotting themselves, and using this as an excuse to preempt the other—and so on. 

I don't doubt the existence of this basic phenomenon—it seems intuitively familiar to any student of the human heart. But I have to say that I doubted the literal truth of Sartre's anecdote about his friend. It seemed a little self-serving on his part to tell it, and the behavior it described a little too blatant. People may indeed be inclined to attribute their own failings to another. But do they do it in real time, just like that? In the immediate act of committing a mistake themselves, would they be so unsophisticated in their projection as to attribute it to the person standing right next to them?

I was forced to revise my skepticism last night, in catching up on the current state of play on Capitol Hill on the COVID-19 relief package. It turns out that projection really can be as blatant as that. 

As a reminder, Congress negotiated the $10 billion COVID aid package weeks ago. The need for it is stark and indisputable. This is not some extraneous package of unrelated public goods—the money in this bill is needed for the bare essentials of pandemic relief: testing, therapeutics, vaccine doses, etc. In order to achieve bipartisan support for this bill, Democrats had already made some major compromises—dropping funds for global vaccine distribution, for instance, even as the global immunization effort is flagging, with horrendous long-term consequences. They made this trade-off in order to get at least something passed. 

Having reached this compromise, Congress had enough votes to finally send this much-needed aid to the president's desk; until—at the last minute—Republicans and conservative Democrats unveiled a new effort to tag on an amendment to the bill that would indefinitely extend the current Title 42 asylum blockade, further entrenching the violation of U.S. treaty obligations under the UN Refugee Convention. Later, they floated another possibility of tying this same amendment to a Ukraine military aid package—which similarly has bipartisan support and would be certain to pass on its own. 

Why are they trying to insert this irrelevant provision into a must-pass COVID relief plan or Ukraine military aid package? Presumably, because they know it cannot pass on its own—as a stand-alone measure, it would be unlikely to clear the Senate supermajority requirement, the House of Representatives, or the president's desk. But they know that if they attach it to an otherwise popular bipartisan measure meeting an extremely urgent need, then it will create a moral dilemma for their opponents. Strike down the whole bill, killing  pandemic relief, or vote for it, Title 42 and all?

It is a devious, underhanded strategy designed to do nothing other than summarily eject vulnerable asylum-seekers to some of the most dangerous conditions on the planet. And not only is it serving this cruel and immoral purpose, it is also tying up and needlessly delaying—if not permanently derailing—legislation that would otherwise pass easily and that meets an urgent and universally-acknowledged medical need. It's not clear how anyone could defend this tactic on its own terms. The costs to people's lives are too high. So what is one to do? This is where our friend "projection" comes into play. 

Exhibit A: Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, appeared in an NBC News story yesterday, saying that he supports tagging on a Title 42 amendment to either the COVID-19 relief package or the Ukraine military aid bill. Then, bizarrely, he says—referring to Senate majority leader Schumer, "Chuck’s shortcoming sometimes is that he gets too cute, and he tries to get to put other stuff in there thinking 'Well, you know, I’ll put stuff in there they don’t like and they can’t vote against it.' Well, yeah, we can. And we often do, and that’s part of why we don’t get a lot done[.]"

Wait, huh? Senator Kennedy just provided a word-for-word accurate description, not of what majority leader Schumer is doing, but of what he and other conservative Republicans and Democrats backing a Title 42 amendment are doing. They know that the amendment couldn't pass on its own; so they are trying to attach it to an otherwise popular must-pass bipartisan bill. They are throwing it in with COVID aid and Ukraine aid, rubbing their hands, and saying "I'll put stuff in there they don't like and they can't vote against it." And in the process they are sabotaging the bill, which is why they "don't get a lot done."

We are truly in the realm here of Sartre's friend tripping over his own grammar and then demanding—"why do you keep doing that?!" Senator Kennedy is being asked why he supports an effort to sabotage otherwise popular and urgently-needed legislation by slipping in a poison pill. He can't defend his actions in doing so on their own terms. He knows he can't. So he just declares that Democratic leadership are the ones doing what his own party is in fact doing.

As a senator, after all, it must be hard to go back to your home state and look constituents in the eye and say: "you know what, we could have delivered you life-saving COVID-19 therapeutics, shots, and testing capacity. We had a bipartisan agreement to do so; we had the votes all lined up. But at the last minute, we chose to inject something extraneous into it in an effort to create a moral crisis that would either kill the legislation or force other people to hold their noses and vote for something they found morally intolerable and reprehensible." 

That's a hard sell to voters who may be dying needlessly of COVID as a result of the failure to pass this aid package. So what is a politician who needs votes to say? 

Just inhabit opposite world. Tell the voters that the person doing exactly what you are doing is in fact your opponent, not you. "Yeah, can you believe it?" you say. "Wow, why would they try to sabotage otherwise popular legislation with a poison pill? Those liberals, sheesh!" 

Problem solved. For the politicians, that is. For the voters, it's another dead loss.