The other week, Stephen Miller delivered a characteristically bizarre speech at a terrorism conference hosted by the State Department. He and Marco Rubio are obviously dreaming up some neo-McCarthyite campaign against the Left—so far with limited success.
But what I really found interesting was the moment Stephen Miller tried to psychoanalyze his opponents:
The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet. [...]
[W]hy is there not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.
Boy, there's a lot to say about a statement like that. For one thing, it sounds like something that Goebbels would squawk out of an overhead intercom. There is the same hysterical, shrieking note of paranoid denunciation.
Miller obviously hopes to paint an image in the listener's mind of some rippling blond Aryan family being menaced on all sides by creeping, beady-eyed ewige leftists.
But that's exactly where the speech fails even at its own goal. Even on the level of shrill, fascist ranting, that is to say, it's not particularly effective. It's too on-the-nose. It sounds too obviously pitched at a 1930s German audience, not twenty-first century Americans.
As a friend pointed out when I told him about Miller's speech, every high school in the country has some students who participate in alternative culture. You can't really shock us these days with the specter of tattoos and pink hair. You need to give us more.
As a result, Miller's speech just ends up sounding far more outré and freakish than the people he is trying to denounce as freaks. So one has to chalk it up as a failure on all counts.
But I'm also interested in the substance of what Miller is trying to say, regardless of how ineptly he gets his point across. Because it really boils down to a stock argument that has been used against the Left for at least a century: Why do you care so much about what happens to other people? Why do you care about what we do to workers, or immigrants, or poor people, or minorities? There must be something wrong with you.
As Arthur Koestler shows, the charge of "neuroticism" is one that has been leveled against the Left—with some accuracy—since at least the first time the specter of Fascism raised its head on the world scene.
As the Nazi character Bernard says in Koestler's Arrival and Departure, "You tried to go against your class and traditions, while I am conforming to mine. I don't need any special psychological considerations for my conduct, whereas you did."
This, essentially, is Miller's argument. He's like: we're the normal ones. We're content to belong to the privileged normative group and not care what happens to anyone else. You all are the ones camped out in front of an ICE detention center chanting slogans in the middle of the night, and risking arrest or getting rammed or gunned down by our agents for it. So what's wrong with you? What "special psychological considerations" are motivating you? It can only be some neurotic complex or ressentiment.
You are a "collection of neurotic Cinderellas," as Bernard puts it in Koestler's novel, "who wanted to overthrow a society in which nobody asked them to dance [... and] male spinsters to whom Power had never proposed." In other words, the Left is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet, as Miller put it.
Koestler's protagonist, over the course of the book, comes to recognize that the point is basically valid, so far as it goes. He is indeed motivated by a neurotic guilt and savior complex. But—he asks—having shown this much, what does it really prove? Having reduced moral impulses to psychological drives, does that prove they are unjustified? Hardly.
"[E]thical imperatives," Koestler summarizes in the Postscript, "cannot be invalidated by reducing them to factors operating on a different level[.]"
As he writes in an essay on the same theme in The Yogi and the Commissar, "[H]istory [...] is not interested in a person's motives, only in his achievements."
For "the intelligentsia," Koestler admits (and he obviously includes himself in the diagnosis), "neurosis is an almost inevitable correlate."
This is because "The pressure of the environment cramps [...] behavior. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt-complex [...] An armament manufacturer may have a perfectly clean conscience, but I have never met a pacifist without a guilty look in his eyes."
"Those who attack the intelligentsia for its neurotic dispositions," then—Koestler concludes—"might as well attack the miners for their susceptibility to T.B. It is a professional disease and should be recognized as such."
There we have it then. Perhaps we really are as weird and neurotic as Miller seems to suggest. So what? It's an occupational hazard of ours. We are trying to "challenge the environment," and the price we pay is to be "scarred" in the process.
Miller, meanwhile, seeks power through force and fear. He spends every night dreaming up ways to make life hell for members of our society's most defenseless and disadvantaged groups.
He thereby "conforms to the interests of his class." No "special psychological considerations" needed there—just the oldest and most obvious ones in the human soul: lust for power and domination over others.
Like Koestler's armament manufacturer, he probably sleeps quite soundly at night.
It is the people who are trying to find motives other than domination and supremacy to motivate a human life—the old, old dreams of liberty and fraternity and all that—who are the weird ones. We are trying to "vote against our human nature," as Vachel Lindsay once urged us to do—and how could we not be punished for it?
We are indeed the freaks, the neurotic Cinderellas, the "blue-hairs." We are like the persecuted "young sinner" in Housman's poem, then: "wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? / Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair."
But history will not be interested in in what motivated us internally—but in whether we were right. I suspect if you could get most abolitionists in the 19th century on the couch, you'd find that they were some odd fish too, whereas their contemporaries who embraced the status quo were the ones who would seem "good and natural," in Miller's phrase.
Such is the price we pay for trying to "challenge the environment," for trying to "go against one's class and traditions"—exile, banishment, persecution, neuroticism, "freakishness"—the mark of Cain that is interchangeable with the crown of thorns, as Shelley pointed out.
It's certainly not a fair fight, when those on the other side have all the normal psychological impulses of greed and power and self-interest at their back—and all the traditions of their class beaming approval on their conduct. But no one said it would be easy.
It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It’s walking on a string across a gulf
With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;
And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck. (John Davidson)
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