Election By Emotion Part 4

FOR this reason, the Ku Klux Klan has been a perfect picnic for them. The Klan originated in a race hatred of the negro; it quickly expanded to include the anti-foreigners and the hundred-percent Americans in general. In communities where there are no negroes, no Jews, no Catholics, and no foreigners in sufficient numbers to authorize a mass movement, the Klan has functioned in the quarrel between unorganized and union labor. Its inspiration is simply the floating hatred in any community that is animated by subconscious self-hate.

One of the Puritan divines who has been most conspicuous in his leadership of this multitudinous emotion has been reminded by his political opponents that he should be preaching “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” But when a man subconsciously hates himself, the text can only encourage him to love his neighbor as little. To love his neighbor, he must first love himself. He must have tolerance, forgiveness, charity for himself if he is to have it for others. And to the Puritan, tolerance of himself and self-forgiveness are a sort of moral turpitude.

In the present election campaign, all the Puritan American’s self-hate is being projected upon the Democratic candidate. And inevitably so. Smith is a Catholic. He is also wet, and in the Puritan mind sex and alcohol are associated in sin. It is this association that makes prohibition a moral issue. And that is probably the subconscious reason, too, why the Puritan divine inevitably believes and argues that Smith is the friend of prostitution, gambling and all allied social evils. These are regarded by the Puritan as especially the sins of the big town. His hatred of his own animal impulse toward those sins gives him a peculiar animus against the city. Smith was born in the metropolis. His campaign song is “The Sidewalks of New York.” To hear that song will move the out-of-town Puritan to a happy release of accumu-lated venom, which he will discharge against Smith.

All this is also inevitable. It is one of the prices we pay for our successful civilization. As the doctors cheerfully point out, the Puritan, by putting a taboo on his sex instinct, damned up in himself an inexhaustible reservoir of instinctive energy which has found its escape in industry, in business activity, in the enormous psychic drive that has produced our material prosperity. Apparently we cannot have both this urge to industry and the genial contentment of soul that comes of self-forgiveness and the tolerance of our animal instincts. We cannot have both the anxious drive and the milk of human kindness that is secreted by the contented psyche. Or, if we can, the doctors have not yet found the way to arrange it. Anyway, it need not concern us here. For the moment we are attempting only to forecast the subconscious issues in a presidential election. You might suppose that all the Puritan projections of self-hate on Smith would be balanced by the votes of the Jews, Catholics, the foreigners and the wets who are included in the Puritan animosity. It does not seem to work out that way. Other subconscious influences interfere.

Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928

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