New York Pseuds Analyze Bush

I know, I know: It is a fool’s errand to attempt to trace the intellectual genealogy of the people who put out New York magazine, which so rarely offers any intellectual content at all.But the recent feature from the February 5 issue, “Bush on the Couch: Analyzing the President,” in which 13 writers subject President Bush to a long-distance psychiatric exam, tempts us to try anyway.Pretending that your political adversary is crazy — rather than merely misguided, mistaken, or misinformed — is a relatively recent strategy of political partisans. It coincides with the rise of the pseudo-intellectual among the country’s cultural elite.There are lots of ways to identify a pseud, that over-schooled, undereducated poser who places the highest value on appearing sophisticated rather than on sophistication itself.One mark is his belief that whoever disagrees with him must be intellectually deficient somehow — the owner of a mind far punier than the finely tuned organ the pseud is fortunate to enjoy.But assuming the stupidity of other people gets boring, and pseuds have short attention spans. And sometimes one’s political opponent seems too crafty to be merely dumb.That’s when the pseud calls in the heavy artillery of bogus psychologizing. The fellow with whom you disagree is not merely a dope, he’s a nut. And the surest evidence of his psychopathology is — that he disagrees with you.Psychologizing disagreements accomplishes several goals at once.The circularity of the argument makes the pseud’s position seem impenetrable. He gets to maintain his customary pose of detached sophistication even as he exercises the crassest kind of ideological opportunism.And best of all, the trick forecloses the possibility of genuine debate. What could be more pointless than engaging the ideas of crazy people? Pseuds hate ideas.The first pseud to apply this form of quackery to American politics was the late Ralph Ginzburg, the convicted pornographer and editor of Fact magazine, who in 1964 asked a panel of psychiatrists to analyze the Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater.Ginzburg was a liberal Democrat who despised Goldwater’s politics; so, apparently, were the psychiatrists. They declared Goldwater not just wrong but nuts.A few years later the “psychohistorian” Fawn Brodie cast her cool clinical eye over President Nixon. Another liberal Democrat, Brodie despised Nixon’s politics. She declared him nuts, too.“Nixon lied,” she said, with pristine pseudo-sophistication, “to gain love, to shore up his grandiose fantasies, to bolster his ever-wavering sense of identity.”Pretty soon, pseuds didn’t even need to pretend to psychiatric training before citing political disagreement as a sign of mental derangement. The journalist Garry Wills, a liberal Democrat who specializes in writing pop history books, published an elaborate account of Ronald Reagan’s political beliefs based on the alcoholism of Reagan’s father. Yes, Reagan was one sick puppy, too.But pseuds like Brodie, Ginzburg, and Wills can only gawk in admiration at a writer named John Heilemann, who introduces the New York magazine article and updates their technique for the Bush era.Mr. Heilemann begins with an expression of mock puzzlement. Why would President Bush order an infusion of new troops into Iraq?There are lots of possible answers to that question, including the one offered by Mr. Bush himself: More troops are needed to establish order and security in Iraq, without which its political system will never stabilize.A debatable answer, right? But why debate, when you can just ask, as Mr. Heilemann does: “Has [Bush] actually lost his mind?”Then, true to the pseud’s vocation, he shrugs on his lab coat and gets all technical on us, citing unnamed, of course, psychiatrists who say, anonymously, natch, that “Bush suffers from a classic case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” And as if those big words weren’t fancy enough — capitalized, too. Mr. Heilemann even cites the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the way real doctors do.With the highbrow technicalities out of the way, the New York contributors are free to riff. This gives them license to blithely assert things that aren’t true.Newsweek writer Jonathan Alter, for example, falsely says Mr. Bush has only recently begun meeting with the families of military casualties. Another writer, Andrew Solomon, praises the compassion and wisdom that he has discovered in the diaries of Abraham Lincoln, who — darn it — didn’t keep a diary.Facts are dispensable for the pseud anyway. Other tricks are far more essential.There are the hard-to-follow insults — “he doesn’t cast a shadow; he’s just this paper construction,” says novelist Robert Stone; theological musing —”anyone who’s ever read the New Testament knows that there’s very little upon which George W. Bush and Jesus would agree,” says humorist Scott Dikkers; mystical powers of mindreading — “Bush has to remind himself to put on a sad face when he talks about his war,” self-help guru Deepak Chopra says, and assertions of superior sensitivity — Mr. Bush, says the former senator, Gary Hart, is “so blithe and casual about death and destruction. It would have kept me awake at night.”And best of all, you can do all these things without once constructing an argument, marshalling a rebuttal, or even gathering facts and evidence from the world outside your own head.Sound familiar? If I didn’t know better, I’d say these people suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. But no. They’re just pseuds.Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.

New York Pseuds Analyze Bush

New York Pseuds Analyze Bush

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