"Hypocrisy is the more-or-less conscious habit of saying one thing and doing another; projection is the mostly unconscious process of displacing one’s own unacceptable intentions onto other people’s presumed desires.
The emergence of guns as a potent political issue in the ‘60s should have told us what ICE’s free rein to shoot protesters is all about: not the rights of the citizen, but the prerogative of a specific faction to dominate when in power, and to lash out with violence when not. Conservatives were not about to concede gun rights to the Black Panthers then, nor to their political opponents now. At other times, as they fantasized that they were groaning under the monstrous tyranny of Clinton or Obama or Biden, they felt they were not merely entitled to carry firearms, but to use them. Inconvenient public safety issues like school shootings were either dismissed as false-flag operations or rationalized, as Charlie Kirk did, as the price “we” (meaning other people’s children) have to pay for “our” (meaning conservatives’) God-given rights.
One abiding characteristic of the right-wing personality is that when he is not dominating others, he feels persecuted. That explains LaPierre’s outbursts in the 1990s just as it explains the lies that Trump, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, et al., require to rationalize their abandonment of a conservative shibboleth now that they are in power.
Sixty years ago, political scientist Richard Hofstadter recognized this syndrome:
For pseudo-conservatism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission. The pseudo-conservative always imagines himself to be dominated and imposed upon because he feels that he is not dominant and knows of no other way of interpreting his position."
Brilliant, that.
Another psychology-principle I’d never have noticed on my own.
Interesting: it seems likely to be produced by damaged-culture, specifically by toxic-masculine culture:
which fundamentally explains ONE HELL OF ALOT, doesn’t it?
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