For decades now— ever since Newt came up with his boilerplate list of self-referential insults like grotesque, pathetic, sick, destroy, corrupt— right wing Republicans have been shouting at us in their mirrors, accusing us of their own secret sins. For example, you may remember Obama was branded as a smug elitist. Jonah Goldberg was very proud of his idiotic book “Liberal Fascism.” A writer for the crap magazine Goldberg edits just offhandedly called Obama a “preening mediocrity.” Black Lives Matter gets slammed as a racist movement.
Psychologists have a term for a similar kind of mirror-bashing: projection. You take the part of yourself you most want to deny, which frightens and shames you the most, and put it onto somebody else, where you are free to despise it safely. I don’t know if psychologists agree, but I see men who get sex from other men and then beat them up for being gay as an extreme example.
Somewhere in the last couple of decades, conservatives perfected a technique of using projective insult as a kind of political ju-jitsu. And it has been throwing us! A man with an identifiably fascistic style shouts “Liberals are fascists.” If we respond “No, I’m not the fascist, you’re the fascist!” we turn into Peewee Herman: “I know you are but what am I?” It’s maddening, actually, and I think they know it and enjoy our frustration.
But look. Nobody these days can take a Republican seriously who insults liberal politicians for being sexually deviant. These used to be serious and effective accusations, true. But then the masterminds of Bill Clinton’s blow-job impeachment all turned out to be hypocritical sleazebags: adulterers, child molesters, men’s room cruisers.
That was just the beginning, the hits kept coming. It’s become a kind of joke; when wingnuts froth at the mouth about sexual matters we just smile and raise an eyebrow. “Quite the wide stance you got there, buddy, did you acquire it by hiking the Appalachian trail?”
Now everybody has begun to see that Donald Trump is exactly what he calls his opponents: a disaster, a crazy lying crooked loser. Let’s make sure to pin the words right back on him, and on his enablers. When conservative politicians start up with their projective trash talk, let’s make a joke of it. “You seem to be getting awful worked up there, fella. Is there something you’re trying to tell us about yourself?”