This is an attempt to explain how Tucker Carlson is exploiting a cognitive bias to hoodwink his audience. This is done through an illustration about how American racism works (or at least one of the mechanisms by which it can be effectively spread). Please allow the argument to expand.
If we’re in the era, the vice-grip, of the politics of projection, then one of the ways we can understand the application of the “Southern Strategy” is through psychology and thus the mechanisms involved in projection. Mostly, when I was taught about Nixon and the Southern Strategy, I was first taught to consider it purely as a political strategy—that is, in very sterile terms. Later, as I began to conceptualize the ramifications of the legacy of racism, I began to view the Southern Strategy in a more modified way: that it was a strategy run specifically to play upon fears of the Northern electorate. These rhetorical appeals have often been framed by historians and social scientists primarily, or even entirely, as economic (that is, as experienced by a certain class or classes). This fear then might manifest in predictable or at least identifiable ways such as blockbusting, resistance to state-managed integration (“forced busing”), etc. Again, this is presumed to be driven primarily by fear, and as it is based on things like economics appears ostensibly rational.
But in the politics of projection, not only fear can be expressed. Projection involves the externalized expression of unconscious emotions or desires that normally are repressed by some internal structure (Freud called this structure the ego). So projection is a defense mechanism that can involve any of these repressed feelings, not just fear; these feelings are repressed into what Jung would call the shadow.
American society harbors a stubborn racial system (as recently iterated by Isabel Wilkerson), it operates as a semi-caste, one that is only somewhat permeable in terms of allowing movement in the social order. In societies, the shadow self is usually or most often represented by the permanent lowest rung of society, and in our society that group—once explicitly designated as such but now simply commonly understood as—are Black (or African-)Americans. Via the process of scapegoating, Blacks operate as the American shadow self, absorbing all of the nation’s perceived flaws; in exchange, the image of the rest of society can shine, through its exceptionalism, as a “city on a hill.”
Scapegoats, as a construct, alleviate psychological anguish and anxiety. It is a transmutation of discomfort via externalization upon an object (sometimes a mere psychological construct but is more often located in the external, material world). Those feelings of anguish and anxiety can then be purged and the object dealt with as an object of contempt/disgust. It is a distortion of reality utilized to maintain a sense of self.
The sense of self in the societal instance is what is involved in what social psychologists call collective narcissism. That feeling of reverence toward American exceptionalism? That is a reflection, a symptom of this collective narcissism. In regards to collective narcissism as it involves society-wide racism, that is how I’ll refer to white supremacy, both the idea and the system it supports.
When I think of white supremacy, I conceptualize it specifically as a form of collective narcissism. White supremacy is afflicted by one specific subset (a concentrated minority) onto the rest of society, and the benefits derived by such affliction accrues not only to that concentrated minority but also to the broader-yet-still-circumscribed parent group in which it nests(—that is, the rest of what might be colloquially termed “white society”). The back-end benefit, the derivative is white privilege; and all people in this larger group enjoy that benefit in a passive way, but some of its effects are as invisible and harmful as background radiation from sunlight. There are certain costs, certain sacrifices, the population inevitably tolerates in order to reap the benefits.
The major negative in this instance of collective narcissism is that when narcissists perceive slights (which in reality may be criticism, disagreement, contradiction, or even mere correction), they react as though they have been wounded. Their reaction to this narcissistic injury can manifest in impulsivity and/or other forms of externalization. But sometimes there is nowhere for this wound to be externalized, and then it becomes unbearable. It threatens the narcissist with psychological dissolution, so the emotions must be neutralized in some way so as to maintain structural integrity, to maintain this distorted, inflated narcissistic sense of self.
So, to circle back to the Southern Strategy, what Nixon truly did was export this narcissistic sense of self that had been possessed primarily by toxic white people in the South, who had for generations benefitted both economically and socially by this caste system of a cash human crop, onto the national psyche (national here reading as white Northern sensibilities). They grafted Southern bigotry into the rest of white society; by doing so, they were able to psychologically link their psychopathology up with those regions of the country that had been, well, segregated from their very peculiar and destructive social distortions. This meant that the wider national (white) society could be conditioned to react, over the course of generations, just as Southerners had been, to act in the interests of these toxic whites for the downstream benefits of the idea of white supremacy actually presiding. (What was that conditioning? At risk of sounding flippant, it was conditioning White people to feel allergic to Black people. It once was referred to as Negrophobia. —ed. 1/14/22)
This internalized identification—nationwide then, and ever since—means that when these toxic whites experience collective guilt over their historical bad deeds, deeds of which actually happened in material reality, they must participate in the production of that culturally narcissistic material reality, if no other way then at least psychologically. In so doing, these people invested in ideological whiteness (i.e., white supremacy) distort reality to match up with their psychological demands. They are beset by guilt, this toxic core of bigots, the ones who are still proud of the actions of their conquistador predecessors; and they are this way because they want to assume a certain spirit. They want to claim the mantle of heir—successor—to these calamitous heroes, without the baggage of dealing with the aftereffects of murder, carnage, and domination.
Hannah Arendt references this phenomenon when she talks about the inexplicable shame the neo-imperialists experienced when they encountered native Africans, that their culture seemed superficially so unfamiliar to these explorers that the neo-conquistadors then felt that whatever they participated in was in a way confined to a dream world, a world where their material actions did not have material consequences.
Race was the emergency explanation of human beings whom no European or civilized man could understand and whose humanity so frightened and humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species. (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 185)
The word “race” has a precise meaning only when and where peoples are confronted with such tribes of which they have no historical record and which do not know any history of their own. . . . [These tribes] were, as it were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder. (p. 192)
Ah! But in this instance, we have toxic whites offloading their guilt of performing such abject domination and subjugation, but they have nowhere else to offload it but onto the broader group of white people. So they implicate the rest of white American society psychologically as a matter of course. It is one of the prices paid for the emotional and material dividends of white privilege. So now the wider white society, burdened with this very peculiar guilt that cannot be scapegoated onto anyone else, must find ways to neutralize this guilt, which would manifest in ways such as denial of the system of white privilege or even the existence of the idea, let alone the implementation, of white supremacy. Also seen would be the minimization of the effects of racism (the logic being that if racism itself is not or was not a big deal, then its effects must not be either, so the efforts to ameliorate the aftereffects of slavery, for instance, must be misguided at best because the remedies appear to be out of proportion).
These defense mechanisms appear to arise from a logical error of misattribution. The error results from
- identifying a social trait in a subgroup (whiteness),
- self-identifying that trait,
- then attributing other traits of the subgroup to oneself.
It’s along the same lines as, “Whales are animals. Animals have four feet. Therefore whales have four feet.” There is a categorization error. Psychologically, this identification (with the smaller insular group by the larger, surrounding one) manifests as kind of a cognitive contamination. In just about every aspect, it’s a viral idea.
By playing this psychological trick, the white supremacists have manipulated the rest of mainstream society to protect itself and, thereby, the concentrated minority core.
This is what Tucker Carlson proposes to do with his to-be-released propaganda (emotional messaging meant to manipulate beliefs and/or behavior). He means to effect this legerdemain and turn non-racist, otherwise racially stoic white Americans into identifying psychologically with those who feel unfairly persecuted by outside authority. (This happens to be coded through a racial lens, which treats the nature of Tucker’s ideological message and does not necessarily touch upon the techniques by which he’s propagating those messages.)
The bigots who stormed the Capitol feel persecuted, but they want a wider group to feel that persecution as well so as to draw them into aggressively defensive behavior (to strike first when responding to a perceived impending attack). With rhetoric, Tucker is trying to cause the wider society to psychologically identify with the seditionists—misery loves company—so as to absorb their guilt and thus eventually expiate it.
(Tucker’s promotion begins around 0:37.) Note how the narrative intentionally attempts to broaden the dragnet to “half the country” when in fact the group that would potentially be targeted in such a manner (which is over the top to begin with) would be seditionists, a very small and demarcated group, not 120 million people.
So white guilt over racism and slavery and all of their attendant systems comes not from the scapegoated group (nonwhite people) but from the perpetrators of that system, the white supremacists and their enablers. The active participants in the creation and re-creation of white supremacy externalize their guilt to the whole of white America, which must then neutralize the guilt because there are no other scapegoats on which to pass the blame/guilt.
This is easy fodder for propagandists.
