The Politics of Hope vs. False Hope

Mr. Fonck's view of the parallels between the political zeitgeist of Hoffer's time and the present has forced me to think more deeply about the matter. I may have been too quick to run to the defense of Obama's politics of hope as a healthy and natural reaction to the Bush-Cheney politics of fear that Obama's supporters desperately sought escape from. My second look is occasioned by a reminder that in PS230 we read an article -- a Q article, in fact -- entitled "Emotional Experiences in Political Groups: The Case of the McCarthy Phenomenon," by Brown and Ellithorp. The McCarthy in this case is not Senator Joe from Wisconsin, but Senator Gene from Minnesota, the initial anti-Vietnam War candidate of 1968. The theory that Brown and Ellithorp are working with is Wilford Bion's. Bion was a psycho-analytic disciple of Melanie Klein, who incidentally was William Stephenson's analyst when he underwent pscyho-analysis early in his professional life -- before he left the UK to take a position at the University of Chicago. Bion's theory of groups distinguishes between the "work" group or the above-board task that any group is formed to address, on the one hand, and "basic assumption groups," the anxiety-driven, latent (typically unacknowledged) emotional needs that give rise to and are served by membership in the group, on the other hand. In the Brown-Ellithorp case, the McCarthy Movement would qualify as a social movement in Hoffer's sense and a work group, in Bion's terms, formed to win Eugene McCarthy the Democratic nomination in the 1968 primaries.

At the emotional level, Bion's work with groups at the Tavistock Institute in the UK lead him to postulate three different types of basic-assumption life: (1) "Fight-Flight," in which the group's manifest behavior can be best understood as if it is acting upon the assumption that it exists primarly to fight or flee from a common enemy; (2) "Pairing," in which the group is inclined to splinter into dyads, usually of the opposite sex, and to manifest a hopeful, forward-looking looking view of the future. Of Bion's types, pairing is the most difficult to comprehend, in part because of the alleged sexual undertones, and in part because the manifest optimism and hope is, in reality, a reaction-formation defense against the anxiety borne of despair in the present; and (3) "Dependency," an orientation which manifests itself as an immature, passive, and overly deferential zeitgeist on the part of group members toward a single leader. The group behaves as if its purpose is to worship and obey without question the dictates of its leader.

Those having had PS230 two Mays ago will remember that we incorporated some "Tavistock Groups" into the class meetings, and the so-called Study Groups were able to see fairly clearly these dynamics as they manifested themselves in a college classroom. For our purposes, here, however, the pertinent point is Bion's notion of the "pairing" group: its overt expression of hope is perhaps what Eric and Hoffer see as the common denominator in Hoffer's True Believer and contemporary social-movement politics, the 2008 campaign of Obama included. If excessive, "hope" -- or any other "positive" emotion for that matter -- may well be the manifestation of its opposite: in the midst of crushing despair, the attractiveness of hope -- excessive, unbalanced hope -- is that it's a strong defense against its opposite. It may also be that it's particularly so in the upper Midwest, a possibility that any reader of Garrison Keillor would sense immediately. If so, it might be at issue in the streets of Madison, Wisconsin now on the part of the anti-Walker forces particularly. But that is not to say the other emotional orientations described by Bion are not involved in that impasse. Clearly, all three and in all valences -- positive and negative -- are involved. Only time will tell which is the stronger.