The Center-Right Demonizing of the Left in The Age of Guilt

Mark Edmundson’s book The Age of Guilt argues that online discourse heightens the guilt people feel today: “It could be the place where people test their ideas, make their inventions and projections known, to be discussed, developed, adapted. Instead it is often a sink of the most repressive, judgmental bile conceivable. The Internet has become not only a second brain but a second psyche, where judgment, often toxic judgment, reigns.” From this perspective, what helps to define contemporary culture is not its permissive nature; rather, we are now dominated by an oppressive super-ego that forces us to condemn our own thoughts, feelings, and actions: “The Twitter mob in too many ways defines the current Internet. The objective of the mob is to stamp out apostasy. We are righteous. We are correct. We conform to the current patterns of behavior—and you’d better too. Ultimately, what the mob enforces is manners. One must always say the right thing. Saying the wrong thing will be punished, often through official channels. The objective of the Twitter mob is not merely to vilify but to ruin the career and public life of the transgressor.” In other words, the online super-ego makes us paranoid and afraid as it punishes us for our real and imagined transgressions.

Like many critics on the Right, Edmundson stresses how the Left has now embodied this externalized super-ego as a new mode of social censorship: “There is no embarrassment about ratting to the authorities. The assumption of the Twitter mob is that if they can alert the abiding super-ego–aligned institutions, those institutions will respond sympathetically and do in the transgressor. Let’s write to his dean! Let’s tell her boss! I’m sure the president of his university would be very interested to hear what he’s done. Let’s join forces with the day-to-day institutional authorities and get our work done together—or, if they don’t do what we demand, turn our fury on them.” From the perspective of the libertarian id, any form of social regulation is experienced as a castration threatening the freedom and pleasure of the individual.

While all societies rely on an internalized censor to control and condemn transgressive drives, what Edmundson finds in current online culture is a new form of mob mentality: “There is no attempt at dialogue. The super-ego does not engage in dialogue or seek understanding. Punishment and intimidation is the name of the game. For every poor soul who is pilloried by the mob and then ruined by the authorities, there are hundreds, maybe thousands who melt into silence. The super-ego enjoys punishment; it seems to enjoy turning the subject silent nearly as much, for silence, to the person searching for freedom or truth, is a form of death.” By equating the search for freedom with the quest for truth, Edmundson unintentionally feeds a Right-wing ideology centered on celebrating free speech as the ultimate value. Moreover, his center-Right discourse tends to be reacting against what is perceived as the Left-wing super-ego, cancel culture, Wokeness, and political correctness.

For Edmundson and the reactionary Right, the true source of perverse sadism in our culture is not the authoritarians, libertarians, or conservatives; rather, it is the Left and center-Left that enjoy punishing people for their thoughts, actions, and speech: “Remember the super-ego as Adam Phillips depicts it, the unwelcome guest at the party. He is judgmental, of course, and literal-minded. He does not like complexity or ambiguity. Jokes are his undoing—he does not understand them. He has no idea how to laugh except in sadistic derision. He is, remember Žižek, a figure of obscene enjoyment who pretends to uphold righteous law but is really in the game for the sadistic thrill.” This attempt to pin the sadistic super-ego on the Left can be seen as a projection of the sadism of the Right, which often revels in attacking others. For instance, Trump’s constant use of derogatory nicknames and mockery is a form of verbal sadism bent on humiliating and punishing his opponents.

While Edmundson argues that the sadistic super-ego does not understand jokes, I would argue that much of Right-wing discourse today relies on the way that humor allows us to both laugh at and laugh with others. As a socially acceptable mode of symbolic violence, jokes are often targeted at people of a perceived lower status. For instance, Freud posited that the paradigmatic joke is found when men get together and target a woman who is resisting their sexual advances. In this structure, the female represents both the social censor and the cause of desire, and by attacking the object of the joke, the men are able to bond over their shared aggression towards the externalized super-ego and the debasement of the cultural other. One reason, then, why people on the Left may criticize the speech and humor of the Right is that they want to protect minority groups against being humiliated and demonized by men seeking to gain pleasure through a shared attack on a disempowered victim.

As a part of the Republican counter-revolution, the celebration of free speech and comedy online is often used to both demonize the Left and center-Left as it also seeks to cater to the desire for total freedom and enjoyment for the sadistic masculine id. Instead of recognizing this political context, Edmundson tends to make general claims about the harm done by the call to censor certain forms of hate speech: “Harper’s magazine recently published a collectively signed letter supporting free speech and denouncing the mob. It was a mild document, arguing simply that no one should lose his or her job for maintaining the wrong views. It was hard to disagree with.” By arguing that no one should lose their jobs or be censored for their words, Edmundson plays into the hands of the Right, which often confuses total free speech with the foundation of democracy.

At one point in his book, Edmundson does seek to place the demonization of the Left-wing super-ego in relation to the reactionary discourse of the Right: “The Internet is not only a home for the chaotic, cruel super-ego. It is also the home for rebellion against it. Do the authorities claim that a candidate we don’t like has won the election? That couldn’t be. It must be corrupt. The count must be wrong. The civil powers are surely in league against the people. The Internet breeds not only the social tyranny of so-called progressives but also the mad response of reactionary minds. The Internet is, in a sense, at the center of our enquiry into the super-ego. It is where the virtue mob forms; it’s where the reactionary spasms against authority take place.” The problem with this type of analysis is that it creates a false equivalence between the censoring Left and the reactionary Right: Like so many other center-Right pundits and philosophers, the desire is to reject both the extreme Left and the extreme Right so that a moderate middle ground can be promoted. However, two wrongs do not make a right, and the middle between two wrong ideas is not a correct idea. Thus, instead of promoting the diversity of viewpoints and total free speech, we should be focused on speech that is based on facts and reality. Since modern liberal democracy relies on the necessary but impossible ideals of neutrality and objectivity, simply allowing for everyone to have their opinions voiced and treated equally does not help the cause of reason or democratic rule.

Not only does Edmundson misrepresent liberalism, the Left, and the Right, but he also misrecognizes the psychopathology of the center-Left. For instance, in examining how his students seek to have their ideal selves recognized online, he confuses the super-ego and the ideal ego: “The Internet is the place where my students—and many others as well—perform success and display their achievements. It’s the source of their standards for what is desirable and what is not. It lets them know how physical perfection looks. It is, in short, the great enforcer of super-ego socialization.” Although Edmundson equates the desire to be admired online for one’s success or attractiveness with the internalization of the social super-ego, it should be clear that for Freud, the narcissist seeks to have their ideal ego admired by others in order to defend against an underlying sense of guilt and shame; in other words, the ideal ego desires to repress the super-ego, and what we often find in center-Left politics is that one signals one’s virtue in order to have one’s goodness recognized by others.

The reason why I am insisting on correctly attaching specific ideologies with particular psychopathologies is that it is important to understand the underlying desires and fears motivating people in their relationships with others. For instance, in Edmundson’s discussion of comedy and Shakespeare, he fails to see how the libertarian Right feeds off both nihilism and sadism: “As the great Shakespeare critic A. C. Bradley puts it: ‘The bliss of freedom gained in humour is the essence of Falstaff. His humour is not directed only or chiefly against obvious absurdities; he is the enemy of everything that would interfere with his ease, and therefore of anything serious, and especially of everything respectable and moral. For these things impose limits and obligations, and make us the subjects of old father antic the law, and the categorical imperative, and our station and its duties, and conscience and reputation and other people’s opinions, and all sorts of nuisances.’ Falstaff reduces all imposed obligations to absurdity, and walks about ‘free and rejoicing.’ He is the image of an individual who has transcended his super-ego.” This desire to go beyond the super-ego as one rejects anything that is serious or restraining is a key aspect of the libertarian Right, and at its most basic foundation, this type of borderline pathology is based on the refusal to control impulses or regulate emotions. As the cynical pursuit of individual pleasure and freedom, the goal is to be released from any social regulation. The problem, then, of simply promoting unrestrained speech is that it feeds into this hyper-selfish mindset of the unconstrained individual.

At times, Edmundson does recognize the social danger of celebrating the libertarian borderline individual: “Today if we seek for figures who ostensibly have no super-egos, we might find them among celebrities. Celebrities, especially movie stars, pop icons, models, and the like, come to us ageless, untroubled, and radically self-accepting. They are paragons of contented being, not slaves to obsessive doing. We love them for the illusion of freedom they possess but also envy their ostensible autonomy. We are invested in their radiant beings, completely present and unoppressed, but we also savor their falls from grace back into the world of judgment and condemnation.” This description of why people today idealize celebrities can be related to Freud’s text on narcissism where he argues that we idealize babies because they appear to be so free and unrestricted, and by idealizing “the majesty, the baby,” we gain access to our own lost anti-social pleasure. As I argue in Political Pathologies from The Sopranos to Succession, upper-middle class center-Left audiences are highly invested in watching sociopathic protagonists because they identify on an unconscious level with individuals who transgress social laws and morality. Even when they condemn these characters, they also find a guilty pleasure in living vicariously through their unrestrained actions. Just like the people who love to hate Trump, there is often an unconscious enjoyment through identification with individuals who appear free from an oppressive super-ego.

This unconscious identification with the libertarian sociopath helps to explain why someone like Trump gained so much attention before he became president. As someone known for his sexual exploits and excessive displays of wealth and power, it was the “liberal” media that first brought him to prominence. In fact, the head of CBS once said, Trump may not be good for America, but he is good for CBS, and the people who tuned in for Trump were clearly not only Republicans. Since people on the center-Left are also attracted to unconstrained id characters, there is a certain complicity between the “liberal” media and the rise of the Right. Perhaps part of this attraction comes from the desire of the upper-middle class to become upper class, but another part may be due to the unconscious identification with the anti-social personality.

For Edmundson, the key to mental health is for someone to defang the super-ego by strengthening the ego: “All of what Freud called ego-syntonic experiences boost the strength of the self and make it less susceptible to super-ego criticism. Denounce me all you like, hate me as you will: the mirror disagrees with you. I am absolutely fine, so mind your own business.” One of the problems with this theory is that it uses the idealization of the ego to dismiss any social criticism, and in this way, it does seem to return to the unrestrained id. In fact, Edmundson turns to a misreading of Lacan to rationalize his very un-Lacanian solution to the oppressive super-ego: “Jacques Lacan, as we’ve seen, pictures the child entering what’s called the mirror stage. He sees the composed, attractive image in the glass and loves it. But he himself lives with internal discord. His needs and desires make his interior being turbulent. He’s a creature of lack, confusion. And there in front of him is a beautiful, composed self that he cannot become identical with, no matter how hard he might try. Probably he’ll spend his whole life painfully pursuing the united being he sees before him. And as Lacan sees it, he’ll never coincide with his ideal. But perhaps this is not quite so. Young people often do seem to blossom into a beauty that occasionally allows them to take themselves as their own ideal. They are content to be. They do not need to do much of anything to be happy with themselves. And it seems their super-egos leave them alone, or at least back off a step.” This strange celebration of the subject’s own beauty misses a key moment of Lacan’s mirror stage, which is when the child looks back at the parents to see if they admire the ideal image in the mirror. Here we have the essence of narcissism as the super-ego is neutralized since the only function of the social Other is to admire the individual’s ideal ego.

Since Edmundson misunderstands the essence of narcissism, he makes the following absurd claim: “But I think we also pursue beauty, or at least physical improvement, in the interest of our internal lives. If we can like what we see in the mirror, we can enhance our ego strength and fight off the tormentor just a little more successfully. For how can the super-ego hate what is beautiful?” What Edmundson misses in his reference to Lacan’s mirror stage is the way that the pressure to conform to an ideal self-image results in self-hatred as one never can completely live up to the impossible standard. Instead of the super-ego being suspended, it becomes even more powerful because it is internalized and unconscious.

What is so interesting about Edmundson’s work is that he uses many psychoanalytic concepts, but he misunderstands most of them. Why is this? Perhaps it is his underlying center-Right ideology that pushes him to repress psychoanalysis as he seeks to overcome the fundamental conflict between society and the individual by giving preference to the unrestrained self. This celebration of the libertarian id freed from the Leftist super-ego comes out in the open as his underlying reactionary impulses are revealed in the following passage: “For dwellers in the world of social-justice advocacy, matters seem a bit different. Here the imagined African American functions as an unassailable authority. One must never question the judgment of a person of color. No White person could possibly understand more about the conditions of Black life than a Black man or woman. Even if facts are on the other side, the Black person’s view is always correct. All must yield to the superior super-ego authority. Is it necessary to say that being cast as a form of absolute authority is also a form of oppression—and also of extreme condescension? Does one have to add that the subordinate position taken up by the White subject is destructive of his human dignity and powers to think with independence and accuracy?” From the position of wealthy white male privilege, the push for social justice by minoritized people can only be experienced as the imposition of a harsh super-ego.