The beat goes on.

In the nearly two weeks since I wrote Part I of this series, an armed gunman was arrested en route to assaulting an obscure progressive foundation in San Francisco — one that’s often been at the center of Glenn Beck’s blackboard (which has become Conspiracy Theory Ground Zero for 2010). Also, this just in: President Obama is attempting to foment a race war, complete with New Black Panthers in the streets, in order to win the November elections.

I know. It’s just so hard to keep up.

In the last post, I defined a conspiracy theory as “any story that assumes that things happen due to the deliberate, covert actions of powerful others — even when the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that the events were almost certainly accidental and unintended.” And I talked about the cultural conditions that soften up people’s skulls and predispose them to accepting these baroque works of storytelling rather than simply accept what the evidence shows.

This post moves from outside influences to what goes on inside our heads. What’s going on internally that makes conspiracy stories appealing to us as individuals? As before, I’m drawing heavily on David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theories in Shaping Modern History as one of the better guides out there to all the factors at play when we willfully choose to believe the unbelievable.

The dark side of celebrity envy
A huge number of theories revolve around the deaths of celebrities — JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana. There’s a direct correlation between the public’s adoration of the good and great and the level of public obsession with every pornographically intimate detail surrounding the stories of their last moments on earth. People find these stories endlessly fascinating — and the more disgusting and perverse the detail, the more obsessed we are with it. What’s up with that?

Part of this is pretty straightforward schadenfreude: as Aaronovitch put it, “Whatever we might have envied in these people, we sure don’t envy them now.” But we may also be obsessed with the realization that such extraordinary people could die at the hands of ordinary people — people very much like us. And worse: we find it hard to confront the possibility that our own passion for them may have played a role in causing their deaths. “It was not our thirst for gossip that killed Norma Jean or England’s Rose, but the CIA,” says Aaronovitch. “It wasn’t an ordinary Joe with a rifle who murdered the young president, but the Mafia or the FBI.

“Conspiracy theory may be one way of reclaiming power and disclaiming responsibility.”

There’s another way we deflect this responsibility, too:

Beware of powerful enemies
When bad things happen to good people — especially people who were agents of positive change like the Kennedys or Paul Wellstone — it’s also easy to imagine, in our more paranoid moments, that they were targeted by the people who were most threatened by what they were doing.

Out here on the left, we’re at least as prone to this as the right wing is. In our grief, we look for reasons for our loss — and too often, there simply aren’t any. Cars and planes crash. Crazy guys with guns target public figures for reasons that exist only in their own imaginations. These are everyday events that just happen; and in the overwhelming majority of cases, there’s no conspiracy involved.

Even so: these high-profile conspiracy theories trickle down through the culture, feeding the paranoia of hardcore conspiracy theorists who eventually come to believe that they’re next on the list. (They always assume that somewhere, there’s a list.) Because I’m so right (and so smart and so important), they must be out to silence me. People who’ve gone over this edge are prone to interpret everyday events — a police car driving past the house or a temporary glitch in their Internet service — as evidence that they’ve been targeted, and are being closely watched.

And for the rest of us, they serve as cautionary tales that blunt our will to engage injustice — or, perhaps, convenient excuses that let us off the hook. Don’t rock the boat too much — or you could end up dead in a ditch, just like Karen Silkwood did.

I’m smart. You’re not.
Conspiracy theories make us feel smart. They’re populist fables that lay bare the supposed actions taken by the power elites against the people. But the real elite (at least in their own minds) are those who are insightful enough to see through the official story and divine the truth of the matter. Being the only one perceptive enough to have cracked the code irrefutably proves that you’re superior to the sheeple around you.

This attitude makes it easy to wave off skeptics. All that insistence on evidence and data and credentials and plausibility is just a smokescreen that hides the reality that they’ve closed their narrow minds to the truth. From this skewed perspective, clinging to reason is for idiots. The real “intellectual” is the one who has opened her mind to all the possibilities — even the most Byzantine and improbable ones.

Unfortunately, this assumption also feeds a grandiose sense of paranoia that actually undermines the ability to think rationally. When embarrassing holes in the story are exposed, they’re invariably blamed on those cunning plotters, who obviously cooked up these inconvenient truths to throw those of lesser intellect off the scent. In fact, in ConspiracyWorld, the bigger the pile of evidence against a theory grows, the more certain the True Believers are that they’re absolutely on the right track. We’ve all met otherwise pretty smart people who are quite sure that the more their facts are disproven by the evidence, the more right they must be.

And weirdly, people who take to this conceit aren’t entirely unjustified:

The smarter they are, the harder they fall
The stereotype of conspiracy believers is that they’re the kind of people who devour the National Enquirer along with their Big Macs and the latest episode of Jerry Springer back at the mobile home park. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Your average conspiracy theory buff actually tends to be well-educated (usually with at least at least one college degree), and a well-established member of the middle- to upper-middle class. According to Aaronovitch, they’re “the professors, university students, the artists, the managers, the journalists, and the civil servants.” It’s not the working stiffs who are propagating this stuff — it’s the chattering classes.

Why would these smart people fall for such absurd tales? Some of it may be due to intellectual arrogance. When we’re used to being an authority in one field, it’s all too tempting to assume that we’re also equally competent to assess data from other fields, too. This is why people usually fall for conspiracies where the details are outside of their own field of competence: they’re quite sure they understand what’s really going on, but they honestly don’t.

Historians generally don’t fall for historical conspiracies like the DaVinci Code hoaxes. And you won’t meet very many structural engineers or pilots who think 9/11 was an inside job. They know better, because they’ve got intimate knowledge of the field, and the flaws in the theory are obvious to them. However, the streets are packed with educated non-lawyers who don’t have the slightest idea how government records or citizenship laws work, but still insist that Obama’s not an American citizen. They’re “experts” in their own minds, even though they have no actual expertise in the field.

History as written by losers
A lot of conspiracy theories are nothing more than a cop-out — sour-grapes stories told by people on the losing side of history. If we can blame our losses on a conspiracy, then we don’t have to confront our own fatal flaws — our disorganization or stupidity or unpopularity. Instead, it’s very reassuring to tell ourselves that the loss was entirely due to the overwhelming ruthlessness of our opposition, who were willing to stop at nothing to defeat us. (See the next item.)

This factor, almost all on its own, explains the never-ending conspiracy obsessions of the Tea Party, which only gets more deranged every time the rest of the country rejects its candidates and its ideas. If you find your movement engulfed in conspiracy theories, look around. They’re a pretty clear indicator that you’ve already lost, and your broken-hearted followers are now working overtime to concoct excuses that will salve their sense of failure.

Evil has no limits
Conspiracy theories confirm our beliefs about the evilness of the other side; and this explains why there’s often a certain symmetry to them. For example: several polls have found that about 58% of Republicans doubt Obama’s right to be president. Conversely, the Scripps Survey Research Center found in 2006 that about 54% of Democrats thought that 9/11 was an inside job.

Likewise, during the Bush years, progressives were deeply worried by FEMA’s plans to build emergency housing camps, suspecting that they might be used as concentration camps for liberal upstarts. The conservatives, naturally, thought we were nuts. Now, it’s an article of faith in Tea Party circles that the government is preparing those same camps to round them up when Obama hands America over to the Muslims, the Socialist International, or the Mexicans and Canadians (the villains change weekly — it’s hard to keep up) — and most of us are pretty sure they’re nuts, too.

It’s just good old-fashioned bias confirmation at work. We tend to believe theories that point up the sulfurous and venal evil of those on the other side, and entirely discount those aimed at the paragons of virtue on our own side. And any neutral object that happens to be lying around on the landscape can be twisted around and used as a weapon by either side.

You can’t just stop at one
Conspiracy theories tend to build on each other, eating away at your reasoning capacity as they take over your brain. If your thinking is muddled or sloppy enough that you’ll accept one wrong thing as fact, you’re statistically more susceptible to accepting any number of other wrong things, too. The only antidote for this is better education and training in garden-variety critical thinking skills, with an emphasis on evaluating evidence, assessing the credibility of those offering it, and drawing sound conclusions from their data.

As noted last week: our teach-to-the-test school system isn’t helping here. But the fact that these theories are so often promoted by people who are well-educated enough to know better, we probably need to be looking at the standards of reason being taught in our universities as well. And beyond college, too many professions have also become lax about demanding rigorous standards of argument and evidence from their members.

Some psychologists who study conspiracy theories lay the blame for all this directly at the feet of post-modernism, which insists that all narratives are more or less equally true. If that’s the case, there’s no such thing as objective reality — and hence no facts to defend, and no need to critically evaluate anything. Whatever sounds or feels truthy enough must be the truth. It’s beyond ironic that the biggest post-modernists on the American scene right now are on the right wing, which creates its own reality with breathtaking abandon — and zero regard for factual truth.

There’s one simple question that separates a dedicated conspiracy theorist from someone whose rational faculties are still intact:

What would it take for you to reject this story? What evidence, if it appeared, would thoroughly refute this theory in your eyes?

If they can’t provide three pieces of evidence that they’d accept as discrediting, congratulations. You’ve found a True Believer.

But it feels so true!
Conspiracy theories often reverberate with emotional truth, even when the facts don’t make any rational sense. The first step in understanding any conspiracy theory is to look for the grain of validity at its core — the deeper truth that speaks to the emotional reality of those who believe it.

Aaronovitch recalls that in the wake of Katrina, the conspiracy theories were even thicker on the ground than the mud in New Orleans. One of the most persistent stories was the levees had been breached deliberately to destroy the city’s African-American neighborhoods. While no facts have ever emerged to support this belief (which would have required implausibly massive collusion followed by years of successfully sustained cover-up by hundreds of local, state, and federal authorities), the story is a powerful parable about the way poor black Americans are always abused, lied to, and neglected by people in power. The facts may be wrong, but listening for the deeper emotional truth and responding to that is the best way to open a dialogue and regain trust.

Who’s in charge here? Nobody.
The bottom line on why we believe conspiracy theories is this: We’re terrified of admitting that nobody is really in control. It’s a lot more comforting to think that *somebody* engineered a crisis than to reckon with the horrible, sickening fact that *nobody* did.

Most humans don’t deal at all well with the cruel, capricious randomness of fate. Shit happens — and it often happens for absolutely no meaningful reason at all. That thought makes people crazy with terror, so we make up entities to blame — God, Satan, the Freemasons, the CIA, or the All-Seeing Eye of Sauron. It’s far easier to blame it all on imaginary Lizard People from another planet than have to deal with the bald fact that millions of lives have been upended (or just ended) by an event — and yet there is simply is nobody out there to blame for it.

As my friend Bob Mackey puts it: “The alternative is a universe that is controlled by absolutely nobody. There is no control, no security, no Men in Black or Black Helicopters or Black Hussein Presidents to frighten the God-fearing upright citizens.” In the end, conspiracy theories are simply stories we tell to fill the blackness of the existential void.

Bob also reminds us to “Never confuse a conspiracy with a massive cluster f**k.” The bare truth is: most conspiracies start with massive clusterfucks. And this brings us back full circle to where this series started last week — with the gusher in the Gulf, which is much easier to explain as the massive clusterfuck the evidence tells us it is than it is to attribute any of it to malice or venality on the part of President Obama.

Next week, this series will finish with some suggestions for how we can ratchet down the overheated level of paranoia, and gently move American discourse back toward the rational, reasonable, and sane.

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The striking contrast highlights the fact that any long and difficult journey should be measured in two parts – the distance already traveled, and the distance still left to go. Both measurements are necessary to really understand how much progress you’ve made toward reaching your destination. Neither one alone is sufficient.

This simple idea – appreciated by many a parent during road trips with young children repeatedly asking “Are we there yet?” – has special relevance for progressives as we contemplate where we stand today. On the one hand, we rejoice that the previous administration’s unprecedented incompetence, corruption, secrecy, and lawlessness are fading in our rear-view mirror each day. On the other hand, we are sobered by the realization that the horizon ahead is clouded by a crippled economy, an inadequate healthcare system, and multiple wars with no clear end in sight.

These competing tensions are readily apparent in the daily news headlines. One day last week, for example, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll revealed a sharp one-month jump – from 26% to 41% – in the percentage of Americans who think the country is headed in the right direction. A very encouraging sign. But then the following day the Labor Department reported that 651,000 people had lost their jobs in the month of February alone. These Americans are certainly not among those now brimming with greater optimism.

This is more than just a “half-empty versus half-full” moment. It’s a reminder that these dueling psychological perspectives will inevitably shape our efforts as we push forward in our pursuit of progressive goals, as we look for ways to collaborate with policymakers and with each other, and as we confront resistance from those who will smugly smile and celebrate if we fail.

Some valuable guideposts for this unfolding journey can be found in an intriguing study published last year by social psychologists Amanda Brodish, Paige Brazy, and Patricia Devine. Comparing the responses of White and non-White Americans to survey questions about racial progress in the United States, here’s what these researchers found:

• The non-White participants perceived significantly less progress toward equality for minorities in the U.S. than did their White counterparts.

• The non-White participants primarily relied on comparisons with the future rather than the past in forming their judgments about the extent of racial progress.

• A subset of White respondents displayed three characteristics: they focused on comparisons with past inequality, they emphasized that much progress has already been made, and they scored higher than others on a measure of racial prejudice.

Although this study focused specifically on perceptions about racial progress, it can help illuminate the challenges facing progressives as we track our progress toward a more equitable world.

First, many of those who have suffered most egregiously from the heartless and greed-driven agenda of the Bush years will understandably be skeptical and slow to embrace the view that better days have arrived. They will not easily be persuaded that things are suddenly different now. Personal experiences of hardship and injustice create powerful and stubborn mindsets that are not quickly changed without tangible improvements in the circumstances of people’s daily lives. A freshly-paved road offers little promise if your car is stuck in the mud.

Second, over time many vulnerable individuals and groups – for whom progressive policy alternatives offer real hope – will evaluate their situations much more in terms of goals not yet achieved rather than on the basis of progress made to date. Although this particular focus may seem to discount important advances, it represents a reasonable perspective for those who have learned that their plight and efforts have typically been forgotten as soon as the news cycle changes. Ongoing forward momentum requires never coming to a complete stop. Or to look at it another way, no matter how clean and attractive it may be, a highway rest stop is nobody’s dream home.

Finally, given their support for “free” markets and greater inequality, many conservatives will be quick to argue that enough change has already taken place – while secretly longing for the “good old days” of elite rule and consolidated wealth. Despite appeals to bipartisanship, they will oppose and obstruct all efforts to advance policies with real redistributive effects, claiming that they are unnecessary, unwarranted, or dangerous. In short, as progressives we need to recognize that Rush Limbaugh and his supporters will never be well-behaved passengers on the road trip we’re undertaking. Given a chance, they will grab the steering wheel from us, find excuses for time-consuming detours, or simply flatten the tires. As we’ve recently heard from the very top of their ranks, they would love to see us fail.

There is no doubt that this is an ascendant moment and a special opportunity for progressive advocates for a more just society. But this new era has begun during a time of turmoil and despair. For many people, things are slipping backward even as the stage is finally set to move forward.

Unfortunately, we simply don’t get to live in the utopian world where the first leg of our collective journey unfolds under cloudless skies. These realities reinforce the critical role that dueling perspectives on progress will play in the weeks and months ahead – and we need to understand all of them. Psychological perceptions will often be at least as important as any facts on the ground. So even when we think we’ve traveled great distances in leaving the past eight years behind us, we are wise to heed the warning on our car’s side-view mirror: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”

Now that progressives have attained their goal of electing Barack Obama president and established the presence of a political mandate for change and, putatively, progressive ideas, what can we expect will happen next? What do we now need to learn to maximize our momentum in the wake of this exceptional, momentous reaffirmation of the democratic tradition in America?

Now that we have won the political argument, the next step is to work on creating the cultural and socioeconomic changes that must follow if we are to build a truly progressive society.

Consider the upcoming changes for the progressive movement from the vantage point of the psychological dynamics that any human organism undergoes when faced with the changes in identity that accompany any life transition. There are forces that seek change, and those that fear it and resist it.

This is what I expect will happen next, and indeed seems to have begun to happen already:

Now that Obama has been sworn in, progressives will go through a momentary backlash of self-doubt. Is this really happening? Can we trust that this is real? Are we able to do this? Are we ready?

This self-doubt typically can play out in a variety of ways. For example, the old guard Democrats of the DLC may try to take credit for Obama’s sweeping victory by positioning themselves in the new administration in a way that seems to undercut all the energy and commitment of “new” and younger progressives who were swept into civic engagement by Obama’s campaign. The media, in turn, tries to play this as business as usual among the Democrats and emphasizes disillusionment and disappointment among the previously hopeful new participants in the political process. The message is that the youthful energy, inclusiveness, and new ideas of the Obama campaign have turned out to be an illusion.

The important thing to remember when this happens is that this is a momentary and expectable development. It will pass. We must not allow the mainstream media to make too much of it, or believe that storyline ourselves. Remember: Obama’s victory was a ratification of change, and change – personal, cultural, or otherwise – does not happen in a straight line.

The most important development I anticipate for progressives, now that Barack Obama has been sworn in as the 44th President, is that our roles as progressives will have to change. Up until this point, we have been the underdogs, not just for the past very long eight years, but throughout the entire arc of the advent of modern conservatism, dating back to the election of Ronald Reagan. Although Bill Clinton held office for eight of those years, and represented a reprieve from staunch conservatism in a number of ways, the zeitgeist of the country was far from a progressive one. It has been a very long time that the progressive movement has been pushing Sisyphus’ rock uphill. We have been the underdogs for so long that many of the newly engaged foot soldiers of the Obama era have no recollection whatsoever of this country being any other way.

We’ve been the underdog for what has seemed like forever – and now, all of a sudden, we’re not. We won. We were victorious. But what do we do with the victory? And what pitfalls lurk under the surface in the transition from victor to whatever comes next?

From Underdog to Change Agent

First, we are going to have to get used to being victorious, to wielding power. At first blush, that does not seem to present any difficulties, but that would be a naïve position to take.

The progressive movement is about to be called upon to undergo a change in identity. A positive change, to be sure, but a change nonetheless. All changes, even positive ones, create stress for the party that is changing. Witness the fact that positive events such as marriage and getting a promotion register high on ratings of major life stressors, alongside negative events such as divorce and loss of a loved one. Moving to a new place to live is high on the list as well – an event that can be construed as either positive or negative, depending on the point of view of the relocating person.

The point here is that all change induces stress, regardless of whether we choose to view it as positive or negative, because we must manage shifting external demands just as we are learning about new capabilities in ourselves we may not have been aware of before, or practiced utilizing.

Progressives are about to experience this first hand. We are no longer the powerless underdogs fighting rear guard actions against the relentless rule of a regressive, repressive majority. Now we are in charge. And we are going to have to get used to it.

The second aspect of this change from progressive underdog to majority player and holder of power revolves around how we will wear our new role. This is a more optional change. But I believe we have an unprecedented opportunity to rewrite the script of how victors behave in the American system, as part of the effort to bring not just political but cultural and socioeconomic change to our country.

If we are to win the cultural argument, and not just the political one – in other words, if we are to build the just, sustainable society that progressives have dreamt of and talked about for so long – then we are going to have to treat our victory differently than we would have under more “normal“ circumstances.

It is patently obvious that Obama’s victory was no ordinary victory; it was a sea change on numerous levels. It was the culmination of a lifetime of work for civil rights activists; an overwhelming statement of agreement with values of the progressive movement by a majority of voters; and a reaffirmation that our electoral system, and our democracy, despite voter fraud and the shredding of our Constitution by the Bush administration, can still function.

On top of this, the magnitude of the problems that our nation and the world face at this moment in history is staggering: war, national and energy security, economic meltdown, and a raft of social ills that have festered for eight or more years without balm. That was no ordinary election, and this is no ordinary post-election. We have a mind-boggling array of issues to attend to. Creating the needed changes in our national infrastructure, commerce, and culture will require some heavy lifting indeed.

Ask anyone who’s ever built a pyramid – some genuine heavy lifting – and they will tell you – what’s needed is cooperation. We as progressives cannot fix the magnitude of problems in this country on our own, even if we are now putatively the majority.

So, the invitation that appears before the progressive movement is to shift our identity not from underdog to victor, but from underdog to, eventually, agent of change. If we are to ultimately do the work that has been set before us, we must shift from being adversarial to cultivating cooperation. We have to learn to work with the people who even recently may have strenuously opposed us.

Doing What is Needed

This will not go down easy for a lot of progressives. There are activists who have labored in the trenches for so long that relinquishing an oppositional stance in relation to conservatives may be functionally impossible, at least at first. And there are doubtless progressive political operatives and Members of Congress who have their own battle scars that will not fade any time soon.

Indeed, it is understandable – and I would encourage it enthusiastically – to enjoy our victory for a good long moment, in order to settle into the mantle of leadership we have worked so long to earn. But we cannot afford to bask in the moment for long.

My point here is that prior elections have kept Democrats and Republicans in a perpetual pendulum swing where one lords their power over the other after an electoral victory, because the battle is so hard won, and there is the perception, often quite accurate, that our opponents would not be especially gracious to us if the roles were reversed. And indeed, we are not especially generous when it is our turn, because now we want the other guy to know what its like to be on the bottom of the pile for a change.

The problem with this thinking is that, well, there’s not much thinking in it. It’s an emotional knee-jerk reaction – and one of the many reasons why citizens have been cynical about politics. There is a playground quality to making your opponent pay after you’ve won. In that sense, the Democrats (though they haven’t won as often) and the Republicans (who have held the upper hand a lot) are very much alike.

Given that this is no ordinary moment in time, and no ordinary victory at hand, there is an opportunity for progressives to find a way to be the better men and women, to take the high road and work to forge the partnerships we need with those who we know may not agree with us.

President Obama, no doubt, embodies this kind of graciousness himself. He serves as a model of how to move forward in working with our former opponents – even if his efforts have initially, and ultimately quite foolishly, been repudiated by Congressional Republicans. As our president is so fond of saying, he cannot do it all alone. Individual citizens are going to need to participate in the challenging work ahead of us that is necessary to rebuild our country. The likening of these times to the Great Depression certainly carries with it the implication that, in fact, all citizens will need to be called upon to pass successfully through this transition. In effect, we will all need to be ambassadors for progressive values in our own lives in order to enact en masse the creation of the vital and humane society we have held dear in our minds all this time.

Indeed, I would argue that, as progressives, it is our moral obligation to do better as victors than historically we, or our opponents, have. If we are to have the integrity of our beliefs, if we are to act in ways that are consistent with what we claim to profess as humanistic and creative thinkers who believe in the democratic experiment, we must strive to do this. Putting aside our differences and declining to vilify those who have vilified us is what we will be called upon to do in order to build the bridges and coalitions we are going to need to build.

The challenge moving forward is to learn how to engage our opponents in the larger work we must undertake together to repair our nation and society. Defiance, gloating, and animosity will not work. There are techniques that progressives can learn in order to do this, which is the subject of another essay entirely. But before we get to that, we must make the transition from enjoying the spoils of victory to transmuting ourselves into agents of positive change, into seeing ourselves as catalysts or midwives, if you will, of the new society and economy we must build.

Ignoring Feelings at Our Peril

How on earth are we going to do that?

Well. First I’ll tell you what we are not going to do – or at least what will very likely not work for the majority of progressives if we default into doing this. We are not going to float feel-good platitudes about how we are going to simply “let go” of our feelings of resentment towards neo-cons that have been developing over the past eight years. The conservative junta has trashed much that progressives hold near and dear, and have worked mightily to dismantle the fabric of our nation. They have institutionalized a nastiness and mean-spiritedness in their governing and their media that has shredded the ability of our nation to hold civil discourse on nearly any topic of substance. We cannot simply be asked to forget this. When the wolf is still standing at the door, you don’t invite him in for tea.

No, instead, I would recommend that we acknowledge openly and vociferously the damage done by the neocons to us – not as a media event to be parsed and misinterpreted by pundits – but as a sort of within-group purge, an opportunity for progressives to speak among ourselves about what we have been through in order to relinquish it and become ready to assume the responsibilities of leadership.

It is not unlike the shift from Apartheid in South Africa – there was a need for the Truth and Reconciliation Committee to hold open hearings on the injustices of the fallen regime, in order for citizens to let go of the pain of that era and move on to something new (although in our model there is no power to grant amnesty from prosecution for perpetrators).

The danger is, if we skip this step – if we move directly to pushing the progressive agenda forward without reflecting on how we feel about what toll it has taken to get here – we risk the dark impulses of revenge and unconscious anger tearing apart the coalitions we need to build. The emotional energy around the Presidential election, and by extension, the cultural transition we are about to enjoin, is considerable. Do not underestimate the importance of emotion in the political equation. If we do not acknowledge our quite understandable desire to make the Republicans and neo-cons pay for the damage they have done, they will sense this unbidden energy and exploit it as our weakness. They will help us self-destruct on it. We must not let that happen.

The advantage of intentionally addressing the lingering animosity that progressives quite understandably may feel towards the conservatives we are now tasked with working with to rebuild our country is that making conscious the desire to express anger towards conservatives and seek revenge against them gives us the power to decide what to do with these feelings. These feelings will not ambush us if we take the time as a group to acknowledge them.

Acknowledging in a collective setting that many progressives feel the same on this score will allow us to set these impulses aside. And in so doing, it will allow us to reclaim a strong and even fierce voice that we can use to work with the conservatives in a way that holds them accountable for their transgressions without seeking blame or retribution.

Accountability and Cooperation

Note that the endgame of working through our negative feelings towards the conservatives is not to roll over, Neville Chamberlain style, and forget everything that was done to us at the hands of the conservatives. Rather, it is to open a way to gather our strength and determination as we hold the conservatives accountable for the errors of their ways, past and present, as part and parcel of learning to work together in coalitions with them. If we are angry, subconsciously or not, we are not empowered; we are reactive, and letting fear of being overpowered again decide what we are to do. If we have a handle on our darker feelings, we can make conscious choices about them, can set them aside and can confront wrongs in clear conscience, even as we reach out to our former opponents.

Once we have moved through this process, we will be ready to assume the mantle of power that we have earned. We will be in a position to choose whether we will act as victors rubbing our former opponents noses in their loss, or as intentional catalysts for change, both building coalitions and requiring accountability and responsibility from our selves as well as our opponents. Once lingering negative feelings have been aired, we will be ready to try on our new identity.

Enjoining the progressive community in an intentional discussion of where we have been and what comes next as part of forging our next collective identity also addresses the fact that progressive forces are now the majority in the executive and legislative branches. Without a permanent stalemate, without an enemy to push against, progressives may be unnerved as to how to act. We no longer need to be locked in combat. This is not to say that we are suddenly free of opponents – or that we are free of the need to hold our leaders’ feet to the fire and demand they act on their progressive promises – but there is no longer a need to be constantly in a state of battle. This will probably be unnerving to many a progressive. And yet this gives us an opportunity to change the terms of the game, to allow at least some of what we contract with our conservative opponents to be less oppositional and adversarial. There is not nearly as much to push against. We will have to figure out how to remain engaged with moving ahead the issues under these radically different circumstances. A forum such as the one I’m suggesting may help to engage activists who would otherwise not have an easy time finding a place in the next phase of progressivism.

And so I suggest the creation of a forum for progressives to discuss the impending changes in our identity, our relationship to power, and all that has come before, in an effort to get ready for what comes next. A place to safely relinquish the battle scars, call them what they are, and begin to collectively create our next identity as makers of change. The time, shape, and scope of this is up for debate, although certainly sooner rather than later (say, within the first 3-6 months of Obama’s presidency) would be advisable. But that it should take place is clear. The dynamics of change are in play, and we would do well to attend to them.

There is a wonderful future to be built. Let’s go.

First, there are those who admire the Obamas. These individuals, including Ms. Warner, fantasize about inviting the First Family over for Scrabble, or having one’s children share a play date with Sasha and Malia. More luridly, some of her respondents shared sexual fantasies regarding the Obama marriage, in varying degrees of symbolic or overt narrative.

Second, there are those who feel jealous of the Obamas, expressing their resentment by chastising oneself for not being as accomplished as the Obamas, or by feeling rejected or excluded from their inner circle.

The central idea of Ms. Warner’s article is that the Obamas have an easy familiarity about them that invites people to identify with them. It feels plausible to believe that socializing (or more) with the Obamas is not outside the realm of realistic possibility.

She lists a variety of reasons that Obama could easily be construed as a peer, reflecting various aspects of the President’s biography that Americans might identify with: being the product of single motherhood, having a black or biracial background, being self-made, a smoker, a Blackberry user, a basketball enthusiast, a community organizer, etc. She notes that many of the people she spoke with (or emailed with) identify with Obama because he is of a similar age, with kids of a similar age to their own.

It is indeed one of Obama’s particular strengths as a leader that he is able to project such a down-to-earth charisma that Americans from a wide array of lifestyles and backgrounds can feel such a personal affinity for him and his family. Americans, and people in general, often project all kinds of feelings onto admired figures, and in this regard, Obama is no different, other than the fact that he seems so accessible that he invokes the notion of friend or sibling as much as that of parental figure.

How one reacts to those projections onto Obama, either positively in admiration and the desire to be close to him, or negatively in jealousy and resentment, says volumes about the person reporting the daydream or fantasy. The first group appears to be fairly benign.

However, in terms of the second group outlined in the article, those who harbor jealousy towards the Obamas, Ms. Warner seems to have missed an opportunity to illuminate the meaning of their reactions.

First, Ms. Warner appears, as is often the case, to be addressing a rather elite segment of the American populace. Those in the jealousy category, at least according to the examples given in Ms. Warner’s blog post, seem to have in common with the President primarily their occupational status as lawyers; their attendance at Ivy League institutions; and/or the fact that they move in Washington DC insider circles, such as sending their children to Sidwell Friends (or wishing they did).

Warner points out, quite rightly, that for these individuals, Obama is serving as a mirror for themselves, through which they may not necessarily like what they see. The belief that, if it had not been for “one or two different turns, [I] could have been [him]”, or that one’s family could have turned out as seemingly happy and well-adjusted as the Obamas, conveys the envy and regret that permeates their reaction to the President.

A Lesson About Change

While it is debatable whether dissecting the emotional reactions of other elites to our newly elected President is a worthwhile pursuit in a time of economic and ecological crisis, there is a lesson embedded in Ms. Warner’s treatment of the topic which bears mentioning, and which can be useful to Americans both within and beyond the halls of power, whatever their reaction to Mr. Obama and his successes in life. Jealousy has a purpose – dismissing it as an interesting sideshow relegates us to missing a valuable insight into our personal and political selves.

The lesson of jealousy – towards Presidents or otherwise – is to ask oneself what it is about that person’s life that I wish I had for myself, and then to do the hard work of going about transforming oneself into someone to whom those rewards and qualities naturally accrue.  Envy and jealousy are about our unfulfilled wishes that we are denying to ourselves.

When we feel envy, we are projecting our secret wishes for things we feel we could accomplish or think we deserve onto those who have them already; we are satisfying those wishes, in a very self-defeating way, by denigrating the person who has them. We are projecting our sense of failure or inadequacy onto the accomplished other person – a sense of failure or inadequacy, it is worth noting, that comes purely from self-judgment and holding oneself to standards that one cannot meet at the present moment. It is an unfair self-judgment that underpins the need to denigrate the accomplishments of those who have done “better” than we have.

Most importantly, it is a whole lot easier to sit and wonder “what makes him or her so much better than me that they get to have X” than it is to admit the pain of dreams we had inadvertently let go of, or were not (yet) allowed to fulfill, and then to summon the courage to resolve to take whatever risks are called for to become the person that is able to make those desired accomplishments real.

Begrudging the happiness of others relieves us of the responsibility to do the hard work of becoming a better person. It serves to keep our healthy desires in check that might otherwise compel us to change. We deny that we have ignored our better judgment or our higher values by spiting those who have paid enough attention to them to make them a centerpiece of their lives.

Of course, removing the obstacles that seem to stand in one’s path to becoming the person one wishes to be is no small task. The first step is simply to have the courage to put down one’s cynicism long enough to decide to try. This is much harder to do than to remain envious. Jealousy is easy. Growth takes guts.

So, despite the ease with which I, too, can identify with Barack Obama as a peer, it seems clear to me that he, and his wife, have done the work, both internal and external, that was required of them in order to become ground-breaking figures in history, as well as an apparently happily married couple with a healthy family and a string of career successes behind them. Mr. Obama did not simply show up at Columbia and, poof, he was handed the Presidency. Put in this perspective, one would hope that it becomes patently obvious how unfair and unrealistic a comparison we are making when we wish we were Obama. Few of us – born to the halls of power or not – are capable of such feats.

On the other hand, if you feel you are someone who can accomplish things of equal magnitude, who can craft an admirable life both personally and professionally, then by all means, prove it, by relinquishing your jealousy and getting down to work. If you feel you are simply entitled to the rewards without the work, then your expectations may need a radical readjustment. If you understand that there are things that will be asked of you to become the equivalent of the Obamas, and you are willing to answer to them, then what are you waiting for?

Why him and not me? Because you haven’t tried. Yet.

When our new President talks about the need for every citizen to be involved in creating solutions to the crippling and urgent problems our nation is now experiencing, when he repeats ad nauseum that it is “us” and not just him who will fix the mess we are in, he is asking us to put aside our jealousy, or whatever obstacles appear to be in our way, and do the work we are called now to do, internal and otherwise. It’s apparent he has already done plenty in that regard. Now it’s our turn.