In the last gasps of their spurned administration, Barack Obama and John Kerry have been frantically plotting to damage the Jewish people.  Their lashing out is like the writhing of an animal after it has been killed.  Obama's scheming to have the U.N. declare the Jews interlopers at the holiest sites in their own land approaches psychotic levels of anti-Judaism.  Kerry's statement that Israel cannot be Jewish and also a democracy is unbalanced raving, in view of the fact that Israel has been a Jewish state and an exemplary democracy for almost 70 years.

For decades, the proclamations of the trans-national left have echoed with the ancient theme of Jew-hating.  Obama and Kerry are not Nazis.  But their words and deeds have a familiar odor: that the real threat to the world is still those Jews.  Their attack on Jews is not genocidal racism arising from authoritarian national fascism.  The bigotry of Obama and Kerry arises in an era characterized not by national fascism, but by post-national narcissism.  Their statements are designed to distract from the fact that their administration has accommodated terrorism, genocide, war, and persecution in places as far flung as Syria and Illinois.

Projective psychopathology is eternal; political opportunism is ever-changing.  This psychoanalysis updates the understanding of postmodern Jew-hating and why Obama and Kerry exemplify the malady.  It explains why Jews still serve as scapegoats in the narcissistic age as they did in the authoritarian one, answering not "why?," but "why again?"

 After World War II, a generation of shocked and reeling intellectuals devoted themselves to understanding fascism, Nazism, and the Holocaust.  Psychologists wanted to understand how, with so little resistance, one crazed man was able to incite the German people into unspeakable crimes against a non-aggressive, law-abiding minority.  Most of the psychoanalysts had a special need to understand because they were Jews themselves, many of whom had suffered horribly at the hands of the Nazis.  They concluded that mass, rationalized hatred arises to fend off unconscious shame, which threatens the ego, and is projected against a safe, non-threatening displacement object – in this case, the Jew.  The individual psychodynamics of projecting shame accumulate into collective bigotry and persecution against a blamed minority.  Anti-Semitism of the Reich was the projective recourse for the wounded national ego of the German people after the First World War.

This same projective psychopathology can be seen in Obama and Kerry, although the content of what they cannot face in themselves is very different.  They cannot face their hypocrisy, faithlessness, and cowardice in their leadership of the United States.  They will not recognize the real dangers facing the nation they claim to serve.  They displace their failures against those least likely to send a terrorist into an American club, a plane into an American building, or a bomb into an American street – namely, the Jews.

The German commanders didn't intentionally lose World War I.  Barack Obama campaigned to be the most powerful military commander on Earth, yet he is intentionally losing the war on terrorism.  He has torn America's borders to shreds and stealthily imported thousands of aliens who have no wish to assimilate into a free society, many of whom have a criminal mindset.  He has given aid to America's enemies and hosted terrorists at the White House.  His favorite military family is that of a deserter.

What better strategy for the Neville Chamberlain of Islamic terrorism than to blame the Jews?

John Kerry enlisted for military service in a time of war with a plan to get in and out and nominate himself for unearned medals.  His service is one of legendary disloyalty.  His betrayal of fellow servicemen was so memorable that it cost him the presidency and provided the gerund "Swift-boating."  Although appointed to serve only one nation and sworn to defend only one Constitution, he intoned: "We are living in a borderless world."  Here's Kerry's attitude towards risking one's life to serve one's nation: "[I]f you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well.  If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

Obama and Kerry cannot face the narcissistic injury of their disloyalty and shirking.  Though of different generations in blaming America first – Obama's anti-Americanism is more racially oriented and Kerry's more elitist disdain – they pulled together in undermining their nation and projecting their failures, not against America's enemies, but against the Jews.

In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists also theorized a personality type – the authoritarian personality – to explain fascism and the Holocaust.  The authoritarian personality is prone to obedience and submission when told by an authority figure to harm a fellow human.  From the 1940s, this personality was ascribed to individuals and groups complicit in racist or anti-Semitic violence.  However, the concept is obsolete and an impediment to understanding contemporary left-wing Jew-hating.  American society is not authoritarian; it is narcissistic.  The narcissists' foremost need is to feel good about themselves, not to serve a national purpose.  Obama, Kerry, and fellow Democrats need to feel like high-toned peacemakers while accommodating terrorism, mass murder, and genocide, such as against the Middle Eastern Christians communities.  And they do feel very good about themselves.  In  neutering the U.S. military and focusing attention on Israel and the Jews, they feel great about themselves.

Nazism arose in what is called the modern era.  In that era, understood to have ended in the mid-twentieth century, the power and importance of the nation-state reached its apex.  That context of over-heated nationalism scapegoated Jews and others to energize German military conquest.

The modern era is over.  (So far, it's been baby and bathwater, because wealthy nation-states seem to be  decomposing into lawless territories under the pressure of mass immigration.)  In the postmodern era, Western democratic nationalism is in rapid decline, being replaced here by the anti-American narcissistic personality.  Just as the authoritarians of the Reich imagined they could exterminate the Jews and conquer the world, and everything would work out just fine, today's narcissistic left, who feel so good about not being racist, insist that mass immigration, preferably of non-Christians, can continue to overrun their nation and everything is going to be fine.

Focusing on the Jewish problem works to stabilize this insanity once again.  But this time, Jew-hating is not psychologically tasked with ridding the unconscious mind of nationalist weakness; it is to rid the mind of guilt over failure to protect one's nation.  Jew-hating serves a narcissistic purpose of unearned moral superiority.  When I am brave enough to blame the Jews, I feel good about myself.

Academic and cultural elites find it convenient to focus on the past bigotries of the mythic authoritarian, hoping to spot a white hood somewhere.  So much pleasanter than facing reality.  Incidentally, theories of social conformity and authoritarianism have been so influential that they established in the even minimally educated mind an equivalency between patriotism and fascism.  If you love America, you must be a fascist.  A stadium of people chanting USA! USA! are not patriots; they are Nazis.  The lingering effects of an obsolete theory is why shallow-thinking, emotionally overwrought people like certain Rockettes, Mormon sopranos, and Glenn Beck succumb to calling Donald Trump a Nazi.

Hannah Arendt wrote of the resentment that fueled the Holocaust: "The social resentment of the lower middle classes against the Jews turned into a highly explosive political element[.]"  Today, the social class structure of Jew-hating has reversed.  In postmodern society, it is not the lower middle classes who resent the Jews; it is the elites.  The lower classes are not seeking a fuhrer; they are not authoritarian, nor do they have unconscious shame about shirking and disloyalty.  On the contrary, the lower middle and working classes tend to love America and are bearing the burden of defending her.  They have no need of a scapegoat.  It is the upper classes, including much of a complicit American Jewry, who have a need to defend against narcissistic injury and to blame the Jews.