Conservative media provide innumerable examples of Democrats shamelessly exhibiting hypocrisy and engaging in psychological projection — the habit of ascribing Democrats’ behaviors to conservatives (e.g., Trump and the GOP are guilty of engaging in lawfare and election interference, destroying democracy).

In trying to understand the shambolic, emotion-driven mentality of Democrats, it is noteworthy that psychological displacement is also a prominent feature of the progressive mindset.  In psychology, displacement is when a person takes a negative emotion (anger, frustration) and redirects the emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient.  An example of displacement would be a work supervisor who refuses to confront a bad, lazy employee for fear of the employee’s reaction, and instead redirects the resentment to a good, high-performing employee whom the supervisor does not fear.

We see psychological displacement when progressives transfer blame for crime from criminals onto cops, with demands to defund, abolish, or even kill (“pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon”) the police.

We also witness displacement when progressive white women or elderly Asians are assaulted or sucker-punched in the face by black males but refuse to blame or otherwise identify their assailants, whom they fear.  Instead, in interviews or on social media, they often blame white males, white “racism,” or some other amorphous thing that they do not fear.

With the Israel-Hamas conflict, we are witness to both progressive projection (ascribing Hamas’s empirically self-evident genocidal threats and behavior toward Israel to the Jewish state itself) and psychological displacement.

Highly educated progressive white Jews, in particular, are consciously aware that hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide wish violent harm upon Jews (based on edicts in the Koran mandating the murder of Jews).  This is naturally and understandably fear-inducing for progressive Jews to contemplate.  However, the emotional coping mechanism of displacement allows progressive Jews to redirect their fear of Muslims onto safer ephemera that they do not fear — Christians, for example, who will turn the other cheek, or white male Gentiles, or Republican voters who have done them no harm and are no threat to Jews.

Psychological displacement explains how director Steven Spielberg, a top supporter of Joe Biden, can make a morally ambivalent movie like Munich, which whitewashes the torture and mass murder of Israeli Jewish athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics at the hands of Muslim Palestinian terrorists.  Instead, Spielberg engages in displacement and moral cowardice, depicting the Israeli Mossad’s pursuit of the terrorist fugitives as morally equivalent to — and perhaps even worse than — the Muslim Palestinian terrorist provocation itself.   

Situational ethics is nothing new to Democrats.  When Bill and Hillary Clinton used the FBI (Filegate) and IRS to persecute Republicans in the 1990s, the Democrat Media Complex (DMC) dismissed the criminal abuses as either conservative conspiracy theories or nothingburgers.  (Then, as now, Republicans mounted nothing more than a meek letter-writing campaign in protest.)

Similarly, when Bill Clinton committed and suborned perjury in the 1990s, progressives proclaimed that his crimes were trivial because they were really just “about sex.”  Yet when Donald Trump (allegedly) paid a porn actress many years later to remain silent about a consensual one-night assignation, suddenly it was not just “about sex,” but rather a baffling series of “felonies” worthy of imprisonment to “save democracy itself.”

As millions of African and Middle Eastern Muslim “refugees” (the overwhelming majority of them young males) overran much of Western Europe in recent years at the express invitation of the European Union (E.U.), countless young European women and children in Germany, France, England, and other countries were raped, assaulted, and murdered by the asylees.

One of many females raped and murdered in Germany was Maria Ladenburger, a 19-year-old medical student.  Unlike most other cases, which were hushed up by the media, Maria’s case became well known because her father was a national figure, a senior lawyer with the European Union, and a vehement, even vitriolic, open-borders advocate.

After Maria was raped, tortured, and murdered by an Afghan refugee, the progressive Dr. Clemens Ladenburger (now the deputy director-general of the European Commission’s legal division) did not rage against his daughter’s killer or the E.U.’s suicidal refugee resettlement program.

No, Herr Ladenburger coped with his grief through psychological displacement, inveighing at length against white Europeans’ alleged Islamophobia and xenophobia. 

Not content merely to sacrifice his own daughter on the altar of his progressive ideology, Ladenburger demanded that the refugee program be dramatically expanded, with unlimited numbers of African and Muslim refugees welcomed into Europe so that untold thousands more could be raped, assaulted, and killed, all for the greater moral good of Germany and the E.U.

Although a minority of whites are progressives, a majority of progressives are whites.

And progressive whites have a reductionist, racist view of blacks and other ethnic minorities as exotic but pitiable, helpless, and childlike, without personal agency, with no free will, no moral compass, no impulse control, and therefore no responsibility for their actions.

However, mentally juxtaposing black skin color with rampant crime and other social pathologies causes cognitive dissonance, because progressive whites simply cannot abide, or even acknowledge, the suggestion that they as progressive white Democrats might be racist (!).  

White progs cope with the cognitive dissonance by displacing their negative perceptions about black behavior onto other whites, blaming and accusing those “other” whites of racism toward blacks.  The self-loathing and redirected racism also explain progressive whites’ remarkable hostility toward their own race.

When Democrats lecture in their incoherent, high-pitched voices that Trump will kill democracy and become a dictator, it is because Democrats have already been there, done that.  When Democrats warn, without evidence, that Trump will weaponize the justice system to pursue political enemies...well, hello, McFly!

If elections and societal outcomes were about policies, conservatives would win every election, every time.  

By an overwhelming majority, the American electorate, even blacks, are desirous of a border wall with illegal migration sharply curtailed.  The public strongly favors mandatory voter ID.  The public wants a stronger police presence to ensure less crime.  A majority of voters prefer lower taxes; school choice; and a colorblind, meritocratic society, rather than the race and gender-obsessed, tribalistic caste and spoils system the Democrats have forced upon us.

Unfortunately, a majority of the electorate vote on base emotion (is this candidate promising more freebies than the other or someone I’d like to share a beer with?), not policy, and this largely explains why Democrats are more successful at winning elections.

Democrats have made the personal political, injecting politics into all subject matter and all sectors of society, and know how to carve up the electorate by race, playing to ethnic voters’ fears and resentments, inflaming and then stroking each tribe’s erogenous zones.

This emotion-based play is why outright kooks and racists like AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley are vastly more effective with the Democrat base than hapless and ineffectual Republicans are with the Republican voter base.

Dry Republican policy prescriptions that would actually benefit the black community and greater society alike are no match for Democrats’ hysterical emotional appeals, nonstop ululating about racism, so-called white privilege, genocide, and other progressive tropes and faux controversies.

Widespread prima facie evidence of displacement, projection, and other psychological coping mechanisms confirms the alarming reality that progressivism really is a mental illness.

The Gregory brothers are previous contributors to American Thinker.

Image: ElisaRiva via Pixabay, Pixabay License.