Putting Sarah On The Couch

Arianna Huffington psychoanalyzes Palin:

It's not Palin's positions people respond to -- it's her use of symbols. Mama grizzlies rearing up to protect their young? That's straight out of Jung's "collective unconscious" -- the term Jung used to describe the part of the unconscious mind that, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings, made up of archetypes, or, in Jung's words, "universal images that have existed since the remotest times." Unlike personal experiences, these archetypes are inherited, not acquired. They are "inborn forms... of perception and apprehension," the "deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity."

Allahpundit shrugs:

The point, as always, is to reassure fellow hyperpartisans that it’s not the opposition’s policies that voters find appealing but something (anything!) else ... You’re going to see a lot of this if she’s the nominee, and it’ll all run along the same lines: Palin’s practicing some sort of witchcraft or hypnosis or unleashing America’s “id,” etc etc, all geared towards insisting that her appeal is, and can only be, operating on a sub-cerebral level. That’s the goal here to suggest that, because no thinking person could vote for her, this is all playing out somehow in America’s subconscious. Credit to Arianna for framing it in terms of Jung, at least. Most of the lazier pieces you’ll see in this vein, and there’ll be many more, will stick with Freud.

What policies? The point here is that Palin's incoherent, whatever-sounds-good-right-now, whatever-hurts-Obama streams of consciousness have nothing to do with policy. They have to do with identity, with visceral issues of national meaning, and with the starbursts factor of a beauty queen as war-leader. Her appeal is sub-rational in a party that is irrational.

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan