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sysprog:
Greg Sargent & Media Matters - Kurtz Promotes Michelle Malkin While Supposedly Disclaiming Malkinism
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Kurtz may be predictable, but he is certainly well skilled in his craft. He knows that most people will only see how he promoted Malkinism, not how he pretended to disclaim it. And if anybody objects, he'll point to his implausible disclaimer and he'll deny that he was promoting Malkinism.
What you're pointing to is something a bit more sophisticated than projection. It's another form of ego defense, known as "dissociation," in which different parts of one's consciousness are walled off from one another.
Thus, one part of Kurtz enthusiastically promotes Malkinism, while another part disowns it--though without letting the reader in on it, with the end result that Malkin herself is promoted as what she is not.
A classic example of dissociation is a ruthless, cut-throat businessman who goes to church, tithes and sings in the choir on Sunday. John D. Rockefeller, I presume.
But the separation doesn't have to be that well-defined by different social roles. The example you cite shows how dissociation can appear between two different stances in the same piece, stances which those not in the know cannot even tell apart.
I think that the study of ego defenses is very helpful in understanding how the right wing works, as well as how it coopts the clueless. Projection is the ego defense that folks on the left have been talking about the longest. Ego defenses function primarily to protect the ego (self) from annihilation due to conflicts between the id (drives/impulses) and superego (conscience, internalization of social rules)--although defenses can also handle conflicting drives or conflicts between the id and external reality. Wikipedia has a pretty good intro:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanism
It's been my observation over time that defense mechanisms are used in political discourse to protect the the political self--either an individual or shared group construct--in much the same way that they are used in everyday life to protect the actual, personal self. because projection is such a common example, it serves as a good starting point. When one person engages in it, the difference between the political and personal self is difficult to distinguish. But when they do it while gorup identifying themselves--as conservative vs. liberal, say, or Christian vs. atheist, straight vs. gay--then there is a clear divergence, since they are appealing to all others who share their group identity to enter into the same ego defense process, which doesn't happen in everyday life. There is an imaginative fantasy of group identification happening, which makes the political self distinctly different from the personal self.
As the wikipedia entry notes, there is a whole spectrum of ego defenses from primative to advanced.
Another ego defense that's readily recognizable in the political realm is "rationalization," which wikipedia describes as "The process of constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process." For example, justifying the invasion of Iraq because of non-existent WMDs, when the original decision was made because of a plan for world dominance.
I think it's a good idea to become more familiar with these mechanisms, in the same way that it pays to be familiar with the classic forms of fallacies. In everyday life, ego defense mechanisms are not bad, per se--in fact inadequate defenses can lead to personality disorders. But the balance of when they're harmful or beneficial would seem very different in the case of the political vs. the personal self.
