The Pathology of Normalcy

From Kevin Jon Heller at Opinio Juris I learned of a new Harris poll that finds

• 67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.
• 57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
• 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president"
• 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did"
• Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."

John Avlon, author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Highjacking America (2010), writes that

The full results of the poll...are even more frightening: including news that high percentages of Republicans—and Americans overall—believe that President Obama is "racist," "anti-American" "wants the terrorists to win" and "wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one-world government."

My comment to Kevin's post:

I suppose we need explanations from both cognitive psychology and social psychology (on the latter, think of Fromm’s pioneering studes of ‘authoritarian character’) to account for such egregious violations of the norms of basic reasoning and simple canons of rationality. In addition, we seem to have failures in socialization/acculturation or systems of formal and informal education. In addition, we need to look at the role of the mass media, including the use of the internet in a way (as Sunstein argues) that reinforces existing beliefs and on occasion pushes those beliefs in an extremist direction. 

It’s all rather frightening and reminds one of how and why fascist ideologies come to rule peoples’ minds. The consequences of social consensus, conformity and “false consciousness” amount, once again, to a “pathology of normalcy” in Fromm’s locution (we might equally invoke Plato’s Cave allegory here). Collective delusions and widespread (willful?) estrangement from the truth suggest an epidemic of mental illness, one that, to date, has escaped the diagnostic assumptions and methods of most clinicians.