Norman Mailer and the radical left’s psychopathy

In 1952, the legendary writer predicted progressivism’s descent into madness.

Photo: Carl Van Vechten

Recently, I wrote an essay on the progressive left’s cultivation of “controversy” as a strategy to foment social discord in the United States. This discord provides progressives with a means to seize power, especially in the universities, by exploiting the divisions they themselves created.

The unanswered question, however, is precisely why the progressive left feels the need to do this and why it has become so popular among them.

After all, progressives have not always taken such a destructive attitude toward American society. During the New Deal era, for example, they were quite positive and optimistic about the United States and built a political consensus on that basis that kept them in power for several decades.

Beginning with the emergence of Students for a Democratic Society and other New Left groups in the 1960s, however, a more aggressive and violent strategy was adopted. As the SDS manifesto put it: “A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.”

This is, in many ways, the origin of America’s “culture wars,” in which radicalism is imposed on American society through the universities, exploiting social divisions (not all of them invented) to do so.

There are many reasons behind the New Left’s turn to a strategy of ripping America apart, but I think the main reason has rarely been mentioned, even though it represents perhaps the primal trauma of the ‘60s generation.

First, it must be understood that SDS and the New Left were primarily reacting to the prevailing culture of the 1950s, which they saw as an era of conformity and repression best represented by McCarthyism. They felt that the left’s gains in the New Deal era had become ossified. The momentum had been lost, the experiment truncated, and a new more radical approach was required.

The ‘50s as the New Left understood them were not entirely defined by chronology. The zeitgeist they sought to overturn began with the end of the Korean War and continued roughly until President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 and the dawn of the “New Frontier” era.

Many trace the beginning of the cultural upheavals of the ’60s to Kennedy’s assassination at the end of 1963. This primal trauma, it is held, upended America’s understanding of itself, ushering in a new era of angst and upheaval.

I do not believe this is the case. Though the assassination has overshadowed it in the collective memory, the primal trauma of the 1960s was likely the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kennedy’s assassination was undoubtedly a terrible trauma for the United States, but the missile crisis was far larger and more terrible in scope. For the first time, the world seemed to be genuinely on the brink of nuclear war. Apocalyptic fears became real for Americans as they never had before. The world, the nation felt, could well be about to end.

Although the US and Russia pulled back from the brink, everyone knew it could have ended very differently. If it had, humanity would have been all but completely destroyed. Given this, it was nearly inevitable that messianic fantasies and fanatical quasi-religious movements like the hippies, New Age paganism, and the New Left itself would emerge.

To a remarkable extent, the writer Norman Mailer predicted this in his famous and wildly controversial 1957 essay “The White Negro.” He posited that the apocalyptic threats America and the world were now facing would inevitably result in a general search after sensation, a heightened sense of life, violence, and for some, outright psychosis.

“Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years,” Mailer wrote. “For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation … a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city.”

Mailer pointed to the figure of the “hipster” as one of the reactions to this existential anxiety, writing: “Whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness.”

“In this country where new millions of psychopaths are developed each year, stamped with the mint of our contradictory popular culture … it is as if there has been room already for the development of the antithetical psychopath who extrapolates from his own condition, from the inner certainty that his rebellion is just, a radical vision of the universe which thus separates him from the general ignorance, reactionary prejudice, and self-doubt of the more conventional psychopath,” he continued.

In a parenthetical and somewhat monstrous passage, Mailer pointed to the endgame of all this: “It can of course be suggested that it takes little courage for two strong 18-year-old hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper. … Still, courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak 50-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act it is not altogether cowardly.”

“The White Negro” is, in many ways, quite mad, gleefully amoral, and impossibly verbose, but it is not an exaggeration to say that it predicted the next 70 years of American radicalism and, in many ways, American culture as a whole.

However much they may cloak their admonitions and actions in pretensions of morality, there is undoubtedly an element and perhaps an essence of psychopathy to the progressive left—from SDS to the fiends who now take to the streets to declare their fealty to Hamas and Hezbollah and celebrate the slaughter of Jews.

It is there most of all in the progressive left’s dedication to “controversy,” which in practice is the sociopolitical equivalent of beating in the brains of a small businessman. Attacking the sexual and gender identity of all human beings, hailing the actions of barbarous genocidal terrorists, renewing Nazism for the social media age, browbeating and silencing dissenters, rioting in the streets, setting loose hordes of criminals to cause social havoc, driving whole populations out of work for the sake of renewable energy, and a great deal more all stem from the progressive’s “inner certainty that his rebellion is just” driven by “a radical vision of the universe which thus separates him from the general ignorance, reactionary prejudice, and self-doubt of the more conventional psychopath.” It is to murder an institution in the form of the nation.

If this is indeed the case, then what the progressive left requires more than anything else is therapy. What this therapy might look like and who might administer it are, for the moment, unknown and perhaps unknowable. It could be as simple as setting and enforcing limits. It may require far deeper and more analytical strategies.

Above all, perhaps, it may involve forcing a confrontation with the cultivation of controversy; an assertion by the silent majority that some things are not, in fact, controversial, and there will be no argument over self-evident truths: Terrorism is bad, antisemitism is bad, racism of any kind is bad, crime is bad, rioting is bad, and so on.

Last November, the American people appeared to take the first step in that direction. Whether this is the shock treatment required to bring the progressive left to its senses and end six decades of latent and active psychopathy remains, for the moment, an open question.