Mitt Romney — where do you draw the lines?
Numerous media have analyzed the demographic makeup of Mitt Romney's 47 percent, and that's good. Such information can help us to better formulate policy choices going forward. But in my view, few of these efforts have captured the real essence of Romney's motivation to divide the country into the 47 percent, and all others.
Of course this cynical, self-serving philosophy is not new:
WEDNESDAY, OCT 12, 2011 10:22 AM MDT
Conservatives launch a campaign against the poor and the old
[excerpt] Conservative filmmaker Mike Wilson and vacuous right-blogger Erick Erickson joined forces to start “We Are the 53%,” a blog made up of contributions from the 53 percent of Americans who pay more in federal income taxes than they receive back in deductions or credits.
The project was kicked off by Erick Erickson, who announced that he works “three jobs,” by which he means being a professional television pundit, radio pundit and Internet pundit. There is a stunning amount of cognitive dissonance, misplaced resentment and class revulsion going on, even for a conservative Web project...
—Salon: The tragic, hilarious “We Are the 53 percent” movement
What made it so easy for Romney to adopt the language and, ostensibly, the beliefs of the divisive 53 percent movement?
Historically speaking, we humans have many generations of tribal behavior in our background. The concept of a tribe is a group of humans circumscribed by a boundary. The question, then, becomes: where do we draw the most significant boundaries between "us", and "other"?
Some have always focused primarily on self, or on the family. Some adhere to the philosophical principle that all of humanity must be considered the same tribe. Others embrace boundaries between these two extremes; the village, city, state, or nation, for example.
One of the necessary prerequisites for ascending the corporate ladder is viewing the company as its own tribe. This characteristic is inculcated at every opportunity — through competition with other "tribes", through corporate identity and branding, through spans of control, and through the benefits and obligations of employment status.
But the prime directive for any corporation is making a profit. Any CEO worth his wall of certificates learns early that there may come a time to downsize the tribe. Where leadership of the corporate tribe is concerned, ex-employees must be dismissed without regard, and without a second thought — cutting them loose means they're no longer members of the corporate family.
In decrying the "irresponsible" 47 percent for whom Romney declaims any leadership obligation, Romney is simply reverting to type: seeing the populace through the eyes of one who lays off, down-sizes, off-shores, and feels no necessity of contrition. Those folks are only relevant to the Romneys of the world if the tribe decides that it must once again begin to hire.
The mainstream media is beginning to pick up on this just a little. The Associated Press quotes a former Romney strategist, "[Romney] was talking about the electorate as if it were a ledger sheet. It diminishes him."
Of course not all corporate executives or would-be presidents necessarily think this way. Indeed, some company executives take an entirely different path. But in my view Romney has revealed himself to be the prototypical pathological personality, with all that that implies:
Lack of guilt, fearlessness and interpersonal dominance — that may sound like a description of a high-powered executive or politician, but it's actually a list of traits commonly found in psychopaths. According to new research, this similarity may not be a coincidence. [excerpt]
—Huffington Post: Psychopathic Personality Traits Linked With U.S. Presidential Success, Psychologists Suggest
Mitt Romney may assauge any lingering guilt (
or more cynical concerns about image issues) through charity and donations to his church, but that doesn't equip him with an appropriate attitude to be president of
all Americans. For that reason and others, he'll never get my vote.