On the one hand, I appreciate it when critics take my ideas seriously enough to dispute them. On the other hand, I have grown weary of having to begin so many debates by stating what I am not arguing. Clearing the discursive battlefield of the bodies of straw men (as well as straw feminists) mowed down by Matt Zeitlin is a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it. (Thank you, Susan for beginning this onerous task. I’ll try not to be too redundant of your cogent retort.) Neither Susan nor I hold any of the reductionist positions he duels with. Nothing in either of our posts, in my book, or her book (I have read it) could be construed as an assertion that any social, political, or military event was inevitable. There has been no claim that individual leaders can have no influence in the outcome of those events or on the probability that they would come about at all. Neither of us have argued that certain traumas from our collective past, hypermasculinity, sexism, gendered narratives, and unconscious conflicts are the sole determinants of political behavior. On the latter point, you might want to reread the last sentence of my post: “…an invasion of Iraq becomes the preferred strategy of counter-humiliation (in addition to satisfying imperial and economic motives)…”

That it is even necessary to say these things does raise some interesting questions. What is it about recognizing the power of the affective and unconscious realms of human experience that leads otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people to work so hard to diminish their significance? Why is it necessary to transform a psychologically informed explanatory model of politics into a caricature in order to challenge it?

As Freud understood it, the unconscious does not just refer to that part of ourselves we don’t know, but concerns those things we don’t want to know. This may be why the world’s first psychoanalyst was not so sanguine about the enthusiastic invitation from American scholars to visit the US. “What they don’t realize,” he wryly asserted, “is that I’m bringing them the plague.” My impression is that psychoanalytic thinking remains in many quarters an unwelcome affliction, especially in left politics where very impoverished forms of rationality can hold sway – where it is considered reasonable to regard emotion as some sort of trivial epiphenomenon.

What first woke me up to the profound limitations of the self-interest theory of political motivation was the 1984 presidential election. The vast majority of those who voted for Ronald Reagan, the master teller of soothing fictions, disagreed with his major policy positions, and either failed to benefit from or suffered under his economic policies. In surveys conducted after the election of George HW Bush, most people questioned insisted that the infamous Willie Horton ads had no influence on their vote. But when asked which issues mattered most to them, a majority of voters mentioned prison furloughs for criminals as a top concern. More recently, we witnessed George W Bush’s approval rating spike every time the official “Threat Level” was bumped up. Now, contrary to Matt’s assertion, these phenomena are not an argument to dismiss any notion of collective agency. Rather, they call for us to have a more nuanced understanding of that agency, one that is informed by a respect for the power of emotion and unconscious conflict. But since Matt privileges empirical methods and epistemologies over hermeneutic ones, I’d like say a little bit about my own research and that of others, as it pertains to this discussion.

Not only has empirical research demonstrated the reality of unconscious thought, emotion, and motivation (see Drew Westen’s vast body of work in this area, for example), but its impact on political cognition and behavior has also been persuasively illustrated by a variety of studies. Most relevant to this exchange is the work done on the relationship between anxious masculinity and political attitudes. In my own research using empirical measures, I found that men more than women tended to embrace a set of conservative political positions (on war, the provision of social services, the environment, and the regulation of corporate behavior). And, those males who did hold these beliefs were more likely than liberal men to score high on measures of gender role conflict, homophobia, and fear of femininity in men. Sociologist Robb Willer took this work one step further and demonstrated the causal nature of the correlation between femiphobia and right wing politics. In a 2004 study, he administered a fake gender identity test to a large group of randomly selected, demographically similar men and women. Following the test, subjects were randomly assigned to receive feedback that their responses indicated either a masculine or a feminine identity. The male subjects whose masculinity had been experimentally threatened reported more distress, shame, and guilt than the other men. In addition, the men who were told they scored high on femininity increased their support for George Bush, the Iraq War, and a ban on gay marriage. They also showed a greater interest in buying a large SUV and were willing to pay more for it than was the group of men told they were manly. Women’s responses were unaffected by the feedback they received.

To those who have another straw man in their sights: No, this does not mean that femiphobia is the only, or even primary cause of conservatism in men, merely a significant one. But as a profound determinant of the gender gap, anxious masculinity could have, and as I argue in my book, has had a major influence on election outcomes. We on the left ignore this dynamic at our peril.