A widespread view of campaigners who make false, grossly degrading comments about the opposition is that they're just plain sleazy. They're liars, and they're shameless. They don't care about democracy or any other ideas. They just care about getting power or spewing hatred or beating up on people. Some of them are insane zealots; they believe that any means is justified, because their cause is supreme--their oracle told them so. Many of them are racists, and some of them are corrupt and even criminal.

To progressives, these characterizations just seems true, the truth about this kind of campaigner. We tend to take these characterizations for granted as valid. But what if these descriptions actually are only deeply engrained prejudices rather than accurate. What if calling a person racist is, in form and logic, no different than calling a person "nigger?"

In my work with and writing about the limit case of sleaze, a sociopath," that's just what I've shown. And I'm not alone. Their are many other professionals, including award winning psychiatrists, who say much the same thing about people diagnosed Antisocial Personality Disorder.

In truth, a sociopath does care, feels remorse--even soul murdering intensities of remorse--no less than any other person. The difference between the average person and a sociopath really has only to do with how repressed is their caring and remorse, not how caring and remorseful they truly are. That's what many of us are disclosing about these kinds of people. And thousands of empathic prison guards, corrections social workers, parole agents, and treatment professionals already know up close and personal. Within ten years, I believe, this cutting edge view of sociopaths will be widely accepted.

My point in bringing up this limit case of a sleazy kind of person is that, if even sociopaths don't fit the stereotype, then nobody does. Take for example 

But these characterizations are themselves grossly degrading and infuriating. It can be argued that the 1960s progressives incited Republican sleaze by means of incendiary language and tactics.