I have been following politics for most of my adult life,
and I can honestly say I have never seen a stranger campaign then the one run
by Republican candidate Mitt Romney in this year’s presidential election.
Everything about it seemed to defy every standard rule of political strategy
from start to finish, so I began to form my own thesis, one anchored to the
idea of the candidate suffering from some kind of mental malady. I began
analyzing his every move and posting about it on the Internet, so I was
naturally thrilled to get an assignment for my personality psychology class
that would allow me to culminate all of my observations into a relatively
simple explanation. Without further ado, here is what I believe to be the
psychological motivation behind Mitten’s three most bizarre campaign blunders.
Let us begin with the infamous and devastating “47 percent”
comment. During a private fundraiser behind closed doors in Florida, Mr. Romney
was secretly recorded making the following comments to his wealthy donors: “There
are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.
All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon
government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has
a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health
care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That, that's an entitlement. And the
government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no
matter what…. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never
convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their
lives” (Mother Jones, 2012). To help explain this politically damaging comment,
let us turn to Henry Murray’s Theory of Needs.
In summary, Murray believed that we are driven by physiological
and psychological needs, which are influenced by both environment and the
individual. A press, according to Murray, is something that exists in the
environment that either presents a chance for- or a restraint against-
expressing a particular need. When a press and a need are intermingled over a
long period of time, you have a thema. In the case of Mr. Romney, his
apparent contempt for the 47 percent is his thema. The press is the social
programs that benefit lower-income people, or what he calls “government
handouts”. The need this press conflicts with is dominance. Romney
and his conservative supporters wish to control elements of their environment
(society) by taking away the “entitlements” that they believe foster laziness
in the underprivileged.
While the 47 percent fiasco is easily explained by Murray’s
theory, the second major mistake Romney made during his campaign is better
described as a Freudian defense mechanism of the ego. Freud
believed that the human psyche is made up of three parts- the id, or the home
of unconscious urges that primarily satisfy sexual desires and aggression; the
superego, which is an internalized manifestation of authority figures that
tells us which thoughts and actions are acceptable and appropriate; and the
most important of all- the ego. The ego is the rational go-between or mediator
between the id and superego, and it is essential for our survival and ability
to function within civilized society. When the ego is threatened, Freud posited
that we all employ defense mechanisms. Mr. Romney’s second campaign blunder is
what I like to call the “Trust me, I’m a businessman” defense. This strategy
can be easily called rationalization, because he consistently used it
whenever confronted by fact-checkers and economists who insisted the math
behind his budget did not add up, and that reducing the deficit through tax
cuts and loophole closures alone was quite literally impossible. He never did
offer any explanations for why his critics were wrong. He just kept insisting
it would all work out fine, based on his business acumen alone.
Mr. Romney’s third and final mistake was not writing a
concession speech. The first term that comes to mind for me in regards to this
bizarre move is narcissistic delusion, which can be easily explained by taking
a look at what Carl Rogers would call Mr. Romney’s phenomenal
field. In The Person: And Introduction to the Science of Personality
Psychology, Dan McAdams says a phenomenal field “is the entire panorama of
a person’s experience, the person’s subjective apprehension of reality. It is
the individual’s overall frame of reference” (pg.271). Mr. Romney was born very
wealthy, became even wealthier, and was surrounded almost exclusively by other
wealthy people during his formative years. This gave him a sense of
entitlement, and the expectation that he would always get whatever he sought.
Then, during the campaign, he was entirely surrounded by people who also lived
in their own “reality bubble”, in which the majority of Americans also
hated President Obama, and held the same contempt for his liberal policies that
they did. This reality bubble was reinforced by watching only Fox News and
listening only to right-wing radio, which gave them the illusion that they were
in the majority in objective reality. In short, Mr. Romney did not write a
concession speech because he literally did not think it was possible for him to
lose, a notion that was created and reinforced entirely by his personal
phenomenal field.
All things considered, there is a very good reason why Mitt
Romney’s campaign seemed to defy all political logic. He was not operating in
objective reality. He was unconsciously suppressing it instead, by expressing
Murray’s psychogenic need for dominance, employing Freud’s ego defense
mechanism of rationalization, and operating in a false reality, created
entirely by Rogers’ phenomenal field.
References
McAdams, D.P. (2009) The Person: An Introduction to the
Science of Personality Psychology. (5ed.)
Published by John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.
Romney, M. (2012) The MoJo News Team, Mother Jones.
Published September 19, 2012
Retrieved from:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-
video#47percent
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