Jews and Genealogies of Group Narcissism

And so it begins

Recently, I’ve been considering vicarious group narcissism (or group narcissism by proxy) in certain academic fields like sociology and social psychology, whereby an academic promotes the abstract grandiose group self-image of a group which doesn’t include the academic. The first two articles looked at Talcott Parsons and Robert Bellah, both sociologists who located the essence of America’s civil religion in America’s dissenting protestant roots and who further interpreted that civil religion to require the promotion of grandiose group identities in certain non-white groups that had suffered group-based discrimination and victimization.[i] The third article looked at a trend in the field of social psychology, which called for the creation of group identities and the enhancement of group self-esteem in historically disadvantaged groups.[ii]

This approach garnered criticism suggesting I had endorsed Moldbug’s genealogical arguments about the connection between Puritanism and Progressivism.  This wasn’t my intent. In writing those articles, I had hoped to provide examples of the sources and motivations undergirding the establishment’s promotion of group grandiosity, which has amplified recent political phenomena like “wokeness” and The Movement for Black Lives. In other words, I wanted to show some of the external (to the group) etiologies of group narcissism in groups like Black Americans without denying the existence of other external and internal etiologies.[iii] In passing, I even provided examples of Protestantism in America that were explicitly anti-liberal and Teutonic-supremacist to illustrate why the exclusive protestant genealogy of American liberalism is tenuous and possessed of low explanatory power for modern political phenomena.

Some of the criticisms also accused me of diminishing (this is historical diminishment!) the Jewish origins of modern liberalism. The evidence of the influence of left-leaning Jewish intellectual movements on American liberalism has been exhaustively documented by Jews and critics of Jews alike, and there is no need to recapitulate here. However, in receiving this criticism, I wondered whether it might be useful to investigate right-wing or Zionist sources of vicarious group narcissism, both to uncover lesser-known etiologies of modern group narcissism and to further undermine the absolutist theological genealogies that obfuscate modern political analysis.