More wisdom from Emphasis Added

Rob at Emphasis Added hits it out of the park again today, with his commentary on the flap over Rick Santorum's comments, sexual repression, reactionary politics and homophobia.

The psychologist and political theorist Wilhelm Reich made an intriguing link between the dynamics of sexual repression and reactionary politics, arguing that the latter was an externalization of the repressed individual’s lack of control over powerful sexual urges. Essentially, the authoritarian tendencies of political movements on both the far right and far left represent the efforts of sexually repressed individuals and social masses to reproduce the misery of their own repression on everyone else, and it is no accident that sexual Puritanism and “family values” are part of the vocabulary of every historical authoritarian movement. In Reich’s view, the lifting of sexual repression as a feature of social mores will inevitably result in a more progressive politics. (This is a radical simplification, and those interested should consult Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution, both from the early 1930s, for more information.)