http://The power of public fantasies: Three years of political libel
Public fantasies are behind 3 years of political libel reflecting not hatred of 1 man, but of American democracy and the rule of law.
Merriam-Webster defines “fantasy” as:“the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need”;“a creation of the imaginative faculty whether expressed or merely conceived”; or“a mental image or a series of mental images (such as a daydream) so created”
And so, a fantasy most often relates to a private creation of imagination or mental images. It is the stuff of dreams, daydreams, and individual psychology, a way to overcome reality.
Much of the hatred for the State of Israel is based on public fantasies. In Israel itself, recent disclosures may put the left’s cultivation of accusations against Prime Minister Netanyahu in the same category..
We should study more how the fantasies meet the psychological needs of the haters, whether they are Islamists or western leftists. Anti-Semites who are individual sociopaths are much less dangerous than when they turn their fantasies into public group-think among fellow Leftists or Islamists.
Contemporary politics, especially in America, seems to reflect an increasing set of public fantasies, increasingly from the Left, which traditionally embraced a classic liberalism based on reality, but which now embraces fantastical revolution. For example, Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing in National Review, “Dangers for Democrats”, August 31, 2010, states that “the fantasy of ending Donald Trump’s presidency through some kind of apocalyptic and extra-legal confrontation, rather than an election, keeps getting persistent airing on the left.”
Surely the debunked Russian Collusion and Ukrainian Collusion narratives, the bizarre impeachment hearing, the deceit of the Kavanaugh investigation, and the attempts to blame the Coronavirus and the big city riots on President Trump, were mere fantasies of hyper-politicized operatives, rather than the exercise of reasonable political limits within a constitutional democracy.