Progressive Views: Dr. Bryant Welch on the Psychology of Politcs

Dr. Bryant Welch earned his juris doctorate from Harvard Law School before earning his PhD from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Welch first lobbied Congress concerning health care reform in 1963, and has been involved in subsequent efforts at health care reform. During his tenure with the American Psychological Association, his work delt with government relations, legal and regulatory affairs, marketing, state psychological associations, and public relations. He is the author of State of Confusion, an examination of how paranoia and envy come into play in American politics. This passed Sunday, he spoke with me concerning health care reform, President Obama, Fox News, and his experience debating John Kerry in college for an interview originally posted on www.progressiveu.org:

Progress, Welch said is moving forward. And, hopefully in a more constructive way that builds on mankind’s capacity to build a better world.

John: Who or what is your biggest influence on your political viewpoints and ideology?

Welch: Well, certainly my father was a big influence, he was a city manager in the community where I grew up… he was very highly regarded and I was active in politics from a very, very early age. I think a lot of it was just part of family life growing up, so I would certainly say my dad was the biggest influence, by far.

John: Then what drew you to study psychology?

Welch: I was in law school, and had planned on becoming a lawyer and running for political office myself, and this was in the late Sixties, early Seventies, and I found, I felt there was something missing in the law, a certain depth. And this was the Sixties, when everyone was becoming more, or a lot of people were becoming more introspective. I found myself working for a law firm one summer, and on the way to work, reading psychology, and being pretty bored with legal work, so, I finished law school and really decided that I just found psychology to be a lot more meaningful, I found there was a lot more depth to it then the law, and I think it was probably the best thing I did for me personally.

John: Do you believe that aspiring politicos should study psychology?

Welch: Well… they inevitably do. Whether it’s in a classroom or whether it’s in life. Because politics is psychology. When you are trying to understand how to get people to work together constructively on legislation, when you are trying to decide how to persuade people in a large group, when you are working with constituents one on one, whenever you are dealing with people, you are dealing with psychology. So it’s not in my experience… most politicians, while they may not call it psychology, they have to be pretty good psychologists in order to survive

John: I’d like to start talking about your book, can you explain please, for the people who have not had the chance to read it, what the phrase “gas lighting” means?
Welch: Gaslighting is a term, coined in the mental health community, that came from the old movie “Gaslight” starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. And in the movie, the husband tries to drive his wife insane by manipulating her reality, and the name of the movie comes from the fact that he would turn the gaslights up and down and, when she would notice that and ask him about it, he would deny there had been any chance. So gradually, by doing that and multiple other things, he undermined her confidence in her own ability to discern what was real and what wasn’t real, and she became more and more dependant on him, and more and more repressed, and eventually had a Scotland Yard detective, in the person of Joseph Cotten, who understood what he was doing, he came in and exposed the husband, and when the wife saw what he was doing, she was able to confront the husband. So, the mental health community has picked that term up to mean when someone is manipulating someone else’s sense of reality in a way that undermines their trust in their own perceptions and it then has a debilitating effect on them psychologically: they become more repressed, they are less able to function independently, their judgment is impaired, and they tend to be easily manipulated.

John: In your book, you are very critical of the previous presidential administration. In what ways gaslighted by the Bush administration?

Welch: I think that the Rove/Bush team was particularly manipulative… just one big example that comes to mind is the “Swiftboating” of John Kerry. It was a remarkable thing that two candidates who had not seen active duty were able to convince people that John Kerry was not fit to lead because there was something defective about his wartime service. And I think the reason they were so successful is that when people where just about to be introduced to John Kerry, they jumped in with both feet and began to labeled him unfit to lead before people could form their own opinion. So, as people are in an uncertain state, if someone comes in and answers their questions for them in a very forceful way, as the “Swift Boaters” did, they then can preempt people’s uncertainty, tell them how to feel with certainty, in which case they feel more secure and comfortable, and basically, the gaslighters in that situation own the other people

John: As a psychology if you were able to sit down with a Dick Cheney, a Karl Rove, a George Bush, what would be the one thing you would want to know about them?

Welch: Well, I wouldn’t be terribly optimistic about a conversation like that…. I think Bush probably can engage with another person, probably, better than Rove or Cheney. And, to some extent, you probably could have a conversation and I’d want to, well, if I could sit inside of his head, I’d like to know what his early experience in the White House was like. He was certainly not qualified by interest or experience to be in the White House. I don’t think he was a stupid man, by any means, but I don’t think he had been interested in the kind of issues he was confronted with. In addition, people glossed over his problem with drinking, because he stopped on his 40th birthday. But if you think about it, what men learn in their 30s and 40s, is absolutely critical as a foundation for what they do in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. So, I’d like to know what his initial experience was, and I suspect he was overwhelmed, and confused, and turned to Dick Cheney. So, I guess I’d like to ask Bush about his relationship with Cheney… I don’t think it would be possible to engage Dick Cheney, I think he lives, psychologically, in a very tight world where few people gain access to it. So, I don’t think he’d be much interest in the questions I’d ask, [chuckles] and I don’t think I’d get much helpful information

John: you’ve written about APA reaction to the Bush Administration. You wrote about Dr. Paul Kimmel’s panel, which aimed to study how the War on Terror was affecting our national psyche. Why do you suppose that Kimmel’s findings were never really discussed in the media?

Welch: Well, I’ve written several articles on the American Psychological [Association ’s] transition from a liberal organization, which it was when I worked there, to one which has, really, on the torture issue, gone over to the “dark side.” The American Psychological Association had some very key, influential people who were closely aligned with the military, and the organization had been weakened in a number of ways by some previous leadership. So, when the military began to want to make psychology complicit and wanted to use psychology to put the of legitimacy on the detention centers and the torture… it wasn’t difficult for them to take over the APA and control it. And Kimmel’s taskforce represented the old, liberal, APA, and initially, it was a taskforce that was going to show what the real cost was of Bush’s War on Terror on psychologically on the American people, that it had a harmful effect on people’s judgment, the impact on people’s health, and it makes people suspicious and uncomfortable, but that, obviously, would be an embarrassment to the Bush Administration, so, what had initially had a lot of support was derailed by a remarkably small number of people on the APA Board of Directors at the time. The President and President-Elect in particular, and there was a fellow who was Senator Inouye’s administrative assistant who was a psychologist and he was quite influential in the association at the time, and I think the three of them, combined with some of the military interests, really dictated APA’s policy.

John: what current issue do you think best exemplifies this idea of gaslighting?

Welch: Well, there are any number of them, right now, certainly today, I think the reactions to Obama, be it the health care plan, or the “birthers” phenomena (of people insisting he was born in Kenya), I think my book addresses the kind of psychological mechanisms at play when people have the kinds of distortions or are so quick to accept the kind of distorted thinking, that we are seeing playing out in health care. People think that the health care plan has “death panels,” and I think my discussion of paranoia and envy, both, provide a pretty good foundation for understanding that phenomena. You then have people trying to process the fact that we have an African American who is President of the United States, I think that Obama’s election preceded much of the psychological change that was needed for many people to accept the fact that we have an African American as president. And I think for the, whether it is thirty percent of the country, or what have you, I think for the percentage of the country that was not psychologically prepared for that, it has created a very paranoid response, that there is something foreign and “different” about Obama, and they can’t say blatantly that it’s his race; but they can say he’s “from Africa.” So, I think the book talks about paranoia, it talks about envy, and it also talks about sexual perplexity in terms of the gay marriage issue, and how those things disrupt the workings of the mind and make it very difficult for people to weave their own independently determined sense of reality. So instead they turn on Fox News, and if you listen to… Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh you just can’t help but come away impressed by the forcefulness and the vehemence with which they say things. And that, I think, when you are trying to “gaslight” somebody, or take away their reality sense, and tell them what’s real and what’s not, that’s probably the single most important ingredient: that you say it very, very forcefully. So, if you listen to Brian Williams, it’s not the same as listening to Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh.

John: Byard Duncan of AlterNet.org recently described the tactics of certain anti-health care reform groups as “textbook psychopathic,” claiming that these groups exhibit “egocentrism, deceitfulness and aggressive.” As someone more acquainted with the psychological field than Mr. Duncan, what do you make of his claim?

Welch: Well, I don’t.. I think there is something to it. I do think that there is a ruthlessness that has characterized what I’ll call the “Lee Atwater/Karl Rove” geneology in the Republican Party, and it is a completely ruthless approach to politics in which you use the tactics I describe in my book, manipulating people in the deepest layers of their psyche, their paranoia, their envy, or their sexual security, and in that way try to disrupt their ability to do what’s in their best interest. Now, is that “psychopathic,” well.. I think it’s pretty bad. So.. I wouldn’t have a lot of quarrel with it. I don’t like using psychological diagnosis in that way because I think oftentimes it obscures more than it illuminates. I think the kind of psychological description I try to give to these people [gaslighters] in State of Confusion, I hope that’s more helpful than just giving them a label, but I can’t say I would take strong issue with that label.

John: The L.A. Times reports that the Senate Finance Committee is going to remove the language which lead to the “Death Panel” hoax. What message do you believe this sends?

Welch: I guess it means that there’s not much sense that it’s possible to communicate with the people in the public who have been brainwashed into believing that there is a “death panel.” I think one of the remarkable things that the Senate Finance Committee will discover is that even when they take it out, people won’t believe that it’s been taken out, because the false belief plays such a role in the psychic stability of these people, that they need it. So they’ll just keep believing it. So I think… I think a better way to approach it is to launch a counter attack against the people who are saying that, and to expose the kind of nefarious tactics that are going on. That way, you can take the same underlying anger and resentment, and hoist these people on their own petard. And the problem, I think, is that the liberal wing will think, “oh, well then we are just as bad as they are,” but I don’t think that’s true. I think that to expose someone else’s shenanigans is a lot different than engaging in the shenanigans yourself. But I think if you can do that in a way that gets people angry enough that they will turn on the people who have lied to them, then that is a preferable way to deal with it. Now, it’s difficult, because a lot of these people have been captured by Fox News, and people who haven’t listened to Fox News recently: you really need to tune in. Because it’s nonstop, it is nonstop political propaganda. There are a lot of people who just have Fox News on all day, and they just listen to this vitriol, particularly directed at Obama now, and it’s very difficult to reach this audience.

John: You wrote recently that “If the Obama Administration does not tap the deeper strata of the mind at play in the health care issue, it will lose. It will lose for the same reason the Clinton plan did.” Is tapping into this “deeper strata” a simple matter of exposing lies, or what else needs to be done?

Welch: The comment I just made addresses that. I think people need to understand, they need to take a couple of the more obvious lies, be it the “death panels,” or one that I don’t think has been explained very well, is they are saying the government is going to interfere with their relationship with their doctor. Well, you know, that happened a long time ago with managed health care. And the doctors are being more controlled under managed health care then they would be under the government… so I think they need to attack their opponents by exposing them as liars, and it would have to be almost that course in order to tap into what I call the “deeper layers of the mind.”

John: You met Senator John Kerry when the two of you where both still students.

Welch: Right.

John: And you wrote in your book that, from that meeting, you knew Kerry was in trouble in 2004. What made then-Senator Obama Different?

Welch: Obama really transcended American politics, I mean, he was the transcendent figure. First of all, his organizational skills were ingenious, and I think that’s the piece of his campaign, that and his oratorical skills, were just terrific. I think also, it was very difficult… I think McCain was ambivalent as to whether to attack Obama and last summer, he started to launch a negative campaign attack which, had he stuck with it, I think might have won for him. He was trying to portray Obama as an “elitist” and, if he did that, he could have harnessed the resentment and envy that people felt about a black man who had everything and was cavorting with Paris Hilton, and if he was able to maintain that, and just hammer it home, I think it would have stuck, and it would have been difficult, but once he appointed Sarah Palin, I think the campaign dropped that issue, lost that issue, and just fumbled the rest of the way. Obama was--and is--a brilliant organizer, he has a tremendous oratorical skill, and he is very, very, smart.

John: Turning back to these frightened people we where discussing earlier, the SPLC has reported that we have seen an upwelling of anti-government groups, and that these groups are very well armed. Larry Keller of the SPLC has reported that these groups are taking on a racist overtone. Several lawmakers have received death threats and their offices have been vandalized with racist graffiti. President Obama has reportedly seen an increase of death threats. Why are these groups and these so frightened?

Welch: I think I addressed the underline basis of that isState of Confusion. These people are extremely frightened and extremely paranoid. Now, paranoia is a term that is misunderstood. I don’t mean, when I use the word “paranoid,” as I indicate in the book, I am not just talking about sort of an irrational suspicion. I am talking about a deep fear that one’s mind is going to be penetrated and taken over by someone else in a very fundamental and primitive way. So these people are organizing this fear in their own mind, in terms of the federal government, in terms of Obama, and of the fact that it’s someone different, with a foreign sounding name, a different race, which has had enormous history in this country. I think that people get more and more frightened and they get more and more rigid and so they are projecting an enormous amount of rage onto the federal government. And I really worry about it. I mean, we had one of the groups, they talked about on Meet the Press today, used one of Thomas Jefferson’s sayings that the “tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots from time to time,”

John: The protestor that showed up with the gun…. [in reference to the event in New Hampshire]

Welch: It’s very scary. And the danger of violence is very scary. And I worry for Obama’s safety.

John: Moving on to what I think is a bit lighter of a topic. To me, one of the more interesting points you raised in State of Confusion was why anti-drug and anti-smoking commercials fail. One government issued report concluded that “greater exposure to the campaign was associated with weaker anti-drug norms and increases in the perceptions that others use marijuana.” If this is the case, why do we continue to waste money on such measures?

Welch: Well, that’s a good question. I think what we are trying to learn is what works and what doesn’t work. The point that I’m making in the book is that people tend to identify with what they see, that it is a suggestion, and that you plant a suggestion in people’s minds. And I think that I talk about that in the context of Fox News, that when they say “we are fair and balanced” it is like an implant in the human mind. In the case of smoking and drugs, the implant is the marijuana or cigarettes or what have you, there’s no not there; the negation is droped out. One just starts thinking about smoking pot or smoking cigarettes. So it becomes almost an implant of stimulation. I think that Fox News makes a very sophisticated use of that principal as well.

John: Which was why they took it to court when Al Franken used the phrase “fair and balanced” in his book
Welch:That’s right. That it was a trademark, that the words “fair and balanced” were a trademark

John: Last question, what measures are most important if one is to overcome the state of mind which leads to gas lighting?
Welch: I think there is one that is overarching, and that is exposure. I mean, the reason I wrote State of Confusion is, my hope is that these kinds of psychological manipulations and the devastating effect they can have will be better understood, and the more people understand them, that is the profulactic against being affected by it. That’s why I’m saying is that the approach that the Obama camp has to take with health care is to very, very aggressively expose not just the false information, but to expose the scoundrel who is perpetrating the information: showing that it is a Republican operative or showing that it is a health insurance executive. And hammering it home: hammer, hammer, hammer. So, it’s exposure. And that’s what I was trying to do with State of Confusion, was expose the concepts and show people how and why they work.