The excremental Left — an amateur Freudian analysis

The SF Chron had an article about the mountains of rubbish that revelers left in San Francisco’s Dolores Park on July 4.  I can tell you with absolute certain that the Dolores Park partiers were liberals or, as they would call themselves, Progressives.  That City and, more specifically, that neighborhood, tell you everything you need to know.

The story made me realize how strongly I associate the Left with dirt.  When they party, they leave behind mountains of dirt.  When they Occupy, they leave behind mountains of dirt.  When they have street protests, they leave behind mountains of dirt.  More than that, the Left is obsessed with excrement.  They poop and pee in parks, on flags, and in buildings.  They collect poop and deliver it to their “enemies.”  Even their writing is littered with excrement, insofar as they are addicted to using scatological phrases to insult anything (or anybody) that doesn’t meet with their approval.

Part of the filth is the Progressive mentality that says an individual is never responsible for things.  Responsibility lies with the community or the government.  That’s how things roll in the socialist world.

Looking at the writing, though, you realize that something deeper is going on.  After all, even wackiest Progressive doesn’t expect some government organization to come along and purge the expletives from his paragraphs.  In other words, at least mentally, a lot of Leftists live in the gutter by choice.

If I was taking a stab at psychiatric analysis — and I am gleefully unqualified to do so — I would say that Progressives are stuck in the anal stage of development:

The anal stage, in Freudian psychology, is the period of human development occurring at about one to three years of age. Around this age, the child begins to toilet train, which brings about the child’s fascination in the erogenous zone of the anus. The erogenous zone is focused on the bowel and bladder control. Therefore, Freud believed that the libido was mainly focused on controlling the bladder and bowel movements. The anal stage coincides with the start of the child’s ability to control their anal sphincter, and therefore their ability to give or withhold gifts at will. If the children during this stage can overcome the conflict it will result in a sense of accomplishment and independence.

Here’s the key:  according to Freud, the adult charged with potty training a child has to strike the right tone.  Too strict, and you get one of those compulsive, rule-following people we all casually refer to as “anal retentive.”  Anal retentive people can be irritating (or, colloquially, a pain in the ass), but theirs is an ordered world.  Too lenient an approach — and you can bet that the young Lefties out there were all raised by “rules be damned” old Lefties, and you’ve got today’s Progressives:

If parents take an approach that is too lenient, Freud suggested that an anal-expulsive personality could develop in which the individual has a messy, wasteful or destructive personality.

In other words, the problem with today’s politics is clearly a result of bad parenting a few decades ago, especially when it came to potty training.

It’s all so simple when you have a degree in armchair psychology.