The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism

"Given his mental convolutions, it's impossible to resist applying Lerner's cherished psychologizing to Lerner himself. An analysis would go like this. The people Lerner 'treated' at his Institute for Labor and Mental Health were working-class and middle-class. That is, they were members of the 'silent majority' who had once rejected Lerner's calls for revolutionary action. So for two decades Lerner got back his own. His patients might reasonably have thought he was trying to help them; but Lerner had another agenda. He tells us that his 'aim was to better understand the psychodynamics of middle-income working people, and also to try to understand why so many of them were moving to the political Right.' And the findings of his research with the people who put themselves in his care were that they had been deformed by pain and misrecognition, maimed by the 'deprivation of meaning.' In other words, it was their fault that the revolution had failed and propelled Lerner into twenty years of oblivion, not his. They had failed him. This project of self-vindication has been at the 'meaning' core of his ambitions since before Lerner was seduced and then abandoned by the Clintons and lost the media spotlight. Now, as an indifferent society once again rejects Lerner's calls for transformation, the self-vindication remains.
Let all this infuriated healing come to an end.Lerner, Michael is the author of 'The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism' with ISBN 9780201154894 and ISBN 0201154897.