David McElroy

When it comes to my ideas about how to structure society, I have confident answers for most things, because they’re based on solid principles that I’m very comfortable with. But there are a few tough questions that I don’t have answers for. The toughest one — and the one that haunts me the most — is how to protect children with parents who are abusive or otherwise unfit. I honestly have no good ideas. Do you?

I started thinking about this Wednesday because of a video clip that a lot of people were linking to. Some were laughing. Some were shaking their heads. Others were angry. I’m just left frustrated at how no solution to this problem fits neatly into any of the things I believe in.

The video is a collection of several stories about a woman in Florida who has 15 children with three different men. She is angry because she thinks no one is doing enough to give things to her and her children. She’s not a sympathetic character, to put it mildly. At one point, she tells a TV reporter:

“Somebody needs to pay for all my children and all our suffering. Somebody needs to be held accountable and they need to pay.”

The state’s child service agencies had been trying to help her. They had been paying her rent, giving her furniture, and providing other services. But that wasn’t enough for this dysfunctional woman. When we meet the woman and her kids, they’re all living in a two-bedroom motel unit — after they had been evicted from a house that the state had been paying for. (The details of the eviction are unclear.)

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If you dig beneath the surface of most politicians, you’ll find a narcissist. Once you understand who narcissists really are — and what it is they crave — there’s nothing surprising about it. The only surprise is how few people notice it.

For more than 20 years, I’ve worked with dozens of politicians. By dealing with them in very stressful situations — when their careers and egos are on the line — I’ve seen sides of many of them that the public never sees. So I’m willing to say without question that most of them are narcissists. Most of them honestly believe the world revolves around them and their needs.

In casual conversation, we think of narcissists as those who are in love with themselves, but the reality is much different. A narcissist craves attention and love and respect, but he’s secretly empty on the inside. He projects a false self to the world in order to get what’s sometimes called “narcissistic supply.” He’s like an emotional vampire who desperately needs other people’s attention and admiration to survive. (You can read much more than you’ll probably ever want to know about narcissism here.)

So is it any surprise that people who crave attention and admiration from others gravitate to politics? Of course not. To these people, the entire world revolves around them and their desperate needs. They matter. Other people don’t. They can be charming and manipulative when they need to be — when they need to impress you or make you love them, so you’ll give them the attention and love they crave.

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People frequently tell me that they don’t really support either the Republican or Democratic candidate for president, but that they’re choosing the lesser of the two evils. That’s what conservatives tended to say in 2008 when they voted for the contemptible John McCain.

It’s true that Barack Obama hasn’t been great for people who love liberty, but it’s just as true that McCain would have been a disaster. Just look what he’s trying to do right now in the U.S. Senate.

McCain is pushing a bill that would give the president the power to snatch any American of his choosing and send him to a military prison for a military trial — just by claiming he’s a possible terrorist. That means if a president doesn’t like you or me or anyone else, all he has to do is tell the military to collect us and send us to Guantanamo or anywhere else of his choosing. On the floor of the Senate today, McCain is reacting angrily to efforts by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul to delete this insane clause.

This is the sort of thing we would expect in the sort of dictatorships that we’ve traditionally opposed. However you try to dress it up as being about national security, this bill is evil. And McCain is the biggest backer of the bill.

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