FOR THE PAST couple weeks Republican activists have bent themselves to the task of proving that John Kerry, who was awarded five medals during four months of service in the Vietnam war, isn't a war hero, and the marvelous intensity of their exertions started me thinking.

As normal Americans lose interest in politics, and as their moderating influence fades from the general conversation, politics has become increasingly the plaything of obsessives. And what obsessives bring to politics, unsurprisingly, are their own obsessions, rooted in the uneasiness and insecurities that we all share to one degree or another. Punditry may not be a branch of psychopathology--not yet, anyway--but in some cases the most penetrating political analysis should follow the method of Bertie Wooster's valet, Jeeves: "The first essential is to study the psychology of the individual." Both Bertie and Jeeves, by the way, were paleocons.

It's amazing, the mysteries that can be illuminated by the psychological approach. Consider the recent self-presentation of the Democratic party. The party as we know it today was founded in 1972, when its old guard was swept away by the McGovernite revolution. The party's purpose and image were unambiguous. It was the peace party. And it remained such through the rest of the Cold War, even when--as in '72--it nominated a decorated war hero as its presidential candidate.

Over the years a few Democrats have objected to this reputation, of course, and the cleverest polemicists have even flipped their party's peacenik image against their opponents in the war party. Beginning in the 1980s, Democrats have delighted in scolding various Republicans as "war wimps"--public officials and think-tank types who advocate the use of military force and who did not themselves serve in the military.

On the kindest interpretation, the "war wimps" charge is based on a non sequitur, linking two things that have nothing to do with each other (military service as a young man, on the one hand, and sound judgment in geopolitical affairs, on the other). On a not-so-kind interpretation, it entails the repudiation of a crucial democratic principle: civilian control of the military. After all, if only men with military experience are justified in ordering other military men into combat, then national security has been ceded to an unsupervised warrior class--something that Democrats used to warn us against. And besides, by this definition, several of the country's wartime presidents, including Democrats Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, were war wimps.

As an argument, then, the war-wimp charge is incoherent, even illiberal. It's also inexplicable--until you realize that it isn't an argument at all, but a sign of severe psychological frustration, a means by which a desperate Democrat might overcompensate for years of being called a peacenik wimp. The same frustration led directly to the bizarre outcome of this year's primaries, when Democrats nominated a charmless and undistinguished candidate whom no one seemed to like very much and who displays a dazzling lack of the most elementary political skills, such as being able to deliver a speech without boring half his audience into paralytic catatonia.