| The Chickenhawk Giveaway
Perhaps the most obvious giveaway that Republicans aren't really the "daddy party" is the almost total absence of military experience in their warmongering core. It's not that war makes you a man, though this is a myth that Republicans obviously embrace. Rather, it's that using war to define one's manhood, and having other people do it for you is about as far away from real manhood as one could possibly get. The term "chickenhawk" virtually exploded on the internet after 9/11 in response to the realworld explosion of chickenhawk fever, but the term goes back at least to the 1980s. In particular, Wikipedia notes:
A notable example of this response [to conservative critics of Clinton in the 1992 campaign] was liberal satirist Al Franken's 1996 book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, which included a chapter called "Operation Chickenhawk." The story details the exploits of a fictional Vietnam War squad made up of Quayle, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Phil Gramm, Clarence Thomas, and George Will-all conservative Republicans who were of draft age during the Vietnam era yet did not serve in the conflict. In the story, the cowardly and incompetent squad bungles a surprise attack on a North Vietnamese Army company and ultimately extricates itself from the battle by fragging its gung-ho lieutenant, Oliver North (a conservative Republican veteran of the war).
The chickenhawk syndrome is hardly the only expression of disordered masculinity on the right, however. It's just one of the shinnier facets. To really grasp what's going on, we have to pass...
Beyond The Valley of the Chickenhawks
The other side of war and fear of war is fear of peace. Fear of being still with oneself. This is particular terrifying for men, Stephen Ducat argues in his book, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. It's a fascinating book, full of insight, but the essence of what's needed for my argument here was laid out in his answers to the first two questions in an Alternet interview :
What is the central thesis of your book?
First let me throw out the term "femiphobia" as a way of naming this anxiety. Femiphobia is the male fear of being feminine. The underlying premise of my book is that the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This imperative to be repudiate everything feminine - whether it's external or internal - is played out as much in politics as in personal life.
In politics - where there is an enormous potential for personal gain or ruin - what this leads to is a concerted effort on the part of candidates to disavow the feminine in themselves, and to project it on to their opponents.
That was the central function of the Republican National Convention. Once you got past the moderate sweet talk, the purpose was essentially to make John Kerry their woman. There were a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle code words in this attempt to feminize him. This is a strategy that Republicans have long employed. They've just been more brazen about it lately.
In the book, you argue that this anxiety about the feminine defines not just American politics but has been a part of the history of Western culture.
The problem with our current notion of masculinity is that it's a definition of manhood based on domination. The problem with definition of manhood based on domination is that domination can never be a permanent condition. It's a relational state - it is dependent on having somebody in the subordinate position, which means that you may be manly today, but you're not going to be manly tomorrow, unless you've got somebody to push around and control. This definition goes back to the ancient Greeks, and it makes masculinity a precarious and brittle achievement - which has to be constantly asserted. It has to be proven over and over again. It is the ultimate Sisyphean pursuit.
It has characterized politics going all the way back to the ancient Greeks. They had their own version of the "wimp factor." The worst thing an ancient Greek politician could be accused of is being a binoumenos, which loosely translated means "fucked male." Manhood for the ancient Greeks - just as it is for us - was a difficult and transient achievement. It wasn't the gender that you had sex with that determined your masculinity, but what position you occupied in a relationship of domination. If you were penetrated, you were rendered essentially a woman. If you were the penetrator, then you were the man. In a way, we still hold that definition.
The larger context for this, I would argue, is the emegence of agricultural societies with large surpluses, which corresponds with the emergence of the first signs of war in human pre-history. As William Ury argues in Getting to Peace, prior to that our competitive urges were generally trumped by our cooperative side. It was only with the development of large, hierarchical social structures that the balance tipped the other way. Those who dominate are able to extort and exploit the fruits of continued cooperative behavior of the rest of society, and thus there is an extreme premium on domineering behavior.
However, Ury argues that the pendulum is swinging back toawrd cooperation, and has been doing so for several centuries now-primarily due to the increased role of knowledge and information since the invention of the printing press, since this shifts us toward a cooperative logic, in which advances benefitting the large mass of society tend to predominate over those benefitting only the few. This is anything but a smooth or easy transition, but Ury argues persuasively that it is well under way, and the major peacefully transitions of recent decades-most notably, the end of the Cold War, and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa-are a good indication that non-violent conflict resolution has indeed come a long way in a seemingly very short time.
But if the flow of information in general is a transforming force moving us in the direction of greater cooperation, and undermining the logic of domination, there is no guarantee that this must always be the case. Indeed, hierarchical control of information is all the more understandible as a process of social control when we see it as a move directly countering the natural logic of information. And this offers yet another perspective on the significance of hegemony, conventional and the material structures (tv networks, telecom companies, etc.) that help sustain them.
It's important to note that there is a general congruence of many different sense of "penetration." It's not just a physical sexual act. The power to control and dominate is intimately related to means of penetration-insight into how things work is necessary to alter or control them. Physical penetration into the inner workings is usually necessary to bring this about. Physical invasion of another's space is needed to establish dominance and control. And so forth.
Penetration and Analysis
It's worth noting that Bush Sr. was famously fearful of being analyzed, of efforts to penetrate his thinking: "don't put me on the couch," he said on more than one occassion. Bush Jr. is similarly fearful, but much more aggressive in his manner of resistence. When his oppositon to fully funding SCHIP as Governor of Texas was briefly brought up during the 2000 campaign, he struck back hard, saying that no one but God could judge what was in his heart.
This is part of a more general resistence to analysis that pervades the conservative movement, and with it the Republican Party as well. Several different factors converege here, actually, above and beyond the underlying femiphobic fear of being penetrated.. Most significantly (1) the disbelief in analysis as a source of useful knowledge is deep-seated on the right (science [bad] asks questions, religion [good] gives answers), (2) analysis is strongly associated with their enemies on the left, (3) analysis for the purpose of maintaining power and dominance is the exception, and there is a strong desire to control such analysis as thoroughly as possible.
All this serves to reinforce the tendency on the right to develop simple messages and repeat them ad nauseum, which in turn greatly strengthens their hegemonic discourse. They repeat endlessly that they are the Christian Right, and everyone believes them-despite the fact that there is very little about them that Jesus would recognize as his own teachings. Similarly, the entire ediface of the "daddy party" is built on repetetive insistence, rather than reality. Republicans are not particularly competent at any of the male-gendered tasks of government. They're not great leaders in war, their economc record pales comparted to that of Democrats, and they're generally quite hostile to science. Yet, they repeatedly insist on their daddy status, and they get away with it because of a lack of penetrating analysis, and a public discourse to match.
Of course, this is changing on the internet, where discourse in general is far more penetrating, where feedback loops are everywhere and feedback times are short. It's our job to drive that change further.
On the other hand, liberals and Democrats are subject to constant criticism, constant "penetrating" analysis in the sense of analysis intended to poke holes in what Democrats affirm. It matters not whether what is said is true or not, the point is to attack and dominate. I will return to these points in future diaries. But for now it's simply worth noting that when someone like Barack Obama comes along and echoes rightwing criticism of Democrats-attacking unnamed secular liberals as hostile to religion, for example-they are aligning with a truly vast and sweeping dynamic, the full extent of which they almost certainly have no idea. It would be quite different if left and right played by the same rules, but the difference in the rules is central to the difference between right and left.
The GOP/Authoritarian Daddy Thing
Last August, Sara at Orcimus wrote a very insightful diary that's highly relevant here, Leering Old Men: Another Take. She was responding to two other diaries, one by Digby, and the other by Orcinus founder David Neiwert. The diary begins:
As Dave discusses in a post below, Digby thinks the conservatives are a bunch of whining babies who can't take a loss. Dave responds with the observation they're leering old men who can't get it up any more. Both views suggest that our national corps of conservative talking heads, taken as a group, has a very warped relationship with masculinity. But I've got a third take on it, which sort of takes in both their arguments and then goes a little deeper.
Over the years, my online ex-fundie community has spent a lot of time puzzling over the ways in which fundamentalism arrests the moral, social, emotional, intellectual, and sexual development of anyone who embraces it. (And I could argue that, inasmuch as fundamentalism is authoritarian religion, this observation may well hold true for political and social authoritarians as well.) Specifically, we've come to a consensus that the belief system traps people somewhere around the age of five or six -- and keeps them there for as long as they continue to believe.
In fact, that naivete -- deceptively packaged as purity and innocence -- is one of the main things people are seeking when they're drawn into authoritarian systems.
What Sara is talking about here is Kegan's Stage 1. I haven't talked about it much because it doesn't figure much in the creation of political policy discourse. Authoritarian followers mostly just regurgitate what is feed to them, and this usually comes from Level 2 regressions from the Level 3 vantage point at which conservatives normally functioned before being subject to the stress of the modern world. However, this doesn't mean that this level isn't politically significant. Indeed, the name-calling that runs constantly throughout rightwing political discourse is deeply rooted in this level-as well as the even more primative Level 0, although that's beyond the scope of the present discussion. Remember that I said before that Level 2 is characterized by durable categories. Level 1 is not. It is much more fluid. And the struggle to maintain order is fierce indeed for those who should have outgrown this stage long ago.
Skipping a little, Sara continues:
Unfortunately, seeking this regression means giving up on quite a few of the most important attributes of adulthood. First, there's the intellectual sacrifice. There's a huge cognitive leap that occurs around the age of seven (it usually comes in right alongside reading fluency) that enables a far greater level of abstraction -- typically, at the expense of magical thinking, which drops off dramatically once kids learn to read. At this age, kids give up fantasy play and Santa Claus in favor of a more empirical approach to life, and more serious pursuits leading to the mastery of adult-world skills. Developmental psychologists call this leap "the age of reason."
Indeed, the transition to Level 2 has been recognized by Catholic and other moral teaching traditions for thousands of years, as was the even more widely recognized transition to Level 3 in the form of initiation rights that mark the transition to adulthood.
The whole diary is incredibly rich with insight, and it just won't do to quote the whole thing. But what comes next is really crucial, because Sara connects this regression with right-wing authoritarianism (RWA):
Right-wing authoritarian (RWA) followers have little use for reason; but are very invested in their fantasy lives. They take myth and metaphor absolutely literally, because interpreting them requires a level of abstraction they aren't comfortable with. In other words: they are voluntarily choosing to operate at the intellectual processing level of a first-grader.
They also have to give up on adult-level emotional functioning (which, as I mentioned, may be welcomed as something of a relief after adult life has blown up under you a few times). Authoritarian followers crave someone who will keep things ordered and safe, someone who will provide and protect and set firm rules and boundaries; someone all-powerful and all-knowing who can teach you right from wrong and keep the harsh parts of the world at bay. Someone, in short, who looks like Daddy looked when you were about five years old.
RWAs would far rather curl up in Daddy's lap -- even if it means abandoning reason and taking the occasional spanking -- than try to deal with the world by themselves, on adult terms. This is also why RWA family and community relationships (as Lakoff has explained) are necessarily hierarchical.
Oaky, okayu, I've got to stop quoting. Here's a little synopsis, instead. This regressed stage of development requires authorities setting the rules and enforcing them. But it's also at the threashold of oncoming control, it's the age at which kids spend a great deal of time and energy focused on rules. Sara then notes that this is also the age of "over-the-top behavior around masculine gender roles." (I got a Davy Crockett costume for Christmas at about this age, for example.) This is why, she notes, the male Kewl Kids are so gaga over Bush playing out these roles for them:
The fact that so many mainstream and conservative media guys are suckered by this posturing shows that they don't really have a clue about what a Real Man looks like -- though, somewhere deep down inside, they're pretty sure they don't qualify. That's why they're so easily wowed by men who can put on the costume and make it look good.
And now, the KEY point:
But they're even more easily cowed by men who can actually fill the boots. John Kerry. John McCain. Colin Powell. Bill Clinton. (You don't have to agree with their politics; but nobody can say these men haven't comfortably worn the full measure of male power and responsibility for some critical stretch of their lives.) Like little boys, the media guys are so awed by the outward forms of masculinity that they eagerly make a fetish out of them; but they also actively fear and resent men who display the authentic internal goods that make an honest-to-God man. These guys' very presence incites such a strong sense of personal inadequacy that the Boys On The Bus can only resort to attacking them in ways that are openly calculated to feminize them -- that is, to bring them down to their own level. He look French. He's whipped by his powerful wife. He's preoccupied with his hair. Translation: This guy has more balls and more maturity than we do -- and we need to take him down before everybody figures out how inadequate that makes us feel.
This is so profoundly important, that I just want to end my diary here. The bottom line of all the constant feminizing attacks on Democrats is that they are pre-emptive strikes meant to drive away examples of real male competence, which is endlessly threatening to the Versailles punditocracy and their rightwing masters.
I have only two quick points to add:
(1) This provides another angle on the point of this whole series. The dynamic that Sara is talking about is directly parallel to the way that the policy competence of liberalism operating at Level 4 drives conservatives into making pre-emptive strikes on "character," "loyalty," etc. Liberals and Democrats do not respond in kind partly because it just seems too incredibly juvenile to take seriously. And that's true. But it's not too juvenile to put a stop to.
(2) There is a general principle here worth naming, so that we can communicate it to others. When rightwingers and Versailles pundits who are gender insecure pre-emptively attack Democrats to feminize them (or attack Democratic women to both hyper-feminize and de-feminize them), we need to be very clear that they are talking about themselves. And so, we need to make a label for this.
My initial suggestion--just to get the ball rolling really--is "counter-talk," as in what they are talking about is directly counter to what is actually going on--specifically with them.
Linguistically the term is similar to "contradiction," which could be good or bad. But I'd be happy to have someone come up with a better word. The point is, it is so important that we need something to name it, to nail it down, and to begin holding people accountable with it in a much more economical way than we've been able to do up to now. |
