I don't see any evidence that the particular apocalyptic "my enemies are totalitarian madmen" strain of Birch/Beck/Goldberg conservatism has helped anyone win any elections.
Tristero's piece is very good, very thoroush, and very worth reading. But it proceeds by basically saying, "Okay, even if that were true:"
Let's ignore all the obvious contradictory examples, like Bachmann and Coburn and Tancredo and DeLay and so on and so on and - solely for the sake of argument - go so far as to entirely concede Matt's point: no one gets elected by being a rightwing loon.
I want to take the opposite approach. I want to basically argue that movement conservatives would be nowhere without this sort of rhetoric. It's not always their dominant form of rhetoric--particularly in its crudest, most blatant form, but it's always somewhere in the mix. As I explained back in May, 2008, in "Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--Pt. 1", conservative elites have been playing this game for centuries now:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
This is a very old game, and it's way past time we got a better handle on it. Before getting into any sort of messy details, it's important to note--ala my diary two weeks ago, "The Ontology of Snark: A Prelude"--that there's a common ego defense mechanism in play here:
Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet; separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her husband.
Real, actual conservative elites have been using displacement as a stock in trade for millenia, creating ghost elites for unwitting populists to misdirect their anger at. It was virtually inevitable that Obama's "new politics" of "change" would be targetted with this ancient charge....
Elites Create Their Demon Others It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group. Because this involves disowning something fundamental of itself, the mechanism involved for the elite is more projective identification than projection, per se:
Projective identification is used to project the bad object into (not onto) another person so it becomes a part of that person.
The person then identifies with that other person, and hence has means to control them.
The person projected into may consequently be pressured to behave congruently with the projective phantasy.
This description captures quite well the enormous investment of time, energy and money we see on behalf of conservatives pushing the meme of "liberal elites", and devising various ways of getting "liberals" to act out their appointed roles.
The more extreme forms of demonizing liberals work very well for conservatives, in large part because they resonate with this broader narrative framework that they have repeated and reinforced countless times over the centuries. Of course, that's not all there is to it. There are cognitive motivations and biases that predispose conservatives to see the world this way. And what Matt is doing is invoking a counter set of cognitive motivations and biases--ones that are generally much sounder and saner, but that totally mislead when one is trying to understand and respond effectively to conservative attacks.
Those biases are the foundations of the dominant 18th Century Enlightenment model of disembodied reason. And late 20th and early 21st century cognitive science has definitively shown those biases to be false. Facts do not persuade people apart from narrative frameworks. When the facts contradict the framework, the facts are rejected, not the frame. Indeed, that's why folks like Matt stubbornly hold onto their false models of reason.
Of course this is all very high-level stuff I'm arguing here. But it dovetails very well with the specific history of movement conservatism, particularly since the New Deal and WWII, as it consistently failed to develop any sort of positive, pragmatic framework for dealing with America's realworld problems, and only managed to win elections by promoting paranoid us-vs-them narratives of seemingly limitless scope--McCarthyism in the early 50s (based on Nixon's smear campaigns that first won him a seat in Congress), racial backlash and the culture wars beginning with Goldwater 1964 and Nixon in 1968, honed to perfection by Reagan in 1980, and systematized by Gingrich in 1994--but never, ever actually solving any of the problems that it promised to.
And yet, when it comes down to it, Yglesias is basically trying to argue that nothing conservatives have done along these lines has been politically successful.
Which is utterly, downright delusional.
Am I twising his argument beyond his meaning? First off, I'd say that if I am, then his argument doesn't hold much punch. But here's what he said in complete context:
You can always tell what conservatives are up to by the "Iron Law of Conservative Projection": They inevitably accuse liberals (or perceived liberals) of doing exactly what's on their minds. So it comes as little surprise that there's a creeping tide of prison camp advocacy starting among Tea Party candidates, to match their accusations that Obama is planning to put them into prison camps. (Obama, a neo-liberal, would never do that, though we would intensify the use of existing camps for the same folks conservatives would and do. As Sadie Baker notes, the camps already existed in 2007.) As announced earlier in "Idiot Wind, last week's "Idiot Wind" contest was won by The Big Hurt's nomination of Marg Baker:
Marg Baker, FL State House GOP candidate
A candidate for the Florida House of Representatives says "camps" should be built to house illegal immigrants in Florida until they can be deported.
Marg Baker, who is seeking the Republican nomination for House District 48, says officials could "collect enough illegal aliens until you have enough to ship them back."
In an interview with Salon today, a Republican candidate for the Florida state Legislature stood by her controversial idea to arrest illegal immigrants and send them to "camps" where they can be held en masse.
"We can ship them out to the middle of the country and put up high walls and leave them there," said Marg Baker, the middle-aged real estate broker vying for the Republican nomination in the state's 48th district, north of Tampa....
She added, "You've gotta have places for them to eat and sleep and breathe fresh air. It can be a tent city ... You don't want to make them too comfortable or they'll want to come back."
Red State's Erickson: "It is and has always been the left" who resorts to violence
March 08, 2010 5:34 am ET by Media Matters staff
From Erickson's March 7 Redstate.com blog post:
At least since the 19th century, it has been the left employing murder and death as a political weapon. From Hitler to Mao to Lenin to Stalin to Chavez to Castro to Guevera to Arafat to Pol Pot to Mugabe to [insert your favorite American union] to Margaret Sanger the left and its heroes have used death, violence, and murder to advance their agenda.
For every Pinochet or Netanyahu the left grasps for, the list is three times as long on the left.
It is inconvenient. The left will try to laugh it off or attack the person pointing out, but the truth remains.
It is not conservatives burning down homes in Washington State with the ELF. It is not conservatives throwing blood on women wearing fur. It is not conservatives burning down the Texas Governor's Mansion during riots. It is not conservatives rioting during G-8 summits.
ERICKSON: This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I'm not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife's shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They're not going on my property. They can't do that. They don't have the legal right, and yet they're trying.
Of course, Think Progress goes on to note that:
According to the Census Bureau, response to the ACS "is required by law (Title 13 , United States Code, Sections 141, 193, and 221). The same law protects the confidentiality of the information." Erickson basically repeated his comments on RedState this morning, complaining that "naturally the left is out today saying I was on the air advocating killing census workers."
But, more importantly, I want to know if the only reason liberals haven't threatened to kill census workers is just because they want to make Erickson look bad?
I know I've made a great personal sacrifice for precisely that reason. After all, this is a chance that only comes around once a decade....
Last weekend, I wrote a 6-part series exhaustively going through Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". I called it "Conservative condescension: Projection and conservative victomology on parade". There's a brief reminder of what was in each part on the flip. You'd think I had enough already. But there's some very good reasons why this is not the case.
First of all, a very good point was raised by Oaktown Girl last weekend about the need to come up with the exact opposite of what I had provided--a short--very short--response to Alexander that could be widely disseminated to counter the potential power of his narrative. We're talking one-liners here, folks--elevator speeches at most.
I'll be running a diary on that--soliciting your suggestions--later today, currently scheduled for 3:30 PM EST.
Second, I wanted to do up a systematic shredding of his touting of "welfare reform" as an example of something that conservatives got right and liberals got wrong because of their "condescension." I'll be doing a diary on that sometime tomorrow.
Third there were a couple of stunning rebukes of Alexander in the news this week. The first is relative simple to deal with--turns out that 80% of Americans are condescending liberals!Yikes! But the second takes up the vast bulk of this diary: a delving into the weirdness of CPAC. I'll just say this flat-out, you don't get much more condescending than the way conservatives talk about President Obama. But there's something much uglier and more primitive going on here, and I'm not talking racism, though that's certainly part of the mix. I'm talking primitive psychological processes that I've written about before that need to be looked at again.
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 I dealt with the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This final diary deals with the underwhelming conlusion of Alexander's column.
First, Alexander insists:
These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant -- they insist on it.
But, since I've demolished his arguments about each of the four narratives, not so much. Remember, he's never even tried to produce any evidence that any of the narratives he's gone on about are held as widely or inflexibly as he argues--or more importantly that liberals claim they apply to all conservatives.
Next, he tries to have it both ways, pretending to back off a bit just before jumping in for the kill, and accusing President Obama himself of being an avid purveyor of the four pernicious narratives. Remember, one of those four narratives was characterizing conservatives as using racist appeals--and the example Alexander used to prove this hadn't changed a bit in decades was Jimmy Carter calling out the hysterical attacks on Obama, after which Obama himself rejected Carter. Needless to say, logical consistency is not one of Alexander's strong points. But it's about to get even worse:
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4, I dealt with the first three of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This diary deals with the fourth and last such narrative. A final diary will deal with the conlusion of Alexander's column.
Alexander's fourth narrative is perhaps his most baffling:
Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety -- including fear of change -- whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic.
What's baffling about it is that conservatives themselves have spent centuries now attacking liberals precisely for their reliance on reason, which conservatives have argued is far too frail an instrument to deal with the complexities of human affairs. In Part 1, I quoted from Edmund Burke, considered the father of modern conservatism:
"You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them."
More recently, Burke's importance was reaffirmed and amplified by Richard Kirk--less known to non-conservative than William F. Buckley, but a contemporary of Buckley's whose intellectual influence was almost as great--about whom Wikipedia says:
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2 and Part 3 I dealt with the first two of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This diary deals with the third such narrative.
If Alexander's second narrative has a germ of truth to it, he more than makes up for that with his third purported liberal narrative of condescension: conservative exploitation of racial prejudice. It should be obvious that overt racism of the kind that was commonplace until the 60s and 70s is no longer socially acceptable in most places, and plays a relatively insignificant role in mainstream politics. But that hardly means that race no longer matters, or that more subtle forms of racial politics are not powerfully at work. One can see this quite clearly in the composition of the two parties, as measured by Gallup in June of last year ("Republican Base Heavily White, Conservative, Religious"):
With figure like these--a Republican base that's 89% white--it boggles the mind to hear anyone pretend that race has no impact on politics. Examples of racial messages in political campaigns are both abundant and notorious, as well. But above all, for the purpose of refuting contrary claims by conservatives such as Alexander, we have the testimony of one of the GOP's most influential party operatives, Lee Atwater. From Wikipedia:
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2, I dealt with the the first of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This diary deals with the second such narrative.
If Alexander's first narrative is a transparent bunch of hooey, the same cannot be said about his second one. There is some truth in claim that liberals look down at people repeatedly voting against their economic interests, for cultural causes that are repeatedly ignored or outright betrayed between elections. But this is an isolated observation, and the question is one of context, which raises a host of subsidiary questions: Are liberals who do this more or less condescending than the cynical conservative manipulators who run these games? Is there anything particularly liberal about this? Or is it simply a matter of elite attitudes towards the masses? Or--as Jack Balkin's analysis "Populism and Progressivism as Constitutional Categories" suggests, of people who identify with progressivism towards those who identify with populism? And what about those on the left who reject the 'stupid voter' narrative one way or another? Such as George Lakoff, Drew Wesson, Larry Bartells ("What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?"), or me, for that matter? And, finally, what about all those liberals who are themselves members of the working class who haven't been fooled at all, but sure are pissed at Democratic elites for doing such a lousy job on their behalf the last three decades or so? The welter of questions like these points to where a genuinely honest debate about elitism and condescension, left and right, might take us. But it's not at all a direction in which Alexander has any interest.
Indeed, Alexander regards his interpretation of this narrative as so self-evidently true, without any possible alternatives, that he lays it out in a single sentence, then points quickly to three examples in support, before (condescendingly, one might think) telling us what it all means. First:
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending" This is the first of four installments dealing with each of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension."
The first purported liberal narrative indicative of an attitude of condescension is a vaguely articulated awareness that conservatives engage in hegemonic warfare in a way that liberals do not. Neither Alexander, nor most liberals--even the examples he cites--actually sees things so clearly and sweepingly. Thus, the examples he points to generally point to, but understate an ongoing reality that liberals have long sensed, but never really come to grips with.
The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush's presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors.
Alexander introduces and identifies this narrative with Hillary Clinton's statement about a "vast right-wing conspiracy"--that was actually documented as an organized effort to sustain scurrilous attacks on her husband, then the President of the United States. Clinton's claims were later confirmed by David Brock--one of the central actors involved--though he argued that it wasn't all that vast, but Brock was limiting the meaning to those directly involved in trying to dig up dirt to bring the President down, and not all those involved in spreading the propaganda, which clearly was more in line with Clinton's meaning. The fact that such a concerted effort was real, and that Clinton was referring to it after the documentation about it had already been assembled, simply does not matter for Alexander.
But surely, simply telling the truth cannot by itself be proof of condescension, or any other attitude. Something more is needed, and this would be obvious to anyone who hasn't already assumed what they set out to prove.
[Note]: This started off as a simple diary, but like Topsy, it just growed: six parts, three today, three tomorrow. My only excuse is that I think the subject could become a very significant meme this election cycle, and that thought feed my obsession. Hope I'm wrong, tho.
Of course, it's true that liberals can be quite condescending. Just about everyone can. But some folks can do it upside-down and backwards in their sleep, secure in the knowledge that they're the moral majority, and you're just one of those traitorous fifth columnists who want the terrorists to win, and are going to spend eternity just wishing you could be waterboarded. And those folks ain't no liberals, honey chile.
It's been a weird couple of weeks. Last week, Markos released the results of a Research 2000 poll he had commissioned, replicating and expanding on earlier poll results that strongly indicate an irrationalist strain of paranoid fantasy has a deep foothold in the GOP party base. While long-time critics and political observers such as myself were hardly surprised with the results, it seemed a very good idea to get solid poll numbers to measure the extent to which qualitative impressions were born out in cold hard facts. Among other things, the poll showed that 79% of Republicans thought either President Obama was a socialist (63%), or they weren't sure (16%); 58% of Republicans thought that either President Obama was either foreign-born (36%), or they weren't sure (22%); 76% believed that either ACORN stole the 2008 election (21%), or they weren't sure (55%); 64% of Republicans thought that either Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people (31%), or they weren't sure (33%); 57% of Republicans thought that either Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win (24%) , or they weren't sure (33%); and 68% of Republicans thought that either Barack Obama should be impeached (39%), or they weren't sure (29%).
Then, at the end of the week, the Washington Post ran an op-ed "Why are liberals so condescending" (which it later turned out the Post had commissioned). As the headline implied, it argued that liberals were distinctively much more condescending than conservatives, prone to dismissing conservatives out of hand, and concocting crazy narratives to support themselves in doing so. "[I]t feels like many liberals dismiss what conservatives have to offer, from the start." the author, Gerard Alexander, an Associate Professor of Politics, from the University of Virginia, wrote in the introduction of the followup online chat, adding:
My point is that many liberals have developed entire theories that question that validity of what conservatives have to say, and those theories are voiced by media personalities, magazines, serious book writers, academics, and not just one or two but many politicians, up to and including Barack Obama. I'm unaware of a full-scale parallel to that among conservatives. I don't think it's a helpful posture, and would love to see it changed. So I welcome your thoughts.
One might think, from reading this, that Alexander was somehow unaware of the Dkos/R2000 poll, showing just how many Republicans believe entire theories that question that legitimacy and validity of the entire Democratic Party and even the Presidential electoral process-unaware, even though the poll had kicked up a storm of controversy by way of conservative denunciations, most notably on Fox. But in fact, Alexander was aware of the poll and had actually pointed to it in his original op-ed, using it (or, more precisely, Kos's remarks about it) in support of his argument:
Ah, for the good old days when angry white supremacist guys attacked our black President and Latina Supreme Court nominee as racists. That the week before last. This last week its fascist thugs hurling accusations of fascism.
I'm nostalgic for the good old days simply because the new ones have brought us to the brink of mass violence. There have already been some blows, and a hyping of threats (from TPM):
Based on the news that health care events are edging into violence, an anti-health care reform protester in New Mexico named Scott Oskay is calling on his hundreds of online followers to bring firearms to town halls, and to 'badly hurt' SEIU and ACORN counter protesters.
Popularized in part by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, the hashtag symbol he's using, #iamthemob, has gone viral on twitter, appearing several times a minute according to a recent search.
Anti-reform activists have scheduled a protest outside SEIU Missouri offices tomorrow, and officials there are taking these threats seriously.
On the other hand, there's an upside to this sharply increased threat level, which is two-fold: First, it has the potential to lead to lead to a sharp rejection of what the movement conservatives are up to. Second, it's a whole lot easier to document the projection involved. That's because the dynamic of wealthy special interests supporting street thuggery against "the left" is exactly how both Mussolini and Hitler came to power.
I don't want there to be any misunderstanding. Black people hate what Alan Keyes stands for.
I'm sure that some people like the guy, there are some useless fools who call themselves Republican. who do, but to most black people in America, he is simply a traitor. He betrays the community, the culture, everything good about being black.
...
Now, I know being black isn't easy, and some people, unfortunately, are driven crazy. I mean did Keyes try to lighten his skin? Bathe in milk? Why did he have to try so hard to adapt the way of his masters.
It isn't even that he's a conservative. There are lot of people who are black and conservative, at least socially. But Keyes crossed over and decided to take stands which would hurt black people, to prove he wasn't like us. He wanted to be a special negro, one white people would like, would let run something.
But of course, they would no more do that than let him marry their daughters.
...
People need to understand that black conservatives are our shame, our embarassment. People driven mad to assimiliate at ANY cost, their soul, their dignity, common sense.
Look at the respect people like Tom Joyner, Tavis Smiley and even Oprah gets. They don't debase themselves for the approval of white people. They have character and dignity. Look at the gollum which is Alan Keyes and you see something entirely different, sadder, but different.
Unsurprisingly, what Steve said here (of which the above is only the briefest excerpt) gets to the very heart of the matter.
Last night, the first segment on Bill Moyers Journal dealt with rightwing hate radio, using the late July shootings at the Knoxville Unitarian Church as the entry point. It was an unusually raw and unvarnished look at what hate radio does--examining specific examples: Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh--and yet, there were some significant critical avenues that were left unexplored. Still, the media has been so neglectful of this for so long, it was heartening to see this virulent cultivation of mass hatred finally get a spotlight thrown on it. Rick Karr was the correspondent reporting the story. He began reporting like this:
RICK KARR: On a steamy Sunday morning in July a man armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun burst into this church in Knoxville, Tennessee and opened fire. Seconds later, one person lay dead, another mortally wounded, and six injured.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: The man who walked into this sanctuary on July 27th was armed with a gun but he was also armed with hatred, he was armed with bitterness, he was armed with resentments, he was armed with indiscriminate anger. He was armed in body and spirit.
RICK KARR: Members of the congregation wrestled a fifty-eight-year-old, unemployed truck driver named Jim David Adkisson to the floor and held him until police came. At first it seemed like just another inexplicable outburst of violence until a police news conference the next day.
POLICE CHIEF STERLING OWEN: It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement.
Here's a list of people involved in politics, most of them prominent bloggers, some with other political accomplishments as writers and activists spanning decades, one (Jennifer Nix) a publisher responsible for helping bring two important voices to printed prominence--George Lakoff and Glenn Greenwald. So what do the following people have in common?
Chris Bowers Mike Lux Matt Stoller Jennifer Nix Pam Spaulding
Frederick Clarkson Howie Klein George Lakoff Brian Leubitz
Vincent Bugliosi Duncan Black Amanda Marcotte Rick Perlstein
Funny how it is such a waste of time to join a Facebook group, which took me roughly 30 seconds this morning, but apparently well worth the time to write paragraph after paragraph criticizing people for joining the group.
It reminds me of someone watching someone else playing a video game and then, after an hour or so, criticizing the video game player of wasting his time. Perhaps, sure, but not compared to the guy who didn't even play.
This could just be just another trivial example of the endless foibles of humanity. But I think there's something a bit more significant in the mix as well.
My series, "Shadow Elites And Religion" was interrupted after its first two installments (Part 1, Part 2), mostly because I'd built up such a head of steam that I wanted to do a lot more digging for the third installment, focused on John McCain and his ties to two Word of Faith ministers--John Hagee and Rod Parsley. All sorts of other stuff intruded, and, well, the hiatus continues.
But meanwhile, Sarah Posner, Word of Faith expert extraordinaire, has posted an excellent piece over at Huffington Post--"McCain's Pastor Problem", while Gary Kamiya chimes in at Salon with "Psycho Christians and the media", and there's even signs of catchup with my second installment, "Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 2: Sun Myung Moon", as noted in a frontpage post at DKos, "Moonshadows ", by DarkSyde, which focuses on recent attention to the connections between Moon and Bush Sr.--connections that I didn't delve into in my post, because I wanted to focus on the deep structural connections, but that are quite considerable in themselves.
Darkside highlights this piece at the Houston Chronicle, and John Gorenfeld's book, Bad Moon Rising.
I'll be writing more this weekend, but one thing worth highlighting now is the thinness of the McCain defense--"He's not my pastor, so it's not my fault."
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