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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a diary, “John McCain Is A Dangerously Hot-Headed Celebrity POW Who Can’t Remember How Many Houses He Owns”, in which I referenced Josh Marshall’s 2004 post, “the Republicans’ Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics.” I went on to say, “Yes, it’s an offensive term, and it was meant to be.”
The concluding line of the passage I quoted was:
Demonstrating Kerry’s unwillingness to defend himself (if Bush can do that) is a far more tangible sign of what he’s made of than wartime experiences of thirty years ago.
The main reason this works so well is two-fold–as I’ll elaborate on jump. But the essence is simple: Conservatives are confronational, while liberals are cooperative, which gives conservatives an edge. The prize is culturally working-class swing voters whose political interests align more with liberals, while their political instincts align more with conservatives.
The full background and complexities of how this works are simply beyond most liberals, which is why the Democrats keep losing. Many old-style New Deal and Civil Rights-era liberals had a “fighting faith” that was fundamentally moral, not military, and they could cut through the miasma that todays more tepid liberals seem perpetually encompassed by. But they are in very short supply these days.
While some have possibly learned some of the lessons of 2004, the relative lack of such fighting liberals means we lack a critical mass that truly understands the conservative mentality and how it evolves from one battle to another, one presidential campaign to another. Someone who does understand is award-winning novelist Jane Smiley, and, she’s just written a short, but must-read diary at Huffington Post, titled “Gaslight”, after the Charles Boyer-Ingrid Bergman movie. In a very few short few sentences, she captures the essence of how the quantitative increase in the intensity of lying actually reflects a qualitative shift in the nature of the game being played. Yes, “bitch-slapping” is still part of the mix, but it’s now only part of a more sophisticated game.
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As Smiley explains:
Remember the old Charles Boyer-Ingrid Bergman movie Gaslight? In it, a famous opera singer is murdered. Her niece is then seduced by the murderer, who constantly tricks her and lies to her in order to prove to her that she is crazy, so that he can institutionalize her and get the jewels he missed the first time. Gosh, what does this remind me of — oh, yeah! John McCain, Bill O’Reilly, and the Republicans! Same motive–grand theft, same strategy–asserting with a straight face that what we all know to be true is complete wrong — we must be crazy to think that!
This is key, really, since the growth of new media makes it increasingly impossible to hide the lies. They now must simply be denied right to our faces. And that’s precisely what is happening. Smiley continues:
When O’Reilly was challenged on calling the Spears parents “pinheads”, but not the Palin parents, those gaslights kept flickering, but he denied saying it, even though it’s on tape! Then there’s McCain. Don’t we know he’s been in Washington for a generation? Don’t we know he’s voted with Bush 90 percent of the time? It’s all on tape! Its fully attested and in the public record. But don’t look at the flickering gaslights, dear. And that brooch in your purse? Don’t you realize you put it there? Darling, you must be crazy!
So, the Republicans have gone beyond lying. Bush and Cheney have been great liars, really, the best. Rove has made a career, and even a philosophy of lying about everything. But there is a special cold villainy to the way they have taken it to the next level now. “Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.” Rather than repent, they plan ever more of the same.
That last sentence is key: The liberal mind simply can’t comprehend how anyone could not repent in such a situation. The explanation is obvious: the distilled essence of conservatism as practiced in America today is sociopathy. Think Criminal Minds, not West Wing.
Smiley continues, and concludes:
Knowing that we know what they know, they now tell us we’re crazy, that black is white and cats are dogs and John McCain is a maverick and Sarah Palin is a tax cutter (hear the one about Sarah P. leaving the town of Wasilla with 19 million dollars in long term debt? You did? No, you didn’t, darling. You must be imagining things)
Well, we are crazy if we let them get away with it. The whole world thinks so.
She’s right, of course. But what she says is just a beginning, a wake-up call and a prod to get us moving in the right direction–if only we’re willing to go there.
Fleshing Things Out
In the intro, I said that the GOP “bitch-slap” stragey worked because of two reasons, which I summarized quickly:
The main reason this works so well is two-fold–as I’ll elaborate on jump. But the essence is simple: Conservatives are confronational, while liberals are cooperative, which gives conservatives an edge. The prize is culturally working-class swing voters whose political interests align more with liberals, while their political instincts align more with conservatives.
I now want to elaborate some more, as a means towards sharpening our sense of how to respond.
First, let me expand a bit on the ideologically-based aspect. Conservatives believe in force and violence in the same fundamental way that liberals believe in reason and creativity. While liberals are willing to fight if forced to, they are not anxious to do so, because they are well aware of the costs. Conservatives, OTOH, are generally heedless of them, indeed, they often welcome such costs, and take advantage of them. This can be seen through a variety of complementary approaches–Lakoff’s Strict Father/Nurturant Parent dichotomy, and Altemeyer’s work on rightwing authoritarianism are two examples that come readily to mind.
The second reason this works is cultural: The working class (especially the Scotch-Irish), with whom liberals have long been allied, shares the conservative’s perceptions about the primacy of force–and ultimately, violence–in the realm of politics. They know damned well that politics is a life and death struggle. In many cases, they have family members who have died as a result of politics–black lung disease, the Vietnam War, police shootings, etc. And, as educationaction has explained many times over here in the “Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing” series, they know that they only have political power by joining together to fight for it.
From the Great Depression forward, militant leftists played an important role in bridging the gap between working class masses and liberal politicians and middle-class sympathizers, which is one reason (among many) why those leftists were so intensely targetted during the McCarthy Era. Even afterwards, however, there were a good many liberals influenced by the struggles of the New Deal era, and succeeding struggles, like the Civil Rights movement–particularly those with working class and/or minority background. As I said before, such liberals had a “fighting faith” that was fundamentally moral, not military. And they are in very short supply these days.
Albion’s Seed: 4-Fold Matrix For The Culture Wars
While some have possibly learned some of the lessons of 2004, the relative lack of such fighting liberals means we lack a critical mass that truly understands the conservative mentality and how it evolves from one battle to another, one presidential campaign to another. Someone who does understand is Jane Smiley, which is why it’s not surprising that she wrote the “Gaslight” diary. But to understand the further implications, it helps to look back at another diary she wrote a while back at Huffington Post, “Jane’s Bingo! Award for Most Informative Book of 2006”, written on December 29, 2006.
The book Smiley was writing about was Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer, (Oxford University Press, 1989). It describes American political culture in terms of four distinct cultures of immigrants from the British Isles. These are:
* East Anglia to Massachusetts: The Exodus of the English Puritans
* The South of England to Virginia: Distressed Cavaliers and Indentured Servants
* North Midlands to the Delaware: The Friends’ Migration
* Borderlands to the Backcountry: The Flight from Middle Britain and Northern Ireland (Scots Irish).
Over time, the influences have spread far beyond the original genetic/cultural carriers, so this is not a simplistic quasi-racial argument. Most American Jews, for example, belong to the Friends’ (Quakers) cultural tradition, as do American liberals in general.
My DKos diaries were very much tied up in controversies surrounding how the Socts Irish are seen, particularly focalized by contrasting Smiley’s take on Fisher’s work with James Webb’s rather univocal championing of the Scots Irish cause. In order, these were: “Political Correctness vs. Discussing American Culture At DKos”, “Jane Smiley and James Webb-Contrasting Views on The Scots Irish”, and “A Four-Fold Vision of American Politics”. Long story short, I generally concur with Smiley’s view, as expressed in this passage:
After reading Albion’s Seed, my take on American history is that each culture has another that is its natural opponent. For the New Englanders, it was the Virginians, and the Civil War constituted the pitting of those two antagonists, with the Virginians being defeated and in many ways routed by the New Englanders–perhaps the Civil War in the US is more akin to the earlier Civil War in England that we usually realize. The Appalachian/Borderers culture, the natural ally of the Virginians, emerged from the Civil War in some sense intact and unscathed, because a) the Confederacy conceived of itself in terms of the slaveholding Virgina culture and b) the Appalachian southerners who fought for the South were in a position to move west after the war, and they did, leaving behind the ruins of a South that they had only been a tangential part of to begin with. It might also be noted that for the Borderers, the American Civil War possibly amounted to just more of the same after seven hundred years of border wars in Britain. The borderers/ Appalachian culture never had the opportunity to fight their natural enemies, really, until now, because they have never been ascendant until now. Their enemies are us, culture #3, the descendants of the Philadephians. They do not understand us and we do not understand them. What we see around us is the inevitable culture war.
It’s that fighting attitude at the core of Borderer culture that makes them so accessible to the arguments of conservative ideology, even when their class interests are sharply at odds. Of course, working-class whites still tend toward the Democratic Party nonetheless–Thomas Frank was mistaken on this point–but they are subject to intense cross-pressure, which is considerably relieved when liberals/Democrats stand up and fight for what they believe, and stand up and fight for them.
Conclusion
Now it should be obvious at this point that Sarah Palin is a Borderer, and that her nomination powerfully taps into this centuries-old matrix of cultural tensions. But even if the irrational, antagonistic core of Borderer culture is antithetical to the Quaker core of liberalism, it does not mean that unconditional war is necessary. Indeed, figures like Steve Earle–far more than James Webb, IMHO–show quite powerfully that strong, and powerfully fruitful connections exist, and we must stand by them particularly when confronted by the likes of a Sarah Palin.
We need to fight just as hard as they do. And we need to fight twice as clearheaded. We need to call out their lies, each and every one, because every lie they throw in our face is–in terms of their culture–an insult to our honor.
And if we will not defend our honor, then we will not command respect, and nothing else we do will matter.
More to come. But it’s your turn now. |
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