25/09/08 "ICH' -- - The second most astonishing thing about American politics is that John McCain and Sarah Palin have a respectable chance of winning the White House in 2008. (Or, for that matter, that any Republican could have a shot at any office for which the Democratic candidate hasn’t suddenly died on the stump.)
Yeah, yeah, I know. Barack Obama has a funny name. He’s relatively young and inexperienced. Oh, and – have you heard? – he’s also black. But, just the same, I mean, c’mon. A Republican could win the presidency in 2008? You gotta be kidding, right?
All of this is deeply related, in multiple ways, to what is without a doubt absolutely the first most astonishing fact of American politics. And that is that conservatism (I prefer to call them ‘regressives’) isn’t the most repudiated ideology this side of cannibalism. And that regressive practitioners of this hateful disease masquerading as a political philosophy haven’t been tarred-and-feathered, hung, drawn and quartered, then run out of town on an electrified rail. And that any red-blooded American wouldn’t infinitely prefer in this day and age to be called a pedophile, a terrorist or a European – heck, or all of the above combined – rather than a conservative.
I mean, seriously, people. Now that Wall Street has imploded, potentially taking down with it the entire global economy in a fun reprise of the 1930s, what more could possibly be necessary to repudiate a set of ideas for which a good day is when thousands of people don’t die (again) as a result of anyone, let alone the world’s sole superpower, subscribing to something so astonishingly stupid? Really, is there anything that the regressive agenda has touched so far that hasn’t completely turned into a pillar of salt? Not only do these nice pious Christians show every evidence of actually being the antichrist, they’ve also managed to be the anti-Midas as well.
The scope of the destruction is breathtaking to gaze upon. The rapidity with which American affluence and power and respect and responsibility were converted into their opposite numbers is mind-boggling. But the most astonishing thing of all is the absence of repudiation. Not from subscribers, of course. That army of clones was so existentially terrorized in their impressionable years by some toxic stew of religion, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-communism and/or some other forms of anti-otherism – along with a sinking economic status – that their cold, stiff fingers will never be pried from the politics of guns, gays and god. Especially now, when they can also add to their fears the blame for being so spectacularly wrong about everything imaginable these last decades. Who would want to own that?
But what about the rest of us? What, indeed. We still live in an America where almost nobody dares call themselves a liberal. But what’s even more bizarre – and I mean like watching-a-Twilight-Zone-marathon-in-Wonderland-sitting-there-with-Alice-and-frying-on-acid-while-listening-to-In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida-(“here-comes-the-drum-solo-man!”)-backwards-and-at-half-speed kinda bizarre – is the degree to which conservatism has not become a dirty word and a rejected ideology. For my money, this is the single most absolutely anomalous political curiosity currently to be found in what is surely one of the most curiously anomalous polities that ever existed. Oh, and, for the record, it turns out that that bit about ‘my money’ is quite literally true – a whole bunch of it has already been spent on the various insanities of this backwards ideology, and probably a lot of yours too.
But I digress. What is conservatism, and how should it be regarded? Like any ideology, it has lots of flavors and sub-cults, many of which don’t necessarily get along with each other, and certainly don’t agree on which conservative projects should be given priority at any given time. All the same, I think we can boil the ideology down to a few key concepts – indeed, ones that even our regressive friends would agree accurately represent the ideological program.
Traditionally, well... tradition has been key, as a matter of fact. One key tenet of conservatism is to avoid change. Reactionaries go even further, preferring the (typically heavily mythologized) world that grandpa inhabited. Economically, conservatism is all about low taxes, low government spending (except when it comes to cops and bombs), balanced budgets, low regulation of the private sector and privatization of any service which might otherwise be provided by the government.
This is why conservatives love to describe themselves as the ideology which maximizes freedom, but this turns out – shockingly, I know – to be a lie. Indeed, it first turns out to be a lie because in practice supposedly conservative governments break most of their own economic rules catalogued above. Saint Ronald The Reagan quadrupled the national debt by irresponsibly slashing tax revenue (especially for the rich) and massively increasing spending. Before he sold out the country for his own career aspirations, George H. W. Bush described that formula as “voodoo economics”. He ought to know. His voodoo spawn was not to be outdone by any White House predecessor. Or even all of them. Lil’ Bush has followed an irradiated version of the same formula as Uncle Ron and has now doubled all the national debt which was incurred by his 42 predecessors. Combined. Very ‘conservative’, eh?
But the even bigger lie is that the supposed ideology of freedom from government doesn’t even pretend to extend outside of the economic sphere. Ladies, would you like to control your own bodies? Better try another ideology. Real conservatives don’t even want you to have access to birth control or divorce, let alone abortion. Want the freedom to decide who you can sleep with, what you can do in bed (even if you’re a married hetero couple), and who you can marry? Oops, you stumbled into the wrong philosophy, brother. And don’t even get me started on substances of various sorts one might choose to imbibe, even to stay alive while undergoing chemotherapy. Freedom? Guess again. Unless of course you mean the freedom to live the life prescribed for you (but not themselves) by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Mark Foley, Larry Craig or Newt Gingrich, based on their selective misinterpretations of some obscure text written by hermit politicians 4,000 years ago in the Palestinian desert. (Where people are still fighting over ownership of the sand to this very day – hey, let’s follow that model!)
Lastly, conservatism means hawkish aggression in the face of potential threat, real or imagined. Abroad, that translates into sending in the Marines or small nuclear devices to deal with pesky former clients who’ve now gotten a little uppity in their ambitions. Domestically, that means lots of cops, lots of judges, lots of jails and lots of electric chairs (but only for little people, of course, who can’t afford good lawyers).
So that’s the formula – and, again, I doubt even conservatives would dispute this rendering: traditionalism, the pretense of small government in the economic sphere, big government in the social domain, big stick abroad and on the streets.
But here’s the part that they won’t admit to, despite the fact that it is inescapably true. Indeed, precisely because it is true, and because of where it leads. And that’s this: This is an ideology that has been tested. Nobody can say that George W. Bush, or his cronies in Congress or his enablers on the Supreme Court have pulled any punches these last eight miserable years. But the truth is, it runs a lot deeper than even that. With the exception of Bill Clinton’s moderately and sporadically progressive social policies, it’s actually been a solid thirty years of conservative politics in America, including Clinton’s economic policies, which were indistinguishable from anything you’d get out of Wall Street or off the GOP convention platform of any given year. Ever since Reagan, and in some ways even back to Carter, Washington has been all about implementing a conservative agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and privatization, unraveling feminism, gay rights, civil rights and the Constitution, along with interventions abroad and mass incarcerations at home. In short, it would take an obscene distortion of truth – of which regressives have so often shown themselves singularly capable – to argue other than that we’ve had a very thorough and robust test of the ideology these last decades, and especially under George W. Bush.
So, hey, how’s it all turned out? Can you say “unmitigated disaster”? Not even John McCain, who nowadays will say anything, argues that we’re better off than we were four years ago. He, of course, neglects to mention the degree to which he’s been part of the problem, and now even seeks to extend it another four or eight years.
Let’s start with national security. The “grown-ups” who were supposed to come to town and show Clinton Democrats how to do government right were so obsessed with their little pet Iraqi project that they were asleep at the switch (if not behind the wheel) during America’s worst national security crisis ever. Then they went to war against the supposed perpetrator of that crime in Afghanistan, until they got bored with it all and sent the troops to Iraq instead. The upshot has been two endless wars completely un-won seven years later (at least one of which was also completely unnecessary), a broken American military, global hatred toward the US, massive ‘defense’ spending equal to more than that of every other country in the entire world combined, and a polarized and deceived public at home. Quite a score-card, eh?
It gets better. At home, the highest national surplus ever was rapidly turned into the greatest national deficit ever, adding and compounding now to nearly $10 trillion in debt (and rapidly rising), twice what it was (then falling) when the Little Bush came to Warshington. That’s $66,666 (hey, don’t all those sixes mean the devil is nearby?) per taxpayer, for those of you keeping score at home. If Bush’s massive tax transfers (commonly but erroneously referred to as cuts) are continued, as McCain vows to do, that number will explode even more than it will still be mushrooming anyway without them. Meanwhile, the dollar is lower in value than ever, the trade deficit is astronomical, inflation is rising behind gas and food prices climbing off the charts, and a steady diet of regressive deregulation has jeopardized the entire global economy, requiring taxpayers to ante up another trillion bucks to rescue us from the depredations of the robber baron elites, whose vision of capitalism – abetted by their cronies in government – is that all profits go to them and all risks go to stupid regular people.
What a great economic record, eh? Since the 1970s, when the right side came to bat, polarization of wealth in America has increased to banana republic proportions. The rich now account for half of the income in this country – up from one-third during the liberal period of the 1930s through the 1960s – and the middle class has actually lost ground, despite an economy that has been fairly steadily growing over the last decades. It ain’t rocket science, folks. Cut the legs off of unions, apply pressure to workers to keep them too frightened to organize, globalize jobs abroad and reward their export with tax incentives, change the structure of the tax system to favor the rich – guess what’s going to happen? Guess what has happened? Of course, it hasn’t hurt to also throw in a few scary foreign boogeyman monsters, racism, homophobia and some other nifty tricks to keep voters distracted long enough to loot their wallets.
The record outside of foreign and economic policy is hardly any better. Healthcare in America is a disaster, made worse by another eight years of standing by watching conditions deteriorate, and letting a sexually-obsessed American Taliban dictate policy on stem-cell research and anything else even remotely related to genitalia and other evil things. That whole idea of using government to reward cronies and political stormtroopers turns out to have worked just about as well as it did back in the nineteenth century – before we abandoned it the first time – as Heckuvajob Brownie so well demonstrated during Katrina. And won’t history be kind to the regressive right for denying that global warming was a massive threat to humanity, and then blocking solutions once it became undeniable that it was? Or attempting to destroy the International Criminal Court (hmm, wonder why?). And so on, and so on...
These are the reasons, altogether, that Bush is the most widely reviled president ever seen in polling data, and that many notable historians have abandoned their traditional reluctance to weigh in on any subject that isn’t half a century old and have gone ahead and declared the Bush presidency the worst in over 200 years of American history. But we need to remember that Bush, of course, is only the most visible manifestation of an entire regressive movement, which is as completely predatory as it is patently a failure. So the real question is, how come ‘conservative’ isn’t a dirty word today, a label that any politician outside of Mississippi would run from as if it were the Ebola virus? The answer, I think, has principally to do with marketing, and also with the will and motives of the so-called opposition party. I remember George Bush the Elder, carrier of the demon seed, mercilessly hammering the hapless Mike Dukakis across the 1988 campaign as “a liberal”, spitting the word out as if it was the worst epithet imaginable. Week after week, Dukakis said nothing, as his poll number slid into the basement, missing the obvious retort of “If you mean someone who favors Social Security, Medicare, school loans, the GI Bill, civil rights, equality for women, protection of free speech and the Constitution – then, yeah, hell yes I’m a liberal!” Week after week he was silent, that is, until finally I saw him do it live, with my very own eyes. He copped to being a liberal. On the very last day of the campaign. In San Francisco, no less. Brilliant.
What’s happened is that the regressive right has been wildly successful at one of the only two things they’re good at (the other being theft), which is marketing lies. The Atwater/Rove/Schmidt machine is fairly brilliant at using fear, smear and queer to turn night into day, black into white, Palin into Truman. Nowhere does this show up so clearly as in the contrast between policy preferences and the ideological self-definition of voters. On issue after issue – yes, even including guns, gays and taxes – Americans definitively line up in favor of liberal positions, often by huge gaps. They want national healthcare, they want regulation of guns, they support equality for women and gays, they oppose ‘free trade’, they favor government steps to ameliorate the polarization of wealth in America, they want to protect the environment, they approve ‘big government’ providing more services, they want the minimum wage raised, they support stem-cell research and massively oppose Terri Schiavo-type government interventions into personal morality, they strongly support abortion rights and oppose repealing Roe by a two-to-one ratio. Nowadays, they’re even giving up on the death penalty.
But then these same people have, over the last thirty years or so, self-identified as conservatives to the tune of about 30 percent of the population, versus liberal on the order of about 20 percent. And while there are decent arguments to be made that the public doesn’t understand ideological labels as well as they might, or that the other 25 percent or so calling themselves moderates are really liberals, the more important point has to do with marketing success. Who in America wants to be labeled a ‘liberal’ today? It’s still a dirty word, even though all its policy prescriptions are widely held, and even though conservatism has been monstrously and emphatically disastrous. This is the product of a marketing coup of first proportions, a stunning Madison Avenue success at, well, putting lipstick on a pig. You could see it, most recently, at the Republican Convention last month, where neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney nor even the word Republican were anywhere to be found, and yet people bought into loads of the claptrap about Sarah Palin. Democrats would have been hopeless and morose with a hand like the one Republicans have dealt themselves in 2008. The GOP, on the other hand – them boys know how to peddle soap, man.
Meanwhile, the Dukakis tradition, well preserved by the likes of Gore in 2000 and John Kerry and still somewhat by Barack Obama today, continues to illustrate one of the few things a conservative ever got right – namely, Edmund Burke’s oft-quoted observation that all that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. But there’s good and then there’s good. As another famous old quip notes, many progressives during the New Deal era came to Washington to do good and stayed to do well. One reason that regressivism has been so miraculously successful as a set of politics while being simultaneously so disastrous as policy is surely because of Democratic cowardice. But, just as surely, another is because far too many donkeys are nearly as bought into the corporate predatory nexus as are the elephants (and I don’t mean Babar).
Why does this all matter? Well, for the same reason that eight years of Bush/Cheney matters, and that the very real prospect of a McCain presidency followed by a Palin presidency matters. Political battles are half-won or lost, in advance, by the framing and labeling which precede the actual contests. The right understands this so well, which is why, among other of their successes, liberal is a dirty word, and the press has been successfully labeled with a liberal bias. Progressives – or at least Democrats – are clueless about this stuff. They’ve never worked on Madison Avenue. They’ve never been driven by a rapacious ambition toward infantile self-aggrandizement. They’ve never had to sell gold-plated cappuccino machines or Hummers to idiot consumers just itching to depart with their own money in order to salve their raging insecurities. No wonder they can’t win elections.
It’s astonishing, if you think about it – how much can be sold on the basis of so little substance. Put it this way: I’d be willing to bet there isn’t a day that doesn’t go by in which Karl Rove doesn’t salivate all over his Dockers, dreaming of the kind of empire he could build if he had the material progressives have to work with. An angry public, policy agreement on virtually every issue in the public sphere, a hated government powerfully representing the opposing ideology. What more could you want? It’s true, conservative voters are incredibly susceptible to fear-based political appeals, and tend to have the critical analytical faculties of a pile of rocks. Still, it’s been a very long time since the cards were stacked so heavily in favor of a progressive tsunami in America, and the right knows it. And they alternate between sheer astonishment and giddy joy as they contemplate the utter inability of progressives to pick up that ball and run with it.
Those, like Rove, in the regressive controlling class cannot believe their good fortune in not being completely chased from the field of play, as if they were transsexual Nazi pedophiles advocating for the national agenda a confiscation of all private property and America being annexed as a province of Bolivia. “Goddam, I’m good” Rove tells the guy in the mirror each morning as he shaves, I can assure you. And he’s (very) right, I can also assure you, provided you take the talented meaning of the word ‘good’, not the moral one.
But imagine if progressives were half as good, especially with all the material they now have to work with.
They could be the chemotherapy for the country’s conservative cancer we’ve so badly needed for so long now. Instead of an America on life support, we could once again be a healthy polity, growing and thriving.
And the regressive disease could be banished from the body politic forever.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles ( dmg@regressiveantidote.net , but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
[Blunderov] You are very welcome. On the subject of the management of media and messages, at which the regressives are so especially good, I have found the following absorbing information.
7/7 could have been a turning point in British political history, more important than the abolition of the 10p tax band. It was a chance for the British ruling class to start again.
The Republican regime used 9/11 to push changes in American political life: denature democracy, rig the odds even more heavily in favour of the neo-liberal consensus, strengthen the military/industrial complex and so on. The British ruling class, in the form of the Labour government, tried to hop onto this movement to push similar changes: from various anti-terrorism acts, to new narratives about “extremism”, right down to denouncing striking fire-fighters as “fascists” and “Saddam’s little helpers”.
They failed in one crucial respect: they did not take the people with them. They alienated millions of people from official power structures and sowed seeds that are now being reaped as the current crisis: wipeout in 2010.
The government counted on a passive population readily receiving and absorbing the official line about the war. Labour banked on Blair’s broad (but shallow) authority and charisma, backed by their undefeated media machine, winning people over (as happened in 1999 with the Balkan conflict). They underestimated the number of people who would take an active interest in the War on Terror. Why did 9/11 happen? What is al qaeda, who is Osama Bin Laden and what did they have to do with Iraq?
But if 7/7 was a chance to start again the Labour government (and the ruling class more generally) being graded on building a ruling class movement, would have a comment next to their mark: “must try harder”. In the past few years the population has built up immunity to the word on high.
Even in the most authoritarian societies ruling class power is built on a mixture of force and consent. In a democratic society there is an expectation that ordinary citizens can contribute to the political process. Ruling class movements have to take this fact into account
Ruling class movements have to be built from the ground up. Capitalist ideology has to be shaped around people's everyday experience, often phrased in everyday language, delivered and explained by trusted people and institutions. Ideas and themes generated from below have to be incorporated into consensus (the illusion of meaningful participation often helps draw potential opposition groups into upholding the system).
Of course said themes used won't be be solidarity, internationalism or such like (although Make Poverty History was an attempt to divert latent anti-capitalism into paternalistic concern for the less fortunate, i.e. people not blessed with working neo-liberal regimes). In terms of ideological struggle “On Your Side”, the by-election campaign for Liam Byrne in Birmingham in 2004, was a key moment. Labour has increasingly tried to appeal to all that’s hateful and afraid in the working class, positing the average voter as a little Alf Garnett or Self-Righteous Brother.
Byrne’s campaign was themed around crime and immigration (he was going to be tough on both). But in case you didn’t get the point the leaflets were decked in the St George’s Cross.
This is called Dog Whistle politics, where symbols and code are used to say things to a specific audience without actually saying them out loud. When you stick the St George’s Cross on a leaflet and use the language of “them and us” it is easy to infer who ‘we’ are.
The next question is, if the ruling class message relies on trusted and capable media, what are those media, and how do they work?
Hot and Cold Media
The philosopher Marshall McLuhan is most well known for his aphorisms “the medium is the message” and “we live in a global village”. His analysis of media is often brilliant, certainly materialist and at times neck and neck with the great Marxists who looked at communication and ideology (Gramsci, Lukacs, Benjamin and so on).
One of his key concepts is that of hot and cool media. A hot medium is one that imparts large amounts of information where meaning and form is mostly predetermined. A cool medium is one where the audience participates much more in the creation of meaning.
One interesting example he gave was the medium of dance. The Waltz is a hot medium, where things like movement and etiquette were strictly determined. McLuhan compares this to the Twist, which is mostly improvised.
An interesting diversion: at the time of writing McLuhan compared the popularity of the Twist in America with the Charleston in the USSR. The USSR had been through a tremendous period of industrialisation and modernisation. Conformity and precision were regarded as positive qualities, improvisation and individualism were discouraged. The twist was apparently considered taboo in Soviet Russia.
The significance of hot and cold media is in their general effect on social and individual consciousness. Hot media, loaded with information, over-stimulate the senses. The mind (social or individual) is thrown into imbalance. In order to cope it has to numb itself to the assault until it can recover. There are a number of illustrations that spring to mind, voter apathy, compassion fatigue, insensitivity to violence, channel hopping, internet surfing…
McLuhan develops this idea to the point where he suggests the content of a medium is socially almost irrelevant (the medium is the message).
Here comes the science part… ish
We touched a little on the significance this has for politics (voter apathy etc…). Another great twentieth century writer, Aldous Huxley, actually saw over-stimulation, a flood of information as a source of oppression.
The people who control our information-saturated media are able to do two things. The first is bury bad news, facts, opinions and stories detrimental to the consensus, in a welter of (often trivial) information. Second is use almost pure sensation to create meaning.
This second tactic is the most incredible as it can transform lies into facts and madness into reason in the public mind. To go back to the start, the pro-war government movement was a particularly egregious example.
The Axis of Evil was generated out of thin air, along with weapons of mass destruction and the connection between Iraq and al qaeda. Lies, guesses, half-truths and suspicions were worked up into facts, magnified and repeated endlessly. ‘We’ were 45 minutes from destruction. By ‘we’ it was meant British bases in Cyprus (no one asks why there are British military bases in Cyprus), and by destruction it was meant possibly, if Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and if the delivery system could carry them that far and that accurately.
Another short diversion: the social implications of sensationalism are clear. Each new dose of sensationalism, added to cut through the numbing mix, leaves a longer and deeper hangover. Porn becomes ever more graphic, horror ever more gory, comedy becomes an imperial adventure into the realm of taboo.
There are those who know how to use the media…
One of them is Karl Rove. He is supposedly “Bush’s Brain”, certainly the mastermind behind his career and the current Republican domination.
John McCain has revived him in a rather soviet-like way. McCain was firstly cut out of power rather brutally by the Bush election machine in 1999-2000. Now that George Bush is a deadly liability and the Republicans tainted by his years of misrule McCain had no choice but to… bring Rove back.
He first made his mark in direct mail appeals (cool medium). He would apply a deep interest in voting groups and sub-groups to hone his message precisely to their prejudices and fears. Telephone campaigns (also cool) were variation on this. According to legend, at the climax of one election campaign in Texas he had his staff phone people to earnestly tell them the Democratic candidate was a closet lesbian.
It doesn’t matter whether lesbians run the Democratic Party or not. Most people cold-called to be told this ‘fact’ would laugh or hang up. The calls were targeted, narrowcast to people likely to believe such a statement and find it significant. The suggestion has been made, but it’s up to them what they find significant.
Remember, Republican activists have a bee in their bonnet about the “liberal media”. There is no such thing of course, but that’s not the point. 80s and 90s saw the rise of media that bypassed the supposed liberal stranglehold, talk-radio and the internet. Conservative activists and advocates developed media where they could specifically control the message. The success of these new media had an immediate effect on the old, supposedly liberal media outlets (see the Bush 'election' in 2000 or the build up to the Iraq war).
Well, what’s the old skuldugger up to today? Evil genius though he may be, he’s not above playing on the name of Barack Hussein Obama. Go out and look for Americans, before long you will find some who honestly believe Barack Obama is a Muslim and that that’s a baaaad thing.
A quick dip into the news finds this:
DVDs of an anti-Muslim documentary film are being distributed to 28 million voters in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Colorado and Wisconsin…
The 2005 film, called Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, warns that Islamic jihadists aim to take over the US government and destroy our way of life and urges voters to consider which candidate will best protect the nation. Among other subtleties, the film attempts to equate Islam with Nazism, juxtaposing scenes of children being encouraged to become suicide bombers with shots of Nazi rallies… The film's production and promotional campaign were bankrolled by the Clarion Fund, an obscure non-profit that has not filed the required IRS form that would allow the public to see who its officers and major funders are. The group was founded, however, by Raphael Shore, an Israeli-Canadian citizen and supporter of John McCain. Shore's website, Radical Islam, featured an editorial endorsing McCain for president. That's a big no-no: 501c3s aren't legally allowed to endorse candidates.
Also:
Jewish voters in swing states have also been the targets of push polling from Republican-affiliated marketing outfits. Joelna Marcus of Key West, Florida received a telemarketing call asking if she is Jewish. After replying "yes", she was asked whether she was religious. Then the push poller then asked her if her opinion of Barack Obama would change if she knew that Obama had given lots and lots of money to the PLO. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Debbie Minden received a call asking whether her support for Obama would be swayed if she knew "his church was anti-Israel" or that Hamas endorsed him and that its leaders had met with him. The caller also asked if she would change her mind if she learned he was Muslim.
The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn also received a call in Michigan and took notes of the smears: According to the caller, some of Obama's best friends in Chicago were "pro-Palestinian leaders"; Jimmy Carter's anti-Israel national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski is an Obama foreign policy adviser; Obama sat on a board which funded a "pro-Palestinian charity"; Obama said that if elected he would call for a summit of Muslim nations and exclude Israel.
Minden reported that her call came from a firm called Research Strategies, which is none other than Wilson Research Strategies, whose founder is Chris Wilson. Wilson is a top Republican consultant and friend of, you guessed it, Karl Rove. Cohn said his call came from a company called Central Marketing, which has done push polls on behalf of the campaigns of Republicans John Thune and Michael Bloomberg.
The nice touch here is Rove (let alone McCain) is never directly involved. Nonetheless are “obvious Republican scare-tactic[s], right out of the Rovian playbook”. They are examples of cold media being used. How is the Republican campaign dealing with hot media? An example:
So I was abed this morning listening to NPR and on comes Mara Liasson with a report about the women's vote. Typical silly evenhandedness, and then she plays a snippet from a McCain-Palin radio commercial that sums up the whole problem, really.
The commercial is about the "sexist" attacks on Palin. The script is read of course in a woman's voice, and she conveys just the right tone of anger and contempt for the sneering hypocritical liberal elite misogynists. They tried A, and B, and C, the woman says. And then, when that didn't work, "they called her a liar." She brands this "despicable."
Okay. I spent yesterday afternoon fretting that Obama's message was too muddled, not pointed enough. Almost everyone I know thinks this. Maybe we're right. Or maybe we're just compulsive fretters, because that's what liberals tend to be based on experience.
So maybe the Obama team is flailing. But now I hear this ad and I think, how do you fight an opponent that not only lies, but then tells lies about the lies?
Palin is a liar. Of this there's no question. She supported the bridge to nowhere. She asked for earmarks as governor – and not just one or two, but $453 million worth. She still goes around the country saying the exact opposite of both of these things.
Having already created a new audience through naturally cool, narrowcast media, the Republicans are better placed to fight for control of the hot, broadcast media.
The line about ‘sexist’ attacks on Sarah Palin is to create a foolproof defence for a weak candidate. If it’s sexist to attack your opponent for lying then its sexist to attack your opponent for anything. The idea hangs on the well-developed meme of the hypocritical liberal elitist. If you subscribe to that meme in any way the case is all but won. The hypocritical liberal elitist is put on the backfoot, they have to defend themselves when they should be attacking their opponent.
Hot media are pumped full of sensational (mis)information, in the style of cold media, in the knowledge there is an audience segment that will pick up and absorb the misinformation: dog whistle politics. It doesn’t matter if said information is eventually proved wrong or misleading, as it will quickly swamped.
In this case a temporary advantage has been won for the Republicans. However, the advantage has been won thanks to years of preparation. The audience was created by Rovian strategy, by a movement from the ground up.
Closer to home
I think we’re still a long way from the lunatic culture wars of America. We’re going through a similar warping process, one that, I believe, is starting to be applied consciously.
An example to begin with: in the 2005 general election campaign, seemly out of nowhere, the Labour party campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow put out stories of how Oona King was subject to anti-Semitic abuse. Two particular incidents were mentioned. One where a group of Bengali lads insulted her as a “Jewish bitch”, another where unknown youths egged a World War Two veterans event. There was a general insinuation put round that “Respect supporters” were encouraging local Muslims not to vote for her because she had Jewish ancestry.
Not once did the campaign say that Respect had been doing such things, or that Respect had an anti-Semitic programme or membership. Despite the dubious nature of the accusations (someone directly involved in or touched by the campaign could know or prove them to be wrong or right), they were carefully placed to cause damage. They tried to establish guilt by association and, even if they failed, they would put the Respect campaign on the back foot, deflecting attention from King’s record as a New Labour stooge (the other tactic was to remind everyone she was only one of two black, female MPs in London: so much for the system).
Labour’s dirty tricks failed. They were unleashed too late. The Respect campaign had too much momentum; too many people were doing too good a job overturning the King’s majority.
The Bethnal Green and Bow Labour Party picked on the theme of anti-Semitism developed by a small group of ex-leftists based in the media and academia as part of a programme for entering the right via the War on Terror. The anti-war movement of course supports justice for the Palestinian people. With the same kind of logic (put your opponent on the back foot, deflect from the flaws in your argument) the ex-leftists insinuated consistently this solidarity was anti-Semitic.
They developed and magnified their arguments through the conventional and electronic press, in particular through the web log and discussion forum. These are cooling media, with a veneer of popular participation (the final say always goes to the proprietor). To a greater or lesser extent the readership is drawn into the idea they are contributing to meaning, in this case the shape of the news agenda (comment is free, have your say, Speak you’RE Brane).
The vox pop and poll have been parts of the news media for a long time. As media divide and combine the idea of audience participation has blossomed. Each newspaper now has its own blog with comment section. Newsreaders now ask for your comment via email. On TV you can vote for just about anything (except of course a change in government policy). If you’re bored with TV go to Youtube and you can make your own films.
The content, however, near universally poor: often bigoted and illiterate. The significance of audience participation is now when right-wing newspapers churn over legends about hated minorities (such as the Swan Bake legend) online Alf Garnetts’ can vent together, adding to the meaning of the story.
This process is almost certainly being cultivated for political ends. When the government pushes out islamophobic propaganda it is increasingly taken up and developed from below. Pro-war racists may have seen the anti-war demonstrations, the mass meetings, the stalls, they may have felt the general anti-war consensus pointed against them and concluded they were alone. Now they can go to BBC online, listen to LBC or pick up a London Lite and feel validated and confident.
Round-up...
The ruling class has always used its dominance to control information, manipulate consciousness, divide and rule, hegemony. They don’t get everything their own way, however. Personal experience often contradicts official theory and can potentially generalised into counter hegemony. Ruling class ideology has to be shaped to fit ordinary experience and expressed by trusted people.
The Labour Party, the mainstream media and parliamentary democracy took great hits from the anti-war movement. They still haven’t recovered. The ruling class will have to find alternative means, alternative media to secure its hegemony.
Labels: 'war on terror', Marshall McLuhan, media, us elections
[Bl.] Talking about revolution...oops. Did I say that out loud?
In 1969, Hillary Rodham, at Wellesley College, wrote an 'A' paper --a 92-page senior thesis entitled "'There Is Only The Fight…": An Analysis of the Alinsky Model". During the Presidency of Bill Clinton, the GOP --thinking that the paper contained evidence that Hilary had strong radical or socialist views --tried to get a copy that it could use against Clinton. In fact, the GOP is the biggest practitioner of Alinsky's 'rules for radicals'. I know because I had a GOP 'campaign manual' that was based upon Alinsky's campaign and organizational tactics.
By that time, at Hilary's request, Wellesley was denying access to the paper. What is in that paper that 'neo' and other 'conservatives were so massaged and outraged? A clue may be found in the terms: 'social revolution'. If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the result would be social revolution. Ironically, this is not a disjunctive projection if considered in the tradition of Western democratic theory.
-- Hillary D. Rodham, There Is Only The Fight…": An Analysis of the Alinsky Model Ninety-nine percent of America's total wealth is now owned by just one percent of its population. Social revolution, therefore, is a necessity if the nation is to survive. This increasingly tiny elite will not --of its own accord --release the strangle hold it exercises over the nation's means of production, its national defense, the government itself.
Put another way: about one percent of the nation is rich enough to have bought and paid for a 'government' that it utilizes to defend its interests, its wealth, and the 'transfer of its raw power' from this generation to the next. A top-heavy US increasingly resembles the pro-typical, militaristic banana republic. A top-heavy society is unstable; one that has nukes poses an imminent threat to the entire world as the rogue administration of George W. Bush has demonstrated.
Hilary's paper deals with the work of Saul Alinsky, a social activist and organizer born in Chicago in 1909. Hillary's thesis is touted as '...very revealing of Alinsky’s view of American life '.
…after graduating from the University of Chicago, Alinsky received a fellowship in criminology with a first assignment to get a look at crime from the inside of gangs. He attached himself to the Capone gang, attaining a perspective from which he viewed the gang as a huge quasi-public utility serving the people of Chicago.
--Quote, "There is Only the Fight, Hilary Rodham
Alinsky is described as an 'academic-turned-radical' which it is claimed was a 'personality type' found first among journalists covering the Russian Revolution of 1917 and --some 'five decades later --among journalists and students trying to make sense of US military involvement in Viet Nam.
What is interesting to me about Hilary's paper is the level of 'outrage' it inspires though very, very few have actually read it. Wellesley denied access to it. Later, when it was released, it was apparently available for a while on the internet. Now --even that access appears to have disappeared. I found but one link and that, interestingly, was on a 'neoconsertive' web site. Like 'neoconservative' ideology, it didn't work.
It would appear, then, that those who are most outraged by Hilary's paper have never read it. Secondly, Hilary's paper is inspired and thus based upon Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals'. You can get a copy of that by mail at Amazon.com. Why does Hilary's paper continue to generate so much right wing teeth gnashing when its inspiration is available in paper back. That has to do with the fact that the right wing may get away with absurd characterizations of works that are not available. Lies about a work that is in print and available on Amazon.com are more difficult to support. The GOP is would be well-advised to confine its lies to things that cannot be so easily verified otherwise.
At last --the disingenuous nature of right wing outrage is obvious when it is the right wing, the GOP in particular, that cites Alinsky more often than does the 'left'. For years, I kept a 'Repulbican Campaign Handbook' carefully put together by 'right wing' political consultants in Houston. The manual quoted Alinsky extensvely, primarily his 'Rules for Radicals', which include:
Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.
Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules.* “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.
Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.
Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”
Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.
Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”
Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame. --Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals For a complete online 'manual' for organizers, see: The Citizen's Handbook
I want to thank the right wing for having directed so much attention to the work of Saul Alinsky, a man whose work might have gone unnoticed. Clearly --he is not forgotten and, thanks to the press he still gets, millions of progressives and liberals will continue to be inspired by his 'rules' --as applicable to communities hoping to improve conditions in their neighborhoods block-by-block as well as those seeking to build a consensus, a movement, perhaps a much-needed social revolution.
Such campaigns, indeed, revolutions themselves are most effective when they are put together the Saul Alinsky way: block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood. By daring to call attention to Hilary's book and, by extension, Saul Alinsky, the right wing has done a much better job than her suppressed paper could ever do. The right wing has shown us HOW we can organize to defeat them and, in the process, build up a liberal, progressive consensus from the ground up, block by block, all over the nation.
[Bl.] Of course when this happens to Republicans they become suddenly "bipartisan". The Democrats of course just wag their heads in agreement because they're so happy to even be invited to the party at all.
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