Just some chin-scratching on the psychological tactics of reactionary movements.
That right-wing frames control much of political debate, and that the discursive center of gravity is consequently far to the right, is well known. This remains true, infuriatingly, even as the great ideological projects of the ruling elite have been publicly exploded in most spectacular fashion: financial deregulation, “the war on terror”, the omniscient benevolence of the “free-market:, etc.
Right wing dominance over political debate is, of course, highly overdetermined and multifaceted. That national democratic leaders are largely subservient to the coprorate elite which also sponsors the right is no small reason. But one particular feature of right wing thought control seems to encapsulate the systematic and top-down method of planting easily controlled and sub-conscious emotional valences in place of critical thinking and consciously pursued values: the slogan.
“Ground-Zero Mosque” is only the latest, but one of the most effective, in a long line of brain-crippling phrases coughed up by the right-wing beast. That it contains two distortions or lies in three words is typical. The key to the power of these slogans is that even to say them, even to think them really, is to have submitted to the emotional framework the phrase imposes. Laborious debunking a la Keith Olberman does little or nothing to reduce the rapid and irretrievable currency of the phrase. Hence the media absolutely loves these phrases, over and above their own deep-grained subservience to the ruling class with their manufactured consensus. They are simple and easy to distribute and have an emotional payload. Bingo.
“Death Panels” was another genius slogan from last year, derived in a way from “Death Tax”.
“Ground-Zero Mosque” is really a masterpiece of the form, a perfect distillation of the mind-control techniques favored by the right. Of course they engage in widespread linguistic corruption and perversion for propaganda purposes, and indeed the entire right-wing program is basically rhetorical and linguistic. For instance, they simply took the language of the “war on terror” and applied it to something else, Iraq.
While slogans such as these are characteristic of the authoritarian program of the right-wing, producing simplistic and basically moronic political attitudes, I can’t deny that they appear to be powerful tools in political combat. I can’t think of a single equivalent phrase originating from the left. Obviously there are powerful forces standing in the way of such a phrase coming from the left, but even then there doesn’t seem to be a desire to distill the message down to the purest possible form. Possibly another factor is that such slogans from the right are basically about resentment, fear and anger. That’s the engine of the right, which makes sense since anger is the gateway drug to the ignorance and frank stupidity in which authoritarianism thrives. And it seems that those brains which have been primed for these slogans are eager to adopt new ones and delight in the juvenile and tribal conflict they imply. So maybe the special nature of slogans makes them resistant to being vehicles for progressive values.
