I came across an interesting response to my It’s The Stupid, Stupid piece. Parts of it struck me as a touch pedantic and triumphant, but I thought the conclusion was stimulating.
I think it is crucial to grasp, first, that Republican discourse is suffused with non-argumentative subcultural signaling and, second, that the content of that signaling is mostly a matter of impotent rage and despair for a real reason.
We are wrong to react to non-arguments as though they are arguments, pointing out the foolish ways in which they fail to pass muster as arguments when they are not arguments at all. We should be making our own arguments and filling the empty argumentative space they have evacuated in their rage and despair.
Further, we should hear the rage and despair in their signals. We should grasp as they clearly have done themselves, that they have been defeated. We should stop treating the ferocity of their passion as if it represented an organized opposition. We should be building up multicultures and convivialities in the midst of the wreckage of the Culture Wars that we won and they lost and filling the empty civilizational space they have in evacuated in defeat.
None of this is to deny the real civilizational threats posed by the historically all-too-familiar bad-faith alliance of parochial short-sighted incumbent-elites and the impassioned mob, but it is to demand that we identify their convulsions for what they actually are and respond to what is actually happening here and now.
That clip makes a little more sense in context, but you get the picture. My reaction is that there is some good advice in there, but that idea that we’ve won the Culture War is premature and inappropriate at the moment. I haven’t seen a poll in six months that would indicate that we’re winning the Culture War or anything else. He doesn’t deny the real civilizational threat we’re facing, but he downplays it. We have a two-party system. When one of those parties becomes captured by neo-fascists, you have to take it as seriously as a heart attack.
He’s not saying don’t take it seriously. He’s saying we’re not thinking about it correctly and therefore not dealing with it correctly.
We have to deal with it in a logical way instead of a knee-jerk or we won, you didn’t way. While I know we get tired of explaining things sometimes, we have an opportunity to explain our thinking and also the fallacy of the opposition. Just saying your wrong does nothing but anger people and make them even more argumentative. We must take them seriously but we also have to do a much better job of educating all people. Some will never get it but then we have some on the progressive side who never get bi-partisanship either and that is needed to get many things done.
I read that as saying that the Republican base at the moment are the self-perceived losers of the culture war trying a desperate last stand. That sure fits what I am seeing here. For the most part, while white privilege remains, it is those unconscious cultural habits that people run into and are embarrassed instead of the overt hostility shown by the 87,000 out of 310 million that Glen Beck brought together. The issue is no longer debatable.
The same for women’s rights, including the right to chose to be a full-time homemaker. Only a very few women have the anxieties that Phyllis Schlafly exploited in the 1970s. And most of the political force in the Republican base is from men who are threatened by competent women — which goes a long way in explaining the popularity of Sarah Palin with this base.
The same for LGBT rights. When Ted Olson joined the suit in California and when Ken Mehlmann comes out, the debate is over. And the closeted gay men (and it is mainly gay men who are closeted in the Republican Party) and the guys who have a stereotyped masculinity are the ones threatened. And that then gets translated through churches to women opposed to gay rights. Which is really where the “Christian nation” language is coming from.
And the Republicans have now lost the immigrant issue even before Arizona overreached. It was Richard Burr who dredged up fear of immigrants in order to beat Erskine Bowles in 2004 in a fairly close election. And then the leadership jumped on this issue. But now it’s gone. The national consensus is for comprehensive immigration reform, regardless of the Republican posture of Horation at the bridge.
It is only through chicanery and winning unwatched political offices that this base has put evolution back in the debate. And time after time they have been slapped down by the law and slapped down by public opinion. And the anxiety there is their own doubts about the Bible as literally God’s words (in the plural). They have placed the Biblical text in a competition with science on science’s terms. They have lost and they deep down know it, and it scares them because they feel they have lost control over their own children as their children get educated.
In the culture war, the Battle of the Bulge of the last 20 years is over. All that is left is sniping. And terrorism.
And that is why the discourse is back to socialism, liberty, tyranny and all the gobblygook from the anti-Communist period of America. The economic interests funding the fleecing of the rubes can’t get them to buy into the culture war anymore. Not with 24/7 talk radio shock jocks, not with addiction to FoxNews, not with rallies, and not even with Glenn Beck and the Tea Party Express. Except for a small fraction of the people, the culture wars are over.
They got a victory on abortion. Now, only the wealthy can afford to find a doctor who will perform an abortion. Girls who are the victim of incest have to ask their parents if they can get an abortion; think how that works. But that victory, which was really more about the punishment for pre-marital or extra-marital sex than it was about abortion, has turned hollow. Contraception and cohabitation have taken the satisfaction of victory away, driving a smaller and smaller minority to more desperate measures.
Even in the rural South, the culture wars are over. The loud voices you hear are just the last hurrah of “a way of life that used to be” nostalgia for what never was.
The tea partiers remind me of the white South Africans in the Apartheid era who saw their power slipping away – and became increasingly violent and vocal and extreme and shouted ever louder as if that would stop the tide. Now those whites who were more or less guaranteed middle management positions under apartheid despite a glaring lack of ability or education are working as car park attendants whilst more able or educated blacks form a rapidly expanding middle class.
The point is corporatism and globalism has little time for the unskilled or uneducated workers who make up much of the extreme right. Why pay an unskilled white more than a skilled Latino or Indian or Chinese worker? But rather than upset their lords and masters even more, those unskilled whites then blame the Latino, Chinese and Indian workers and not the corporates who employed them in preference to them in the first place.
But the answer is not to mock them as the corporates (and the real liberal elites) do. The answer is to give them the tools to analyse their real situation, their real assets and enemies, and to help them develop the skills and the education they need to compete in a much more complex and globalisation world.
Those who cling to creationism and climate change denial are also signalling their inability to achieve science based occupations. Those who scapegoat minorities are also signalling their inability to achieve middle management positions in advanced employments. Some will undoubtedly never make it, and for others it is too late. But what really galls them is that their children can and are.
They see the world passing them by, and it is. In that sense their rage is not irrational or inchoate. But the humanitarian (and progressive) response is to offer education, training, development opportunities and a listening ear. Their problems are real and growing, and just because we do not sympathise doesn’t mean we can’t empathise.
That is a dangerous stereotype. The extreme right comprises mostly middle-aged or older farmers, managers, small business owners and tradespeople who have been left behind by competition from agribusiness, big box stores and shopping malls or by the influx of immigrant workers and large trade services providers into competition. The tradespeople are nonunion for the most part, which is why they are so threatened. And their wives are driven by the moral certainties to which they were educated in the 1970s and before.
Their economic failing is a loss of market power over the past 30 years.
Most unskilled and uneducated workers, when they vote, vote for Democrats. Even in the South. And not many of them watch FoxNews or any all news channel.
Part of the classist charge that Republicans are making is to say to the tea partiers that “those liberals think you are white trash.” If you are those people I described, that makes you extremely angry.
The relatively unskilled or uneducated white workers were “farmers, managers, small business owners and tradespeople” in Apartheid South Africa by virtue of their colour rather than their ability and could never have competed successfully on equal terms with the more savvy or able black entrepreneurs/managers on an equal playing pitch – never mind with global corporates.
Let us not confuse access to money, political power, or social connections within a privileged group with real ability.
Indeed what has struck me about a lot of even senior American business managers operating in Europe is that many of them are not all that emotionally intelligent or culturally sensitive. They have positions of great power/seniority by virtue of coming from a dominant culture, large business or privileged background but are often lousy leaders or decision makers.
Given US business’ huge advantage of scale, market access, capital access, technology access, blatantly biased patent laws etc. US businesses or businessmen often perform extraordinarily badly in a non-US context. Contrary to popular stereotypes, many European societies tend to be more socially mobile than the US, with the result that people of real ability are more likely to make it to the top.
Show me a neo-con, Union bashing, racist, arrogant US manager, and I can often show you a very poor manager/leader as well – one who often has to be bailed out by more capable subordinates. The egotism, short sightedness, dysfunctional individualism and crass materialism many outside the US associate with US corporatism also leads to many very poor team players in US management.
The reason why Chines, Indian and other non-US economies are gaining in technology and market share – despite many other disadvantages and societal shortcomings – is because US politics and business is often run by idiots who have inherited their wealth/position or who have been promoted beyond their ability because of their ruling class background.
The myth of Log Cabin to the white House is precisely that: a myth to cover up an ossified class structure which is increasingly disenfranchising even the middle classes brought up on an ideology of progression by education. The tea-partiers are at the wrong end of a revolution which is hitting the US rather late in the day. Obama has a lot of catch-up to play if the US is not to continue its trajectory of imperial decline.
Well, you’re there and I’m not, but I get the impression that the non-union workers in the South at places like Toyota and the oilcos tend to buy heavily into the teabagger line. Maybe they’re just the loudest ones, as usual. Any read on that?
You are correct. My point is that these folks are neither unskilled nor uneducated and they still follow the tea party line. It’s a mixture of all the groups that I mentioned, and the loudest ones depend on who you talk to. One might be an IT worker who is PO’d that a Pakistani is outcompeting him. Another might be a restaurant or convenience store owner PO’s about having to pay Social Security and unemployment insurance.
I agree with this sentence that you quoted:
“We are wrong to react to non-arguments as though they are arguments, pointing out the foolish ways in which they fail to pass muster as arguments when they are not arguments at all.”
This is something that I’ve only recently come to realize. I have always assumed that folks on the right, even if they were misguided, must have come to their conclusions based on something like the same reasoning process that brought me to mine. My assumption was always that we simply had different balances in what we valued, and in our experience. But I no longer believe that. It just seems to be all emotion and propaganda over there.
I keep coming back to the quote (that I can never track down) to the effect that we ignore the madman ranting in the marketplace and he thereby incontrovertibly establishes his point. It reflects a real dilemma. In a society with a 15-second attention span, do you try and counter total irrationality with reason, or do you try to fight fire with fire? The Soviet solution was putting dissidents into the psyche ward. We don’t have such options, so what happens to democracy, which depends on an assumption of rational discourse, when mindless emotion trumps reason?
“what happens to democracy, which depends on an assumption of rational discourse, when mindless emotion trumps reason?” Democracy dies.
IOW: it’s a waste of time to debate “Free Silver” with the Bush Dead Enders. The world has moved beyond their pet issues, they just haven’t come to terms with it yet.
I think that’s the point.
The people who write the script for the Right (Frank Luntz, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist) long ago figured out that appealing to higher human sensibilities is a tedious and politically ineffective way to win in the game of politics. They are expert at exploiting base human emotions, fears, resentments, and prejudice. We may hold the high moral and intellectual ground, but they survive because they know how to trigger the sentiments of their base and get them to the voting booth.
I 100% agree that the neo-secessionists are the dead cat bounce of an ideology in acute rigor mortis. They are not very significant to me, to put it lightly. But apparently we have to labor zombie like through 10-20 years of undead reaganisms.
So are you saying Republicans will not make significant gains in the mid-terms?
I’m saying even if they do, what’s the worst they are going to do, take us back to the foolishness of the clinton era? Or cut social security? It will just be more of the same, and any serious damage they do will be on a bi-partisan basis, which is of course quite possible.
I think this is essential advice. Where it goes off-track is the assumption that the culture wars are over. As long as rage and despair are widespread realities the wars will go on indefinitely. Liberals/Dems/lefties fail to counter the teabaggers’ appeal because they are too timid to co-opt that rage and despair, or even to acknowledge its appropriateness to the condition in which we find ourselves.
The crazy right walked in in broad daylight and stole the power of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it any more” out from under our noses. From the Dems we hear ad nauseum about hope and we see incremental change. When they talk we get suffocating pablum about the “middle class”, “fiscal responsibility”, “accountability”, and all the rest of the tedious, careful, rhetoric we’ve been getting for half a century or more. No one on our side wants to let loose the Rage and Despair beast and take ownership of it. Obama wants to make change without ever identifying exactly what needs changing and how it came to be — what we should be mad as hell about. The technocrat fixes we’ve seen are important long-term, and I still think they’ll open doors to much more significant progress. But it’s like having a war without an enemy (much like Iraq, come to think of it).
It’s probably not the Dems job, or within their capabilities, to take ownership of the anger and despair and offer real answers instead of teabagger/Palin/Beck incoherence. But somebody has to do it. You don’t beat the merchants of anger by pretending there’s nothing to be mad about. By domestic historical standards and contemporary world standards we now live in a country with two parties, one literally fascist and the other center-right. It is a condition that cries out for rage and despair. The difference between ours, should we ever express it honestly, and theirs is that we have the ideas to do something real about its causes.
I think this is essential advice. Where it goes off-track is the assumption that the culture wars are over. As long as rage and despair are widespread realities the wars will go on indefinitely. Liberals/Dems/lefties fail to counter the teabaggers’ appeal because they are too timid to co-opt that rage and despair, or even to acknowledge its appropriateness to the condition in which we find ourselves.
The crazy right walked in in broad daylight and stole the power of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it any more” out from under our noses. From the Dems we hear ad nauseum about hope and we see incremental change. When they talk we get suffocating pablum about the “middle class”, “fiscal responsibility”, “accountability”, and all the rest of the tedious, careful, rhetoric we’ve been getting for half a century or more. No one on our side wants to let loose the Rage and Despair beast and take ownership of it. Obama wants to make change without ever identifying exactly what needs changing and how it came to be — what we should be mad as hell about. The technocrat fixes we’ve seen are important long-term, and I still think they’ll open doors to much more significant progress. But it’s like having a war without an enemy (much like Iraq, come to think of it).
It’s probably not the Dems job, or within their capabilities, to take ownership of the anger and despair and offer real answers instead of teabagger/Palin/Beck incoherence. But somebody has to do it. You don’t beat the merchants of anger by pretending there’s nothing to be mad about. By domestic historical standards and contemporary world standards we now live in a country with two parties, one literally fascist and the other center-right. It is a condition that cries out for rage and despair. The difference between ours, should we ever express it honestly, and theirs is that we have the ideas to do something real about its causes.
Very thought provoking. It also reminds me of Lincoln’s Cooper Union address:
There is also a large amount of psychological projection coming from Republicans which is a fairly clear sign of how consumed by fear they are.
There’s a follow-up that makes it clearer that he means the Culture Wars in a mainly long-term and non-political sense. On that, I agree with him, but just try to get an abortion in most of this country. All progress isn’t in a straight line, and politics matter. It’s hard to say that you are winning a culture war when the country is getting ready to elect a bunch of radical social conservatives.
Better yet, we should be prepared (and armed) for the logical conclusion of their rage and despair…