05.02.09

Peak Wingnut - A Helpful Idea?

Posted in Uncategorized at 7:52 pm by steve

Dave Neiwert and Sara Robinson over at Orcinus have been doing an exemplary job of keeping us up-to-date on the hate-mongering of the authoritarian far right. It’s a place I like to go when I wonder if it’s just me or if the world really is going crazy. And I feel reassured, a little, that it’s not just me. Sara’s recent piece - nicknamed “Peak Wingnut” by a comment writer - speculates whether the right wing spin machine is going to spin the “wingnuts,” dervish-like, far out of control and into violence. They make a powerful argument that there is a real risk of this happening. And it is especially convincing if one has been visiting Orcinus for a while and hearing the case develop.

As much as I love to go there, as much as I agree with Sara, as much as I buy her arguments, as much as I see the same events, hear the same words, interpret them in parallel ways, I also have a sense of unease about the project.

One of the arguments Sara makes is that the far right has been dividing the country up into “us and them” for a long time. And that this divisive technique is inherent to the authoritarion point of view. Fair enough. I agree. But one of the curious side-effects of the work is that by focusing on groups that possess the characteristics she abhors, she, coincidentally does the same thing. The language is gentler. The focus is on their bad behavior and their unfortunate psychological makeups (Wingnuts are authoritarians. And that makes them psychos. This is the subtext.) And the question that keeps coming up is “What are we to do with people like this?”

The problem with this is that we are aping a behavior in “wingnuts” that we rightly deplore. Rather, what we need to ask is “How do we create a dialogue that changes the equation?”

…

It is a property of people who were in their teens and twenties during the 1960’s to view political power in a particular way. During the 1960’s one did whatever it took to get attention for one’s cause. One created a political group to protect that cause. One pushed that cause as far as one could, to hell with the consequences on society. It’s a kind of Bolshevik “take no prisoners” approach to political power. It achieved political ends that most people less than fifty years old will agree were laudible.

The great problem with this frame of mind is that it enforces the mental practice of aligning with a group over the mental practice of evaluating ideas on their own merit. What happens next is that ideas cease to be the currency of political discourse. Rather, all of political discourse is about allocation of power. And the symbols that belong to that task. Political discourse is targeted at bringing people into the group and making them loyal members. And about closing the door to the influence of outsiders. Political parties and groups of all sorts become more insular. And before long the whole political process freezes up because of a kind of brittleness that pervades every individual, every institution, every component in the political process.

Fueled by bone-deep racism, an unnatural terror of liberal government, frustration over the economic downturn, and fears about America’s loss of world standing, they said, the militant right wing is indeed rising again. Their numbers are up, their talk is turning ugly, and it’s not unthinkable that we could be in for a wave of domestic terrorism unseen since the mid-90s.

In fact, I live in a place with deep right wing roots. And I heard two remodelling contractors whispering in my hallway that they were pretty sure the President would not last out his first term, but would end the same way Kennedy did. This is not the kind of thing we heard even in the 1990’s. We are in a worse place.

Thing is, these are not inherently bad people. They are people who have a psychological make-up that embraces a particular point of view. And they have been fed on a public rhetoric of nationalism, jingoism, hatred and lies preached by the rabid right for thirty years.

There is a very important question about how to make sure that they do little real damage in the short term. But the real question is how to restore their correct relationship with society. Part of that task involves changing the voices they hear in public, the tone and the tenor of the people they listen to on radio and television. Part of the task involves figuring out how to bring the bottom thirty percent of the nation back into society. How do we provide good jobs? How do we provide health care? How do we provide social services? How do we make them feel safe and secure? For it is ultimately a great sense of insecurity and anger at perceived injustice that fuels their rage.

That rage was cultivated by the reactionaries who followed Reagan. Reagan mirrored the methods of sixties radicals by simply choosing a different set of political propositions, selling them by appealing to greed and hatred, and using the political capital to demolish opponents. His own success at this transformed the Republican party from a group of men who acted like Eisenhower - who built the interstate highway system and warned Americans of the dangers of the military-industrial complex - to men like Gingrich, and Dubya whose whole agenda appears to be oriented to sustaining a highly abstract form of pillage of every fungible asset held by the US.

Not only did the backlash to the sixties-style Bolshevism create them, but it kept them in power for sixteen of the last twenty-four years. And it kept liberal politicians cowed and frustrated. The results have been so ugly that people under the age of fifty have resoundingly repudiated not just the Republicans in question, but the whole Bolshevik approach to the political process. Obama’s ascendency represents a repudiation of the notion that who has the power has his way with the system. It represents to people under fifty a hope that political discourse can become both civil and productive of good public policy.

I am encouraged by Obama’s lead. He has attempted to make dialogue a centerpiece of his political modus operandi. It’s a refreshing change from the authoritarian styles of the Bushes and Reagans. But Obama’s administration has its own share of left-leaning Bolsheviks. And the Republicans have circled the wagons and taken a totally obstructionist role. So the hope that Obama created of a new age of dialogue remains more of a hope than a reality.

The impression from outside the beltway, at least, is that there are two groups with mutually incompatible views of the world running Washington. They have grown incapable of talking to each other. And the question is not so much how to adopt policies that create the most good for American people and institutions, but rather “Who is in control?” Outside the Oval office, it is still the adolescent activists and the counter-activists of the same era who are in control.

Despite inroads made by Obama and the under fifty crowd, the dream of bringing Americans together in a dialogue, every day, seems more and more difficult. The fracturing of the media has meant more views find expression, which is very helpful. But it also has meant a kind of breakdown.

Before the fragmentation process started in the 1980’s there was an effort throughout the media to present information without filtering it through a partisan filter. But with the rise of the Murdock empire, even institutions as large and influencial as the Walls Street Journal have seen ideology filter news. For example, WSJ made no mention of the election of Barack Obama on the day after the election. As if the President didn’t count because he had the wrong sort of political views. And the photo of Arlen Specter that accompanied his change of party announcement made him look completely looney. Even if it were true that six decades of association with Republicans has made him so, it is truly not a sign of unbiased reporting to make him look gratuitously bad.

So, how do we bring even-handed reporting and productive dialogue back into the political arena? Here are some ideas:

• Speak more about common interests and shared ideals and less about fractious issues.
• Speak more about problems, solutions, ideas, policies, and programs and less about people and processes.
• Focus discussions on finding common ground in interests and principles.
• Speak less severely about the psychological deficiencies of opponents and more about ways to persuade and encourage constructive engagement. Exchew name-calling, ad-hominem attacks, calling into question a person’s intelligence, mental stability, or sanity. We have different physiologies and different life experiences. And unless we are willing to systematically eliminate those who are not like our own ideal selves, we will all be happier if we can live together peacefully, with civility, and with respect.
• Attempt to be truthful and balanced.
• Focus less on the horrific and scandalous and more on the possible and necessary.
• Make political discussions less strident and more thoughtful.
• Introduce ideas and points of view that are not compliant with partisan points of view - any of them - but ones that still make sense to reasonable, apolitical people.
• View arguments to be less about winning and losing (which makes debate a zero-sum game) and more about being an organized and systematic search for valid propositions - things that reasonable people will agree with. (which makes debate a means of increasing knowledge)

It may be that we have gone so far with polarization that the only purgative to the poison is a terrifying and destructive social upheaval. I hope that is not so. But it is clear that fact has played an ever-diminishing role in all of political discourse and political power considerations have played an ever-increasing role. It is almost to the point at which if a person is not strongly aligned with a political organization, he has no voice. And people of one partisan persuasion have become deaf to all the noises made by people of the opposing party persuasion.

A failure of the body politic to recognize and come to grips with the most fundamental and obvious facts is the inevitable result. One is reminded of the story of the emperor’s clothes. Only a naive child is willing to state the obvious, that the fine suit of clothing the king is wearing is not simply diaphanous - it is non-existent. In the fable, the whole world fell silent and blushed at the recognition of the gap between truth and accepted political dogma. But in our political climate instead of such a statement creating a great stir, it goes completely unnoticed amidst the cacauphony of political gamesmanship.

I respect Neiwert and Robinson for their great integrity, for their formidable insight, for their persistence, for the power of their prose, and for the depth and commitment of their readers and commentators. As I said, I find Orcinus a source of encouragement and sometimes inspiration. But I earnestly look forward to the day when their work is irrelevant. I wish I knew how we might get there.

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