Real fears, real traumas, and the very real inequalities within the social fabric are in danger of being used to rip apart the opposition against the extremely powerful Bush-led war machine.
At Daily Kos and elsewhere, on the heels of the Don Imus/racism scandal, powerful psychological and sociocultural dilemmas are taking front stage, pulling apart the consensus that could lead to an effective coalition to bring down the Bush Administration.
"Divide and conquer" was recently used by the GOP to rally their base, playing on irrational fears about homosexuality and false claims of attacks upon Christianity. It worked to bring out enough GOP voters to give Bush the semblance of a "legitimate" win. We must recognize this strategy and find a way to address it. As a psychologist, I want to look at how this mechanism works, describe why it is so effective, and discuss ways to counter it.
"divide et impera" -- "divide and rule". The motto of Louis XI of France. Though this political axiom--conveying that government is more easily maintained if factions are set against each other and not permitted to unite against the ruler--is attributed to the Florentine political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), he in fact denounced it. [LINK]
When Fox News went after Barak Obama recently, and began loudly suggesting that Hillary Clinton was leaking dirt on him, the FoxAttacks website correctly recognized the "divide et impera" in action:
This is the classic "divide & conquer" tactic. It muddies the waters, sows suspicion and, if successful, leaves one's enemy in a demoralized, confused state.
On the largest canvas, this is what Bush's war on terror is all about. With its not so subtle overtones of racism against non-caucasians, he labelled entire states -- Iran, Iraq, and North Korea -- an "axis of evil". More recently, Bush said the Iraqi "enemy" represents "pure evil".
But on the national scale, the divide/conquer strategy has historically centered around race and sex. The divisions between class and national groups is also real, but of diminishing significance (although nothing prevents them from not becoming more divisive in the future).
Lest the diary become unneeded tinder for yet another flame war, I would like to explain HOW issues like the Imus "joke" (too many links to give), or the kos diary on Kathy Sierra, and its critics (one prominent example), become unwinnable exercises in self-explication, self-justification, and the very basic human need for other-validation.
In all of these diaries, the perceptions of oneself and the behaviors of others are thrown together into a spicy stew of righteous indignation, inevitable defensiveness, and a fevered search after truth and rejection of falsehood. This is all made possible because for each diarist and commenter, their own subjective selves are the basis for the commentary.
And rightly so! For it is very difficult, if not impossible, to step so far outside of ourselves that any kind of objectivity is truly possible. We are formed by the society that conditioned us, by the parents that raised us, and by the experiences that fashioned our psyches and nervous systems.
The sad fact is that most of us experience invalidations of our experience almost every day. For some people, the experiences are more profound and pervasive than for others. Examples are members of minority groups living within a majority-led society, or members of a despised or negatively labelled group -- like ex-felons -- and finally, not exhaustively but as an example, the mentally ill and wounded or traumatized. For instance, the women who suffer from PTSD because of sexual assault and rape wrote very movingly of their experiences in some of the more recent diaries.
So, human experience is ineluctably subjective. And yet, human beings have found ways to communicate and join into larger and larger collectives over the span of historical time. In my mind, the great tragedy of the fall of Marxism (which may yet be exaggerated) was that it was the last great representative of a universalist trend coming out of the Enlightenment that promised a greater unity for mankind.
Returning to the contemporary concrete, today we are trying to end the rule of one of the biggest groups of criminals and incompetents to have ever ruled a nation-state. The recent controversy over Wolfowitz getting his girlfriend a job shows how the Bush Administration and its acolytes are sewing chaos and rebellion wherever they go over the globe. As the NYT comments on the Wolfowitz/World Bank flap:
At its core, the fight about whether Mr. Wolfowitz should stay on at the bank is a debate about Mr. Bush and his tumultuous relationship with the rest of the world, particularly the bank, the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which have viewed themselves — at various moments since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — as being at war with the Bush White House and its agenda.
But if straights are fighting (or afraid of) gays, blacks and whites bicker over the terms of discrimination, and men and women argue over the extent of female oppression, the needed unity to battle the main enemy -- the military-industrial complex and their White House board of directors -- will be broken.
There are so many successful examples of using the divide and conquer strategy that it is disheartening. Whispering the name "Willie Horton" is enough to stir powerful feelings of angry impotence and rage in any liberal old enough to remember what it signified.
The undeniable truth behind these controversial diaries is the experiential truth that usually underlies them. Women are assaulted. Reproductive rights are under daily attack. African-Americans are still horribly discriminated against. Human beings are still cast out from their families because of the person they love. The poor still lack opportunities. We could go on and on.
What is usually so WRONG about the flame or pie wars is that the individuals involved are 99.99999% good people, intent on defending the integrity of what they have experienced in life, whether it be kindness, violence, or anything else. And if you disagree with them, the invalidation becomes too great to bear, at least in a medium where a few keystrokes and a return key are enough to quickly and severely slay your enemy. I know... I have felt the intensity myself and hit the return key one too many times for my own good.
The Internet is still so new, from an evolutionary, social-psychological perspective, that we have not learned always how to handle it with aplomb and dignity.
We need to have MORE diaries about the crimes and indignities of racism and sexism, about the need for tolerance of sexual orientation, about the oppression of poor countries and people by giant corporations, facilitated by the even more powerful nation-states that back them.
I thought of putting in charts and statistics that would show how shitty black Americans still have it in America, or how women are far and away more victimized by male violence than men, but I thought again about it.
What good would that do for the man who was bullied by other men growing up, or for the thousands of men sexually assaulted in the prisons of America? What good would that do for the thousands of impoverished caucasians, or the thousands from other race/national/ethnic groups who live in oppression and poverty. Some may be able to hear (because, for instance, the centrality of prejudice and discrimination against African-Americans in U.S. history and politics is crucial to anyone who would understand this country), but if they can't, it may be because their own experience stands out too loudly to allow them to hear it.
If you do not resonate to a negative label, you will feel defensive if it is attached to you. I don't care who you are. In that case, political dialogues that seek to vilify a group or people run the danger of generating opponents that they might not otherwise have if the dialogue had been steered away from the personal.
This may be impossible under current circumstances, and I have bemoaned the degree to which political discussion has been subsumed under the personalistic and trivial, following the ethos of "reality TV" and People magazine.
Anyone can go back and read what political discussion and commentary looked like thirty or forty years ago. In those days, the FBI or somebody like them would have to go underground, in programs like Cointelpro, to cast aspersions, rumors, and dark insinuations against one's opponents. Now, it's done simply, quickly, and daily on the blogging boards of America.
This must stop! Our time grows perilously short to defeat the forces of reaction that would turn this country and the rest of the world back to barbarism, if not destroy the planet itself.
But it will take forbearance, a heightened sensitivity and tolerance, a willingness to see things from the other person's viewpoint, and an understanding that every human being needs and seeks validation and will answer with outrage if he or she senses or believes they are attacked.
Forbearance, kindness, a willingness to understand the other person's point of view...
Are we up to it?