It is very tempting to chalk the latest episode of Bachmania to yet more sick evidence of right wing lunacy and dismiss it with some eye-rolling or shake of the head. Nothing wrong with that reaction, as Michelle Bachman DOES guarantee an endless supply of episodes of Wingnut paranoia theater. But to dismiss the kookie frenzy popping up all around us from both elected and unelected actors should cause a long pause. There is a method to their madness. And believe you me, President Obama and his policies are but a foil, merely incidental to their larger plan.
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Yesterday's installment of blood-dripping paranoia theater was brought to us courtesy of the 205 Texas secessionists who gathered in Austin calling for blood, and Michelle Bachman asking people to "make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers’ against health care reforms". Together with the outlandish assertions by Huckabee, Mike Enzi in the Republican radio address, Grassley's "air-gram," the PR effect certainly amplified by the spectacle-hungry media has simulated guerrilla warfare. This is straight out of the Taliban insurgency playbook. The point is to besiege us the public with nonstop high decibel propaganda warfare, make the public square totally uninhabitable for us, such that we eventually scream and run out of there in disgust.
Indeed, it is we, not President Obama, who are the real targets of this insurgency (Remember Rep. Pete Sessions's (R-tX) loud opiningthat the Republicans should emulate the Taliban? We were warned). It was we who tried to shift away from the erstwhile Reagan orthodoxy. Now, they will punish us for such heresy, and offend our sensibilities so much that we recoil. The endgame it seems is the following:
- Erase and endlessly shift the boundaries of "taboos" - speaking the unspeakable: The goal is to significantly recalibrate our tolerance level for verbal and the threat of physical violence. We become desensitized to what we once believed was taboo and are no longer sure what the acceptable parameters of public discourse are anymore. Similarly, Al Quaeda re-interpreted Jihad such that even non-radicalized Muslims became trapped into arguing what is and is not Jihad. They make what everyone thought were already settled facts about Jihad subject to debate. Right there, the taboo boundary has been shifted.
- Decentralize the source of attacks: Use multiple levels. The point of bombarding us non-stop with wingnut "IEDs" is to reset the decibel level of public discourse. They anticipate that the din will drown out any conversation whatsoever plus the threat of violence will and drive many people OUT OF THE PUBLIC SQUARE. See, the problem the wingnuts and their conservative allies realized was that too many of us came out into the public square as far back as the 2006 elections believing that we had re-claimed that space for civic participation. The Palin rallies last Fall test-drove the idea of noise warfare but they ran out of time before the election to seriously clear us out the public square. Now that we're in governing mode, which necessarily involves debate, dispute, doubt, soft and hard decision making, and dissatisfaction, the wingnuts think that their noise will meld with our policy anxieties into this unbearable and amorphous sense of ennui. Their hope is that we literally quit the public square in disgust over the insanity. Voila, we exit, we abandon prize territory that we won. The media predictably eggs us on to sour on the public square.
- Reconstruct the subject/object equation of the public discourse: They have gotten us taking about a subject matter that they have chosen (exactly what I am doing here). We enter "reaction mode" and we talk about them and not us or our proactive agenda/debates. We also are limited to using terms they have released into the public bloodstream. So we talk about 'birthers," "deathers," "tenthers," "torture made us safe" etc. And it does not matter if we are talking about these terms critically or even pejoratively. The fact is, these have become the topic/subject rather than something else of our own choosing. The leaders of Al Qaeda had a savvy media self-exposure strategy prior to 9-11, telegraphing their presence not only to their enemy (us) but also to would be supporters. They "hid in plain sight" and got us talking about them. In spite of earlier operational successes such as the WTC bombing of 1993, USS Cole bombing, US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania etc, they were simply considered a media curiosity. It didn't matter that the intelligence agencies were aware of them and and their deadly potential for mayhem (Richard Clarke et al's warnings), Condi Rice could wave the information off as not being "actionable intelligence". Similarly, the gun-toting town hall invaders are just the advance guard that gets our attention not only with the visible props but also rhetoric that we find bizarre. The MSM predictably laps it up while wondering out loud whether such threats should be taken seriously. Some of us wonder how this could be possibly happening, all the while believing that someone (Secret service, FBI etc.) is watching all this and doing something about it. Right? Well, the fact is that these wingnuts are INDEED pushing the envelope of unapologetic displays of threat beyond what they could do during the 1990s when the last Democratic President was in office. They are OCCUPYING the public square and dare us to enter it. At first it all seems fringy, well, until a critical mass of their ilk does it and it becomes commonplace
- Generate facsimiles of endless crises: Like a perverse Seinfeld episode, the "crises" don't have to be about anything at all, let alone about something substantive. Both conventional and insurgent armies routinely create diversionary battles that seem pointless but the value of which lies in creating the "right atmospherics." Crisis mode occludes long-term strategic planning in favor of instantaneous fire-fighting mode. Putting out fires generates "heat," blinding light, acrid smoke as all kinds of dangerously combustible components flare up. Right now, the Healthcare reform debate has been stripped of its pedigree and the indisputable facts. No-one is able to talk about its complicated history and context, and so without focus on the critical antecedents, wingnuts are able to freeze it in the "acrimonious present" where the facts are recast as "opinion" and outright lies are given serious consideration.
Do these and many other tactics mean that they are likely to drive us out? NO, but that is their plan and these seemingly freakish behaviors dovetail into a potent theme. There is a method to their madness. Generating disaffection using well-worn triggerpoints (racism, myths of rugged individualism, religious apocalyptic rhetoric, good old capitalist greed etc.) is a playbook that they have down to a science. They own the media and are able to exponentially amplify the antics of what should be a statistical minority into a faux critical mass. A successful media sleight of hand, I say.
Remember, ideologically the rabid right has not had to do anything other than defend the status quo, asymmetrical power relations, and attempt to erode many forms of hard won social advances. Thus, when they play their cards right, as Reagan did, the public ironically feels safe in their hands. We on the other hand risk provoking real anxiety anytime we try to advance social and economic justice. In a country founded on the creed of competition, such anxiety among most ordinary people is real, and not to be mistaken for ignorance/gullibility.
So we need to be savvy to the wingnut tactics, not dismiss them with snark. The challenge is to devise smart multipronged strategies to simultaneously neutralize the corrosive wingnut stunts whilst doggedly sticking to our long term strategic goals of consolidating our hold on the public square, delivering policies that actually benefit the majority of the populace, and also working inch by inch to build AND sustain a critical mass for our point of view. It is going to be really hard, since as is already evident, we ourselves sometimes work at cross-purposes to our end goals.