This weekend I attended a wedding where I enjoyed the company of family and very old and dear friends. As I was talking to one close friend who I've known for over ten years, he jokingly informed me that he had concluded that two of our other friends are what he refers to as
Dirty Liberals. He said this in a tone that would have made Kathy Bates' character in
Misery proud when speaking of "dirty birds". However, what I found even more ominous in my friend's words were the way the term
Dirty Liberal resonated so well with the old anti-semitic word
Dirty Jew. This led me to wonder whether
anti-liberalism has come to replace
anti-semitism.
more below the fold:
My friend knows that I'm a philosophy professor and a psychotherapist, and therefore, no doubt, deduced my political leanings (we've always been drinking buddies in the past and have not discussed these things). Thus, no doubt, he was needling me. But I'm still curious about this term
Dirty Liberal as it was said with such delight, relish, and
loathing. Now, if anti-liberalism has come to replace anti-semitism, then we, as leftists, have far more serious issues to face than those of framing. This is because anti-semitism functions in a manner very different than other forms of ideology.
As I was reading this evening I happened to come across the following passage in Sean Homer's little introductory study on the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. I ask you to read it very carefully. Homer writes:
The 'Jew', or the Jewish race, is presented with fascist propoganda as a figure who transgresses and undermines the law and as such must first be punished and eventually eradicated so that a new harmonious Aryan society can emerge. Furthermore, the Nazis claimed that, because there were so many Jewish people who occupied positions of wealth and power, then the state must be strong and authoritative to counteract them. On the one hand, therefore, we find in fascist propoganda the portrayal of Jewish people as less than human-- as insects and rodents --so that it is easier to rationally justify their extermination and, on the other, the attribution to them of excessive power and influence. That is to say, a dual process is taking place whereby the dehumanizing of the other is accompanied by an inflation of the other's power and strength. If a particular group is so small and insignificant that we can simply stamp them out then why bother? They cannot pose that much of a threat. We must eradicate the other precisely because they are rich, powerful and influential. But, more importantly, by being rich, powerful and influential they are depriving us of our rightful position in society. What we find in anti-Semitism is the vicious cycle articulated through the superego, whereby the law-- the prohibition that maintains and regulates the social order --draws its strength from that which it excludes. The more authoritarian a regime becomes the greater the threat against it must be presumed to be. (Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan: Routledge Critical Thinkers, 2005, pg. 61)
This is a very disturbing analysis of how anti-semitism functions as an ideology indeed. Homer's point is that the anti-semitic person uses the term "Jew" to explain all the social ills of the world. The Jewish plot is taken to explain everything. Paradoxically, the anti-semite both believes that Jews are a small insigificant minority, yet that they have an enormous amount of power and control.
Having read the passage above, now replace every instance of the word "Jew" with the word "liberal" and every instance of the word "anti-semite", "fascist", or "nazi" with the word conservative. Doesn't this passage describe what's happened to liberals in the United States to the letter? That is, aren't liberals today portrayed by conservatives as people who transgress the moral laws (they're supposedly lazy, sexually promiscuous, perverse, etc). Aren't liberals also represented as having an enormous amount of power (media, congress, the courts) even though they're also supposed to be lazy and stupid? Aren't liberals held to be the cause of all of America's problems such that if we just got rid of liberals, all our problems would be solved? Finally, and most importantly, hasn't conservative paranoia and intolerance about liberals become all the more intense the more power conservatives have gained?
It is for this reasons that I'm skeptical about Lakoff's solution to the problems of today's political plight through framing. Don't get me wrong. I don't think Lakoff's proposals can hurt per se. However, the issue isn't so simple. It's not simply that liberals aren't getting their message out in a clear fashion. This is a problem, but it's not the central problem. What Lakoff fails to take into account is the sender of the message. That is, Lakoff doesn't take into account the fact that our capacity to listen to what another person is saying is partially dependent on the credibility we attribute to the sender of the message. Thus, for instance, I don't even bother listening to the arguments of neo-Nazis or KKK members because I assume that they're already instances of sophistry and not worth even entertaining. Similarly, conservatives have successfully painted liberals as being devious, immoral, untrustworthy, etc., such that there's no point listening to their message at all. Just as the Jews were ghetto-ized by the Nazis, liberals have now been ghetto-ized by conservatives. This does not bode well for the future of those of us on the left as it entails 1) that our message is ignored from the get-go, and more disturbingly 2) that we're portrayed as the cause of social disharmony and ill, which entails that down the line laws against us will become stricter and stricter.
I don't have any proposals as to how to get around this problem. I spend a great deal of time studying ideology and racism, but I don't have any easy answers as to how to shatter these phenomena. However, if this analysis in any way approaches the truth of what's currently going on in this country, then simply framing things in the right way or speaking in the right was is not going to solve our problems. Lakoff's theory, no matter how right it is in certain respects, is the fantasy of a group of political activists who don't care to be politically active but who believe that it can all be done through simple words and sound bites. However, as I recall, the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage, the French and American Revolutions, and the Englightenment didn't proceed through simple framing. They had to get off their bottoms and actually do something. We should be too. Any suggestions would be welcome.