Sometimes it is good to remember all the blessings we have. For example, thanks to voting Republican, there aren’t death panels euthanizing everyone over 65. Also, thanks to giving the GOP a majority in the House, the United States has not made Christianity illegal, while gay marriage and abortion continue to be illegal. Because we gave the GOP a majority in the senate, President Obama’s plan to overthrow the U.S. constitution and institute sharia law has been foiled. Also, we are all safe from Ebola, which has been cured, thanks to the GOP majority in the Senate.
Now, you might protest that there never were “death panels,” that no elected Democrat has wanted to make any religion illegal, nor the practice of any religion*, that gay marriage was and remains something that Congress has nothing to do with, that no one has wanted “sharia law” in the United States**, and Ebola hasn’t been cured and wasn’t a national threat as much as a humanitarian catastrophe, but then you might as well say that you never voted for the Republican House and Senate! Next, you’ll be telling me that you don’t watch cable news.
"Ignorance is the mother of admiration." -- George Chapman (1612)
The 2014 by-elections were a disaster. Democrats should not have lost as badly as they did, but Republicans won with a nihilistic and self-destructive 21st century strategy that we don’t generally recognize as an electoral strategy. They won by waging a War with Terror.
In the last four decades, Democratic Party thinkers have all, practically from their first votes, known about Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” We talk about it around these parts quite often, in fact. It explains the Republican Party’s flirtation (Nixon era), engagement (Reagan’s victory), and consummation (post-H.W. Bush) with racist politics. The only real argument anymore is whether or not we should stop calling it “Southern,” because, after H.W. Bush tried to back away from race baiting tactics only to succumb with “Willie Horton,” appealing to racism became a winning strategy all across the U.S. for the GOP. What I’d like to point out is that manufacturing a fictional fear in order to campaign on it is now a real and peculiar second strategy only made possible by the consolidation of media and the artificial ratings panics in cable news.
I don’t suppose anyone remembers “the summer of the shark” in 2001? One reason people didn’t know much about Afghanistan, George Bush meeting with Taliban, or al Qaeda killing Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, 36 hr before the 9/11 attacks is that the news was on a shark bubble all summer. It was a case of, as the Chinese proverb has it, “One dog barks at a shadow, and seven bark at the noise.”
I don’t need to explain news bubbles, I’m sure. Our free press is a free market press. Newspapers have been disappearing since the 1990’s, and television and radio stations have been “consolidating” at a ferocious clip. Since advertising depends upon ratings, and ratings come from people flipping through or scanning by, the most successful formula is spectacle (CNN’s helicopter hovering over a place where they expect the hearse containing Michael Jackson to show up, “live!”) followed by basic, base emotions.
People talk about “The Jerry Springer Effect,” but they miss the lesson when they do. (I just saw that there are “free download grade saver papers” on The Jerry Springer effect. O misericordia! What did I do to suffer for this?) People think that the outstanding effect of that show was the elevation of “trailer trash” and “ghetto stars.” Sure. That happened, but the real lesson of the show was refined, pure displays of rage, lust, and despair draw viewers. It was professional wrestling with adultery, and “The Glen Beck Show” was just Jerry Springer with Morton Downey Jr. politics.
Talk radio’s formula is, essentially, “Are you mad yet?” “You won’t believe what those clowns in Washington want to do” could serve as a summary of every episode of most AM talk shows. They make money off of anger. It’s quick, and it’s easy, and it’s addictive. It also scales up to television news.
To get the anger, the old talk radio formula was, “Can you believe how your tax dollars are being wasted by Big Spending Liberals in Washington,” and it could be repeated every day. All that it needed was a single instance of an inspector general catching a fraud or a newspaper detecting waste — both things that show that democracy works and that government functions — to generate another example of how “those out of touch, big spending, tax hogs are all at the trough.” However, talk radio changed in the W. Bush administration, although probably not because his administration racked up more overt waste, at least in gross terms, than any in history. (U.S. Grant might have had more in inflation-adjusted waste.)
It changed to, “Those people want to kill you. Can you believe what they want to do now?” The transition hinged on the framing myth of W. Bush’s claim that “the President’s job is to keep the American people safe.”
Well, that’s a lie. It isn’t the job of a policeman, and it isn’t the job of the executive, and it isn’t the job of the military, and it isn’t the job of the President to “keep Americans safe.” Nevertheless, W. Bush announced that it was his job. It also became his ideology after 9/11/01. Talk radio and Republican candidates had a new line of outrage — a fascist one**, ultimately.
The “safe” populace is the populace in a police state, and “safety” at all costs as ideology led to part of the GOP civil war, where the civil liberties and libertarian voters of the TEA Party were at odds with the bug-eyed nativists. The contradictions inherent in this appeal to fear, and anger arising from fear, rather than anti-intellectualism, led to the bizarre, contradictory stances of the “TEA Party” wave of 2010.
Charlie “the great” Pierce has beaten me to the punch in the central observation I wanted to make in this diary. The GOP won in 2014 on Ebola. From 2008, at least, the GOP has peddled the myth of “our porous southern border.” Until Daesh grew into an omniscient, omnipresent equal of a superpower, “our porous southern border” was a single ululation yodeled in harmony in every Values Voter summit. For 2010, Arizona “had to” make its own border policy in SB 1070, because ourporoussouthernborder was wide open to “illegals,” and Jan Brewer could strike a Tenther and terror warrior pose at the same time. In the 2012 election, we heard about “drug gangs” that did too “invade” Texas and sheriffs in Texas in constant shoot-outs with the Zetas being told to “stand down” by the nefarious Obama administration, which of course covered it all up super effectively, because of “our porous southern border.” How bad is this terrifying villain in the GOP base’s imagination? Ask Eric Cantor. In 2014, just last year, the green room gang of Republicans assured us that Ebola was going to be airborne, that it was being carried by child refugees from Central America, that it was because of “our porous southern border,” which “Obama” refuses to enforce.
"I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Book II.
Why is this a new “strategy,” you ask? Haven’t satirists imagined it for some time?
This is a new strategy because it is not ideological but merely opportunistic and cynical. Republicans are not staking themselves to any issue or policy. They co-opt whatever fixation is currently inflaming the unblinking eye of television and explain how they have always been against it, how they would fix it, how Democrats won’t say the magic words that they will. In practice, Republicans have been unable to agree on a platform or enforce discipline since they became a lapel pin for self-funded candidates and plutocrat meat puppets, so the War with Terror strategy is their most viable campaigning tactic.
Their aspiring sophists like Frank Luntz identify slogans, but that’s about all the candidates need from “Washington.” They can exploit the weekly fear from a position of opposition or power, too. Thus, “The President refuses to call these shark attacks what they are: piscaterrorist murder invasions of our sovereign shores” can just as easily be, “The Democrats want to undo all of the protections against flesh-eating bacteria that we have put in place. Our commander-in-chief, and you really shouldn’t criticize a wartime president, has kept America safe from flesh-eating bacteria, but Democrat Party leaders want to weaken our borders and let immigrants to come into our schools and swimming pools with flesh eating bacteria all over them.” Candidates wait for cable television to throw fit and then ride it, whipping its flanks and spurring its belly, straight into office.
What are we hearing from the front running GOP candidates on all levels today? They have fastened, like a tick on a cow’s hide, onto a central idea that we Democrats are out to get them. They argue that we want to throw them in jail for their religion and their guns, and we also want to accelerate the changes that already frighten them by inviting Muslims and Hispanics, and then making their opinions on the matter illegal. They campaign on the idea that our prior Secretary of State actually ordered the death of Americans, that all of the current executive administration hates all of the U.S. military, and that there are plans to abolish American sovereignty. Donald Trump begins and ends with “Everything is terrible.” He doesn’t have to specify, because the details are a collection of miasmal ghosts summoned by a full day of Rush Limbaugh, Neil Boortz, and FoxNews. Every Republican I know can tell me that “the debt is $11 trillion.” Oh, I forgot: “!!” The GOP front runners campaign on the idea that we are a threat to their safety. Republican voters genuinely think, and are encouraged to think, that we wish them ill, that we want to beggar and control them.
So, the 2016 version of Ebola, which was the 2014 version of the “Texas invasion” of 2012, which was the updating of the 2010 “Obama won’t deport illegals,” which was the updating of 2008’s “Saul Alinksy, terrorist palling around with, Jeremiah Wright-not-denouncing,” is yet to be defined. It will appear, though. It will likely be a Syrian refugee, invented or real, but there’s no way to predict. The media will gravitate to it. They will because it makes ratings, because it keeps people rooted to a station, because it leads to re-Tweets, because it ends up being #1 on “trending.”
The GOP wants it to be “our porous southern border” or “treason in Libya,” but it doesn’t matter to them what it is. They were able to ride Ebola to Congress on the shoulders of eleven sick Americans, so they can inflate just about any balloon into a bouncy castle.
So, with the 21st century Fear Strategy, what do we do? Well, we know what to do, but it’s the same choice we had in the 1960’s. We can choose our own fear — one that might even be reality based — and turn it into a towering monster. We can make it simplistic and garish and ugly and a false dichotomy of us or them. Of course, if we do that, then we will be mastered by our monsters as surely as Frankenstein, as surely as the Republican Party, and we will lose our selves as well as our minds in the process.
* I have to be careful with gigantic statements. In fact, “liberals” and conservatives alike have a problem with some religious practices. There are legal issues with Christian Science, Jehovah Witness, and, needless to say, some aggressive “exorcisms,” but that’s not what the right means when it accuses “Democrats” of “wanting to outlaw Christianity.”
** “Sharia law” is a nebulous thing in reality, but not in the minds of extreme right wing voters. In reality, it is law based on religious text. In reality, the group most desirous of having U.S. law based on religious text in the U.S. is the fringe of evangelical Christians who insist on putting decalogs in courthouses and read David Barton books.
*** It is fascist, I would argue, because it argues for strength as a goal in and of itself, the strong man and strong leader as savior, and Order and orderliness as an answer to an atmosphere of cultural uncertainty. This is similar to Mussolini’s original appeal — right down to the praise of the machine and machine age (in this case the assumption that NSA and cameras will be a New Age) — as well as the underlying stew of fear beneath the Wiemar. Obviously, all analogies are tenuous, and I only want to say that the appeal is fascist, nothing more.