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Matt Yglesias is delusional

Thu Sep 02, 2010 at 16:30

Truly:

"I don't see any evidence that the particular apocalyptic "my enemies are totalitarian madmen" strain of Birch/Beck/Goldberg conservatism has helped anyone win any elections."

Over at digby's place, Tristero has a long take-down of Matt's entire piece, which is apparently part of the neo-liberal attack on Markos's new book, American Taliban.

Tristero's piece is very good, very thorough, and very worth reading. But it proceeds by basically saying, "Okay, even if that were true:"

"Let's ignore all the obvious contradictory examples, like Bachmann and Coburn and Tancredo and DeLay and so on and so on and - solely for the sake of argument - go so far as to entirely concede Matt's point: no one
gets elected by being a rightwing loon."

I want to take the opposite approach. I want to basically argue that movement conservatives would be nowhere without this sort of rhetoric. It's not always their dominant form
of rhetoric--particularly in its crudest, most blatant form, but it's always
somewhere in the mix. As I explained back in May, 2008, in "Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--Pt. 1",
conservative elites have been playing this game for centuries now:

While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite
simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to
define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone
else as the dreaded "elite".

This is a very old game, and it's way past time we got a better handle on it. Before getting into any sort of messy details, it's important to note--ala my diary two weeks
ago, "The Ontology of Snark: A Prelude"--that
there's a common ego defense mechanism in play here:

· Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more
acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet;
separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense
emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in
order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For
example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her
husband.

Real, actual conservative elites have been using displacement as a stock in trade for millenia, creating ghost elites for unwitting populists to misdirect their anger at. It was
virtually inevitable that Obama's "new politics" of
"change" would be targetted with this ancient charge....

Elites Create Their Demon Others
It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged
dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things
the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness
and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow
onto another group. Because this involves disowning something
fundamental of itself, the mechanism involved for the elite is more
projective identification than projection, per se:

Projective identification is used to project the bad object into (not onto) another person so it becomes a part of that person.

The person then identifies with that other person, and hence has means to control them.

The person projected into may consequently be pressured to behave congruently with the projective phantasy.

This description captures quite well the enormous investment of time, energy and money we see on behalf of conservatives pushing the meme of "liberal elites", and devising
various ways of getting "liberals" to act out their appointed
roles.

The more extreme forms of demonizing liberals work very well for conservatives, in large part because they resonate with this broader narrative framework that they have repeated and reinforced
countless times over the centuries. Of course, that's not all there is to
it. There are cognitive motivations and biases that predispose
conservatives to see the world this way. And what Matt is doing is
invoking a counter set of cognitive motivations and biases--ones that
are generally much sounder and saner, but that totally mislead when one
is trying to understand and respond effectively to conservative attacks.

Those biases are the foundations of the dominant 18th Century Enlightenment model of disembodied reason. And late 20th and early 21st century cognitive science has definitively
shown those biases to be false. Facts do not persuade people apart from
narrative frameworks. When the facts contradict the framework, the facts
are rejected, not the frame. Indeed, that's why folks like Matt
stubbornly hold onto their false models of reason.

Of course this is all very high-level stuff I'm arguing here. But it dovetails very well with the specific history of movement conservatism, particularly since the New Deal and WWII, as
it consistently failed to develop any sort of positive, pragmatic framework for
dealing with America's realworld problems, and only managed to win elections by
promoting paranoid us-vs-them narratives of seemingly limitless
scope--McCarthyism in the early 50s (based on Nixon's smear campaigns that
first won him a seat in Congress), racial backlash and the culture wars
beginning with Goldwater 1964 and Nixon in 1968, honed to perfection by Reagan
in 1980, and systematized by Gingrich in 1994--but never, ever actually
solving any of the problems that it promised to.

And yet, when it comes down to it, Yglesias is basically trying to argue that nothing conservatives have done along these lines has been politically successful.

Which is utterly, downright delusional.

Am I twising his argument beyond his meaning? First off, I'd say that if I am, then his argument doesn't hold much punch. But here's what he said in complete context:

Paul Rosenberg :: Matt Yglesias is delusional

I previously expressed hope that Markos Moulitsas' American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right would be better than the publicity material suggested. Jamelle Bouie read it for The American Prospect
and reports back that it isn't. Kevin Drum, meanwhile, notes the contrast between this kind of
scathing review on a very mainstream liberal magazine and the reception of Liberal
Fascism on the right.

I tend to think that this is one of the areas where progressives aren't just doing the right thing, but have a smarter tactical approach to politics. There are scenarios in which tagging
your political opponents with smears can be effective, but I don't see any
evidence that the particular apocalyptic "my enemies are totalitarian
madmen" strain of Birch/Beck/Goldberg conservatism has helped anyone win
any elections. This should be differentiated from the occasional lapse into
rhetorical excess that everyone does now and again. I'm talking specifically
about the kind of sustained effort to seriously persuade people that Elana Kagan favors sharia or Dwight
Eisenhower is a Communist that you see among loons of all stripes but that
seems to be granted more respectability on the right.

So, progressives "have a smarter tactical approach to politics"??? Really? Looking back at the past 42 years, since 1968, you can actually say that with a straight face?
Particularly after the trainwreck of the last 20 months? That's a
whole separate count of delusional thinking in my book.

But back to getting a fix on what Matt's saying here. I haven't seen Kos's book, but I don't have to to respond to this. If his execution's flawed, then it's flawed, and he can be
criticized for that. But the claim that his argument is inherently
flawed could only hold water if, for example the inverse of the wild-eyed
conservative claims were equally absurd. And this simply is not
the case. For example, the inverse of claiming that Elana Kagan favors
sharia law is claiming that top Republicans favor turning America into a
theoocracy.

Which, of course, they do!. The influence of R. J. Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism on the conservative movement seems to be
something that Matt is utterly ignorant of, so he's just a brief quote from one
of many relevant posts at Talk2Action.org to give some idea:

David Barton, who recently has been tapped as an alleged "expert" on American history featured on the Glenn Beck show, has built a career upon his claim that United States
government was founded on Biblical precepts. This creates a major problem - if
America was founded as a Christian nation, how can we account for slavery?
Barton's articles on slavery on his Wallbuilders web site stress that many of
the Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to the institution of slavery (which
is true) but then he refers readers to a Wallbuilders article by Barton's close colleague Stephen
McDowell, which explains that although Southern Slavery was wrong, it was wrong
because it wasn't Biblical slavery as defined by Christian Reconstructionist
theologian R.J. Rushdoony, whose basic approach was simple - what was
permissible according to Biblical scripture is permissible now: including
slavery.

McDowell's article cites R.J. Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Law six times in its footnotes and that's notable given that the book was Rushdoony's master work on how to
implement Biblical law in the American legal system. R.J. Rushdoony's scheme
included establishing stoning and burning at the stake for adultery, homosexuality,
and idolatry, and the legalization of Biblical slavery. Leaders in the
Christian Reconstructionism movement Rushdoony founded have for several decades
now been trying to make it so.

This is what's been building beneath the surface on the right for several generations now, and it's beginning to come right out into the open with the likes of Beck and Tea Party candeidates
like Sharon Angle.

It's not a delusion to talk about it.
It's a delusion to deny that it exists.

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