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Thursday, June 11, 2009

Moving Past the Manichean Moment

"The Commenter Formerly Known as NCSteve" over at TPM wrote:
[I]n the fever del[i]rium that conservatives call "reality" these days, people are endlessly, dangerously su[s]cept[i]ble to video games, popular music and situation comedies, but completely unaffected by those who actually purport to be trying to affect their opinions. Are we going to have to wait until one of these loons gets his hands on some fertil[i]zer and fuel oil and takes out hundreds [before] the MSM says "enough is enough" to jolly ol' Rushbo, the dramatic Beck, and the little black dress clad Coulter rather than calling them "great guests" and "entertainers" and "always provocative?" …

At some level, every one of them, from John Boehner to Rupert Murdoch to Rush Limbaugh to Billy Jim Goober in his un-airconditioned manufactured home/arsenal in the Dixie Twilight Trailer Park believes that race means something more than a slight variance in the genes that control melanin production. They think that that something is inextricably linked to "Americanism." Obama personifies and crystal[l]izes their anxiety over the browning of America that's been growing among them for thirty years. For the rich ones, their horror is magnified by the idea that he wants to bump their taxes up a few points and put some modest curbs on the unfettered rapacity they fought so hard to claw back from the New Deal reforms.

Fearing taxes and regulation, they eagerly whipped up the more open racial hostility and anxiety of their poorer brethr[e]n. They saw it as a handy tool with which to rally the poor whites to the noble cause of unfettered rapacity.

All too true, of course. The Southern Strategy was an undeniable reality, and it reverberates perniciously into the present life of Movement Conservatism's mass-mediated hate speech, long after the Culture Wars were fought (and decisively won by us secular democratic multiculturalists, it pays to remember).

I worry a bit that just what is being recommended by the phrase "enough is enough" is under-specified here (more straight-talk analyses of the kind exemplified by the marvelously compelling quoted commentary itself? or wider legal proscriptions of ugly opinions construed as incitements to violence, with all the real practical and civil libertarian problems of any such moves?), just as I worry about the rather cavalier admission that right-wing dumb-dumbs and hate-mongers are all participating "at some level" in the maintenance of a climate that denigrates the vulnerably different but leaves unspecified how actual differences in participation should make a difference in our responses to them.

I do think it is crucial that we respond to the terrifying reality delineated here by working to marginalize the white-racist patriarchal theocrat (whether market or Chiristianist or both) "Movement Conservative" element both from the American mainstream and the Republican Party, rather than just losing ourselves in yet another facile self-congratulatory episode in borad-brush Manichean politics -- remember when the left were all traitors for opposing an obviously illegal immoral ruinous war of choice? -- that leaves substantial minorities of comparatively reasonable but unfortunately not progressive actually-existing fellow citizens with too little recourse but likely common cause with the very demonic extremity that so properly horrifies us (and surely most of them).

UPDATE: I just mean that we should always frame these necessary analyses of Movement Conservatism in a way that facilitates the marginalization of the white-racist patriarchal theocracy and encourages the comparatively more reasonable (or susceptible to reasonableness) under its umbrella to dis-identify rather than defend these vile extremities, and also resist investing white-racist patriarchal theocracy with a depth and pervasiveness that provokes paranoid or authoritarian reactions contrary to purpose. I'm far from denying (or defending!) the legacies of white-racist patriarchal corporate-militarism or Christianism, obviously, I should hope, I'm just making a broad point about how actually-democratizing politics should proceed in the belly of the beast.

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