"A dangerous inheritance" by @BloggersRUs

"A dangerous inheritance"

by Tom Sullivan


Still image from Network (1976)

Why, why do some of our neighbors persist in cleaving to a political cult of personality bent on destroying the very nation whose principles they glorify in symbols and songs?

The answers to that are not only more complex than political soundbites, but difficult for a liberalism built on Enlightenment ideals to accept. The left's adversaries are doggedly resistant to reason and facts. Progressives too proud by half of their command of both find it infuriating that their go-to tools have no measurable effect on a cult of personality undermining its own economic interests and professed values. If the American economic system is in a rush to bottom, determined to transform everything and everyone it touches to profits for those at the top, our neighbors are just as determined to wring the last measure of decency from the American experiment.

A couple of articles this week broadened my understanding. But first, let's quickly review our theory of child-rearing.

George Lakoff's "Moral Politics" got at part of the answer over two decades ago. People don't vote their interests, they vote their identities. Lakoff believed conservatives and liberals view the world through a parent's eyes. Liberals hope to nurture children and maximize their potential. Conservatives see a hostile world out there, a natural world with threats around every corner, where the strict father's role is teaching children to navigate and dominate it. Success in that world begins with discipline, with listening to Daddy, first and foremost, and leaving undisturbed the (conservative) natural order's strict, moral hierarchy:

The conservative moral hierarchy helps explain Republican attacks on affordable healthcare. Sound familiar? https://t.co/V0HEbgHu77 pic.twitter.com/YCwZMyKhEt

— George Lakoff (@GeorgeLakoff) July 1, 2017

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!" Ned Beatty bellowed in Network (1976). So have climate activist Greta Thunberg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In sailing across the Atlantic to attend to the UN’s Youth Climate Summit, 16-year-old, Swedish climate activist Thunberg has drawn media attention to her issue and personal attacks from the right. She's experienced "a tsunami of male rage," Martin Gelin writes at the New Republic. Men of the far right have called her a “deeply disturbed messiah of the global warming movement” and a petulant, "arrogant child.” Why? Because this female, this adolescent, is meddling with the primal forces of nature.

Researchers Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology find a link between climate denialism and anti-feminist right. For climate skeptics, they write, "it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity." That is, climate change threatens their identity:
The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.
What Hultman calls climate change is a threat to "industrial breadwinner masculinity." That bundle of values is, as Lakoff described, built on viewing the natural world as a thing to exploit and dominate through development. To observe limits to that is to make them feel less, well, manly. Environmentalism is feminizing and “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy.”

Ocasio-Cortez brushes off right-wing insults like lint from her shoulder. Young, smart, pretty, Latina, she has become an obsession with the American right for reasons similar to Thunberg. Promoting her Green New Deal has made her a target of male rage as nationalism and misogynist rhetoric bubble up not only in the U.S. but abroad. Fear of change is a powerful motivator, Gelin observes.

More rungs on the conservative moral hierarchy are at risk from immigration and demographic shifts. Eve Fairbanks examines for the Washington Post how conservatives sell themselves as "reasonable" in defense of their places atop a hierarchy they perceive as birthrights.

Raised near the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, Fairbanks immersed herself in Lincoln speeches, Civil War rhetoric, and soldiers' letters. What she notices among "reasonable conservatives" is the same "antebellum reasoning" used to defend slavery. "The same exact words. The same exact arguments."

Defenders of chattel slavery sought not to defend the vile practice, she explains, but to portray themselves as champions of "reason," free speech, and "civility." They were the persecuted ones, southern Davids facing down northern Goliaths, shamed "purely on the basis of freely held ideas, the right of every thinking man."

Fairbanks writes:
All of this is there in the reasonable right: The claim that they are the little people struggling against prevailing winds. The argument that they’re the ones championing reason and common sense. The allegation that their interlocutors aren’t so much wrong as excessive; they’re just trying to think freely and are being tormented. The reliance on hyperbole and slippery slopes to warn about their adversaries’ intentions and power. The depiction of their opponents as an “orthodoxy,” an epithet the antebellum South loved.
Lincoln saw the threat "antebellum reasoning" posed, Fairbanks explains, that "by claiming to stand for freedom, reason and civility, and by framing themselves as beleaguered victims, pro-Southern thinkers could draft new warriors who thought they were fighting for something fundamentally American, even if they were wary of slavery itself."

Today's practitioners do not oppose admission of brown people to this country or refugees or Muslims. No, they simply want the laws enforced and borders respected and protected. In another era, the argument might be states' rights.

"If you don't have borders then, you don't have a country," the acting president told a rally in South Carolina last year. Fairbanks does not include him in the reasonable right, but the appeal to common sense in defense of bigotry is the same among "renegade thinkers" who portray themselves as stifled by political correctness.

Others, Fairbanks suspects charitably,
... seek the reassurance of antebellum reasoning to help reconcile their ambivalent feelings about cultural and demographic changes. Still others may simply be disillusioned with contemporary politics, intuit that important conversations are somehow not being had, and long for a discourse anchored on simple, easily shared principles. They may have no racist sympathies nor even be particularly conservative. But that’s why the South came up with this form of argument in the first place. It conscripted allies who had no taste for distasteful things into what was cast as a much wider fight.
In a complex world, an appeal to bedrock American faiths "is still the one, subconsciously, for which Americans reach when we feel blown off course." But 150 years after the Civil War, Fairbanks warns, revanchist elements use appeals to those values "to turn opponents of conservatism into helpless hosts, transmitting its ideas," as well as to skillfully paint liberal opponents as illiberal. The tradition, she concludes, is "a dangerous inheritance."

It is not clear to which "opponents of conservatism" Fairbanks refers in that passage, although she cites a Nicholas Kristof quote in passing. But the right's decades of "working the refs" has made an access-dependent mainstream press less aggressive in challenging the disingenuous nonsense spewed regularly by conservative guests. Republican lawmakers seem to receive more airtime as well, allowing them more weakly challenged opportunities to inject the body politic with its ideas.

They are far more practiced at spreading and defending theirs and their accustomed system of privilege than opponents on the left are at challenging it. Progressives committed to peaceful change had best not rely on demographics alone to do the convincing for them.