understanding conservatives

Since George Bush was elected in 2000, I have been engaged in debates with people who identify themselves as conservatives. In eight years, I have never "won" any of these debates, at least not to my satisfaction. Part of the reason for my failure is the lack of my political knowledge (even in the 2000 election, I cared more about partying than the political parties), and part can be chalked up to my lack of rhetorical skills (as an undergrad, my college buds would make fun of my errant speech, "What are you, an English major?," the joke being that the answer was "yes"). Despite my obvious deficiencies, I can't help but think that I was fighting a losing battle. 

Recently, I have conducted research into what makes people conservative, with the hope that knowing more about what makes them tick will enable me to convince them of my convictions, and that winning over self-proclaimed conservatives is not a losing battle. The following list represents a useful survey into the literature of rhetorical knowledge that progressives and people on the left need to acquire in order to begin breaking out of the hegemonic stranglehold that conservatives hold on the political "conversation" taking place in the early 21st century United States. 

•  The Rockridge Institute, specifically their book Thinking Points, A Progressive's Handbook: Communicating Our American Values and Vision. In 2004, progressive political thinkers like George Lakoff responded to the wave of conservative rhetoricians that have been at work to secure conservative hegemony since the early 70s (4 billion dollars were spent in the last thirty-five years by conservative think tanks, according to Lakoff). Lakoff et al. responded specifically to the work of Frank Luntz and argued that the Democrats would have to reframe the terms of the political debate taking place in the U.S. if they wanted to win the White House. 
  
• Stephen Duncombe's work, specifically his book Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy begins with a similar presupposition to the now defunct Rockridge Institute: rationalism is a fallacy. Although progressives are correct to side with the Enlightenment's belief in arriving at truth via rational and critical thinking, conservatives are winning elections by taking sophistry to new commanding heights. Progressives do not have to sacrifice the truth and join the wave of "New Sophistry" in order to win, but they do need to understand the power of desire and fantasy in people's lives. Although they may have been bathed in the clear waters of Enlightenment thought provided by the institutions of higher education, this is such a painful process--"spiritually" and economically--that many opt out of a secular baptism. Education hurts (at least at first). Perhaps this is why conservatives report being happier than progressives. I'm not sure about studies of happiness, but I am sure that Duncombe's book is invigorating and will deliver some of those jolts of enjoyment that those who choose education eventually discover is the payoff of being disabused of their of illusions. 
• Jonathan Haidt has recently wrote an article for Edge: The Third Culture titled, "What Makes People Vote Republican." Haidt's article also plugs into Lakoff's cognitive scientific work that sees moral values and systems at work beneath people's political views, positions, and ideologies. On the whole, I'm convinced by this social scientific turn to understanding politics via morality (for more, check out this blog). Yet, there may be some traps in "reducing" politics to morality (see Zizek's critique of Lakoff in this article). At the very least, the responses to Haidt's approach are a testament to a lively interdisciplinary debate taking place in the academy on the roots of ideology. Indeed, the ol' Marxist problem of ideology is back with a vengeance. 
  

I have concluded that although there are several ways to explain the political divide between the Right and the Left, a simple but eloquent theory seems to capture many, if not all of them. I believe that conservatives are essentially premodern, while those on the Left (whatever we call them, radicals, progressives, liberals, etc.) are modern. 

Although conservatives believe in refrigerators as much as leftists, their conception of political space is premodern. If political space is a circle, "conservative-corporatists" believe that this circle is whole. Its structural integrity is threatened by an external agent (in premodern times, a rival tribe or empire; in modern times, the criminal element, communists, terrorists, illegal immigrants, etc.). "Revolutionary-antagonists" believe that this circle is divided from within, that it is structurally unstable because of an imbalance in the social order's distribution of wealth and power. The threatening agent is thus internal (this is an essentially modern vision because it recognizes that the antagonism that divides us is the "class struggle," not one that pits the Montagues against the Capulets). 

thomas friedman on obama

I've never been a fan of Thomas Friedman. His claim to fame is the half-baked idea that the world is now flat. He's since realized that such a claim--which is related to Bill Gates' idea of frictionless-capitalism--is a bit strong, to say the least. Hence, his recent book's title, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, offers two qualifiers to his earlier designation. But "hot," which incorporates an environmental critique of global capitalism, and "crowded," which deflects a proper class analysis to head into Malthusian territory, each fails to offer the kind of analytic framework that globalization requires. And yet, articles like this, convince me that Friedman, like David Brooks on the rare occasion, is not an idiot but a thinker who, if he could only leave his latent class interests behind, would be able to write cogent systemic analyses of our global predicaments. 

In the piece referenced above, "From the Gut," Friedman demonstrates an understanding of how realpolitiks operate. I agree with his general claim that the republicans are better at "shameless" tactics than the democrats, and that Obama seems to be in retreat from his earlier promise to reverse this trend. Yet again, the dems seem to be making the same mistake that they did in 2000 and 2004: buying into the myth of rationalism. As George Lakoff, among others has written, people don't vote on the issues, they vote based on their identities and values. They buy the brand because the brand is the brand, not because product A can do x, y, and z. The dems cannot sell their message by laying out policies x, y, and z. They need to get their hands dirty (God knows they've been dirty for years), and appeal to people's fantasies. If the republicans are going to play fascism-lite--hell, if in the age of the New Media all politics is reduced to idoltary,then the dems need to risk eternal damnation by breaking the second commandment over and over again. 

As I watch this election run its course and witness Obama popping downers, I can't help but contemplate the stranglehold of conservative hegemony. If McCain actually pulls this off and wins despite "a 50-pound ball called 'George W. Bush' wrapped around one ankle and a 50-pound ball called 'The U.S. Economy' wrapped around the other," as Friedman puts it, I won't be able to stop myself from flirting with Spenglerian ideas about the predetermined decline of civilizations. Conservatism feels like a cancer that we may be able to put into remission for a time, but that slowly overtakes us until the last remnant of our existence goes "puff."    

the gop convention

How watching the GOP convention makes me feel...

a colleague chastises

A Colleague Confesses
 
Now that we've gotten along as office mates
For three semesters, I don't mind letting you know,
In confidence, that the poems and stories we're teaching
Are less important to me than they are to you.
However beautiful in themselves, they don't uplift me
As meditation uplifted me when I was a disciple.
To be sure, I gave up the discipline after a year,
Unable, finally, to empty my mind enough
For the kind of higher harmony with the void
Enjoyed by the few who become enlightened.
Now, in my fall-back mode, I try to content myself
With working at harmony with the world.
 
I want to know what it's like to be other people
And am always practicing, weekdays with students
And colleagues, weekends with strangers.
Even in the car alone, on a Sunday drive,
I move my lips with the preachers on the radio
As I imagine what longing pushes them forward.
As for the satisfied, what right have I to judge them,
To declare they shouldn't be happy
With the raises they've earned or the holiday reservations 
They've called in early enough to book the rooms
They covet, facing the ocean?
 
I wouldn't konw what to say if they asked me
Point-blank about the life I believe they're missing.
As for the books we're teaching,
I think I respond to their plots and characters
As fully as anyone, but I have to confess
I don't regard them as throwing much light
On the world beyone the page. True to experience,
Now and then, the best ones, maybe,
But not to something experience merely hints at,
Something more spacious and longer lasting.
 
It seems odd that the books likely to last
Can only acknowledge that nothing lasts but wishes.
Am I leaving out something that stories and poems
Help you see clearly?  Spell it out, if you think so.
I'm only too set in my ways to listen.
 
-Carl Dennis

A good friend of mine sent this poem to me, and I await to hear his motivations. Still, when I read it I was bothered enough by its cynical message to write the following analysis:

My favorite line: "It seems odd that the books likely to last/ Can only acknowledge that nothing lasts but wishes." I agree that human desire exceeds the temporality of biological life, natural cycles and systems, etc. I take this to be a truth, but not the only truth literature can express, as the old, jaded narrator of the poem seems to suggest. 

Not to play devil's advocate on purpose, but I'm not a fan of this poem because I disagree with its narrator. I find myself unsympathetic to his "confession" to what I'm taking is a younger colleague who still believes in the "power of words" (not that I disagree that there is an evolution from youthful belief to elderly skepticism). What I disagree with is the (Matthew) Arnoldian assumption underlying this poem that views culture as the modern replacement of religion. The narrator "confesses" that he can no longer believe in literature as something that can uplift him and provide him (spiritual) enlightenment (albeit Eastern enlightenment, which I also have a problem with...). I think that one perhaps begins to read literature as a replacement of our parents's religion, but I do not think this is or should be its primary function. I believe that literature is a source of enlightenment in the Western tradition, a way to become philosophical, critical, and knowledgeable about society, history, human beings--the "nature" of this world, if you will.

Thus, I greet the shift to social concern in the second stanza as a move in the right direction, and I generally agree that literature pales in comparison with real life experience with other people. I can expose my students to all sorts of literature to make them appreciate diversity, multiculturalism, etc., but it's not the same thing as traveling abroad, doing work in hurting communities, conducting field research, etc. Yet, the second half of this stanza turns purely ideological (in my estimation), as the narrator shifts from "empathizing" with other subjective positions to a religious (Christian) position of not judging them (as if to know all is to forgive all--if that's true, only God can forgive, no?). Although I've given plenty of thought to what makes preachers and the citizens of Richistan tick, I do not believe that they should not be judged. And I think that literature provides plenty of criteria for the evaluation of others. 

When the narrator begins stanza three by confessing that he would not be able to tell the rich what is missing from their life I would agree, but I think he misses the point. He sounds like a failed preacher here, unable to tell people what will make them happy, what will fulfill them. Although no one can tell another person what will make them lastingly happy (let alone tell themselves!!), I can surely tell someone what WON'T make them happy, or more to the point, what actions of theirs are hurting themselves, others, society, and the world. I've learned that sense of social judgment (and justice) from literature, an aspect of literature completely missing from this poem. Alas, I think the poem remains narcissistic, a confession of someone who is looking to literature for self-fulfillment, self-enlightenment, self-verification but can't find it and thus resents his office mate who supposedly can. (I'd probably have a problem with this office mate as well, mind you.)

In sum, a professor is bitter that literature no longer fulfills its Arnoldian role, and he is too set in his ways to explore how else it might function.