Yesterday, at DKos,
No one could have predicted..., Kagro X noted how Clinton and Obama's appearances on Fox were covered by the
LA Times (
"Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton embrace Fox News") and the
NY Times (
"Democrats and Fox News Make Friends"). Particularly noteworthy was the
LA Times deck: "Both Democratic contenders have stepped up their appearances, reaching out for swing voters who might be watching the populist-oriented channel."
Kargo X noted:
Populist-oriented?
Oh, my head!
But hey, no one could have predicted that Fox would use these appearances for PR purposes, right?
So there you have it. For everyone who was so sure this was brilliant, because the candidates were "reaching out," apparently we forgot that the traditional media would still have an opportunity to define for America to whom they were reaching out. Fans of the candidates assured us that it was (pick one): 1) swing voters; 2) open-minded conservatives (ha!), or; 3) people who had lost their TV remotes. But gosh darn it if the Fox PR machine hasn't schooled us all. It was populists! Which means both Clinton and Obama -- and all Democrats, by extension -- are elitists.
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. It was not inevitable that it would have such a weak response. But, then, the consultant class that crafted it really is part and parcel of the Versailles elite. So what could we expect?
A little historical consciousness, perhaps?
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. In his new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling The Big Myths of Republican Politics (interview here, review here), Glenn Greenwald focuses long-overdue attention on the most salient aspect of this shadow-projection dynamic as it applies to presidential politics.
As I noted in my review:
Greenwald begins by noting a striking disconnect--on the one hand, voters broadly favor Democratic Party positions over Republican ones across a wide range of issue, but on the other hand, Republicans have won more elections. The reason?
The most important factor, by far, is that the Republican Party has used the same set of personality smears and mythical psychological and cultural imagery to win elections. These myths and smears are amplified by the rightwing noise machine and mindlessly adopted by the establishment media. Right-wing leaders are inflated into heroic cultural icons, while Democrats are demonized as weak and hapless losers. These personality-based myths overwhelm substantive discussions and consideration of the issues.
For most of us deeply immersed in the blogosphere, who see examples of this pointed out and discussed virtually every day, this may not seem like such a striking revelation. But even seeing it on a daily basis doesn't mean that we fully appreciate its significance. To the contrary, we're so immersed in it that it's difficult to put into perspective. This is, to my knowledge, the first book to argue that character attacks on Democrats and contrasting idealization of Republicans constitute a core explanation for Republican electoral success over the past three decades. It's this central thesis that gives Greenwald's book a larger significance that deserves attention from everyone concerned about politics, including dedicated policy wonks.
Greenwald's book is still too new for his thesis to have fully gelled, but here I am going a step further, to argue that it's but one facet--albeit a very important one--of a much larger, much longer-lasting dynamic, in which the internal contradictions of elite rule are largely managed via projective identification onto shadow elites, who then become the ongoing subjects for ritualized displacement of populist discontent.
This pattern--dependent as it is on basic pyschological mechanisms and group social dynamics--almost certainly goes back far beyond the beginnings of recorded human history. It certainly played an important role throughout the centuries in the European elites' use of Jewish agents to take on various roles that drew particular animosity from the masses. Similarly, throughout the British Empire it was a common practice to use minority ethnic groups to enforce and administer policies over larger ethnic groups, thus shielding the British, while fueling inter-ethnic hostility.
A particularly significant watershed in Western political history was the French Revolution, which apologists for the deposed aristocracy blamed on a wholly imaginary anti-Christian, secular humanist elite--the notorious Bavarian Illuminati, who had been disbanded a decade earlier, and who, of course, operated in Bavaria and other German states, not France. So popular was this narrative among reactionary--and even merely conservative elites--that it even spread to America as the Federalists lost power in reaction to their tyrannical over-reach epitomized by the Alien and Sedition Acts. The myth of the Illuminati has in turn informed countless different forms of conspiracy theory throughout American history.
What the Illuminati mythos did for aristocratic elites was explain away the popular unrest with their incompetent rule, which was most extremely evidenced by the French Revolution. According to the implicit logic of the mythos, there was nothing whatsoever wrong aristocratic rule, blessed as it was by God and the Church. All the apparent problems were the results of scheming by a hidden hierarchy which was the very mirror image of the visible hierarchy, and organized with the express purpose of overhtrowing it. Such a tale functioned to (a) deny the reality of social and economic ills, (b) deny the capacity of ordinary people to think and act on their own perceptions and analyses of the misrule they suffered under, (c) deny the legitimacy of any proposed new political order based on bottom-up consent of the governed, as opposed to top-down "divine right."
Over time, of course, conspiracy theories have served a wide range of different purposes, sometimes even nominally progressive ones. Yet, they always involve an appeal to hidden forces of great, unfathomable power, which is itself a recipie for irrational modes of thought and disempowered political stances, which are ripe for exploitation by powerful others--particularly the actually existing (as opposed to shadow) elites.
Constucting America's Racial Order
Clearly, one cannot talk about Barack Obama's presidential bid without talking about race. All efforts to do so have clearly now come to grief. Roger Wilkin's book, Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism contains an instructive account of the origins of Virginia's social order, centered around Bacon's Rebellion (1676), which in turn has a central place in shaping the whole nation's racial order.
Prior to this brief uprising, Virginia was still a rather fluid society, whose upper echelon had only recently clawed its way to the top. When a variety of factors led to open rebellion, with Nathaniel Bacon at its head, there was a broad alliance of those left out of power--freemen with poor prospects, indentured servants and slaves, all of whom were relatively close in social standing, since slavery was neither permanent, hereditary, nor identical with being black. Bacon's rebellion fizzled out after Bacon died of dysentary, but the elite was justifiably shaken, and undertook a two-fold strategy to prevent a recurrence.
On the one hand, it sought to culturally define itself as superior, by adopting a culture oriented around classical Greece and Rome, requiring either tutors imported from England, or else the transport of young men to England for their education there. By itself, this would only serve to intensify the sense of difference and stoke populist hostility. The other side, however, had the opposite effect: blacks were utterly shut out of the white social order, condemned to permanent slavery as a hereditary condition. By marking the black as totally others, totally beyond the pale, the elites could now portray themselves as quintessentially white, and therefore necessarily immune to populist hatred, since hating them meant hating yourself as a white person.
Walters writes:
Interestingly, just as poor whites were being invited by the lords of the colony to join a sort of white social club, the actual social distance between them and the rich was widening. They would be explicitly reminded oftheir lower status by the increaing rigidities being constructed into the social system and by the barriers developed to protext the positon of holders of power and privilege. As social mobility decreased, personal frustration grew. The rage inspired by the personal suspicion of not being good enough to reach the top--a rage that might otherwise be transformed by a skillfull demagogue into rebellious impulses--was now directed at the "others" whose manifest failures were even greater than those of the lower-class whites. Poor whites were thus given two things by the new system: a floor of failure below which they could not fall, and human targets at whom they could direct their own self-loathing.
In this manner, social and economic conservatism were both inscribed into the contours of White southern populism. And just because their own elites were off-limits for hatred, this didn't mean that southern populists had no elite hatred--rather, such hatred was reserved for the elite rivals of their own elites--be they northern merchants or the monopolistic powers of the British East India Company. Over the centuries, this basic structuring has been updated a number of times, but never fundamentally altered. The actual ruling conservative elites are "organically" connected to the white masses by their whiteness/conservative identity. The blacks are the repositories for the shadows of the white masses--their phantasies of lawlessness, rebellion and moral depravity. Foreigners and Northern elites are repositories for the shadows of the white elites--their denied realities of lawlessness, rebellion and moral depravity.
Back To The Present
The foregoing is admittedly only a rough sketch, but it's enough to see the broad outline of this current minidrama in historical terms. The conservative hegemony of the past several decades, finally bursting all bounds of restraint, has produced an unmitigated disaster the likes of which our country hasn't seen since the GOP was last fully in charge, under Herbert Hoover. The degree of misrule is at least broadly comparable to the failures of the French monarchy in the late 18th Century, and Bush's record disapproval ratings--over 70 percent--despite continued fawning attention by the Versailles media is both evidence of that and a striking warning of regime change to come. The actually existing elite is thus highly motivated to rev up all its mechanisms of blame-shifting to the shadow elite, which is precisely what we have been seeing over the past several weeks.
Failing to comprehend this dynamic, Obama has walked right into the rhetorical trap of seeking absolution from the Faux populists. He will either have to wise up fast, or face the prospects of an incredible intensified recapitulation of every move that's ever been used against shadow elites for the past 200+ years.
"I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild." -- Albert Hofmann (1906-2008)