AlterNet
Posted by Adele Stan at 9:58 am
April 12, 2010
Amid all the nuttiness that marked the this past weekend (my colleague, Alexander Zaitchik, offers a rundown here), what I found to be the most chilling aspect of the confab seems overshadowed by Sarah Palin’s spunky vitriol and Michael Steele’s act of contrition.
But if you listened closely on Day One of the conference to the remarks of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (video link below), you would have heard a game plan for victory in this year’s congressional elections based on a Big Lie that accuses Democrats of advancing that very thing. Gingrich, you’ll recall, was the architect of the Republicans’ first majority in the House in 40 years, won in 1994 after the Clinton administration lost its battle for health-care reform.
The Gingrich game plan is largely a rhetorical frame that, if it succeeds, could tear this country apart and even lead to violence.
Here’s how it works: First, dehumanize your opponent. (Oh, hell, let’s be real; they’re not really your opponents, they’re your enemies.) Second, convince the base that everything they’ve been told is a lie, and that the nation is on its way to a totalitarian takeover by “the most radical president in history.” Third, dress it up in a code that appeals to racist sentiments without being overtly racial in their nature.
1. Dehumanize your opponent. Throughout his address, Gingrich urged all Republicans running for office to adopt the frame that they are running against Obama’s “secular, socialist machine” — not Obama or Pelosi or Reid themselves. Why? Because Obama, Pelosi and Reid are human beings. Characterizing the Democrats as a machine renders them less than human, something soulless, as reinforced by the modifiers “secular” and “socialist”. To smash a machine, especially one that is ominous, threatening and programed to do ill, is a virtue. It’s Dave versus HAL.
This must all be framed in terms of “culture,” Gingrich said — American culture and values versus the machine.
2. The Big Lie Squared. Already suspicious of any real news reported by mainstream media (see Obama’s birth certificate), numbers crunched by reputable organizations (see CBO) or the notion that African-Americans possess intelligence, the occupants of the GOP base are poised to believe that only that which they see on Fox News is true. How easy it will be, then, to convince them that the secular, socialist machine that is Obama and the Democrats is actually programmed by an evil force bent on totalitarianism. In fact, they don’t really need convincing; this is what they feel in their bones.
Orwellian times call for Orwellian measures, Gingrich seemed to say. Projecting the tactics that Republicans have clearly drawn from Orwell’s classic cautionary tome, 1984 (the stripping of education dollars under the rubric, “No Child Left Behind,” naming a plan for clear-cutting woodlands the “Healthy Forests” initiative), onto the Democrats, Gingrich urged his listeners to do as the Poles did when mounting their resistance to Soviet domination of their land: put a sign emblazoned with the equation, “2 + 2 = 4″ in their windows. It’s a way of saying, we know that if we put the truth in words, you will kill and oppress us, but it’s hard to punish us for displaying one of the absolute truths shared by everybody.
The message on the “2 + 2 = 4″ signs, Gingrich said, were drawn from 1984, when a character who is torturing the protagonist tells him, “If I say two plus two equals five, then it equals five.” Orwell was writing not about a right-wing state, Gingrich reminds us, but a totalitarian socialist state, which he saw as the future of his native Britain. And, of course, then there’s the matter of from whom the Poles were attempting to wrangle themselves free. In Gingrich’s scenario, the white, paranoid GOP base is like the valiant, Christian Solidarity movement versus the soulless, brutal, atheistic Soviet machine. (No mention of the fact, of course, that Solidarity was a union movement.)
What Gingrich is selling is Goebbels’ Big Lie to the power of two (or 2 + 2…). In other words, advance a Big Lie that your opponent — excuse me, mortal enemy — is advancing a Big Lie (from which your dissent could have life-threatening consequences).
3. Dress it in racial code. Gingrich is too smart to dabble in the sort of overt racism that waves the Confederate flag or dresses Obama as a witch doctor on a Tea Party placard. No, Newt is a master at advancing the sort of racism that is hard to peg as just that. In the subtlest way possible to imply such a thing, Gingrich implied that Obama was a slick talker who didn’t really comprehend the lofty things he read, and that his keenest abilities were limited to the basketball court. (And at that, Obama isn’t exactly brilliant, he is merely “clever”.)
Noting Obama’s use of a Lincoln quote in his inaugural address, Gingrich said, “[He] picks up a couple of words the feel right, then pretends that he understands the rest.” Later in his address, Gingrich said of the president, “Shooting three-point shots is clever, but it doesn’t put anybody back to work. We need a president, not an athlete.” (Because, of course, the only arena in which African-Americans excel, is the sports arena. See Jimmy the Greek.)
The problem with Gingrich’s rhetorical frame is that it stands to be extremely effective. Mid-term congressional elections are base-driven, and this frame is likely to resonate among an increasingly paranoid and right-wing GOP base, which includes elements of the Tea Party movement.
But more than that, this is virulently toxic brew of strategically leveraged resentments that, even if the Republicans fail to prevail in the fall, will so increase the strength of the poison already in the air that I fear our nation will find a long road back to recovery.
Already threats of violence abound against Democratic politicians. Violence against LGBT people continues at its usual pace. And a week from today, thousands of gun-owners, paranoid that their right to be armed is in great peril under the current administration (despite no White House initiative to change current gun laws), will rally at the Washington monument.
Add to that the impact of the recent Supreme Court decision that has gutted campaign finance restrictions, and its not hard to see how certain corporate interests — say, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, or the Koch brothers eponymous hyperpolluting industries — could amplify this toxic, hateful message to great effect.
Now, Democrats, what’s your rhetorical frame for 2010?
