Democracy and the Fallarovous

Memes.....Don't you love 'em. There they stand, giving you the entire meaning and narrative to a series of disparate events and happenings, always with the right answers, always gnostically satisfying. Like prejudice reinforcing, moral certain pringles. Once you pop etc etc.


And what about the clash of the memes? The sheer joy of the loudest emitting. My, the treats of political theatre.


Looking at the boo-sucks around the Tea-baggers, them being perceptive civic angels who see the Nazi-Marxist-Jonestown nature of the 44th president, and a mass movement of dedicated racists oft to storm the White house, you see just such a crash of theoretical circle jerking. And how new is all is, how fresh.....


Hofstadter's famous essay (its first line adorns this missive) is probably now the most over flogged piece of writing on these here lefty interwebs. This kind over-flogger will at least link to a copy:-


http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html


Written with reference to Goldwater's electorially doomed but historically significant campaign, 'The Paranoid Style' makes the case that American political discourse had become tinged with a pseudo-apocalyptical manchianism, a divided world made up of devilish plotters and voiceless helpless victims, wolves and sheep.

For 8 years, we have witnessed BDS in its finest robes, a thought-less hyper-active sub-culture. Now, I have my reasons for thinking Bush is a bit of a patronising Lady garden and was a fairly terrible president. But BDS goes further; it plucks him out of the mundane of normal politics and made him Wagnerian. The heart of Bush derangement was a conceived lack of legitimacy that then made each action of the administration something more. His promise of ‘compassionate conservatism’ and being conscious whilst governing of his plural defeat in 2000 proved to be hogwash.

That led on, with the deep nation wide shock of 911 and the nature of the debate on the invasion of Iraq, to a virtual suspension of political moderation within discourse. Thus 8 years of ‘fascism is just around the corner’, ‘the 2002/2004/2006/2008 election will be cancelled’, Bushitler and that most obscene ‘Troof’ made 43 a monster of unparalleled evil. This was matched in part with a deafening but slowly fading level of counter vitriol; ‘Traitors’, ‘Appeasers’, ‘Hell bound agenda pushers of acid gayness’.

The theft/mere electoral peculiarity in Florida in 2000 made a space for this carnival of the grotesque projected. But I suspect it was just the trigger rather than the cause. Bush, as a vocal culture warrior and a trickle downer nightwatchmen, ticked all the boxes to get under the wider American left’s skin. He, like any good fan of the eighties, loved the classic figures of the age. Returned were many of Reagan’s middle rung of appointments, now in place to dazzle. The deepest fears of one half of the political spectrum were intrinsic in the wee fella’s frame.

Obama has that same quality. He is everything that the wider right has learnt to hate. And from that point, everything is up for grabs. Now Race, I believe, is only a conscious part of this hatred for a small portion of the waves of ordure dumped on Pennsylvania avenue, as snobbery and ‘east-coast’ distain was for BDS. OBS is not about race. It is about a disparate collection of absolute fears, potently mixed in with a whole host of material concerns.

At the moment, the American (economic) Dream is going through its periodical night terror phases and the grounds of how government should act have shifted. Tea Baggers are reinforced in their delusions by the titanic numbers of losses, bailouts, share falls and index crashes. It is the mood music of their movement. Yet the elite’s bipartisan response, massive government intervention, seems so alien to the doctrines of rugged realtor mum and plumbers everywhere, popularly sold again and again since the mid seventies, created a shocking disconnect. OBS thrives in this void, a void of legitimacy, of sacred rhetoric versus evicted reality.

As such, Obama can be an out and out Radical, a Socialist, a Marxist, a Fascist, a Nazi[1], a Gay agenda throat pusher, a supa-dupa militant Black Panther, a Salafist Muslim infidel burner, a knitting needle wielding baby popper, he can be an absolute evil.

There are the questions, how ‘American’ is this paranoid style and how ‘new’ is it. With reference to the UK, it does seem to be an element in our discourse. Brown, an incompetent and clumsy third way acolyte is not just wrong or ill-suited for the job, he is a Stalinist wannabe, leading a party of anti-Semites, totalitarian Rad-Fems and bin-snooping fascists (see footnote). Thatcher wasn’t just a driven ideologue, she was a fascistic child snatching bitch and earlier there was Wilson the KGB agent.

There might be a case that this rise in vitriol and its stark dualities might be an after effect, a social mechanism, of dealing with a long term crisis in society and in self perception of said society. The Seventies trauma for Britain remains a central component on policy and discourse. Turning it over to America, a series of existential or nearly so crisis have had decades and even centuries old after effects. The Civil War and reconstruction, the agrarian crisis of the late 19th century, the great depression; these are milestones, events that required a society to deal with their consequences; they are too vast to ignore. The paranoid style might well be such a mechanism, channelling resentment, into periodical ‘elections of a generation’. On the whole, these manias do manifest themselves within the current political system and in conventional political action; they are not, like the rise of Nazism or military coups in South America, an implicit denial of existing political arrangements.

One element that the Tea baggers do have that much of BDS lacked was the whole hearted financial and ideological support of the leading news outlet in the States. Where the line can be drawn from spontaneous outburst and strategically managed corporate branding would make a fine academic career, but this would probably make a fine abstract.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-october-1-2009/tea-partiers-advise-g20-protesters

Some rather charming and affectionate reporting on proto-tea-baggers here by Alexandria Pelosi

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-7294526473944146040&ei=U_TFSrbNFpSt-Abss6nrBg&q=Right+America%3A+Feeling+Wronged#


[1] Lest we forget – NAZIS AND COMMUNISTS AND FDR AND CLINTON ONE AND TWO ARE EXACTLY THE SAME THING!!!!!!!!!