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Saturday, October 18, 2008

Republican Projection

So, of course, the Republicans are trumping up a scandal of voter fraud in order to perpetuate an epic scaled voter fraud themselves. They are counting on the ignorance of the people they have always despised and, sometimes, to their cost, underestimated. They are counting on the laziness and on the prejudices of the incumbent interests of media to broadcast the fraud to do its misinformational and demoralizing work over the last couple of weeks of the campaign. The people are of course too energized and incumbent media too uncertain in the face of the Netroots for these tried and true strategies to have the usual chance of success. Even if the Republicans fail (as I strongly suspect they will) to achieve another squeaker victory by means of the usual demoralization, disenfranchisement, and theft, this last ugly gambit will set the table for a season of trumped up uncertainty and full-throated hate which will refuse the mandate of the election and bedevil our every effort to solve the shared problems of this nation. For Republicans, this is, grotesquely enough, the sort of thing that looks like a "win-win" situation.



There is a larger point to make here, beyond the obvious and awful observation that Republicans would create a phony voter fraud precisely to cover up their effort to engage in voter fraud on a scale incomparably greater still.

This isn't, it seems to me, an act of "daring." This isn't a matter of "boldness," as one sometimes hears from the kinds of folks who like to say that the criminal thuggery of a blunt instrument like Karl Rove amounts to some kind of "genius" (rather than simply a greater willingness to be evil than most people could manage without suiciding). This outrageous projection seems to me instead to be symptomatic of some deeper tendency of mind that connects up to the authoritarian spirit in the service of which this sort of gambit seems so often to be mobilized in the first place.

I've lived intimately with deeply conservative people all my life. I've been one myself in some aspects and episodes of my own life, truth be told, and struggle to this day with unexpected unwelcome upwellings of reaction. Much of my immediate family is uncritical, unrepentant and enormously loud in its espousal of Movement Republicanism in its Christianism variation, and has been for decades. I've listened to their anger and fear getting vented in the car, at the table, in holiday gatherings all the years I was growing up. I know what they were talking about before the Gingrich Revolution and George W. Bush even better than I know how they've been talking since -- just because I don't talk to them much these days, rather for the same reasons I'm not likely to dive into the oven when it's on.

All those years of claiming to fear dictatorship, and then Republicans got into power and began immediately to dismantle the rule of law and started building up mercenary armies to patrol the streets in the name of the profits of the rich and the faith of fundamentalist theocrats. All those years heaping scorn on "moochers" and "second-handers" and people looking for "free lunches," and then Republicans got into power and began immediately to loot and "privatize" public infrastructure and services, vacuum up public funds in the name of "defense," steal everything that wasn't nailed down at home and abroad, gorging on the future via ballooning indebtedness, pyramid schemes, and "starving the beast," demanding free lunch after free lunch, handout after handout. All those years of hysterical sanctimonious rage directed at "political correctness," cutting off even the modest expression of worry about the harm of racism, sexism, homophobia, conformism in America, and then Republicans give in at the first sign of resistence to their rule to a full-throated carnival of hate, a surreal and endlessly elaborated Boschian spectacle of disgusting race-baiting, misogyny, queer-bashing, self-congratulatory Know-Nothingism, mob-minded intimations of violence in the streets.

Even those who were not the direct beneficiaries of such grotesque reversals seemed to become eager apologists for them the moment they began. (A few conservatives drifted no-doubt into the fairy-tale abstractions of "libertarianism" in the face of these hypocrisies, but this was typically even worse than those who failed to learn the lesson of the contradictions of the corporate-militarist worldview of Movement Republicanism, and yielded not so much a repudiation of those contradictions as an escape into the deeper delusion that driving the market fundamentalist blade even deeper and more stridently home would wound us less rather than even more surely fatally.)

The long and the short of it falls to this.

It is ultimately too easy, I know, but honestly won't lead you astray as often as you might think, simply to hear in the zanier accusations one hears from the right wing directed at Democrats, liberals, and progressives nothing more than the confession of the deepest desires vomited up from their broken brains and shriveled hearts.

Their leaders and partisans would scorch the skies and call it a "Clear Skies Initiative," they would sell you hideously unsafe prohibitively expensive nuclear plants and coal-fired acid rainstorms with public propositions sold with images of windmills and daffodils. They would create a permanent hereditary overclass and sell it to their would-be serfs as "tax relief." They would tell you that government is a corrupt and incompetent and criminal enterprise and then claim to prove it by governing corruptly, incompetently, and criminally. They would lie you into an immoral, illegal, catastrophic war of choice and declare dissent unpatriotic. They would lie to your face and call you a liar when you point to the facts that expose them. They would brag of their rugged individualism and twist their faces into ugly masks of contempt at the slightest confrontation with novelty or difference. They would boast of their innovative genius and then "propertize" the commonwealth to capture for themselves the energy, intelligence, and effort of their peers, or congratulate themselves for their risk-taking and then whine for a handout whenever a bill comes due in the aftermath of their recklessness and fraud. They would declare the peacemaker a warmonger as they draw up their warplans. They would tell you the dissent that has been the hallmark and accomplishment of the American way of life at its best is actually hatred of America, and then reduce the consent of the governed to unquestioning obedience to the rich and powerful and call the resulting Anti-American travesty "Pro-America."

They are the dictators they were warning us about. They are the looters and freeloaders and lazy no-account frauds they excoriated. They are the liars, the thieves, the scam-artists they repudiated. They are the cravers of Big Brother's thick boot-heel and thick lipped smile. They are the rank conformists they disdained, the flatterers of power that inspired their disgust.

It should go without saying, by way of conclusion here, that all the while there is a crucial sense in which this "they" I keep talking about are inside all of us.

Whoever else they are they are also our own moments of weakness, our own inevitable occasions of succumbing to fear, our exhausted turns at our worst from the demands of kindness and difficult scrutiny into the ease of cruel blanket repudiation.

Growing up and becoming a responsible citizen requires grappling with these capacities to active ignorance and indifference and indulgence we all have within us. The authoritarian types who presently throng so noisily among the ranks of Movement Republicanism, who seem forever to project onto their enemies the malign intentions, falsehoods, and schemes they inevitably implement themselves the moment they have occasion to do so, sometimes seem to me to be extraordinarily thoughtless about their own privileges, vulnerabilities, and inter-dependencies. It is foolish to overgeneralize, of course, but one wonders how often the politics of facile projection connects quite viscerally to the failure or even the diminished capacity (bad education? trauma? chemical imbalance?) of those who engage in it ever to empathize with the real circumstances of others, ever to do the work of abiding self-criticism, ever to mourn rather than deny their real losses or admit their abiding limitations. Failing or refusing the struggles of intelligent introspection, they indulge in the funhouse mirror struggles of an alienated extrospection instead.

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