Controlling the Narrative

One of the basic presuppositions that lies behind everything I write in this blog is that people operate largely unconsciously with presuppositions.  We all have biases, and those biases are rooted in narratives that organize reality for us, and we don't give up on them until the evidence becomes so overwhelming that the narrative can no longer be sustained. There is no objective reality that we can know directly; there is only mediated reality, and narratives are the medium. They are social constructions, and they are provisional.

We cannot do without these narratives and the biases that come with them, but we can do some work to make sure that the biases we have are well grounded. The difference between the wise and the foolish is that the wise work with narratives that are well grounded, and the foolish within narratives that are specious. Philosophy since at least the time of Socrates has been at root the exercise of bringing those narratives into awareness in order to evaluate how specious or well grounded they are.

In politics, the party that controls the narrative controls the levers of power.  In a democracy, the people are supposed to control the evolving narrative, and political power, in theory, ultimately lies with them.  In a tyrannical regime a power elite controls the narrative, and it uses its power to suppress competing narratives, mainly through propaganda and threat of reprisal.

The Republicans understand the importance of controlling the narrative in a way that the Democrats don't. Or if there are some Democrats who do understand its importance, they are powerless to do anything about it. There are layers of reasons for this, but among them is that many of the people who are attracted to the Republican Party are authoritarian personality types who are more easily organized into a lockstep mentality to support the leader no matter what. The Democrats have a more difficult time submitting to authority or doing anything in a disciplined, focused way.

I'm not saying that all Republicans are good little soldiers unquestioningly following orders or that all Democrats are independent free thinkers, but it's fairly obvious that at the core of the Republican party--the so-called base that comprises about one third of Americans, loyalty and group cohesion are more important than being independent minded. That's an enormous political asset for factions who want to play the power game. To me it's pretty frightening that at this late date such a large proportion of American citizens still thinks positively of this president and his administration. They either approve of the authoritarian tilt of the administration or they are working within a loyalty narrative that is impervious to evidence that would otherwise demand their disapproval.

And surely this authoritarian mentality is on display in the current controversy regarding the unprecedented firings of the eight U.S. Attorneys   The USAs who were fired were republicans who exhibited a little too much independence. These attorneys were not "loyal" enough, and they resisted marching orders from central command: Prosecute Democrats, and leave Republicans alone.  They learned that being independent minded and following the law is no longer a Republican virtue.

But the narrative that organizes reality for the authoritarian segment of the American citizenry, while clearly ungrounded and specious and an everpresent threat to the wellbeing of the commonweal, is not my primary concern.  I'm more concerned about propping up the narrative for the middle. As I've argued here repeatedly, our political discourse has skewed so far to the right in the last twenty-five years that what used to be the middle is now considered left.

So let me reiterate what I said about defining Right, Left, and Center in response to some questions about my post earlier this month about The Phantom Extremist Left.  The question is whether it's possible to objectively define right, left, or center.  Isn't it a matter of subjective perception depending on where one stands? Well, I would argue that it isn't; it only seems that way in the U.S. because the Right and the mainstream media have essentially delegitimated the "real" left in this country. We don't have a politically legitimate left as they have it in Europe, Latin America, and even in Israel. So let me define left, right, and center by an objective standard that I think most people who know some political philosophy would agree with:

The political right is defined by (1) its celebration, if not idolization, of the market and its correlative agenda to destroy the New Deal compromise and (2) by its hypermilitarism in the face of the terrorist threat and of its correlative authoritarian-leaning moves to strengthen the executive branch, to stack the courts, stonewall the legislative branch, and to diminish civil liberties in general. In the United States the right is corporate power aligned with and subordinating political power to its agenda while relying on a specious jingoism and traditional-values narrative to seduce the cultural and religious right to provide the votes needed to support its agenda.

The principle that defines the "real" left is its agenda to control the market through the nationalization of key industries and by its program to redistribute wealth through various governmental mechanisms. There is no such left in this country at this time with any political clout.  There was a Left at the turn of the 19th century through the 1930s  and '40s  And the New Left played a role in shaping political discourse in the late '60s and early '70s but for reasons it might be interesting to go into another time, it dissipated rather quickly after the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam. In the early eighties there was some anti-military and anti-nuclear activism, but as the decade progressed, the left agenda pretty much shrank to concerns about rights for women, and racial and sexual minorities, which is pretty much how it stands today. There is no widely accepted legitimate critique of power distribution in our mainstream political discourse.  Most Americans either accept or are unaware of the the trend toward aggregations of power and wealth in the hands of fewer people since the 1980s.

The center is defined as the people who seek a compromise between the left and right as defined above. The New Deal was its model in this country insofar as it works with both markets and with government controls to solve problems and seek to achieve goals that promote the nation's general welfare.

Was there some overstretch by some of the left-leaning people in government who sought to solve problems with clumsy top-down programs like busing during the '60s and '70s  Yes, and some adjustments were warranted. Top-downism whether it originates from the right or the left is for me always a problem except in extraordinary circumstances.  In my post here about Latent Authoritarians, I discuss how the real spirit of the New Deal is subsidiarist, and how subsidiarity is a guiding principle that affirms both self-reliance and interdependence. The balance between these two social principles is for me what guides a centrist agenda.

So I grant that some of the top-downism of the '60s progressive political agenda required some adjustment, but with the ascendancy of Reaganism the New Deal compromise was confronted with a program of dismantlement.  The point is that most Americans were pretty happy with the New Deal system in defining a socially democratic center. Even Nixon accepted its basic premises, and what later became Reaganism was in previous decades considered right-wing lunacy.

The New Deal consensus was so thoroughly "normal reality" that most people were complacent in their acceptance of it as such. This resulted in this center's not taking seriously at first the extremism of Reaganism. And this in turn led to its being unprepared for the withering assault the right mounted in the '80s that continues to this day. So the amazing story of the last thirty years is how what was considered right-wing lunacy in the '70s became the dominant narrative in the '80s and beyond.  And the only way to understand it is by analyzing how the right organized to achieve its remarkable political objectives. And they did it by doing what the "right" does everywhere--by a concerted program of power and wealth consolidation behind a screen of jingoistic nationalism and traditionalist values.

I have made repeated arguments that true American conservatism in our current political context is defined by those who seek to vigorously resist the program of the hard right as defined above. That attitude of resistance to the hard right is characterized now in media-think as as a Liberal or Left position, and I think such a characterization absurd. The center is now defined by some middle point between the hard right and the New Deal Center, which means that the center is very much skewed to the right. So people who think of themselves as centrists according to this scheme are really rightists.

This is an important point because I think there are many people who are uncomfortable with the program of the hard right currently in power, but are reluctant to join in actively resisting it because they fear that to do so requires their collusion with the program of the hard left, which they loathe, even though it's currently non-existent as a power faction in American politics. The hard right, however, is very much existent. And so the point is that "Liberalism", insofar as it simply preserves the New Deal compromise, is really the center. To resist the agenda of the hard right is a centrist project focussed on preserving the social democracy that brought so many Americans prosperity and civil rights in the period following  World War II. 

This unprecedented prosperity is pretty much the only thing most working Americans in the boomer generation and after have known, but it wasn't always that way, and there are very powerful structural forces at play right now that could very well return us to the quasi-barbarism of the late nineteenth century. That's why the real fight right now is to control the narrative that defines the center. And it starts with "conserving" the center as the consensus defined it in the New Deal compromise between the hard right and the hard left.

And so the entire thrust of what I've been writing for some months now is to show why such a media characterization of "left" is distorting and enabling of the program of the hard right. There might be a cultural left in the universities and in the arts world, but there is no political left--no left that offers an alternative program for power and wealth distribution in this country.  I am not promoting such a program; I  simply want to point out that insofar as most Americans are unaware of such a hard left program, they see a philosophically centrist, i.e., New Deal, position as leftist, and it just isn't.  As a result, we're in a situation right now where anyone slightly to the left of Ann Coulter is considered a moderate. Coulter serves the right effectively because she pushes the limits of what defines the right, so that rightists can position themselves somewhat to her left and be considered "reasonable."  It's not reasonable; it's a flim-flam.