Rhetorical virtue requires having the practical wisdom to achieve your communications goals with a particular audience. What's virtue for one audience is not virtue for another. If you to lead a group of true believers, there's rarely rhetorical virtue in appearing moderate and reasonable, or to suggest looking for ways to compromise with your opponents. True believers are not interested in having their minds changed--they'll shout down anyone who will try to do it, and push him to the side. Anyone who preaches compromise will not be perceived as virtuous but as disloyal and weak.
The group ethos of true believers requires that members take seriously only those who are the purest, uncompromising exemplars of their already clearly defined and passionately held beliefs. The group wants to listen to people who are going to get them feeling it, get them charged up to fight the good fight. It's all about us vs. them; it's about standing loyally by any other true believer who is under attack, and condeming anybody who isn't a true believer as either weak, stupid, or evil. We see this in the way the NARAL true believers on the cultural left or NRA true believers on the Right treat unbelievers. There is no arguing with a true believer; you're either with them or against them.
But this is a far more robust phenomenon on the Right today. What personalities come to mind when you think of hardcore Left true believers? Are there any matches on the left for the exemplary virtue of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin on the right? I'm not saying they're not out there; it's just that they do not have nearly the share of media attention that these three and several others have. To the degree that there is a hard left in this country, it plays no role in our public consciousness, and the people who are designated by conventional wisdom as "Left" are people who would have been considered centrists forty years ago. [BTW: The MSNBC anchors are not hard left; they are primarily reactive, defined by their outrage at the mainstream influence of the Right. They do not represent a positive program or a movement forward.]
These exemplars of right-wing rhetorical virtue have influenced Republican political leaders, even the sanest of them. The mantra for some time now has been "no compromise"--for how can you compromise with evil? And because the unbelievers are by definition weak, stupid, or evil, they must be either dominated or destroyed. And we've seen time and again, whenever a Republican leader says something moderate or conciliatory, he's condemned as weak or disloyal, and has had to backtrack. He has good reason to believe that he'll otherwise be a leader without a parade.
Americans, in giving the House back to the GOP this week, have essentially ratified as virtuous this kind of extremist talk, and any hopes for more reasonable or moderate voices to emerge from the Republicans any time soon are dashed. Moderation no longer has any connection to rhetorical virtue as it is practiced among Republicans. McConnell and other GOP leaders have made it clear that their only objective for the next two years is to destroy Obama. It's ok to talk like this because as an unbeliever, Obama is either weak, stupid, or evil, and Republicans have a civic and moral responsibility to either dominate or destroy him. So the question for me is whether Obama will submit or whether he'll fight back. And if he chooses to fight, as I still have some dim hope he might, how can he do it and win? Just fighting isn't enough; he has to have clear goals, an effective strategy, and the skill to execute the tactics that will enable him to accomplish his strategic goals.
The rhetorical strategic objective is to capture the center, and as I said in my last post, you can't capture the center by accommodating yourself to the center. The center has no substance. The center, as it's currently framed by conventional wisdom, is a fiction created by right-wing communications strategists. There's no there there if a "there" requires clearly or firmly held political principles. The American political center is a confused mentality that comprises a mishmash of conflicting cliches and frustrated hopes; it doesn't know what to think or who to blame. It flails mindlessly from right to left and back right again begging for somone, anyone, to earn its respect and loyalty. Neither party has it now, but this confused group is leaning right because, if nothing else, the message from the Right is clear and passionately communicated, while the message from the Left is confused and compromised.
So if Democrats are to win over the center, what kind of rhetorical virtue must they practice? If you're a Dem and your objective is to convey your message to an audience that comprises an equal mix of of right, left, and center, your primary focus must be to win over the center without alienating the left. That's a political commonplace. But it's fatuous to think that Dems must distance themselves from their base by moving more to the right. That accepts the Republican frame, and it confirms that the Right is correct to think that Dems are indeed weak, stupid, and easily dominated. The challenge is not to "move" to the center, but to "define" the center. Dems must make their case that they are already at "true center".
The center is a kind of chaos that needs to be molded, and the Right is winning that definition war right now because its message is clearer and more passionately communicated, not because it meets the real needs of the people who inhabit this mushy center. The real needs of the people in the center define the program of the center, and that program aligns with the traditional mission of the Democrats. That should be an advantage to them, but they seem incapable of exploiting it.
I think there are complex reasons for this impotency on the part of Dems, not the least of which is their cooptation by corporate money--which must of necessity take Dems away from its traditional mission. But there is still a core of Dems that are not co-opted, and if we have any hope, it lies with them. I'm saying here that this "core" must figure out what rhetorical virtue means for the "true Dems" and assert themselves as Dem exemplars. And the key to that virtue is to find a way to capture the anger and frustration of the people in the middle and channel it with a program that gives them a sense of purpose and hope. And they have to communicate their program with a passion and commitment that the confused middle can believe in. Nobody expects this "core" to win in the short run. The most important thing this core can do in the short run is by word and deed show that it is trying to move the country in the right direction.
Rhetorical virtue for the Dems is different than it is for the GOP. For GOP virtue inheres in crafting a message designed to reinforce tribal identity with simplistic slogans about 'no compromise', 'no taxes', and 'wasteful big government'. This is not a message designed to capture the center over the long haul, but it's a message that wins if the Dems offer nothing robust enough to counter it. The GOP currently controls the center by default because the Dems are too timid to fight to define it on their terms. Since 2006 they had their opportunity to capture the center for good, but they squandered it, and this year they were rejected just as the Republicans were rejected in '06. This flailing back and forth will continue until someone takes command of the center. The Dems should have the easier task, but they don't seem to know how to do it.
But here's the point: you cannot give the confused center a message that adequately meets its hopes and allays its frustrations if you accept the definition of the center as it is currently defined by the Right's narrative. You can't accept the Right's definition of "center" as no-taxes, frugal spending, small government, and hope to deliver what the center needs most but is too confused to demand. The Dems cannot cede a rhetorically defined center to the Right; they have to make the case that they represent "true center" and that they better represent the interests of these people who would gladly embrace Dems if the Dems would give them a reason to do it.
It has to regain the trust of Main Street not by running from its traditional New Deal, social democratic heritage, but by communicating its program in ways that will appeal to the frustrated longings of this disoriented group between the 45 yard lines (or is it the 25 yard lines?). The center is clay; it will be molded by whoever does the better job of communicating a message that meets the center's real needs. The Dems are not doing that with even a scintilla of effectiveness right now.
The Dems task is quite achievable; they simply have to fight to regain the territory they lost through their own feckless, clueless idiocy in the 70s through the 90s. And if the Dems can't do it because they are too hopelessly compromised by corporate co-optation, then someone else has to do it. This kind of realignment is going to happen sooner or later, but there will be a lot of unnecessary suffering if it doesn't happen sooner.
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The Right sees this as a street fight with baseball bats, bike chains, and broken bottles, and it's not looking to take any prisoners. I still have some faint hope that the Dems will wake up and understand what the stakes are, that they will find some fight and some street smarts about how to win back the country.
Accommodation to the current definition of "centrist" is essentially surrender, a choice to let the Right-wing narrative dominate. The willingness being signaled by Obama to compromise and work with Republicans is fine if it's part of a rhetorical strategy to position Dems as the reasonable and flexible "true center" in contrast with the extremist, uncompromising, obstructionist Republicans. But the truth is if Dems really believe that they have to compromise, then they have surrendered, and this surrender will lead inevitably to the destruction of the Dem party as the party that fights to promote the interests of ordinary Americans. It will become as irrelevant as the Whigs of the 1850s. And something new will have to be created to do the job it should be doing.
Right now it's not about getting things done, as if a politics of give and take were still a possibility. It's about whose narrative is going to frame our imagination of future possibility for the next decade and more. If the rightist, corporatist Republican narrative continues to dominate, the economic bottom 80% is in for some very tough times.