The selling of ignorance

In an NPR interview airing today, President Obama conducts a long-needed public tutorial on a few of the eccentricities of contemporary right-wing politics. What Donald Trump is "exploiting during the course of his campaign," says Obama (who, I assume, is using Trump symbolically), is that "particularly blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy." This unpigmented bloc is also experiencing an incursion of unlike demographics; it is listening to the pounding drivel of the right's clatter machine — "that somehow [Obama is] different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, etc."; and it is suffering from the profound delusion that ISIS — indeed "a virulent, nasty organization" — is somehow an "organization that can destroy the United States." Voila. "You combine those things," concludes Obama, "and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear — some of it justified, but just misdirected."

A very nice synopsis of the current, of whose continuity one is reminded. As I have noted before, I resist the "this-is-nothing-new" narrative of political commentary, which in my opinion possesses an unappealing schoolmarmishness. Yet, as President Obama also notes in his NPR interview, it is "important for us to keep things in perspective" — and in this instance, proper perspective is intrusively historical.

Perhaps just a scattering of it; no dry, chronological survey, and certainly nothing comprehensive. What, we ask, is new about Trump, Cruz, economic distress, evangelical palsy, nativist paranoia and bogeymen everywhere, from swarthy infidels to godless fifth columnists? They have always been with us, the exploiters and the exploited. Reaganism, Gingrichism and New Rightism, hustling pretend-economic cures and whipping up religious chauvinism. Goldwaterism and Nixonism's exploitation of white backlash. The right's obscurantist pushback against New Deal experimentation (designed to save — the leftist horror of it all — capitalism). McCarthyism's defamatory conflation of liberalism, socialism, communism and Stalinism. The hysterical movement of 100 percent Americanism set against Eastern and Southern Europe's deracinated. In general the right's paranoid stylistics of dreading the differently shaded and the culturally unfamiliar; and of course its ceaseless fear of foreign ideas, its unrelenting need for enemies — foreign and domestic — and its incurable compulsion to shriek Boo!

All of which, over the decades, has now fluently vomited up Trump and Ted Cruz, both of whom are killing the hysteria-lagging competition in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. You want to succeed in pseudoconservative politics? Simply yell Boo louder and more often. The children of the right just love to be frightened. Always have, always will. 

 

Comments

[Anne J]

Basically, they're drama queens and always the victims. Sadly, you don't have to look far to find people like this. They're angry, they're paranoid, they're misinformed, and have no interest in becoming informed. That would kill the drama for them. It must be exhausting living in such an angry, scared state of mind 24/7.

[Peter G]

To be fair not all the Republican candidates are selling ignorance. Most are merely catering to it.

[Bob]

There's a rare thing in his interview that Mr. Obama is completely wrong about as well as contradictory. He thinks it's healthy for young people to be engaged and to question authority, but considers protests of some speakers to be "try[ing] to just shut them up." This attack on imaginary political correctness is disappointing.

According to Bloomberg news commencement speakers generally are paid from $1000 to $200,000 in fees according to their stature. Condoleezza Rice was to have been paid $35000 for her speech at Rutgers and receive an honorary degree ( http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/rutgers-university-condoleezza-rice-2014-commencement-speaker ). This is a woman that helped drum up support for the Iraq war with language known to be misleading and later supported torture. Students were engaged and would have been negligent in not pushing back on the university's plan to honor her and make her a role model.

The case against Christine Lagarde isn't as clear. She's done great work as a women's right advocate, but as head of the International Monetary Fund oversaw financial deals not always advantageous to the client countries, especially their poorer inhabitants. Still, the students showed engagement on the issue. The president can't have it both ways. Why should Christine Lagarde's right to speech nullify the students'?

[Turgidson]

It's sort of a gray area, in my view. Condi was invited to give a commencement address, not just speak at a symposium or other sort of lecture/debate setting.

I think protesting her right to speak in a symposium-type setting is on one, less noble side of the "PC police" line, while protesting her being a commencement speaker is firmly on the other.

The former events are meant to encourage the airing of opinions, discussion of ideas, and debate. By all means, let Condi speak at these. Challenge her ideas, push her to attempt to justify her historic foolishness. That's the point.

Commencement is a joyous, pride-filled once-in-a-lifetime event for the students receiving their degrees and being celebrated. They have every right to object to having a lying war criminal foisted upon them to give the address on such an occasion. I drew a short straw of sorts for my commencement - rather than have an interesting or inspiring public figure, we had one of the university's economics professors (who no one particularly liked, no less) give our commencement speech. Many years later I'm still miffed we got hosed. I can hardly imagine how pissed I'd be if, say, Donald Rumsfeld had been our speaker (and wasn't dragged away in cuffs at the end of his remarks).

[Bob]

Obama was probably trying to sound reasonable to people huffed up about PC, but no one should have to listen to an assistant war criminal and torturer at commencement. I can't even imagine what the people responsible for booking her were thinking unless they were conservative trolls.

[Turgidson]

Amazingly, Condi managed to emerge from that trainwreck of an administration with a fairly positive reputation, at least compared to Bush/Cheney/Rummy. So the suits at the university may have genuinely thought it reasonable to book her. Their students knew better.

[S. Holland]

Beautifully stated!!!

[Bob]

I can still remember her claiming we couldn't wait until the smoking gun was a mushroom cloud, which the UN inspectors had already said was not in the works. Anyone who read the news should have known better.