This piece, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, caught my eye recently. It’s a meditation by two communications professors on how the Big Lie—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Democrats—draws its power by tapping into deep, angry feelings of alienation and resentment that are part of the DNA of the American right. It includes a warning to anyone—in communications, politics, or journalism—not to be superficial when sizing up the angry tribalism of the right and the political potential of that tribalism.
Call me cynical, but I think it’s a warning likely to go unheeded. The generally preferred response among politicians, pundits, and reporters is to cast a pearl-clutching gaze over the chaos and ask some version of, “How did we get here?” The “answer” is, by and large, some vapid discourse on how society has somehow failed (see David Brooks’ recent Atlantic piece on how America got so “mean,” for example) or how tribalism is the product of “both sides.”
It’s not “society,” and it’s not “both sides.” The divisions, the hate, and the accompanying violence are the result of decades of calculated messaging from the right that, while it stoked a number of grievances, played, at its core, to racism. They’ve been steadily forging white identity politics, and it’s worked spectacularly well.
The LARB authors, Anthony Nadler and Doron Taussig, open their piece with a description of Kyle (a pseudonym) a conservative college student. He voted for The Angry Inch, but he does not buy the lie that the election was stolen, so he is troubled by the attempted coup on J6. But he is even more disturbed by what he feels is an unfair characterization of everyone on the right as somehow complicit:
“You have every cultural outlet in your life stacked against you . . . . you go to a job but you can’t really talk politics to [your] co-workers because there is a good chance that one of them might say something to your boss and you might get demoted or even fired. You can’t go to college without having most of your classes consist of definitely very progressive left ideologies … You have Hollywood … [Conservatives] have the sense of, “I’m being constantly repressed, and now my election’s being stolen from me.”
Kyle—and he’s far from alone, here—appears, on one hand, affected by the Good German syndrome, the condition in which you claim—perhaps truthfully, perhaps not—to have disagreed with a repressive government but did nothing to call out or resist the repression. On the other, he carries a deeply instilled resentment that liberals scorn him and have somehow rigged everything against him.
A typical liberal would say that if we simply provide people like Kyle with the facts, they will become enlightened and shake off the bonds of their self-imposed resentment.
No, they won’t.
Psychologists call it “confirmation bias,” as Dr. Daniel Williams explained in this Boston Review piece:
“In general, people are highly skeptical of information they encounter: if a message conflicts with their pre-existing beliefs, they demand arguments that they find persuasive from sources they judge to be trustworthy. Otherwise, they typically reject the message.”
Our culture is riddled with examples, but look no further than the right digging in, Alamo-like, when The Angry Inch was indicted for making off with classified documents, for trying to convince Georgia election officials to overturn the result there in 2020, or for his central role in the January 6th coup attempt.
I recall one of the Inch’s supporters being interviewed about the documents case, and he growled at the reporter that he didn’t care because Der Leader “is for America First.”
A recent CBS/YouGov poll—the LARB article links to it—reported that more than half of Republicans responding believed the investigations and resulting indictments of The Angry Inch add up to “an attack on people like me.”
Nadler and Taussig put it succinctly: “Lies matter when they take root in fertile soil.”
That soil has been tilled for at least my entire life. In 1963, two conservative columnists, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, published this piece decrying the decision of Republican leadership to court racists as the Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum.
In 1966, Richard Nixon toured the country on behalf of Republican Congressional candidates. This was a year after the Voting Rights Act became law and two years after the Civil Rights Act was signed. Republicans, following the playbook Evans and Novak described, were on the verge of major gains in the off-year elections. As The New Yorker chronicled 15 years ago, Nixon whipped audiences into a frenzy of hate against Lyndon Johnson, liberals, and, especially, Black Americans, as then-aide Pat Buchanan recalled from an event in South Carolina:
“ . . . the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, ‘burned the paint off the walls.’ As they left the hotel, Nixon said, ‘This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.’”
Two years later, Nixon would run for president under the theme of “Bring Us Together,” but, as The New Yorker points out, he “ . . . adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few.”
Then-Republican strategist Kevin Phillips called this approach, “positive polarization,” which is kind of like Mitt Romney talking about wiping out people’s jobs as “creative destruction.”
Meanwhile, an up-and-coming Republican political operative, Lee Atwater, was absorbing these lessons. As he explained to an interviewer in 1981:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N_____, n_____, n_____.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n_____’; that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. … ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘n_____, n_____.’”
Fast-forward to 1988, and, while the Dukakis campaign was imploding from the relentless attacks orchestrated by Atwater—who’d decided to drop the abstractions—and Roger Ailes on George Bush’s behalf, Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko got right to the point about what the scorn for liberals was all about.
Shortly thereafter, Rush Limbaugh was in full, poisonous flower, hitting the white victimization button at every opportunity. Newt Gingrich became famous and powerful riding on a strategy of extreme divisive messaging. Then FOX hit the airwaves in 1996. By the time The Angry Inch descended on his gold escalator, haranguing about the diseased, criminal, brown hordes gathering at the border, three generations of white Americans had been imbued with resentment.
To a certain extent, the mainstream media bought into it. White backlash at the polls in the off-year elections in 1994 and 2010 and the general in 2016 has been viewed and described as something organic, even understandable, and there was even a certain strain of guilt expressed in media circles that they’d missed the story.
They did indeed miss the story, but not the one they think, despite the evidence right in front of their eyes. Moreover, despite their efforts to make good, they are still treated with scorn by the people they are supposedly trying to understand.
And they keep getting played. Practically within hours, after devoting brief lip service about how awful the J6 violence had been, the right pivoted to blaming liberals, to the point of saying the attempted coup was actually the work of the left, and now they were trying to blame conservatives. The Angry Inch’s exhortations to his motley mob were simply him exercising his freedom of speech. The press, rather than shunning such wild, conspiratorial lies, passed all this along, and, as Pew reported about 18 months ago, it has had the effect of blunting the blame.
So, the failure of large parts of our media to investigate, understand, and accurately report the efforts to sow division and violence in our country have a real-life effect. Efforts to shake the institution out of its lethargy are, for the most part, met with a kind of condescending response to the effect that critics simply don’t understand how journalism works.
Oh, we understand, all right.
Nadler and Taussig end their piece saying “it is critical” to understand the alienation of right-wing whites. For the sake of our democracy, it’s even more important to understand the planning, funding, message development, and execution that has created it.
Later.
Posted by scaypgrayce 
Scaypgrayce 