On Jul 26, 2010, at 11:58 AM, zwil...@zwilnik.com wrote:
On July 25, 2010 at 7:57 PM Bruce Bostwick
<lihan161...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On Jul 25, 2010, at 1:06 PM, Doug Pensinger wrote:
>
> > Is the Tea Party fundamentally racist? Or is it just coincidental
> > that it formed as a black man was taking office? For years,
> > Republicans were in office busting the budget and passing bills
like
> > Medicare D which was completely unfunded and will cost us
something
> > like $72 B a year. Where was the outrage then?
> >
> > Doug
>
> I wouldn't say it was fundamentally racist as a matter of actual
> policy, or at least not overtly stated policy. Most of the time,
they
> carefully avoid using racist language or imagery in their public
> statements. Most of the time.
>
Don't overlook what is called "dog whistle" political statements.
This names comes from the well-known phenomenon that a highly-
pitched whistle will be heard by dogs, but not by people. And in
polictics there is a similar phenomenon whereby you can say
something that cannot explicitly be criticized when you you say it,
but the people who are supposed to hear it will understand what you
really mean.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
One important thing to note related to covertly targeted communication
is that the right wing in general is not in the habit of making
broadcast public statements all that frequently to the general public,
for various reasons, not the least of which is that they tend not to
be well prepared for or tolerant of the inevitable criticism from more
moderate or progressive-minded audiences.
The far more common practice in the right-wing community is to
communicate through viral chain emails, which can usually be counted
on to travel only to sympthetic readers and whose targeting leverages
interpersonal relationships as a filter to keep the communication from
reaching people inclined to question the content. This bears some
serious consideration.
The Tea Party leadersip doesn't seem to be authoring a lot of the
viral content, but the rank and file membership use that back channel
almost exclusively, and given that the people in those channels tend
to be a vector for both Tea Party and neopentecostal theocratic
agitprop, among many other (and sometimes many much, much nastier)
subjects, there's no small amount of cross-pollination and
conflation. I have at least two ore three separate taps into that
vector, thanks to certain oddities about my family relationships and
my political leanings, and I can say confidently that about 90% or
more of what the Tea Party rank and file are saying isn't making the
news because it's targeted tightly enough that the media don't see it.
And it's being mixed with a lot of theocratic and Christian-
nationalist messages, and various flavors of racist and/or white
supremacist content as well, and because it's largely viral, it's
nearly impossible to trace to a given origin, or stop in any
meaningful fashion. And I'm only getting a tiny fraction of the full
stream of it, and I get a lot.
So this is a complex question, because while the Tea Party does
technically have a leadership of sorts, it's a weak one, and there's a
lot of leaderless-cell activity underneath the surface that's not at
all like the public face of the party. And I'm not sure whether
that's a feature of the design, or an emergent property of its
population and the methods they use to communicate. I'm leaning
toward the latter, although the leadership certainly doesn't seem to
be too serious about doing anything other than enabling it and
diverting outside attention away from what's going on.
"The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly
is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a
thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the
people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past
the point at which these changes cannot be reversed." -- Adolf Hitler
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