Monday, September 4, 2017
Episode 86: Wedgies of Mass Distraction
Play Now!(This episode is part of the series The Powell Movement.)There are complexities, techniques, and nuances learned when you split wood for, oh, 40 years. It's not as simple as smashing an ax on some wood and have it cleave cleanly into smaller pieces. All too often, you've got to not only bring out the wedges, but know how to use them effectively.And, it turns out, splitting wood has quite a few traits in common with splitting electorates, with issues used as wedges.That's the topic of this Episode 86: Wedgies of Mass Distraction. (And yes, that's "wedgies," as in the resulting uncomfortable underwear bunching that comes from someone pulling the undies up another's butt. You expect lofty analogies from someone that coined the term The Powell Movement?)In this episode, I read from: my computer's dictionary; Kevin Kruse's book One Nation Under God; Dan Baum's Gun Guys; and Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner Take All Politics.I play Jill Lepore observations, taken from her interview in the August 3rd, 2017 episode of On The Media, an episode titled "Smashmortion"; First Lady Betty Ford from 1975 giving her opinion on abortion's legalization (the audio taken from the same OTM episode); D. L. Myers reading from the Memo Itself; and Henry Giroux at the opening, backed by KMFDM. The Necronomikon Quartett played "Future 03" in the middle, and I closed the show with Mistle Thrush's "It's All Like Today".I'm releasing this and all my episodes under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution, share-alike, and non-commercial license.(Oh, and one final note: No, I did not take the cookie analogy used in this episode from Season 3, Episode 7, of "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." I know, I know, both of us mentioned the comparison between raisins and chocolate chips, and both associated that mention with Seattle. When I saw that episode, this episode of Attack Ads! was already recorded and mostly edited, so much so that including that bit of Kimmy Schmidt would have been a real pain. It's just a happy coincidence, nothing more.)
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Ooooo, cool, a day early. I somehow never remember to check on the normal release day, so here I am on the not-normal release day, checking for an old episode, and I get rewarded! :-)
ReplyDeleteYay! Unexpected rewards!
DeleteThe Labor Day Doldrums convinced me to do something productive, even if it was a tad off-schedule.
Great analysis!
ReplyDeleteThe Archdruid would be proud of your analogy between chopping wood and dividing the electorate. Teaching the audience a useful skill (chopping wood) even as you make a political point.
I’m not even going to dispute your idea that the primary motivator is disgust. “[Positivity is mainly] being the negative of what they hate.” Ehhhhh, that’s sure as good a theory as anything else I’ve ever heard.
However, I don’t think you should leave the impression with the audience that _all_ the wedge issues are minor or artificial issues (like, say, raisins in cookies). Some of them have real “meat” and are therefore not suitable to talk about like they’re cookies… (torturing your food example).
Gun laws are a good example. Gun laws that work easily and fairly and justly in rural Evansville, IN where I live, probably don’t work as well in downtown Los Angeles, CA. Hopefully I don’t have to explain that; it’s just a fact. City mouse versus country mouse. Part of the problem is that we as a nation (probably at the behest of the rich) tend to delegate our laws and political issues upwards, more and more with time, insisting that everything must be handled by national political parties and national one-size-fits-all blanket laws, instead of acknowledging more local autonomy. Like the US has done even in the relatively recent past -- we tend to nationalize everything to a degree more today than we used to even, say, in the penultimate few decades of the 20th Century. Local autonomy being, I believe, closer to the intention of the Founding Fathers. I am not sure if it would be easier to reverse this trend, of delegating political issues upwards with more and more vehemence… than it would be to break up the country into smaller entities that still had centralized laws, only over a smaller area. Hence I suspect our country will eventually Balkanize and break up into smaller states or groups of States. The Center Cannot Hold.
Hey, Kevin!
DeleteThe Archdruid would be proud of your analogy between chopping wood and dividing the electorate.
Just doing my part to spread Green Wizardry.
I’m not even going to dispute your idea that the primary motivator is disgust. “[Positivity is mainly] being the negative of what they hate.”
I was going to include a probably apocryphal anecdote of dubious validity. Pre-WWII, the Japanese, allies of course with Germany, saw and really liked what Hitler had done to galvanize the German population, so much so that [someone] sent an envoy to learn more, perhaps to see if that could be done in Japan.
The envoy supposedly realized that the particular strategy employed by the Nazis was worthless in Japan, simply because Japan — being +99% Japanese — had no Jews and no Gypsies, no internal minority the political propaganda operatives could connect to their country's upheaval and thus blame.
The politics of disgust are all about misdirection, pointing loudly to one thing with one hand while quietly making other things happen with the other.
That said, not all political movements can be thus described. Some really are motivated by good intentions, and many of these are successful. But, oh boy, most of the Powell Movement talking points?! Wow.
Part of the problem is that we as a nation (probably at the behest of the rich) tend to delegate our laws and political issues upwards… instead of acknowledging more local autonomy.
Interesting notion, one I had not considered. I wonder what effect broadcasting has had over the decades on this, bringing people news stories from all over the nation and thus de-localizing our national experience.
I have heard that the iconic photo of the earth taken from the moon really put the "Oh, crap, that's us!" into, for example, the environmental movement. No longer could a river fire in Ohio be separated from a blanket of smog in LA: both sprang from the same ultimate cause, one that transcended political borders.
Again, interesting notion.
I am not sure if it would be easier to reverse this trend, of delegating political issues upwards with more and more vehemence… than it would be to break up the country into smaller entities….
I'm not sure there are smaller entities there to take up the slack. Think about the social Balkanization that has already befallen us: the destruction of small town cores; the spread of car-centric living; the lack of person-to-person interaction; all of which that would be necessary to, for your example, defy the national and emphasize the local.
Bring this back to Greer and others, especially Kunstler. Perhaps it is just this social transformation that has allowed the centralization of law and power, perhaps, as you say, by the wealthy.
Lots to think about.
The Archdruid had a great old column about “consuming democracy” where he pointed out that you could imagine Democracy as a commodity, like oil or wheat. As the citizens interact and negotiate with each other locally or even regionally to make good, mutually agreeable, local laws, they “produce democracy”. If a group of citizens in the nation decide to _enforce_ their preferences on some other, distant, unwilling group through sheer force of law and government -- for example if Californians decide their strict environmental laws need to apply to rural Arkansas -- they are “consuming democracy”. There is nothing necessarily wrong or immoral about “consuming democracy”; sometimes it’s necessary and the right thing to do. For example, we as Americans might well decide that murder is murder throughout the nation even though people in Wyoming want the liberty to shoot their neighbors at will. However the problem comes if we as a nation are constantly “consuming” the commodity without ever replenishing it. To replenish it, you need to grant local discretion and autonomy for citizens to govern themselves in _at least some areas of comparable importance_ even while other areas of life or government have no flexibility in local discretion. The Archdruid pointed out that tactically this may mean, for example, allowing Southern highly religious States to ban abortion because their entire communities agree on that. And this makes Leftists highly uncomfortable, because we focus a lot on inalienable human rights. But if the more numerous coastal liberals refuse to allow Southerners to follow their religious beliefs, (however those beliefs might have been planted by unscrupulous politicians), those Southerners become a splinter group who wants to disrupt the coastal liberals and who want to go out of their way to make bitter enemies of them. It’s uncomfortable for leftists to imagine a return to the days when abortion was state-by-state, but as J.S. Hacker and Paul Pierson stated when you quoted them, religion tips people’s votes.
ReplyDeleteThe rich, of course, prefer to deal with national laws and issues because if you have a national business empire it’s a pain in the butt to deal with a patchwork of local regulations and laws. Ergo, the rich and powerful have an automatic interest in monolithic, centralized laws. So much the easier to buy and corrupt those laws, and national lawmakers. Follow that out a couple of steps and it’s another example of your earlier point that advertising leads directly to fascism…
I mean heck, the mere principle that a successful national-level businessman is going to think “I can make more money and evade laws easier if I just standardize and centralize all the laws and regulations in the nation” probably explains 80% of what you’re trying to get across with your entire Powell Memo series!
I mean heck, the mere principle that a successful national-level businessman is going to think “I can make more money and evade laws easier if I just standardize and centralize all the laws and regulations in the nation” probably explains 80% of what you’re trying to get across with your entire Powell Memo series!
DeleteYup. Very much so.
I would say, though, that the remaining 20% might be described as funding the propaganda that enables the primary 80%, and that small sliver of misdirection is often exercised emphasizing resistance of a locality over a unsympathetic national behemoth.
The more "noise" generated by so-called pro-life groups and the split between gun rights absolutists and abolitionists (for two examples cited in the episode) the less time in the newscast left for covering topics relevant to curbing the excesses of corporate capture of the entire political system.
By emphasizing emotional issues with shouty radio and telly hosts, the propagandists have many in our local communities hooked, dominated by concerns raised by those shouted voices. Their mental focus so occupied, they find themselves unable to effectively organize and activate any democratic consumption.
Therefore, you get both the "monolithic, centralized laws" and the highly-localized return to state legislation, for example regulating clinic access. The former relates to the profitable national business interests; the latter to the emotional triggers (which, when pulled by the corporate propagandists) allowed the monolithic centralization of the former.
In other words:
Quietly organize nationally;
Loudly distract locally.
Yes. Great feedback, Kevin!
D'oh! An unsympathetic national behemoth.
Delete