Comment I Posted To Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias on the changing attitude toward "redistribution of wealth."

A theory about the shift in attitudes toward “redistribution of wealth.”

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his book “Rabelais and his World” referred to obscenity’s role in everyday discussion by saying that the pejoratives became dissociated from their actual meaning, and became a whole phrase on its own; basically, it became an expression rather than an actual phrase, rooted in the meanings of the word.

I think that’s what happens to talking points: a phrase in the language becomes something ideological, and therefore the words get uprooted from their meaning. Between April and October, McCain has taken the phrase “redistributing the wealth” and turned it into a euphemism for socialism–itself, in the US, a euphemism for dictatorial oppression and big government. So the question is heard by the listener, and it means something completely different now than it did five months ago, if you subscribe to McCain’s euphemism.

I don’t think attitudes have changed. I think McCain has shifted how we use language.

(Another example of this: McCain is firmly against the ideologically charged “regulation” but in favor of the ideologically neutral “oversight.”)

Hard Racism vs. Soft Racism

Our language has simplified over the last generation. Simplified language often leads to simplified thought: thought is, after all, encoded in the logic of language.

So when two phenomenon share the same word, confusion may arise when multiple people misinterpret the same word to mean different things.

This applies to various "isms;" racism, sexisim, ageism, and homophobia (it doesn't end in ism but it's the same sort of sentiment). We use the term racism carefully in this country. But we also throw it around a lot. We have a lot of anxiety about what's termed "racist" and what is not termed "racist." People who use it too much devalue the word; people who use it too little let racists get away with defamation. I'm going to focus on racism right now because Barack Obama invited this nation to have a dialog about race (which has not been followed up on), but this can be applied to sexism as well--that installment is coming soon.

So let me begin by splitting the term 'racism' into two categories: "hard" racism and "soft" racism. Hard racism is a very plain sort of racism, and thus we don't hear it spoken aloud anymore. Ever since the Civil Rights Movement, our culture has decided, as a majority, that it is unacceptable to be a hard racist aloud anymore. This isn't to say that there aren't hard racists; but whenever a statement that is hard racism is heard aloud, that person is pretty much chased out of any public position they might hold.

"Hard" racism is an extreme form of racism. "Hard" racism is holding the belief that one or more races are inferior to one or more races. Adolf Hitler was a hard racist. Racial eugenicists are hard racists. Jim Crow Laws are hard racist laws. They codify the notion that one race of people is objectively (in their eyes) worse than another race of people. People who speak hard racism aloud are tagged, unequivocally, as bigots.

Today, we don't see nearly as much of that. But what we do see is a lot more of "soft" racism. "Soft" racism is hard to define. "Soft" racism is non-absolute; it does not hold that one race is absolutely worse than another. But it has a lot of negative connections with a race. One type of soft racism is ignorance. Another sort of soft racism is resentment.

Barack Obama, in his speech about race, talked about "white resentment," caused by pro-minority actions such as Affirmative Action. It is unsurprising that if one group gets preferential treatment, there will be resentment by the other. And these resentful emotions will spill over into negative attitudes. A hostility; an avoidance.

Now, these people who feel resentment toward African Americans may say that they do not think African Americans are worse, as race. Most probably genuinely believe that. But they do still feel a racial tension which cannot be dismissed as being completely non-racist. And this racial tension, or negative attitude toward African Americans may manifest itself in negative action. And that negative action will be racist, no matter how you dice it.

If both "soft" and "hard" racism are still racisms, why is it important to distinguish? Because soft racism can usually be bridged by better communication, more cooperation, and more information. For instance: affirmative action is only necessary in a community which acknowledges that all of its poor will not get opportunities to education. If a leader brings the white community and the black and latino and asian and etc. communities to work together to improve the opportunities of college education to everyone, then the resentment will decrease.

Hard racism has to be fought. I remain highly doubtful that the Jim Crow laws and segregation could have been ended simply by having Martin Luther King Jr. and Strom Thurmond sitting at a table discussion solutions. Strom Thurmond's belief that the black man was inferior was an ideology; it was entrenched in how he approached the world. And we have no need to give that any time or respect.

The reason is because "hard" racism is an ideology of racism and "soft" racism are facets or actions of racism; the latter being bad, but not as all-encompassing as the first.

Another reason "soft" racism needs to be addressed is that it often causes subconscious soft racism. People who are nervous when black men approach them in the street are exhibiting racism in a way, but it would be ridiculous to put that in the same class as joining the Klu Klux Klan. The imagery and the stereotypes and the cultures which give rise to these soft racisms need to be addressed. They cannot be ignored.

For instance, in the Amadu Dialo case, the officers involved had an ingrained soft-racism; their assumptions were that a black man of a certain age might be violent. And because of it, their reflexes (in under seven seconds; a core part of Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink) led them to shoot a man over 40 times before they could accurately and dispassionately appraise the situation. Do I think they were hard racist--that they think the black man is inferior? No, I don't believe that. But I do believe that they were soft racists; taught to expect trouble from men of a certain description. And although I have only met a few hard racists, I have barely met anyone who doesn't exhibit the occasional sign of "soft-racism" (Exhibit A: "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" from Avenue Q).

It is important to confront these soft-racisms and make everyone aware when they are going on. Because the conscious mind can overcome subconscious soft-racism, and the conscious mind can address the causes of soft-racism. Unquestioned, they might simply fester, and lead to those cases of hard racism that we want to avoid.

And one last notice: hard racism nowadays masquerades as soft racism; sometimes it is barely detectable. This makes it hard to point to. For instance, I personally detect a hint of hard racism about the McCain campaign's allegation of Obama as "presumptuous" (David Gergen, a Southerner, called it a code-word that everyone in the South would recognize as standing in for uppity). But of course I wouldn't be able to prove it, any more than I can prove that Obama's "out of touch" ad is ageist, the way the McCain campaign alleges it is. When Trent Lott famously said that if they'd elected Strom Thurmond, we wouldn't be in "this mess," did he actually mean that we should have a segregationalist country? It seems pretty clear to me and to most people, but because of this conflation of hard and soft racism, it loses its impact.

Be on the lookout, America.

Identity Politics

Today, in my Culture of Dissent class (taught by the inimitable Jan Urban, a Czech dissident from the Velvet Revolution and an excellent journalist in Bosnia, and Kosovo), we discussed the rather difficult question of why Communism proved to be popular.

The answer, from my point of view, is one having to do with the nature of identity in the 20th Century. There are many people who don't believe themselves to be very philosophical in their everyday life (philosophy being a very 'elite' passtime), but in point of fact, everyone has philosophical ideas and worldviews. And one of the big philosophical questions is, "Who am I? What is my identity?"

People base a surprising amount of their political convictions and idealisms based on who they think they are. For instance, one of the reasons that Americans have consistently voted for tax cuts for the wealthy is an array of polls which show that Americans consistently think that they are wealthier than they actually are (which corresponds to the way that they think they're thinner than they actually are).

We talked about the appeal of communism in the Industrial Revolution era. In order to understand it, you need to take a village-eye view of the change. The poor serfs, living in small rural communities, lived in an era with very little mobility. They were engaged in occupations passed down to them from generations, among a small community of people they knew. As the industrial revolution came to pass, serfdom was abolished: they were not necessary anymore. A vacuum formed, which sucked these serfs into the city. Suddenly they were in a huge community, much larger than themselves. Whatever they had previously been known for, through their family, was no longer a mark of identity. They passed by nameless and faceless masses everyday; they worked alongside nameless and faceless masses that did exactly what they did. There was no honor in their new work: they were (proverbially) just another cog in the machine; just another brick in the wall. They had been robbed of their identity, their purpose, and their security.

It was rather like going to a large college after being in a small high school.

At any rate, they needed a new identity. Communism provided that. It gave them a name for themselves: proletariat. It gave them a cause for their misery: bourgoisie. It told them that not only were the proletariat powerful, they were the single most powerful force of history: and that it was historically determined that they must succeed.

So, to turn to contemporary politics: during the Cold War, these identity politics broke apart into large dualisms: Communists and Capitalists on the world stage, and Democrats and Republicans on the American stage (note that third parties were still a noticeable force until World War Two). Ideology became, for one of the few times in American history, a primary source of identification: Democrats, Reds, Anti-Communists, Republicans, Socialists, Peaceniks, Hippies. All of these tags were ideological in nature. They gave people a sense of identity.

Today, these two grand coalitions seem more fractured. At least, the Republican camp seems to have split decisively into moderates, libertarians, neoconservatives, and social conservatives. A messy primary season filled with candidates who did not fully appeal to any of these groups (with the exception of Mike Huckabee for social conservatives and the Ron Paul movement for Libertarians) left people on the right with a lack of a sense of direction. Many of these people identified themselves as Republican strongly, without being on board with many of the actions or beliefs of other Republicans.

A big tip-off to me that this identity politics is coming apart? Obama has a large following of so-called Obamicans (Republicans for Obama). Notice, of course, that they are still calling themselves Republicans despite voting for Obama. I'm not necessarily saying that they aren't actually Republicans, but I'm noticing that their insistence is on defining themselves by a party affiliation which, in this election, may not be entirely accurate.

One of my favorite sayings to hear is "I've been a life-long Republican, but I'm considering voting Democrat." Notice the phrase "life-long." This is put forward as a positive, even though being a life-long Republican might imply that you've supported characters like George W. Bush, Nixon, or Reagan (in the same way that a life-long Democrat must have supported Carter, Dukakis, McGovern).

But this is the way people have previously identified themselves.

But with a hyper-specification of polls, there is a new level of identification going on. We hear it today on the news all the time. Demographics. Very small clusters of identity. How are middle-aged women going to vote? What about older men? Young black men in rural towns? These statistics can all be coallated. And apparently, they matter. And although women's groups have been condemning Palin since she was first put on the ticket, the latest poll shows that McCain has indeed spiked among women.

The question, I suppose, is whether we can move past identity politics. Barack Obama (in my opinion) has a way of addressing that. He appeals to people to vote not as Democrats, or Republicans, or as black and whites, but as Americans. This isn't just a trite slogan of identification: he's asking us to identify ourselves as America, and vote in such a way that doesn't just benefit my group or your group or any group, but benefits all of America.

And the question is: will it work.

Words, Words, Words, Words, Words II

If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation.

The quotation above is from Theater and Its Double, by Antonin Artaud. To a devoted fan of The Daily Show, I sympathize with that statement. We watch the political cycle today, and it feels as though words have become meaningless. Take, for instance, "time line." The Bush Administration, unhappy with the concept of a "time line," branded it as "cutting and running," saying that an "arbitrary time lines" would shackle them from responding to conditions on the ground, and would embolden the terrorists.

Then Obama laid out his 16 month time line, and very shortly afterward, the Prime Minister of Iraq echoed it. And the Bush Administration said that they would begin drawing down troops, to end in about sixteen months.

Was this a time line? No, it was a "time horizon."

To anyone with an understanding of the accepted meaning of words, that's clearly some jiggery-pokery. Both of them imply the same thing. But the point is that the phrase "time line" has become an ideological symbol, rather than a linguistic symbol. The tags "pro-choice" and "pro-life" mean the same thing; certainly the ambiguous tag "change" has. "Torture," "message force multipliers," "patriotism", etc. are words which have their original meaning erased, and replaced with an ideological meaning.

Take Mitt Romney (and others') use of the word "liberal." He is not talking about a person whose viewpoints are slightly left of average, he is talking about a charicature: the ideological imprint of liberal in the conservative mind (namely, a tax-and-spend elitist plutocrat with little interest in family values or faith).

This is dangerous, because it corrodes something even more fundamental than our politics: it corrodes our language itself. And, in fact, it corrodes our thought.

Intelligence is often distinguishable from unintelligence by the proper use of symbolic logic. If the brain can assemble symbols in a correct fashion, it answers questions and creates solutions better. If we confused the internal logic of our brain, muddling facts and decaying the links between language and thought, we are corroding our thought-process. This is a fairly extreme case, but in point of fact, if you cannot clearly interpret facts, and if the landscape of your assumptions are ideological rather than reality based, then you cannot properly think. And if you cannot properly communicate, you cannot properly exchange ideas and thoughts. Corroding language corrodes the marketplace of ideas.

This phenomenon can be seen in totalitarian societies: a perfect example is the Communist world. Take from Havel:

From being a means of signifying reality, and of enabling us to come to an understanding of it, language seems to have become an end in itself.

And further:

When we lose touch with reality, we inevitably lose the capacity to influence reality effectively. And the weaker that capacity is, the greater our illusion that we have effectively influenced reality.

He illustrates these points (in the essay On Evasive Thinking) very clearly when he relates the story of a window-sill which breaks off, falls, and kills a person. This has happened many times, he writes, and a newspaper person writes an article which raises the question of whether better care must be taken of window sills, but then proceeds to pat the communist regime on the back for being the sort of free and open place where one can question to state's upkeep of window-sills. The newspaper is forced to contort and bend over backwards to match the ideology.

I say all of this as a prologue for an excellent Czech play I saw yesterday on this very subject. It was called Tika Tika Politika (translated as Ticks Ticks Politics). It was a four-part experimental vocal score made up of syllables and proto-language (in the first part, for instance, it is entirely repetitions of different syllables of Politika) in such a way as to render all of the vocal language meaningless.

This is, to a certain degree, the way the words in our political language have been treated. In an era of talking points, the constant repetition of ideologically charged phrases redefines those phrases permanently. The only way to reverse this is to remove the content of the language entirely, and to analyze the other communication provided.

In Tika Tika Politika, the analysis comes mostly through body-language and tonality; seeing how they say what they say is the important part. You learn to follow the narrative outside of the message. In real life, this takes a strong ironic mind, and you need all the help you can get.

Which is why, right now, I'm watching the Daily Show.