>On Behalf Of kelley
> Here's the thing, if the logic of enjoyment is such that Haider gets fans
> with all the publicity surrounding his denouncement, then tell me, why
> doesn't it work the other way? Why don't feminists accrue more to their
> ranks when Rush calls them feminazis? Why isn't the queer
> community seeing rising numbers of supporters/identifiers as Dr. Laura
denounces them
> repeteadly? eh?
> The logic that Zizek uses in this analysis is just wrong and that's why
> psychoanalytic concpets ought not be applied to social phenom --
> they don't fucking translate because society doesn't operate like people
and people
> aren't societies.
Amen...I think Kelley hits the nail on the head. When a group has "shadow" popularity beyond the overt manifestation of a specific group, attacks on that group may bring that quiet support out in the open, but it does not CREATE new support.
This is why the rise of Haider (or Le Pen or Buchanan) justifiably scares people. We all know their overt support is just the fin above the water of the much larger racist and anti-immigrant well of hatred out there. Attacking that hatred and denouncing it does not create more racism; it just brings it out into the open where it already exists.
While a few people may make their support more overt for the Haider, Le Pen or Buchanan, it also forces others to choose up sides on a basic issue of racism and exclusion, instead of hanging out in the swamp of equivocation.
The idea that liberals are just as guilty of racism as Haider, Buchanan etc. is oddly the exact same argument made by those forces publicly to legitimize themselves as just one more "pluralistic" opinion-- they say, "sure we have the occasional flaw, the knee-jerk Sig Heil on occasion, but so does every other group, so why pick on us?" And with no degrees of racism allowed, we have David Duke/ Le Pen/ Haider/ Buchanan = Trent Lott/Hague/Kohl = Blair/Clinton = Sharpton/PDS/SOS-Racism = Farakahn. Everyone is a racist, so no one is a racist, so racism is a meaningless term, so let's just talk about pluralist self-interest and identity politics, in the case of Haider or Buchanan, white identity politics.
The Rainbow Coalition or SOS-Racism fighting against racism does translate into a different message about racism than Al Gore publicly defending affirmative action or the Austrian Social Democrats denouncing Haider, but the latter is a different message about racism than the GOP repealing affirmative action in the US or the Austrian conservatives going into coalition with Haider, and all of that is different from the Haider/Buchanan/Le Pen mobilization of hate and racial resentment as their primary political identity.
-- Nathan Newman