Doug Henwood:
> My god. CNN is left, and the network that dumped
> Donahue to hire Savage is the center? What a
> loony bin America is.
It's akin to compulsively reading "partisan" as vice and "bipartisan" as virtue, which, as someone once said, amounts to the belief that a formal two party state functions best as a one party state.
Recently, one local anti-war activist (a big Chomsky fan, actually) was proclaiming the need to "transcend" left & right, by which he meant ally with Buchanan. Another one was saying that having too many lefties in the anti-war movement is like inbreeding, and will mutate the gene pool. Others try to avoid betraying themselves as left for fear of dismissal by others. There's a sense that left = irrelevant (at best), so to be relevant you must not be left (though what left means goes undefined). Specifics don't matter: the very brand is deemed corrupt.
But centrism is a posture, not a political philosophy. It's a way of speaking. It's a series of ritual denunciations of "extremist" positions (real or imagined) -- a Gitlin-esque detox for the sake of ideological hygiene. Joel Schalit got it in _Jerusalem Calling_:
Ignoring a steady stream of right-wing political achievements, many leftists still place a great deal of stock in the notion that American politics remain dominated by a mythic political center. As they see it, some folks swing to the right of center, others swing to the left, but no one ever moves very far away from the middle, unless they are what newspapers and politicians are fond of calling "hardliners" or "extremists". This perception belies a failure to see beneath the surface of democratic rhetoric. Most Americans, with the exception of ultra-right-wingers, shy away from being labeled as zealots of any political persuasion. The language with which Americans have learned to talk politics--best characterized by the concept of _inclusivity_, as discussed in the first section of this book--almost always implies liberal political commitments, even when the ideas expressed are highly conservative. In this context, using language that overtly affirms one's political identity tends to be too _exclusive_, and therefore unacceptable. Does this mean that most Americans really can be defined as "middle of the road?" Not at all. As we have seen with the radical [theocratic] right, there is substantial resistance to the state in places where the vast majority of leftists fear to tread. And most of the people dreaming of a _coup d'etat_ aren't sitting at home in a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt reading Che Guevara's _Motorcycle Diaries_. More likely, they can be found playing paintball, barbecuing on the infield of Charlotte Motor Speedway, or, dare I say it, praying in a house of worship.
Leftists, unfortunately, have a hard time overcoming their investment in the rhetoric of democratic inclusiveness. To be sure, if you say you're a leftist, plenty of Americans will think that you are ignoring the fall of the Berlin Wall. And if you say you're a right-winger, people will assume that you're a racist who wants to bring back segregation. But you can always express your opinions in popular code, paying lip service to the rules governing political expression. These rules have been shaped the now-discredited liberal political ideologies which label right-wing discourse "hate speech" (when it deal with matters of race) and left-wing discourse "hard-line" (when it deals with matters of class). You can call for revolution, but it's got to be cultural, not political. You can criticize capitalism, but it's got to be based on a preference for small business over multinational corporations. And you can voice hatred of women, Jews, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities, but you have to use language that reflects how minorities infringe upon your own _right_ to discriminate in a democratic society.
Right-wing demagogues are far more proficient at this double-speak than their counterparts on the left. For example, an evangelical Christian might say, "My right to worship Jesus Christ is demeaned when other religions have the same right to worship their own gods." A libertarian could argue that "all forms of state intervention in the economy are undemocratic because they restrict the basic rights of producers to create commodities." Or a white supremacist could say, "Giving blacks and Hispanics the same rights as whites discriminates against whites' right to live in a white society." What we find here is a distinction between rhetoric and meaning, with Americans employing language informed by liberalism in order to communicate conservative political sentiments. What's most troubling is how effectively conservatives have learned to navigate through the liberal rules governing linguistic conduct. Once you learn the language of rights, you can use it to argue on behalf of anything.
[end]
-- Shane
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