> According to O’Rourke, Americans know the Republicans,
> like the Democrats, suck and they know that business
> interests wield incredible power. They also know,
> from direct experience, that these influencers – the
> corporations – also suck. But, he said, they fear and
> distrust the government more than they do Walmart
> because the government has the power of coercion
> backed by force.
>
> So although it’s true Walmart can make your life
> miserable, they can’t proclaim you to be an ‘enemy
> combatant’ and remove you in shackles, facing the
> business end of an M441, to Gitmo or charge you with
> tax evasion and dispatch legal and police enforcers
> after you… and so on.
I think he has something of a point here (he's not completely stupid). Of course, the error here is that the economic power of the corporations is completely ignored, although it is much more relevant to people's daily lives than the government's power for the majority of citizens, who are not likely to be arrested or sent to Gitmo on the average day but who are definitely subjected to the power of any number of corporations on that day.
An important step forward here would be to change the frames through which government vs. corporate power are viewed and discussed in the culture. (The concept of frames in politics is being tackled by George Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute <rockridgeinstitute.org>). Corporations are framed as beneficent friends of the common person, whereas government is routinely pictured in much of the culture as nothing but a bothersome, unnecessary intruder on private happiness. Precisely reversing these frames is not exactly what is needed -- rather, corporations, along with government, need to be framed as dangerous beasts which can do a lot of damage and which need to be brought under popular control.
> But O’Rourke didn’t stop there, no sir. It’s not
> just the fear of government that motivates; it’s also
> love of country. Republicans do well because
> Americans like to feel good about their country. They
> don’t want to pause while waving the flag on the
> Fourth of July to commemorate the crimes of slavery or
> the near genocide of Native Americans, or 19th and
> early twentieth century aggression against the
> Philippines or even the very recent victims of Abu
> Ghraib and other facilities of the American gulag
> complex.
>
> They just want to wave the flag and feel good and this
> is what the Republicans allow them to do without fear
> of wind or vertigo, even as they slowly choke them to
> death. Liberals, he said, have a hard time with this
> and so people tune out when they, from the point of
> view of our fun loving masses, ‘bring the noise’ by
> listing America’s extravagant crimes.
Unlike much of the Left, I don't think that waving the flag is a heinous crime for which ordinary Americans should be ceaselessly flogged. Feeling good about their country is something that people other than Americans tend to want to do, as well. The re-framing in this case needs to be thought out rather dexterously, perhaps something along the lines of "things like the Abu Ghraib sort of thing (add your favorite US atrocities here) are not what a country we can be proud of does."
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt