Claiming the Center

In an extended aside to his excellent piece on the writings and speakings of Jonathan Franzen, my friend Daniel Silliman writes:

If you’re on the political fringe in America, you find yourself weighing two possible rhetorical moves. The first is to defend extremism, almost abstract extremism, extremism for its own sake. You deride the democratic majority, calling them “sheep,” unwitting pawns of powerful forces. Thus your fringe status is a sign of the value of your ideas, marking you yourself as one of the few, the chosen, those who really understand. This is the move of anyone quoting Barry Goldwater on extremism in defense of liberty. The other possible move is to attempt to redefine everything, to re-frame the picture so that you are actually at the center. Everyone else is on the fringe, the real crazies. This is what libertarians do with their World’s Smallest Political Quiz, wherein, through “just the honest magic of truth and common sense,” libertarians fall at the center and top part of the map, while mainstream Republicans are a dot on the far right, along with fascists. (Liberals and anyone who doesn’t think the government should be shrunk by 50 percent or more is out on the left with the commies.) The move is actually kind of brilliant, in that the reframing appears natural, and it’s hard, while looking at the redrawn Bell curve, to notice immediately that the terms being used aren’t quite the common, accepted ones. [Emphasis added.]

This seems right to me, and I would add only that the second move — to play with terms until one’s own position is in the center — can play into the former in dangerous ways. Silliman rightly understands the World’s Smallest Political Quiz as a trick intended to open the quiz subject to libertarian ideas. I suspect that a lot of the people who make the first move have made the error of falling for the trick of the second move, first. It would be easy to define libertarian, or conservative, to include anyone who has a beef with the government. Indeed, that is the handy shorthand a lot of even very smart people operate under.

The problem with Silliman’s second move is that, once you forget it’s a trick, you set yourself up for an epistemological crisis. If everyone who had a beef with government were a libertarian, the libertarian party might, for instance, appear on this chart, and libertarian policy initiatives might tend to be laughed out of the room with less frequency. Of course, many people do forget it’s a trick, or fail to appreciate the trick in the first place. If you think everyone who, say, wants to defend freedom is a conservative, you’ll be confused and disappointed when conservative issues and politicians don’t get elected.¹

You can resolve this epistemological crisis neatly by one of two means: 1) re-examine the premise that everyone who has a beef with the government is a libertarian (or, more relevantly, a conservative); 2) explain the absence of libertarian policy success by reference to an outside entity, either the State or something beyond the State, which in fact controls policy outcomes. That is to say, you can de-legitimate your own trick, or you can de-legitimate the political process that does not lead to the outcomes you want. MacIntyre:

When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them. The narrative in terms of which he or she at first understood and ordered experiences is itself now made into the subject of an enlarged narrative.

The enlarged narrative is the narrative of the tea parties and the far right. It is an article of faith for the tea parties that the nation (“Real America” — note again the redefinition of terms) overwhelmingly agrees with them. However, the nation has elected someone who is in some ways diametrically opposed to their beliefs and opinions. It could not be that they are mistaken about what “Real America” is. It must be that their opponent is illegitimate, an interloper and a phony. In some cases, it must also be that he is being controlled by the shadowy powers that be, who are able to stymie at every turn the will of the people which is unified in its conservatism.

Whence, the paranoid style in American politics. The two moves Silliman identifies turn out to be tendencies competing and complementing one another within the same body.

¹ I remain confused about whether “conservative” is best defined as an overweening emphasis on “freedom”, as the rhetoric implies, or an overweening emphasis on “order” as the policies tend to imply. Neither “freedom” nor “order” are necessarily bad things, and as used here, perhaps they are content-free, if value-laden, terms. It is certainly perplexing to me that the party that fears government control on the one hand is the party of law and order on the other. Lest you think, dear reader, that I am overly criticizing the political right, let me defend myself by saying that I believe I can give you a definition of “liberal” that is fairly consistent across both time and geography, in the sense that it would predict policy responses to particular issues within broad lines. I can conceive of no corresponding definition of “conservative” and invite the reader to supply one.

gauche
06 Jan 10