RED SCARE REDUX?

In these final days before the presidential election, we hear more and more negative rhetoric and rhetorical fallacies: ad hominem attacks, straw man fallacies, appeals to ignorance, fear, and so on. The latest rhetoric appears to have shifted from “Obama is a Muslim” and “Obama is a terrorist sympathizer” to “Obama is a socialist.” This rhetorical appeal to fear (argumentum in terrorem) is designed to resonate with voters who perceive socialism as a threat to American values. The socialist argument seems to be based on Obama’s tax plan, and we’ve come across this sort of framing discussion of taxes when we read Lakoff:

Think of the framing for relief. For there to be relief there must be an affliction, an afflicted party, and a reliever who removes the affliction and is therefore a hero. And if people try to stop the hero, those people are villains for trying to prevent relief.

When the word tax is added to relief, the result is a metaphor: Taxation is an affliction. And the person who takes it away is a hero, and anyone who tries to stop him is a bad guy. This is a frame. It is made up of ideas, like affliction and hero. The language that evokes the frame comes out of the White House, and it goes into press releases, goes to every radio station, every TV station, every newspaper. And soon the New York Times is using tax relief. And it is not only on Fox; it is on CNN, it is on NBC, it is on every station because it is "the president's tax-relief plan." And soon the Democrats are using tax relief—and shooting themselves in the foot.

It is remarkable. I was asked by the Democratic senators to visit their caucus just before the president's tax plan was to come up in the Senate. They had their version of the tax plan, and it was their version of tax relief. They were accepting the conservative frame. The conservatives had set a trap: The words draw you into their worldview.

That is what framing is about. Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas.

I wonder if the frame “socialist” has any impact on the youngest voters, who are also the first generation of voters born after the end of the Cold War. What do “socialist” and “socialism” mean to someone born in 1990? And for those voters who were born before the end of the Cold War, is this rhetoric effective or simply anachronistic?

As we explored in the Lakoff essay, this sort of rhetoric attempts to reframe the opposing candidate and reclaim control of the very terms of the debate over who should be our next president. In other words, the McCain campaign reframes Obama’s rhetoric of “change” to the rhetoric of “socialism”: change = socialism.

Among other things, these attacks on Obama as a Muslim, a terrorist sympathizer, and a socialist are examples of fallacies (false reasoning). Regardless of the truth-value of each accusation, framing Obama as a Muslim, terrorist sympathizer, or socialist banks on the belief that Americans will vote not on the basis of the truth of these accusations but on the fears they inspire. Reading McCain’s reading of the American voter, he is saying that we vote our emotions, not our intelligence. As we’ve discussed in class, appeals to emotion (pathos) are often more powerful than appeals to logic and reason (logos). But appeals to emotion can also backfire with voters who find such appeals insulting to their intelligence.

Thinking more about Cold War rhetoric, I recall our discussion this week of Susan Bordo’s correlation between the macrocosm of the social body (body politic) and the microcosm of the physical body:

I wish to pursue these images of unwanted bulges and erupting stomachs . . . as a metaphor for anxiety about internal processes out of control—uncontained desire, unrestrained hunger, uncontrollable impulse. Images of bodily eruption frequently function symbolically in this way in contemporary horror movies—as in recent werewolf films (The Howling, A Teen-Age Werewolf in London), and in David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly. The original Fly imagined a mechanical joining of fly parts and person parts, a variation on the standard “half-man, half-beast” image. In Cronenberg’s Fly, as in the werewolf genre, a new, alien, libidinous, and uncontrollable self literally bursts through the seams of the victims’ old flesh. (A related, frequently copied image occurs in Alien, where a parasite erupts from the chest of the human host.) While it is possible to view these new images as technically inspired by special-effects possibilities, I suggest that deeper psycho-cultural anxieties are being given form.

These films may also be read as playing on anxieties over the relationship between nature and science/technology. Although Bordo doesn’t do a political reading of these horror films, there is a lot of scholarship on earlier horror films from the Cold War era that exploit anxieties over real and imagined threats to the body politic: communism/socialism as an alien, parasite, or monster that attacks from without and within the body politic of the United States. Likewise, we see a lot of post-9/11 horror films that exploit anxieties over an attack on the social body (macrocosm of United States) as an attack on the physical body (microcosm of the individual). And just as horror films from the Cold War era may also be read as expressing anxieties over nuclear annihilation, horror films of the past decade or so may also be read as expressing anxieties over environmental catastrophe brought on by global warming.

Like the anxieties over an uncontrollable body (Bordo’s “rhetoric of craving and desire”) spurred on by capitalism’s consumer-producer model of citizenship, argumentum in terrorem often relies on xenophobia—the fear of “otherness,” or what is perceived as “strange” versus “familiar,” as a harbinger of chaos and the destruction of values. Like anxieties over the otherness of one’s own physical body as not only “self” and “subject” but also “other” and “object,” xenophobia relies on anxieties over the otherness of the social body (body politic) as comprised not only of what we identify as ourselves, but also what we identify as other: “Muslim,” “terrorist,” “socialist,” and so on.

For those interested in the rhetoric of the body to describe the rhetoric of the body politic (e.g., socialism as a “cancer” on the body politic), and vice versa, see for example Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors.

If you’re interested in framing as it relates to these latest rhetorical strategies of portraying Obama as a socialist, check out today’s discussion on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane:

What is socialism and are we headed for it? We talk with JONATHAN ALTER, Senior Editor and Columnist for Newsweek Magazine; RICHARD VALELLY, Professor in the Department of Political Science at Swarthmore College; and NOLAN MCCARTY, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University.

FLIRTING HER WAY TO VICTORY?

Here's a recent Guardian article on Palin's debate performance. Note the analysis of gendered body language and spoken language. Goldberg reads Palin's wink as "flirting," and writes that "had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have been universally noted, discussed and mocked." But McCain winked at least once last night, during the second presidential debate, and I haven't seen any analysis of the McCain wink. What does a wink mean within the context of a political debate? Is there a difference between the rhetoric of the female wink and the rhetoric of the male wink? What does a wink mean, anyway? If anyone has any opinions about winking (male or female), or if you come across any insightful analysis of the rhetoric of winking, feel free to post to the blog. ;)

Sarah Palin's farcical debate performance lowered the standards for both female candidates and US political discourse

Michelle Goldberg
October 3 2008 guardian.co.uk

At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night.

By any normal standard, including the ones applied to male presidential candidates of either party, she did not. Early on, she made the astonishing announcement that she had no intentions of actually answering the queries put to her. "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also," she said.

And so she preceded, with an almost surreal disregard for the subjects she was supposed to be discussing, to unleash fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity.

It was an appalling display. The only reason it was not widely described as such is that too many American pundits don't even try to judge the truth,wisdom or reasonableness of the political rhetoric they are paid to pronounce upon. Instead, they imagine themselves as interpreters of a mythical mass of "average Americans" who they both venerate and despise.

In pronouncing upon a debate, they don't try and determine whether a candidate's responses correspond to existing reality, or whether he or she is capable of talking about subjects such as the deregulation of the financial markets or the devolution of the war in Afghanistan. The criteria are far more vaporous. In this case, it was whether Palin could avoid utterly humiliating herself for 90 minutes, and whether urbane commentators would believe that she had connected to a public that they see as ignorant and sentimental. For the Alaska governor, mission accomplished.

There is indeed something mesmerising about Palin, with her manic beaming and fulsome confidence in her own charm. The force of her personality managed to slightly obscure the insulting emptiness of her answers last night. It's worth reading the transcript of the encounter, where it becomes clearer how bizarre much of what she said was. Here, for example, is how she responded to Biden's comments about how the middle class has been short-changed during the Bush administration, and how McCain will continue Bush's policies:

"Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [sic] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? ... My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate. "

Evidently, Palin's pre-debate handlers judged her incapable of speaking on a fairly wide range of subjects, and so instructed to her to simply disregard questions that did not invite memori sed talking points or cutesy filibustering. They probably told her to play up her spunky average-ness, which she did to the point of shtick - and dishonesty. Asked what her achilles heel is - a question she either didn't understand or chose to ignore - she started in on how McCain chose her because of her "connection to the heartland of America. Being a mom, one very concerned about a son in the war, about a special needs child, about kids heading off to college, how
are we going to pay those tuition bills?"

None of Palin's children, it should be noted, are heading off to college. Her son is on the way to Iraq , and her pregnant 17-year-old daughter is engaged to be married to a high-school dropout and self-described "fuckin' redneck". Palin is a woman who can't even tell the truth about the most quotidian and public details of her own life, never mind about matters of major public import. In her only vice-presidential debate, she was shallow, mendacious and phoney. What kind of maverick, after all, keeps harping on what a maverick she is? That her performance was considered anything but a farce doesn't show how high Palin has risen, but how low we all have sunk.