“Liberals look down on you” is evil genius rhetoric

If you drift into the pro-GOP public sphere (meaning both the formal media and pundits, but also the people who are repeating the talking points in social media, at Thanksgiving dinner, or yard signs), then you’ve seen the talking point that “liberals look down on you.” It’s evil genius rhetoric.

It does a bunch of things at once, all of which benefit the GOP by distracting potential supporters away from its inability to defend its policy agenda through rational argumentation, while providing a feeling of certainty and self-righteousness. The GOP has five major problems in terms of talking openly about its policies.

First, it has the classic problem that toxic populism always has—wanting to get the support of working classes and the extremely wealthy, but those groups have opposing policy agenda. Any rational defense of particular policies would mean discussing in detail what the costs and benefits of the policy would be, and that would alienate some group. Since the GOP has opted for policies that give the rich material benefits at the expense of the non-elite, they have to keep any public discussion off the material consequences for the non-elite of their policies.

Second, a lot of people in the GOP don’t really want a democracy in which all citizens have equal access to voting and all votes count equally—they want a hierarchy of power, in which their supporters have more power (and more voting power) than any group that doesn’t fully support them. They don’t see any benefit in disagreement, so they want to end it thoroughly. Arguing against democracy in a democracy is tricky, and generally achieved by arguing that some other group has already so corrupted democracy that we need to abandon democracy temporarily to purify it of Them. Then we can get to a democracy of the believers (what Giorgio Agamben so elegantly described as “not-law”—we have to abandon the law to save it).

Third, they want to be seen as the party of principle, as God’s Party (they have to do this to keep the fundagelical vote), but they don’t have consistent principles. Neither do fundagelicals, except the “principle” that they are magically able to read Scripture unmediated, and therefore able to be absolutely certain about what God wants. In other words, the GOP has to hold on to the support of people who mistake rigidity for principle. This unholy alliance with people who value rigidity (and who hide their own compromises and changes by rewriting history) means that the GOP can’t engage in the compromises, negotiations, and deliberations that all healthy groups use to resolve disagreements.[1]

Fourth, GOP rhetoric flips and flops—immigration is good (Reagan) and bad (Trump); Russia is bad (every GOP figure till Trump) and good (Trump); chain immigration is bad (Trump) and good (Trump’s use of chain immigration for his family); the government is too powerful (GOP till 9/11) and should be given all the power (GOP after 9/11). There’s nothing wrong with a party changing position—that’s what they should do. I had a coworker who was a devotee of Rush Limbaugh. I watched that coworker love, hate, love, and hate John McCain, dependent on nothing more than whether Rush Limbaugh said McCain was really a Republican—that is, whether McCain was supporting whatever was the party line for the GOP at that moment. But neither Limbaugh nor the coworker said it that way, as though McCain had changed. Every time the (new) stance was presented as a recognition of McCain’s essence.

Parties change positions all the time—that’s fine, and potentially even good. The problem is that strategic changes of position are in direct conflict with the third desideratum.

Fifth, the GOP has become the party the Founders had nightmares about. The second, third, and fourth problems mean that they really don’t want a democracy. Those problems can only be solved with a one-party state. Democracy is premised on a content-neutral standard for behavior—that whether you’re Whig, Anti-Masonic, Jacksonian Democrat, Federalist, or whatever, you are held to the same standards as every other party. Supporters of the GOP (largely because of the rhetoric created in order to solve the second through fourth problems) don’t believe that the GOP should be held to the same standards as other parties. After all, if you’re the party of God, and they are the party of the Satan, then nothing you can do is wrong, and nothing they can do is right.

So, the GOP has to look tough, rigid, and supportive of regular folks while actually passing policies that do the opposite of what they’re advertised as doing (or the opposite of what they were previously advocating as the only ethical policy), and, above all else, keep their supporters from looking at non-partisan data about the policies, candidates, or talking points.

“Liberals look down on you” solves all those problems, mainly because it keeps people from noticing them, and it guarantees that people will look away if those problems are drawn to their attention. Loosely, it enables people to feel good about having a rationally indefensible position, encourages supporters to dismiss dissent or uncomfortable information through motivism, makes politics an issue of dominance/submission, encourages people to feel victimized instead of wrong, sets supporters up to make “Vladimir’s Choice” on a regular basis, makes having an irrational commitment seem a better choice than having a rational policy, and allows blazingly partisan standards to seem justified. It is and enables shameless levels of demagoguery.

It isn’t just the pro-GOP media machine that uses this kind of strategy (which can also have the form of something like, “They’ll say you’re crazy”)— cults, and cult-y churches, MLM, the skeezier kinds of self-help businesses (not all self-help books or businesses are skeezy) use it; it seems that some tech startups seem to use a version of it (Bad Blood describes it being common at Theranos), and I’ve run across in some fringe political groups. It’s just particularly damaging when it’s embraced by the mainstream media (and the pro-GOP media is the mainstream media). As I’ll argue in the last post in what will be a series (I hope just three, but maybe four posts long) non-GOP media engages in various taxonomies and frames that virtually guarantee the “liberals look down on you” rhetorical strategy works.







[1] The notion that people get their way by “sticking to their principles and refusing to compromise” is all over the political spectrum. Refusing to compromise only works for people who have more power—while throwing tantrums and refusing to settle works in an awful lot of families (and not necessarily on the part of the toddlers), it’s rare that it works in political situations except for people who have a tremendous amount of power. We love stories of individuals who refused to compromise, and thereby toppled oppressive regimes, but I don’t know that there is ever a time that happened. (I have more than once had confusing interactions with people in which I had to explain that FDR compromised—confusing because he was famous for compromising, perhaps too much when it came to issues of race.)