Progressives connect emotionally with people at the level of their fears and anxiety. The metaphysical reason for this is that liberals don’t really want men and women to stand very tall on their own. They want mankind always dependent on something, most usually on the state or fellow human beings. They themselves fear a self-confident, self-reliant freeman or freewoman. They fear a venturesome spirit and would much rather return to the hole or crawl up under a rock, and have everybody else do the same. Now one may put a better face on government coercion and just say that the liberal and progressive appeal is based on helping underdogs and defending bona fide victims. This resonates well with Americans, who are basically a fair-minded people.
Regardless of the motive or psychology you ascribe to a fantastic error, conservatives are nonetheless usually busy defending the real America—its record of success now and in history. The real America is as a land of opportunity and freedom. Almost nobody is properly called oppressed or “an oppressed class.” No group has ever flocked as it were to get out of America except arguably chattel slaves and the Old South, but all sorts of people still clamor to get in.
The truth is that no one alive, nor indeed their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents either, were alive during slave times! It has been 47 years since Rev. Martin Luther King, Junior’s great “I Have a Dream” speech. We have a black president for crying out loud. The institutions are dead that gave us slavery and Jim Crow. The Constitution and laws changed long ago, and the social norms and mores of a majority that once sustained socio-economic prejudice against minorities are overwhelmingly different. One is hard-pressed anymore to find a majority. White means nothing in modern day America. The vestige of slavery is reduced to prejudice in its mildest form; and racism is no longer properly attributable to an inheritance per se, but rather to subjective individual experience in present day context.
Received memory is received media, hardly a matter of real history. At this juncture in history, misguided efforts to whip up the issues of race in order to kill the last spectral existence of racism are far more likely to intensify aural projections and lead to something else reactive, unintended and substantial. If that happens, it will be the product of modern and gross political folly on the left and not the product of historical inertia, vast right-wing conspiracy, or of majority opinions extant today.
Indeed further attempts to kill the specter can only result in the strangulation death of freedom itself. That is because free people may and should be able to agree or disagree, to associate or disassociate, and even to seek or not seek their own. They may politically congregate and rally too or choose not to, because freedom requires the existence of choice and the ability to choose in every respect. If I don’t like blue jeans, then I don’t have to wear them. Or maybe I like them, say, in one context or liked them just fine yesterday, but now I prefer something else at church or going to the opera. Quite frankly I’ve got no idea whatsoever what I’ll put on tomorrow. People aren’t blue jeans or horses, but the point is valid in terms of selection and the dynamism and free flow of opinions.
Freed of historical legacy, we are all individuals again. Therefore we really ought to be appealing to people now on the basis of individuality, their character and the ideas they hold, not on the basis of their racial groupings. The divisive and racially charged rhetoric from the national NAACP of late is unhelpful in this regard. The unsubstantiated attack by liberal politicians and community leaders, and bold innuendo from the left-leaning press against Tea Parties labeling them as racist, is also unhelpful and could backfire in November.
But politics isn’t just about reality. If it were, according to David Horowitz, “good principles and good policies would win every time.” Rather, in terms of political war, the contest is “about images and symbols and the emotions they evoke, [and] this is a battle that conservatives generally lose. In the romance of the victim as progressives stage it, Republicans and conservatives are always on the side of the bad guys—the powerful, the male, the white and the wealthy…. Defending America is readily misrepresented…. The left relishes the opportunity to smear patriots as members of the selfish party instead of as defenders of individual freedom.” Ann Coulter describes the motto of the left as “Speak loudly and carry a small victim.”
For Democrats, the romance of the victim stirs supporters and energizes their base. Conservatives are the targeted victimizers. Leftists become champions of the so-called oppressed. Sure hate to say it, but news from the front so far is that the Battle of the Bulge is going to the Nazis! Learning how to confront the left’s strategy, however, will turn the political war around. It requires that Americans become a little more clear-headed and informed, and less crybaby when leftists sing their predictable tearjerkers and blues. Fortunately, as Horowitz explains, “conservatives can use the left-wing attack against them. Contrary to the left’s view, America is not a land of victims. It is a highly mobile society, with a citizenry that aspires upwards through the system, not against it.… [The] most powerful forces obstructing opportunity for poor and minority Americans, the most powerful forces oppressing them, are progressives, the Democratic Party, and their political creation—the welfare state.”
Welfare state programs are demonstrably obstacles to the production of wealth and barriers to private opportunity. What is necessary is for conservatives to connect the dots so to speak, to connect their analysis to a political strategy that gives them a decisive edge in battle against the left’s propaganda—or if you prefer, the left’s purely innocent though misguided interpretation of events. In this way, Horowitz believes we can “neutralize the class, race and gender warfare attacks of the political left” and hopefully rise above such petty, counterproductive and polarizing politics
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