The astro-turf organizing of disruptive protest that seem to be occurring work they may well be copied. If that happens it is more evidence of the democratically corrosive nature of public relations.
We have seen evidence of political action spurred on by the comments of radio shock jocks and there is perhaps a close relationship to the “commentators” who are short of substance and in search of an audience for vacuity. Angry demonstrators have gone to town hall meetings organized by Congressional representatives yelling and acting in a way to close down the meeting. People have got so heated that some have engaged in fist fights, and in one case held up a Congressman hanging in effigy.
However, this behavior might be described as, it is not does not reflect democratic norms. Why do people give themselves the licence to behave in this fashion? It is certainly the case that people who are not organized are comparitively powerless in modern society, and even when they do organize as they did prior to the invasion of Iraq their presence on the streets do not sway political decision making.
Paul Krugman reviews the phenomenon as it unfolds with respect to health care debate in the US, but does not consider the media groupie angle. He observes:
There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.
Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.
That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.
And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.
The “demonstrators” are typically described as “middle class”, but they look to me more like “white under class” – just like me. What most analysis fails to note is the embedded structural inequality and structural violence at the social level and racism, like the attribution of laziness, is a form of violence at the level of thought because it a form of dehumanization. At the same time, I recognize that I do not live in community with racial tensions, in which demarcated groups are competing for social and other resources setting in train social dynamics.
My conclusion that racism was violence followed listening to the ABC National Program, Hindsight which gave an account of “Gandhi in South Africa” featuring the historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds. Interestingly, they observe that the White Australia Policy was influenced not just by prejudice against Chinese gold miners but what was happening in other frontier societies. There book is: Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality ( Cambridge University Press, 2008). They can be seen discussing their thesis with David Marr at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, via The Monthly.
Andrew Nash in his essay, “Gandhi in South Africa: An Intrepretation”, makes to me the new observation that the twenty-one years he spent there made Gandhi as a political leader. Indians were in similar numbers to Europeans in Natal were discriminated in mass, Hindu and Muslim alike and without regard to social class. Andrew Nash observes that John Stuart Mills had argued that democracy was only possible in racially homogeneous societies, never mind that they were socially stratified – the embedded structural inequality.
He writes:
I want to digress briefly in order to point out that it would be mistaken to see Mill’s argument as an unfortunate accretion—a concession to the prejudices of the Victorian age—that could in time be removed from the essential principles of liberalism without affecting their character. Liberalism is in large measure a theorization of the freedom that is made possible in the context of capitalism, and liberal acquiescence in racial domination is most clearly seen in this light. At certain stages in its development, either in a specific national context or globally, capitalism requires coercion in order to create a class that depends on the sale of its labour in order to survive. Race often provides a basis for such coercion, whether in the form of slavery or proletarianization. However, to the extent that capitalism establishes the political and economic conditions for its own further development, it becomes possible for it to do away with extra-economic forms of coercion, and rely mainly on the “free” and “equal” contract between capitalist and wage-labourer in order to perpetuate itself. In this context, liberalism can dissociate itself from racial domination to the extent that capitalism has established itself securely in a given context. The precise moment at which this happens is itself a question on which disagreement and debate within the ruling class are often likely.
People such as Paul Krugman offering his clear, dispassionate analysis of commentary on social developments in the polity have to purblind to such possibilities, otherwise there would be no gig on the pages of that Liberal champion, The New York Times. The proposed “dissociation” from social inequality can be covered over by various means but not dissolved, and the fracture is likely to reappear in times of economic recession when the winners and losers of the system emerge.
As for the angry demonstrators they are largely clueless as to why they are angry and useful for the corporate manipulators. The exercise of effective political action requires collective intelligence, which might be co-opted. We need in practice to be lead by an aspiration of truth and justice with respect for reason and evidence. That is a path that leads to nonviolence not violence, and deep change. We may well discover the status quo, even while employing the sophistication of public relations have other values.
ELSEWHERE:
Fascism and the people used to engage in violence and intimidation always wins right! Just like the Ku Klux Klan, for example. In any regard, some of the columnists at AlterNet have stopped laughing at the “tea baggers”, in particular Frank Schaeffer and Sara Robinson.
Would it not have made more sense to seize power during the Bush Administration?
The role of Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets in these developments bears a close watch, although I suspect the nature of the 24 hour television news programs are pretty rabid regardless of their orientation.
I am hopeful that the disinclination to face facts square on in the light of day is happening at the margins and not among the mass of people. Our understanding of things has to have correspondence to reality if we are to act in a positive and constructive way so as the deal with the real problems and not symptoms. The medical analogy seems to me useful.
Sometimes, the problem with columnists is that they are just too intelligent to understand the thought processes of the afflicted screamers. For example, here is Frank Rich at The New York Times,via Common Dreams:
The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.
Just the sort of thing an intellectual would say. (Punking is verbal bullying, similar to sledging). Pssst. . . anybody, including the Floundering Fathers who ever spoke about “the public good” was probably socialist to some measure.