March 14, 2005
Silly Politics
by P.M. Carpenter
Politics, as you well know, is often a silly business. Silly ideas are sold to silly people by ... silly strategists? Hardly. Silly ideas abound -- take, as merely one example, the proposed bankruptcy of Social Security as its fiscal fix -- and there’s never a shortage of eagerly silly audiences. But the hucksters of silliness are rarely silly people themselves. They are deeply committed (or at least highly paid) ideological guerrillas with a soberness of mind and seriousness of intent that make Alan Greenspan look like a party animal by comparison.
Yet every now and then even the professionally serious themselves slip into silliness. It may be, on the one hand, an occupational hazard that arises from immersing oneself for too long in selling so much silliness. On the other hand, when the serious get really silly, it may be that that which underlies their seriousness is, in reality, a perverse immaturity of thought and spirit. Perhaps, despite all their glibness, there lurks in these psycho-political case studies a profound adolescence of mind that is destined, Freudian-like, to out itself.
I give you, as the best imaginable example, the Republican battlefield tactic of referring to the opposition not by its actual name, but as the "Democrat Party." For the last few years nary a high-ranking GOPer has been heard to properly enunciate "Democratic" in reference to anything Democratic. Turn on any political talk show and there they are -- Republican grownups blithering away about the "Democrat Party," "my Democrat friends," a "Democrat plan," or some such silliness.
I guess the noun-cum-adjective is intended as a cutesy, sarcastic dig, but to mature minds comes across instead as just about the silliest, most immature exercise of rhetorical smugness ever adored by purportedly adult strategists and tacticians. Just about the silliest, for it amounts to little more than name-calling.
As an isolated or infrequent tactic name-calling isn’t so bad, since as fallible humans we all, from time to time, sink to levels of verbal immaturity. And of course occasional name-calling -- "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot" -- carries considerable, if not poignant, comedic effect. But the habitual use of name-calling as an expression of the user’s personal identity and power is a tad more worrisome when its practitioners surpass pre-school age. There’s a word for these practitioners -- bullies.
As too many know from childhood experience, schoolyard bullies act, through the instrumentality of raw power, as though they’re exempt from rules of respectful behavior toward others. In short, they can push you around because they make the rules -- rules that change according to personal whim and momentary advantage but enforced with exacting regularity. You, as a target of bullying, are to suffer these rule changes silently, lest you be labeled a crybaby, or worse.
And what, I put to you, is more symptomatic of today’s Right than bullying? From their threatened change in Senate rules to the routine "outsourcing" of torture, conservatives simply do not believe that decent standards of conduct apply -- to them. They hold the power, hence they are exempt. You’ll take it and you’ll like it. They make the rules, no matter how conversely harmful the new rules might be when they find themselves in the minority once again and once again subject to others' power (at which point no doubt, they’ll cry foul and demand fair treatment), or when our military men and women find themselves captive to equally unprincipled rules.
The obvious questions arise: How intellectually mature is a political party whose core personality meshes with that of a prepubescent, schoolyard bully? And what cognitive precepts are likely to emerge from such a fundamentally immature personality -- one that taunts the opposition through name-calling, rather than critiques through analysis? The obvious answer? Ideational acorns, if you will, fall not far from the tree.
Perhaps if conservatives can mature at least enough to properly articulate the opposing party’s name, a first and healthy step in behavior modification will have been taken and the road to recovery that much shortened. Anything less is just plain silly.
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P.M. Carpenter is a television writer, historian, and an occasional bloviater on BuzzFlash.com. pmcarpenter@buzzflash.com
© Copyright 2004, P. M. Carpenter