Re: Tea Party Racism

On Jul 26, 2010, at 11:58 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> On July 25, 2010 at 7:57 PM Bruce Bostwick  
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Jul 25, 2010, at 1:06 PM, Doug Pensinger wrote:
> >
> > > Is the Tea Party fundamentally racist?  Or is it just coincidental
> > > that it formed as a black man was taking office?  For years,
> > > Republicans were in office busting the budget and passing bills  
> like
> > > Medicare D which was completely unfunded and will cost us  
> something
> > > like $72 B a year.  Where was the outrage then?
> > >
> > > Doug
> >
> > I wouldn't say it was fundamentally racist as a matter of actual
> > policy, or at least not overtly stated policy.  Most of the time,  
> they
> > carefully avoid using racist language or imagery in their public
> > statements.  Most of the time.
> >
>
> Don't overlook what is called "dog whistle" political statements.  
> This names comes from the well-known phenomenon that a highly- 
> pitched whistle will be heard by dogs, but not by people. And in  
> polictics there is a similar phenomenon whereby you can say  
> something that cannot explicitly be criticized when you you say it,  
> but the people who are supposed to hear it will understand what you  
> really mean.
>
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

One important thing to note related to covertly targeted communication  
is that the right wing in general is not in the habit of making  
broadcast public statements all that frequently to the general public,  
for various reasons, not the least of which is that they tend not to  
be well prepared for or tolerant of the inevitable criticism from more  
moderate or progressive-minded audiences.

The far more common practice in the right-wing community is to  
communicate through viral chain emails, which can usually be counted  
on to travel only to sympthetic readers and whose targeting leverages  
interpersonal relationships as a filter to keep the communication from  
reaching people inclined to question the content.  This bears some  
serious consideration.

The Tea Party leadersip doesn't seem to be authoring a lot of the  
viral content, but the rank and file membership use that back channel  
almost exclusively, and given that the people in those channels tend  
to be a vector for both Tea Party and neopentecostal theocratic  
agitprop, among many other (and sometimes many much, much nastier)  
subjects, there's no small amount of cross-pollination and  
conflation.  I have at least two ore three separate taps into that  
vector, thanks to certain oddities about my family relationships and  
my political leanings, and I can say confidently that about 90% or  
more of what the Tea Party rank and file are saying isn't making the  
news because it's targeted tightly enough that the media don't see it.

And it's being mixed with a lot of theocratic and Christian- 
nationalist messages, and various flavors of racist and/or white  
supremacist content as well, and because it's largely viral, it's  
nearly impossible to trace to a given origin, or stop in any  
meaningful fashion.  And I'm only getting a tiny fraction of the full  
stream of it, and I get a lot.

So this is a complex question, because while the Tea Party does  
technically have a leadership of sorts, it's a weak one, and there's a  
lot of leaderless-cell activity underneath the surface that's not at  
all like the public face of the party.  And I'm not sure whether  
that's a feature of the design, or an emergent property of its  
population and the methods they use to communicate.  I'm leaning  
toward the latter, although the leadership certainly doesn't seem to  
be too serious about doing anything other than enabling it and  
diverting outside attention away from what's going on.

"The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly  
is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a  
thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the  
people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past  
the point at which these changes cannot be reversed." -- Adolf Hitler