The Politics of the Emotions

One of the most inexplicable political events of recent history has been the ability of the Far Right to reverse its losses in two years despite the fact that their people caused the worst recession in the last 80 years and that recession was still in effect during the midterm elections which they handily won. Why did this happen and what have we to learn from it?

There are, no doubt, a number of things that played in to it, but the primary one in my judgment is the role that emotions and their manipulation now play in our elections. For example, we must have candidates with charisma, preferably celebrities. That is an emotional test for political viability. The issues chosen to create candidate electability must be "hot" issues or made to be hot. Making an issue hot is best done by those used to making any product hot, namely advertising professionals or, in short, Madison Avenue. The Republican power structure has, in itself, nothing to offer the ordinary citizen. Yet they succeeded in a context thought to assure their defeat. In this advertising saturated and driven economy the tools for emotional manipulation are well honed by Wall Street's well-paid colleagues on Madison Avenue.

Progressives, on the other hand have tried to persuade the electorate primarily with reason and evidence. For example, they cite the millions of children without health care; they cite the scientific evidence for global warming; they quantify the damage to and death of people due to pesticides, air and water pollution, etc. Progressives draw attention to the human suffering consequent on each of these issues hoping to arouse the voter's emotions enough to get the votes needed. It doesn't work.

The manipulation of the emotions on the other hand provides a rich field for fabrication, innuendo and half truths to cultivate and an abundance of votes to be harvested. A brief example of this type of politics can be seen in President Clinton's failed attempt to get a health-care bill through Congress. Even though it was heavily weighted with corporate rewards it failed to satisfy the pharmaceutical and health insurance greedheads. All they had to do to defeat the effort was place and repeat the "Harry and Louise" ad in which a husband and wife discussing the issue at home agreed that something should be done, but doubted this bill would do it. All Madison Avenue had to do was instill doubt, not disproof, to deprive the effort of the support it needed. In this case the emotion appealed to was that of domesticity and the trust that engendered. Nothing like the home fires to soften the harshness of facts.

As noted above, a more powerful demonstration of getting people to use their emotions to make societal decisions was the astonishing change in the electorate's views in the two years between the Democrat's sweeping election of 2008 and the 2010 midterm elections despite ongoing home and job loss and the glaring economic inequity made clearly evident by the disaster. Granted, it was the money of the Koch brothers, which bought the advertising skills of Dick Armey's FreedomWorks astroturf factory, that pulled it off, but why did so many change their point of view? There are certainly a number of reasons, but a very prominent one lay in the manipulations of human psychology.

Let me suggest the following scenario, which occurred to me as I pondered why was there such a pronounced effort to pin the label of "socialism", although honorable to me, on such an unlikely candidate as Barack Obama? How could it be made to stick on someone so obviously pro-business?

Given the deep hole the Far Right had dug for itself the political plotters began by assessing what they had to work with if the wealthy were not to lose their shirts. They knew the American public had been bombarded with anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda for decades thereby creating an available mindset so pervasive and uncritical that people easily confused communism, socialism and even Nazism. The plotters also knew that the Obama administration might have to launch a massive public works program, a la FDR, to remedy the economic damage they had caused. Putting these two perceptions together would allow Democratic efforts to rebuild the economy through public works rather than private enterprise to be defeated by associating such efforts with labels Americans had been taught to hate. The tea party created for this purpose had no remedy for correcting the enormous damage done by conservatives. They did, however, bring forth an old bugaboo, that is an old cold war emotion, and they were able to elect Congresspeople and senators and return the party of disaster to a control of the lower house. Such is the power of the emotions when politically deployed.

But if that is all there is to it, this country and mankind are in the deepest of poo. The facts are out there and in the long run they will not be denied, whether it's global warming or effective health care for the increasing billions of this planet's population--each one of which can be a disease vector to cause the deaths of others. A major problem for progressives is how to make the facts more effective than the emotions in societal decision making.

To lend further dimension to the importance of this issue, I would draw your attention to the U.S. military Psychological Operations (PSYOP) command. This command was created in November, 1990. It says "The purpose of psychological operations (PSYOP) is to demoralize the enemy by causing dissension and unrest among his ranks, while at the same time convincing the local population to support American troops." Put this together with another of its objectives, to wit, "In addition to supporting commanders, psychological operations provide interagency support to other U.S. government agencies." and it becomes clear that there is nothing to prevent the use of this type of mind control on the American people. Indeed the military targeted Senators Carl Levin, Al Franken and others for this treatment in an effort to get their support for more funds and troops for the Afghan War. (Full story at http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/02/al_franken_targeted_by_us_army_psy-ops.php ) In many respects there is nothing new about the many means people have adopted to persuade others ranging from bribes to torture. Nor is there anything new about applying such measures against large numbers of people as is evidenced by the wide scale immersive application of advertising in this society. What is new is to see the military organized and funded to apply mental and emotional manipulation to those deemed to be the enemy and to understand the easy transfer of these techniques to the control of the domestic population via the Homeland Security Department. What next--George Orwell's 1984 followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?

Bob Newhard

Freedom and Society, the Libertarian Example

In my last post I argued that absolute freedom was the freedom of the jungle, in which the top predators deprived the rest of the jungle's inhabitants, including humans, of their freedom through fear and death and that humans banded together to create their freedom. However, some may say that we humans are now the dominant predator and therefore we no longer need to band together. In this simple observation a good deal of our social and economic behavior is encapsulated. Our technology has increasingly allowed us to be independent of each other or seemingly so. Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, has pointed out some of the social consequences of this phenomenon.

However, we still have the dominant predator to fear, it is us or at least some of us. As an example let us consider libertarianism as a philosophy of predation.

Libertarians would have us believe that freedom is an individual right and, ironically, that society should guarantee it, which is obviously another way of saying society bestows freedom upon us. This appeals to the American mindset which tends to be simplistic and given, more than some other societies, to ideological solutions to complex problems. However, as in the jungle, the freedom of the powerful is obtained at the expense of the freedom of the less powerful. A recent and glaring example is the Supreme Court's decision that corporations are humans and can use their massive wealth to pursue their political objectives.

The Internet is replete with articles associating Supreme Court justices Scalia and Thomas as well as Alito with libertarianism. I found the following quote in an article on theses allocations titled The Libertarian Fantasy on the Supreme Court. The quote gives some historical and philosophical scope to the libertarian misrepresentation of freedom: "There are two dimensions to the gun lobby's individual right to gun ownership. One is the libertarian fantasy that we reverse the process described by John Locke in The Second Treatise of Government, declare individual sovereignty, dissolve political community, and return to the State of Nature which is the state of anarchy. The libertarian fantasy mixes with other political ideologies, across the political spectrum, and expresses a defeatist retreat from political life." The complete article can be found at http://www.potowmack.org/997cthom.html. One consequence of libertarian influence is thus the legal baptism of corporate personhood and the unleashing of corporate wealth to subvert the democratic process.

Libertarian influence on our economic policy has been profound. Milton Friedman was the father of trickledown economics in which the rich get the economic benefits first and the rest of society get whatever trickles down after their orgy of greed. Friedman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago (think Obama?), was an economic advisor to Peruvian dictator August Pinochet, and a mentor of Alan Greenspan, a fellow libertarian.

Greenspan expressed "shock" when our Great Recession occurred because he expected the market to correct itself as Friedman had taught him. This is what happens when ideologues address the real world with all its variables. The "law" of the self-correcting market is analogous to Marx's necessity of history in its blind adherence to doctrine. If there is one pronounced tendency in human affairs it is applying certainty, whether of the arbitrariness of morality (think the politics of values) or the arbitrariness of ideology to the vicissitudes of reality. It is a recipe for disaster, human suffering and death. This is the ultimate folly of libertarianism as it was for Soviet communism.

Bob Newhard