Manufacturing Conflicts

For those of you who saw Dear White People, I recommend watching this amazing 25 minute interview with the director.  He is thoughtful and insightful about the multiple, overlapping conflicts over race and identity central to his film—and his effort to reframe how think and talk about these conflicts.

Michael Gerson, conservative columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a column this week that was reprinted in the Akron Beacon Journal today.  You can read the entire column here. 

Gerson uses Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s recent claim that the most important threat facing America today is the Muslim invasion and colonization through Sharia Law.  Jindal provides no evidence, because there is none.  This is a manufactured conflict, designed to outrage and distract and mislead.

Gerson calls this tactic of amplifying phony conflicts ‘Both appalling and symptomatic’ and a much more serious threat to American democracy that a fake Muslim invasion. 

No surprise that Gerson see one powerful agent responsible for our distorted political communication to be elites who own and run our corporatized mass media, and talk radio in particular.  But notice he does not blame the media alone.  His analysis points to a culpable media AND to the equally important agency exercised by public and private sector elites (like Jindal in this illustration) who exploit the mass media to intentionally distort our political deliberations.

“This rhetorical strategy is a disaster for democratic discourse. It creates a cartoon version of reality in which actual problems are obscured or misdiagnosed. It avoids the hard work of drawing careful distinctions and offering nuanced judgments. It leaves some people on constant high alert; others are exhausted by an endless series of supposedly existential threats and unable to distinguish the real ones.

Above all, extreme rhetoric shapes a certain view of ideological opponents. Climate scientists and their allies, say some on the right, are not just mistaken, they are liars. They are acting out of corrupt financial and ideological motivations. No real debate is possible with people consciously engaged in a fraud or a hoax. They can’t be engaged; they can only be defeated. This approach becomes even more dangerous when opponents are defined in ethnic or religious terms. It creates an atmosphere in which neighbors are viewed as potential subversives.”

It amplifies citizen confusion and frustration with politics, by design.  When more citizens throw their hands up in disgust and walk away from our public sphere, elites like Jindal and the owners of Fox News could not be happier to stay put and fill that void. 

“There are, of course, comparable arguments made on the progressive side. Opponents get dismissed as theocrats or as hopeless defenders of privilege. Such people cannot be debated; they can only be delegitimized and silenced. The strategy on both left and right is the same: to present politics as a battle between the children of light and the children of darkness. Opponents become enemies. Democratic deliberation becomes difficult or impossible.”

Here we see Gerson arguing that the illustration he used (Jindal) should not be misconstrued as a partisan argument. He believes this is a tactic used by both sides.  It is and it is not.  See Mann & Ornstein for the best analysis of this question I have read. I do not agree on the part of Gerson’s argument here that suggests each side is doing this in equal volume, with comparable zeal for brazen phoniness, or with an equivalent willingness to misrepresent, confuse, and damage democracy.

Leaders strengthen democracy when they use this tactic to advance the public interest by bringing to the people (putting on the policy agenda for deliberation) the most important conflicts for us to address, with alternatives and trade-offs clearly outlined.

Public and private sector elites weaken democracy when they use this tactic to advance a narrow private interest (re-presented as if it were a public interest) by confusing and misleading publics and dissipating public energies by focusing us on more trivial issues.

“The United States has enough real problems and real enemies without the manufacture of artificial outrage.”