(derekbaker)

The Republican Advantage

So I was listening to my neighbor, Brian Lehrer, the Smartest Man in New York^TM -- that's my claim about him, by the way, not one he's ever made or would ever make for himself -- on his radio show the other day, and his guest was Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist and the author of Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.

The topic was the politics of language, and Nunberg was pointing out that all media has adopted the language of the Republican party. For example, we don't even need to talk about a "liberal elite" anymore, because no one remembers that until very recently the "elite" were not the academics and the overpaid actors so much as they were the kind of people who went to prep school in Andover and college at Yale.

In most of the world, the elite are still those who wield considerable financial or political clout. In the U.S. now, it's mostly those people who either fit somewhere in the subtitle of Mr. Nunberg's book, or are otherwise identified as part of the vast "media-academia complex." Meaning: Kathleen Hall Jamieson is Public Enemy #1, I guess.

Similarly with "values": we don't even have to bother with saying "traditional family values" -- and leave it up for interpretation whether "traditional" modifies "family" or "values" -- because that word has been so co-opted. Everyone assumes today, without thinking about it, that "values" is shorthand for the priorities of a suburban, evangelical Dad, Mom, and their 1.85 children.

Most of the callers seemed to think that all the Democrats needed were some new nicknames, slogans or catch phrases for various programs, policies or viewpoints. Which was not Nunberg's point. I think he was saying that the right wing has mastered a way of speaking that cuts through details to get at the core feelings its target audience appreciates. They don't want to know the details of whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMDs or posed any real threat; they just know that "Saddam was a bad guy" and so he had to be taken out. Liberals are always simultaneously arrogant in dealing with "people like us" or, conversely, complete milquetoasts in dealing with "them," whoever "them" is.

Most of the ugliest of the characterizations of people and issues takes place in talk radio or on Fox News, where the thinking world doesn't even hear it. But then later, when a Bill Frist or Roy Blunt might use the same language the next day, everyone who heard it from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity already feels as if they're on the inside. They already have their cues when to applaud.

I was wondering, thinking on these things, what kind of personality is attracted to this kind of belonging, this kind of team where "versus them" is even more important than the "us." Among the various personality descriptors and categorizations, I think the enneagram describes people perhaps the best.

In some ways, the enneagram is like the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, and studies have been done to map the similarities and differences between the nine enneagram types and the sixteen MBTI types. One of the most common enneagram types is the "six" -- each type is known by a number, for want of a better way to name them. The enneagram six, among other attributes, can be loyal, likable, caring, warm, compassionate, witty, practical, helpful and responsible. Just as often, however, they can be hypervigilant, controlling, unpredictable, judgmental, paranoid, defensive, rigid, self-defeating, and testy. (These descriptions came from a 1994 HarperSanFrancisco book by Renee Baron and Elizabeth Wagele called The Enneagram Made Easy.)

It may be worth noting that the first list could be said to be a rough approximation of how the people who voted for him see George W. Bush. The second could be said to be how those who didn't vote for him view him.

For sixes, the issue often comes down to authority. Most such people appreciate and support strong authority; a decided minority of sixes are defined instead by their reaction against authority. And often, the rest of the sixes are lining up behind the rebel sixes, because that kind of cocksure attitude describes what they admire, even if they themselves exhibit no similar sense of independence. (For example, John Wayne was rarely corralled by polite society in his movies, yet his perceived persona is revered by law-and-order authoritarian types to this day.)

This is the audience then -- more than others -- to which I think the shorthand and caricatures created by the echo chamber on the right are designed to appeal. They get everyone within earshot marching to the same drummer, drawing the battle lines as clearly as possible, even if they have no resemblance to the reality. (See also: "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," Hillary Clinton as a leftist radical, corporate-owned media as "liberal.") By some estimates, enneagram sixes account for forty to sixty percent of the American population. Not all of these will fall in line with such appeals, of course. But in the calculus of elections today, it doesn't actually matter. A "mandate" is held by whoever gets a bare majority of votes, because the end result -- control over a branch of government -- is the same after landslides as after squeakers.

As I thought about all this, therefore, it occurred to me that, more than anything, this is the Democrats' problem in getting elected in enough numbers to control the Congress and White House again. Namely, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think "clarity" is the same thing as "truth" -- and those who think there are more than two kinds of people in the world.

Labels: politics

---