One of the most disturbing things about the last 5 years has been
the lack of any effective resistance to Bush and his fellow gang
members' patently corrupt and unsound agendas, both with respect to
these being carried out and with respect to anyone being held
responsible once the agendas wreak their expected harvest of human,
cultural, and environmental destruction. Record-breaking protests and
petitions, the ongoing deluge of well-documented evidence of
administration criminality, the unprecedented level of on-line tracking
of the political state of the nation---all these efforts, while
extremely compelling in the abstract, have had almost no concrete
impact on the actual course of U.S. political events. The massive
worldwide protests probably did play a role in so few countries lending
support for the invasion of Iraq, but here in the U.S. sensible
domestic and foreign policy has been completely steamrollered by
stupidity on nearly all points.
What explains these failures? Of course it's hard, for all kinds of
reasons, to derail or hold responsible those in power---they're
powerful, for one! But still it seems that the usual strategies of
resistance aren't working in even the limited fashion that they used to
do. The contrast with the comparative peccadillos leading to Nixon's
resigning and Clinton's being impeached is sharp, and needs
explanation, if we are to have any hope of figuring out how in hell to
marshall more effective resistance in the future.
An initial suggestion (as per a friend of mine) points to the fact
that the Republicans control all three branches of government; hence
the institutional means for resistance have been lacking.
Notwithstanding that various aspects of Bush's agenda grossly depart in
crucial fashions from the conservative and libertarian strands of
Republicanism, pragmatic considerations of "my team, right or wrong"
surely explain, in part, why so many Republicans have given Bush and
his gang a pass, at the irretrievable expense of their integrity. On
the other hand, party loyalty doesn't explain why so many Democrats
turned against Clinton, on grounds either of his Oval Office
escapades, or (more righteously), on grounds of his betraying
traditional Democratic values in decimating the social services safety
net and advancing NAFTA and other so-called "free trade" agreements.
Perhaps the deeper reason that Republicans haven't turned against the
madman who is acting in their name reflects the psychology of political conservativism:
Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature
about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of
political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for
inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to
political conservatism include:
- Fear and aggression
- Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
- Uncertainty avoidance
- Need for cognitive closure
- Terror management
Ironically, given the conservative fear of change, it takes them a
long time to switch horses---even when the horse stops being
politically conservative! So people of common sense can't count on
Republicans to rein in their crazies, and this failure provides a
serious counter-force to effective resistance.
Relatedly, as an unfortunate psychological fact to which most people
are subject (conservatives in greater measure, as per the above study)
is the tendency to go along with the agendas of persons in a position
of relative authority (alternatively: go along with the majority).
This isn't necessarily a bad trait---as an epistemological strategy
it's often wise to listen to and learn from people who are supposed to
be in a position to know better (or to think that, if many people
believe X, then that is generally good reason for us to believe it
too). But the strategy goes terribly awry when those at the top get
it wrong. And we've been seeing this departure from the rational over
and over again, as "good soldiers" like Colin Powell implement
obviously unsound policies, against what should have been their better
judgment.
The operation of these sorts of psychological situational factors
provides one large and underappreciated part of the explanation of why
resistance to Bush's agendas has been so futile. This resistance has
tended to involve bringing argumentation to bear that shows these
agendas to be unsound---to be motivated by false premises, or such as
to predictably or actually lead to bad consequences. Attention to
argumentative details is well and good, and must be a core part of any
strategy of effective (rational) resistance. But in itself it is
insufficient unto the task, for those in power who are situated in the
present hierarchical framework are frequently operating at the level of
syntax rather than semantics: they implement agenda X not because they
believe in it (though to be sure, as part of the process of
psychological accommodation they will rationalize their endorsement)
but because their circumstances are such that they are psychologically
predisposed to believe X, for any X, as part of occupying their
relative position in the hierarchy. And of course this paradigm is
also explanatory of how all sorts of corrupt and unsound
agendas---unregulated corporate capitalism, for one---are currently
being implemented, all over the world.
Variations on the theme also provide some explanation of why the
U.S. mainstream media has been so astonishingly lax in tracking the
crimes of Bush et al. (I'll mention another in a minute.) Though not
themselves part of the political hierarchy per se, journalists' access
to those in the hierarchy has, in this administration, been very
directly pegged to positive press; this reflects an important
difference with previous administrations, both Republican and
Democratic. There are the few heroic exceptions---e.g., Helen
Thomas---who have the guts and the tenure to stand up to Bush, Scotty,
and the rest of the snotty, dismissive liars. But it's time we all
faced up to the fact that journalists aren't, in general, watchdogs of
the public trust, but evidently would rather keep their byline and
insider party invitations than expose the inconvenient truth. And when
the fallout from bad policy lands on the heads of Iraqi children or
U.S. soldiers or the multitudes of impoverished and uninsured poor,
what reporter is going to rush to report: Oops, I was duped? And the
coverups and rationalizations continue.
So, point one: until everyone and their sister is made perfectly
aware of how psychological hierarchical influences proceed and affect
the course of public policy, we will continue to see bad policies
implemented and rationalized, no matter how good the arguments against
them.
Another reason for the failure of resistance to Bush's agendas is
not so much psychological as material, and has to do with the utter
triumph of effectively unregulated corporate capitalism in the U.S.
The connections here are obvious, both in respect of public policy
makers being puppets of global corporate interests, and in respect of
main-stream journalists all working for these same interests (you know
the stats --- only 5 corporations control approximately 90% of the
mainstream media). Is it any surprise, given such influence, that
politicians now mainly implement policies whose only genuine imperative
is to safeguard the world for corporate profit, and that main-stream
journalists are restricted to writing press releases? Of course it's
not.
But oddly enough, the multitude of those condemning Bush's policies
almost never mention the corporate capitalist elephant in the room.
So, point two: until we directly address the profound inappropriateness
of capitalism as a generator of appropriate public policy,
and---somehow!---manage to put the beast back in its cage, we can
expect more of the countless human, cultural, and environmental
tragedies that ineluctably result from public policies that are of the
corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.
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