Post-Modernism Final Exam
So apparently the GOP has decided to go all in on its post-modern vision of the US. I am continually impressed by the fervency that the Party displays in its message discipline and, really in The Message. The discipline perhaps comes more easily to everyone when you believe that there is no reality other than The Message, whatever it is these days.
Is this 1984? The Handmaid's Tale? Does it matter? I don't think so. The arch reason is that since it's all a construct, attempting to bind this nonsense to a static theory of anything is futile. The non-arch, and possibly the only non-trivial reason for not bothering with this overmuch is that because it is nothing more than whatever the reader chooses to read into it, it's not possible to make sense of it.
Another way to put this is that it is nothing but pure emotion. It doesn't play to anything other than a “narrative” that's already known. In other words, it's like telling a familiar story but with different names. Is a bedtime story with the names changed a different story? No, as anyone bored by the tale or a bored copyright lawyer can tell you. But it has one great great advantage over any other kind of story: we already know how it comes out. There's no worry, and we discount that at our peril.
And that is in a sense the genius of the GOP. They have managed to make the truly abnormal, the berserk fringe in American politics, the normal. It's a story that has been repeated so many times: “bad Democrats”, “someone is out to get us”, “they want to take something away”, “some nasty people are not like us”, ad nausem, that the only effort entailed in this is shoehorning the opposition into the right box. 2004 is perhaps the best example of this, as a pliable Democratic slate lacked the suppleness to evade categorization. My point is merely that like an old shoe this is a narrative that doesn't require much effort on the part of the narrator or reader.
There is one thing that it does require and here, I think, is the real GOP gamble. It requires credulousness on the part of the voter. Credulousness for authority. In 2000 the GOP was able to fool enough people into accepting an unknown. The situation is not quite the same in 2008 because the GOP has been in power since then and the current occupant of the White House is not loved. So the institutional authority that lends power to the narration (the deep voice, if you will) is missing. Thus we see the various efforts to create it out of whole cloth by incessant repetition of the Vietnam War, as if sitting in a cell in North Vietnam somehow confers … something. Again, my point is not that it confers judgement or experience. It's pretty obvious that in this case it does neither. But what it can do is provide a patina of respect, which can be jiggled a bit to look like authority. The point, again, is that if the narrative track is well-worn enough, it's only necessary to make it fit into the existing framework reasonably well. There are no calipers in the voting booth.
So we come to the point: can the GOP sustain a narrative when the facts that might otherwise sustain it point rather profoundly against the narrator? Success here requires both agility and luck, and IMO I think the franchise has run up against two real problems. The first is, as mentioned above, those pesky facts that seem to suggest that the narrator is not the benign all-powerful caretaker the weary anxious voter may take refuge under. The second problem is one the modern (post-Nixon) GOP has not encountered: an opponent who cannot be easily caricatured. Clinton, whatever his skills at oratory, could not resist giving the GOP a bottomless ammo dump. Obama is, in contrast, much more like the Teflon-coated Reagan so that there's really nothing that has stuck to him. Just as important is his grasp of the rhetorical niceties that had been the exclusive province of the GOP till now.
Faced with these perils, the GOP went all out for what it knows best: firming up its base whilst suggesting something else. Thus as any number of Important People have suggested the Palin selection was brilliant, though not for the reasons they have put forth. What I mean is that it was strategically (and, yes, tactically) brilliant in that it allows the GOP to tell the story it likes best—again. But whether it can do it with this particular pick and against this particular opponent at this particular point in time is a different question. Less than 172 hours after the news of the selection, Palin is dogged by stories that are generating friction with GOP efforts to fit her into the narrative. Can the friction be overcome? I doubt it, because all of Palin's problems are problems anyone can understand, and she cannot hide behind the White House. And if you cannot retell the narrative without someone interrupting all the time, then you've lost in the post-modern ring. The truly interesting question, of course, is whether the GOP is correct that politics in the US is, in the TV age, nothing more than a Punch and Judy show signifying nothing. It appears that's the case in good times. We are now entering a double-blind cognition test phase. Cognitive dissonance chin-ups, anyone?
