How Conservatives Exploit Our Five Core Concerns
by Roy Eidelson
Fri Nov 03, 2006 at 05:04:09 AM PST
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/11/3/849/00296

My work as a psychologist suggests that five
core concerns--about vulnerability, injustice,
distrust, superiority, and helplessness--pervade
the worlds of individuals, organizations, communities,
and nations.

* Roy Eidelson's diary :: ::
*

First, concerns over personal and collective
vulnerability are central to our lives. For most
of us, nothing is more immediate than the desire
to protect the people and things we care about,
including ourselves. Second, we are also strongly
affected by perceptions of injustice, both in our
personal lives and in our group attachments.

We often react to perceived mistreatment with
a combination of anger and resentment, and an
urge to right wrongs and punish those we hold
responsible. The third concern is distrust. We
tend to divide the world into those who are
trustworthy and those unworthy of our trust.

If our judgments are accurate, we can select
our associates and allies wisely, and we can
avoid harm from those who have hostile intent
or are merely unreliable. Fourth is the pursuit
of superiority. We regularly compare ourselves
to other individuals and groups, and prefer to
conclude that we're better than they are in some
important way--perhaps in our accomplishments,
or our morality, or our destiny.

Finally, we strive to avoid the experience of
helplessness, and instead do our best to
control the important events in our lives. When
we're overcome by despair and resignation we
usually fail to achieve our goals.

Vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness are
thus key lenses through which we make sense of the world around us.
Not surprisingly, then, these concerns powerfully influence our
politics, and political leaders who effectively appeal to these five
issues are often especially successful in gaining our support. Such
appeals can inspire us to work together toward creating a better
world. But today's conservative leaders--who currently control all
branches of government and much of the political airwaves too--have
instead appealed to these core concerns to promote a narrow agenda
that has caused far more harm than good, an agenda that has benefited
the few while leaving most of us worse off. Below I offer a sampling
of the fundamental appeals used by adherents of this radical
right-wing program, along with illustrative examples from their public
statements. (A related video version of this analysis is available for
online viewing at: http://www.eidelsonconsulting.com/...).

Vulnerability Appeal: The actions we take are necessary to protect
the public from dire threats; the policies promoted by others will
instead create new dangers and make everyone less safe.

Today's conservative leaders have used variations of this appeal with
regularity. In so doing, they have attempted to short-circuit reasoned
consideration of their claims and policy prescriptions. President Bush
sold the invasion of Iraq as a preemptive necessity because "We cannot
wait for the final proof--the smoking gun--that could come in the form
of a mushroom cloud." The war on terror has been promoted in much the
same way, as evidenced by Sen. Conrad Burns' (R-MT) recent warning
that there are terrorists lurking among us who "drive taxi cabs in the
daytime and kill at night." Similarly, Rep. Ted Poe's (R-TX)
contribution to the ongoing immigration debate has included the
following clarion call: "We are being invaded, we are being colonized,
and there are insurgents from the nation of Mexico and their allies
further south."

But not only do conservatives promote fear to directly advance their
agenda, they also try to scare us away from considering alternatives
to their narrow vision. In this way, their recurrent "stay the course"
mantra extends far beyond Iraq. Two months before the 2004 election,
Vice President Cheney offered voters this stark exhortation: "It's
absolutely essential that eight weeks from today...we make the right
choice, because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that
we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating
from the standpoint of the United States." We saw a similarly severe
admonition from Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) in his defense of the NSA's
warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens: "You have no civil liberties
if you are dead." And on a different front, Focus on the Family
founder James Dobson made the following dire prediction about the
legalization of gay marriage: "How about group marriage? Or marriage
between daddies and little girls? How about marriage between a man and
his donkey? Anything allegedly linked to civil rights will be doable
and the legal underpinnings for marriage will have been destroyed."

Injustice Appeal: Our actions are necessary in response to others'
wrongdoing; criticism of our policies is unjust, and our critics are
therefore also wrongdoers.

Conservative leaders have repeatedly appealed to our sense of right
and wrong--and our desire to see injustice corrected--in order to
pursue their goals. Consider these wide-ranging examples. In laying
the groundwork prior to invading Iraq, President Bush argued "The best
way to secure the homeland is to find killers before they kill us and
bring them to justice. And that's what we're going to do." In
condemning legalized abortion, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) compared it
to the historical injustice of slavery: "I find that somewhat chilling
that we would revisit a very ugly chapter in American history where we
take a human being...and treat it as property." Even further tax cuts
for the wealthy--in the guise of abolishing the estate tax--have been
spun as a necessary response to an unjust system, as evidenced by Sen.
Bill Frist's (R-TN) claim: "This death tax is unfair...It is time to
bury it."

These right-wing ideologues further exploit our concerns about
injustice by arguing that criticism of their policies is unfair and
therefore unworthy of serious consideration. For instance, when
questions were raised last year about possible prisoner abuse at
Guantanamo Bay, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) held a press conference.
With sample dinners of chicken and fish as props, he insisted that
"The inmates in Guantanamo have never eaten better, they've never been
treated better, and they've never been more comfortable in their lives
than in this situation. And the idea that...we are torturing people in
Guantanamo is absolutely not true, unless you consider having to eat
chicken three times a week real torture." In a similar vein, last
December Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lambasted the press for
its Iraq coverage, even as the country was dissolving into an outright
civil war: "We've arrived at a strange time in this country where the
worst about America and our military seems to so quickly be taken as
truth by the press, and reported and spread around the world, often
with little context and little scrutiny, let alone correction or
accountability after the fact."

Distrust Appeal: Our actions are necessitated by the opposition's
dishonesty; those opposed to our policies should not be trusted
because they are disloyal, misguided, or lacking in good judgment.

Conservatives have sought to persuade us that only they can be trusted
to tell the truth and look out for our interests. This claim has
frequently emphasized the opposition's dishonesty and the need to
disregard everything they say. Thus, six months before invading Iraq,
President Bush offered this assessment of Saddam Hussein: "We know the
methods of this regime. They buy time with hollow promises. They move
incriminating evidence to stay ahead of inspectors. They concede just
enough to escape--to escape punishment, and then violate every pledge
when the attention of the world is turned away." Similarly, only a few
months ago, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld encouraged the American people
to be very skeptical of negative news reports from Iraq, arguing that
"The terrorists, Zarqawi and bin Laden and Zawahiri, those people have
media committees. They are actively out there trying to manipulate the
press in the United States. They are very good at it."

At the same time, today's right-wing leaders have tried to disarm
their critics at home by painting them as lacking credibility--or
worse. For example, shortly after the 9/11 attacks Attorney General
John Ashcroft questioned the patriotism of those who raised civil
rights concerns over the administration's response, saying "Your
tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and
diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and
pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to
remain silent in the face of evil." More recently, in the context of
the war in Iraq, Vice President Cheney attacked the integrity of his
detractors: "What I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible--is
the suggestion by some U. S. Senators that the President of the United
States or any member of his administration purposely misled the
American people on pre-war intelligence."

Superiority Appeal: The people we represent are special, and our
actions are based on high moral principles; anyone harmed by our
policies is contemptible and undeserving of consideration anyway.

Many of today's conservative leaders have pushed their agenda by
embracing overly-simple notions of American exceptionalism and by
claiming the moral high ground as solely their own. President Bush
employed this type of appeal in particularly revealing terms during a
recent press conference, when he deemed certain thoughts out of
bounds, stating "It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of
comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and
the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children
to achieve an objective." But perhaps even more extreme was the
Reverend Jerry Falwell's "religiously inspired" approach to the war on
terrorism: "You've got to kill the terrorists before the killing
stops. And I'm for the president to chase them all over the world. If
it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord."

A related version of this superiority appeal, in which society's
disadvantaged are condemned or ridiculed, has been especially
prominent on right-wing television and radio. For example, Bill
O'Reilly offered the following "blame the victim" analysis on his TV
show shortly after Hurricane Katrina: "So every American kid should be
required to watch videotape of the poor in New Orleans and see how
they suffered, because they couldn't get out of town. And then, every
teacher should tell the students, `If you refuse to learn, if you
refuse to work hard, if you become addicted, if you live a
gangsta-life, you will be poor and powerless just like many of those
in New Orleans.'" Similarly disquieting are radio host Neal Boortz's
recent remarks about minimum wage workers: "How incompetent, how
ignorant, how worthless is an adult that can't earn more than the
minimum wage? You have to really, really, really be a pretty pathetic
human being."

Helplessness Appeal: We persevere and succeed when faced with
obstacles; if setbacks occur they were unavoidable, and we therefore
should not be held responsible.

Conservatives have insisted that their actions and policies are
effective and therefore worthy of our support--even when the evidence
suggests otherwise. Nobody has repeatedly boasted of accomplishments
more than President Bush himself. One memorable example occurred in
May 2003, less than two months after the Iraq War began. Landing on an
aircraft carrier in dramatic fashion and with a "Mission Accomplished"
banner behind him, the President proclaimed victory: "Major combat
operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United
States and our allies have prevailed." Almost three years later,
undaunted by that earlier gross misrepresentation or by growing signs
of civil war, he explained to the American people that "For every
scene of destruction in Iraq, there are more scenes of rebuilding and
hope. For every life lost, there are countless more lives reclaimed.
And for every terrorist working to stop freedom in Iraq, there are
many more Iraqis and Americans working to defeat them. My fellow
citizens: Not only can we win the war in Iraq, we are winning the war
in Iraq."

But despite such bravado, when necessary to insulate themselves or
their actions from blame, right-wing leaders have ironically embraced
helplessness as their last line of defense. For instance, then
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice testified that there were
no advance warnings of the 9/11 attacks. Even when pressed to explain
the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden
Determined to Attack Inside the United States," she argued "It was
historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat
information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks
inside the United States." Similarly, following the tragic
mismanagement of evacuations in response to Hurricane Katrina,
Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff offered this excuse: "At the
end of the day, as with any titanic struggle with nature, a plan only
gets you so far in the face of struggling with the reality of miles of
city that are underwater."

The examples presented here make the key point sufficiently clear:
today's conservative leaders and their allies have taken advantage of
us. They have appealed to our five core concerns in an effort to
garner broad support for a narrow agenda that betrays our values and
our communities. It is not wrong to appeal to issues of vulnerability,
injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness when the goal is to
advance our collective welfare. Indeed, it is important to do so. But
it is wrong to employ these appeals as they have done--as a strategy
that exploits our concerns without truly addressing the realities of
our everyday lives.

Fortunately, there is much that can be done. We can start by
identifying, supporting, and electing progressive leaders who will
reclaim these five core concerns of Americans--from all walks of
life--as the basis for their own core principles and policies. What
does a progressive engagement with these five concerns look like?

It means effectively combating the real vulnerabilities that the
American people face--not only the risk of another terrorist attack,
but also daily perils such as economic insecurity and inadequate
access to healthcare, both of which narrow our dreams and leave us
without a safety net if we fall.

It means working hard against injustice, whether the abuses take the
form of horrific and unwarranted violence against our citizens or
instead appear as everyday violations of our civil rights and civil
liberties.

It means making the case that a distrustful posture cannot effectively
protect us from outside threats if it leads us to abandon
international collaboration, and also that distrust of concentrated
and unfettered power is equally indispensable at home.

It means taking pride in this country's accomplishments and founding
principles, not as a pedestal of superiority from which to belittle
the billions of people who live outside our borders, but as the
inspiration to use our renowned national strength in the service of
higher national purpose, whether the goal is eradicating hunger or
protecting human rights.

Finally, it means empowering the American people--including those
suffering from helplessness, despair, or apathy-- by listening to
their concerns and by enlisting their efforts in creating a
reinvigorated politics where they will once again have a forceful
voice.

Tags: Conservatives, Progressives, Elections, Psychology, Right-Wing,
Rescued (all tags)
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"You can fool some of the people all the time,
and those are the ones
you want to concentrate on".
http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/george_w._bush/

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George W. Bush quotes