The motifs of right-wing discourse vis-à-vis the left have changed little over the years. The authors of such discourse fly under different flags, and the content naturally changes, but much repeats itself with dreary inevitability. I note only a few of these themes in passing:
* The pretence that there is left wing dominance in the fields of opinion and education. Thus, the use of terms like ‘the left (or liberal) establishment’, ‘the left-liberal consensus’ etc. Correspondingly, the dramatisation of yourself as a beleaguered iconocalst minority fighting an entrenched tyranny of consent. The most trite Daily Telegraph common sense masquerades as a samizdat.
* Much praise for ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ in the abstract, but no analysis of the concrete economic conditions in which these function or do not function. The invocation of these keywords almost always as something under threat, rather than as something we might radicalise, expand etc
* Attempting to discredit the vocabulary of the left. The use of this vocabulary only ironically or contemptuously. For example, capitalism is never spoken of directly, but phrases like “They [the left] blame all this on the evils of capitalism” or “I suppose you think this is all about nasty American imperialism”. The insinuation that this vocabulary is only a set of empty phrases and slogans.
* The production, by the actual right-wing bourgeoisie, of an ideological double, the ‘middle class’, imagined as isolated from the real world, dangerously naïve, treacherously permissive and implicitly unpatriotic (they are working against what the country stands for etc). In producing this spectre, you simultaneously lay claim to a fake populism.
* The requirement of an 'enemy without' and a corresponding 'enemy within'. The enemy without are necessary to rediscover ‘our values’ as something in danger. The enemy within are those (typically, of course, the left in its various spectral guises) who through their ideological blinkeredness and/or naïve tolerance are the conscious or unwitting representatives of the external enemy (previously communism).
* The support for Trade Union and/ or workers’ struggles only when they are abroad and in defiance of some designated enemy (eg Solidarnosc in Poland).
* The attribution to the left of a fixed and fanatical mindset. The enemy is in thrall to ideology, uses abstractions to measure reality, sees things in terms of a pre-conceived template etc. Similarly, the left is always ‘fashionable’, is merely ‘trendy’ and so on. In both cases, the left is seen as a psychological condition rather than a set of ideas to be engaged with.
It can be seen that each of these motifs is both a portrait of an enemy (who threatens) and an implicit self-dramatisation. Thus: The attack on the spectral middle-class is also the declaration of a no-nonsense populism; opining about left-wing dominance in the media entails a corresponding stance of valiant dissent; the charges of fanatical rigidity and trendyness lay claim to a normal commonsense viewpoint; accusations of left-wing ‘jargon’ and ‘sloganeering’ are also about legitimising one’s own ‘natural’ and transparent language.
In every age the self-appointed secretariat try to pass off these ideological machine-parts as the free products of their own brains.
5 comments:
The literature of the left has to seen - for similarites - to be believed. I suggest that what is unpardonable is always the naivety of the HYPOCRITICAL stance.
There are variants within the model. Right wing populism can invoke a place where these ideas live eg Hampstead, and what such people consume eg 'bollinger Bolsheviks' from the 1930s. Of course, when champagne swilling people from Hampstead support rightwing causes this goes without comment.
Meanwhile, it becomes increasingly necessary to attach leftwing ideas to something extinct - dinosaurs, prehistoric times etc. So Scargill was a dinosaur, Benn comes out with prehistoric ideas that no one takes seriously etc etc. And it's vital to repeat over and over again that it wasn't just Stalinism that died with 'the Wall' but Marxism.
Marxism must also be shackled to Pol Pot.
It's almost a form of ring-fencing or imprisonment. If you imprison the ideas and texts from left socialism and Marxism behind these barriers of insult, 'rhetoric' as you say, and connoting links, you prevent people from finding easy routes to them.
Anon - you'll need to say a little more before your statement becomes meaningful and therefore refutable.
Isakofsky - Yes, I forgot about that move - the left, as well as being merely trendy etc is also prehistoric, belongs entirely to the past etc. And yes, the truth of Marxism is revealed by variosu actual tyrannies, whiel the 'truth' of capitalism is never synonymous with any of its many historical actual horrors.
In reply to Mark Kaplan:
I hardly think I've made, by way of a comment, more than the commonplace observation that what is often under attack, and rightly so, is the basic hypocrisy that underlies the use of an idea to justify a whole idealogy, regardless of which side has been doing it. Looking at it this way, it seems perhaps not a bad thing that cliches do exist. They serve to ensure that everyone can use them to say something which is basically or partially true, even though the users may in turn fail to address more than they find, conveniently, on the surface of any given issue. I'd not wish to refute the 'patterns' laid out in your post, and there's no need to. The pattern does not change. The direction at which the rhetoric is pointed does, that's all.
Fair enough.
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