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. 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. (I’ve also put together an online video with clips supporting this general analysis which can be viewed at:
http://www.eidelsonconsulting.com/blog/2006/09/how_conservatives_exploit_our.html).
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 former 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, former 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 former 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, December 2005 then 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, last summer 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 press conference a few months ago, 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.
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