In my last blog, I talked about how the UFC is a great illustration of paradigm change, how a fighter can create a new style of fighting that renders the older styles obsolete, but how the old styles struggle along from defeat to defeat until they are finally done. 
As I was writing that posting, I couldn’t help but think about Barack Obama and the Republicans’ efforts to attack him on everything from the stimulus package to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to his speech in Cairo on America’s role in the middle east. The Republican attack machine right now is simply going through the motions that have always worked for them. Attack. Smear. Take the pettiest angle on any issue. Concentrate on trivia. Mischaracterize statements (e.g. Fox News’s attempt to portray Obama’s Cairo speech as an “apology”). These techniques once seemed unbeatable, and their originators seemed like political geniuses, but I think today that we can look back and draw some different lessons.
Yes, the slash-and-burn Republican techniques of the past 15 years worked very effectively, but they were less the result of a cold political calculation (except on the part of a very few strategists, perhaps) and more the result of a certain characterological defect in the party that invented the Southern Strategy. Only by tapping into the bitterness and anger that roil under the surface of American Democracy could the right wing draw the power that made their attacks so fearful, a kind of latent violence that always threatens to rear its head in political debate. The clownishness of most right wing arguments (”The democrats want to offer terrorists therapy,” “If you protest that troops do not have the proper equipment to do their job, you are against the troops,” “speaking to enemies is tantamount to surrender”) didn’t matter at all because the arguments themselves were just a thin veneer over the dramatic expression of rage, rage at historical change, rage at being confronted by others who live frighteningly different lives, rage at a world that defies sloganeering. The right wing had turned rage into a kind of drug, a strong jolt of obscene pleasure. I still recall the looks of glee on the faces of Republican strategists yelling at their cowed liberal opponents on news shows “Do you want America to succeed in Iraq? Yes or no!!??”
But the Republicans broke the rule of any good drug pusher: “Don’t get high on your own supply.” They became enamoured of the toxic rush of anger and hate that became the hallmark of the Rush Limbaughs and the Sean Hannitys. The result now is that they only know to do one thing : propaganda, with all the simple morality, primitive emotion, and lowest-common-denominator reasoning that propaganda implies.
What Obama has done is to skillfully shift the very ground of the fight. And he has done so by redefining for a new generation the art of rhetoric. Rhetoric is a much more difficult skill to master than propaganda. Propaganda depends upon the aggressive repetition of a simple message (George W Bush himself called it “catapulting the propaganda”). It can thrive on the semblance of morality. It is telegrammatic and can only take as its theme the simplest idea. Its emotional tone must be equally simple, made up of those feelings that are the most basic, the most primitive: fear, anger, sadism.
Rhetoric, on the other hand, is difficult. It depends (as Aristotle has proven) on a knowledge of human nature. It can take as its theme the most sublime and complex human feelings. Although it can be turned to fakery (since it does imply a distance from the emotion being expressed) the most stirring rhetorical feats — Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence — come from a true emotion truly felt.
Obama’s secret weapon as a politician is not that he is particularly superior as a leader or a manager. His solutions to most problems tend to be paler versions of the best possible solutions that the most competent problem solvers can propose (Obama is usually about 2/3 as insightful as, say, Paul Krugman on economic matters). Obama is, however, a skilled leader taking the reins after a period of such incompetence that his very fine (but hardly superhuman) management and decision-making skills strike us as exceptional. Where he is truly exceptional is in his ability to translate normally competent and insightful solutions into the soaring inspiration of great ideas. We have lived so many years in a world where the reason and decency to which all people can aspire has been made to seem weak and naïve that we are all amazed to hear our own ideas spoken so well. We are struck by the simple trust that the best of our impulses have found a voice. Obama’s rhetoric has taken our best selves (those that believe in democracy, that assume the best of human nature, that aspire to better conditions for all, that are willing to sacrifice for the greater good) and suddenly made it seeable again. It had been invisible for so long.
The propagandist is the bully of the political world. He does well against the unarmed and unprepared. His attacks are violent but unfocused. They rely, in effect, on brute force. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is an art of precision. The right word, the right figure of speech, the right rhythm, for the occasion. Watching a propagandist go up against a skilled rhetorician is like watching a street thug match up against a trained fighter. The thug’s violence can’t touch the fighter, and the fighter can choose exactly how and when the fight will end.
It has become clear now that the right wing simply has no other skills. They attack now, not because it is a wise political strategy but because it is the only thing they know how to do. And each time another GOP representative says something embarrassing and foolish they take a step closer to their own demise. And each time Obama scores with another historic speech he raises before our eyes an image of what can be, what is still possible for us. In the light of this shining rhetorical image, the brutality and primitivism of the right wing appears to us monstrous and twisted, and something to be gladly left in the past.