Frame analysis: Obama, Palin

As I’ve been writing the preceeding series of posts on Sarah Palin I’ve been using my usual feeds and WordPress’ suggestions to do some further reading, daisy-chaining an unsystematic sampling of reactions to Palin’s candidacy. By the happy accidents of mindless word-association this reading has included reactions to Obama’s candidacy. If you’ll trust my powers of synthesis for a moment I think I can hazard a hypothesis I find interesting about what they have in common, perhaps as an occasion for conversation.

I start from the fact that both are engaged in the normal political business of framing, which most basically involves attempting to engage or create an alignment between a stereotyped self-presentation and the stereotyped interpretive schemata of possible constituencies. They’re working on looking familiar in positive and motivationally effective ways. I’m talking here mostly about the basic framing of them-as-candidates, not so much any particular policy position or counterframing of their opponents.

My hypothesis is that for each of them, the effective frame for their target audiences is unintelligible to people outside that audience. In order to make good sense to their crew, they have to come across wonky to everyone else. Although this is true to some degree in all mass democratic politics, it is accelerated into the uncanny and polarized in this case because Obama is a highly-educated black man and Palin is a conservative woman.

I should say here that my own first impression of Obama is that he is one mighty smart and effective fella who consistently addresses issues of substance. This first reaction is because our frames align. The way framing works is by using a pleasantly familiar self-performance to recruit my own interpretive prejudices to fill out the picture. My Obama is accordingly a bunch of stuff I think already, which I assume he also thinks because he’s activated that bundle of associations by correctly framing his impression on me. This is accomplished through word choice, delivery (pronunciation, accent, tone, rhythm, emphasis, etc.), non-verbal cueing, appearance (clothing, grooming, style), and so on. In particular, Obama has a good feel for the cadences of the civil rights sermon in his speeches, which will stimulate the salivation of any liberal; while in his more conversational mode he plays with words like a guy who reads a lot, and clips with a nicely urban rhythm. (Although I grew up in the country, I’ve spent my adult life in the city.) As is often the case with this stuff, the successful outcome is that I think Barack is ‘like me’; and I like him back.

To get clear of this pre-rational first impression I’ve got many accumulated strategies of self-irony and reframing. They come from letting other people teach me to look sideways at what I take for granted. Specifically, I take seriously the negative reactions to Obama, ranging from invective to puzzlement, to the effect that he has nothing of substance to say. When I look at Barack’s speeches and debate performances, which I have enjoyed and admired, I can’t disagree with this. They are long on generalities and exhortations, short on specifics and practicalities. Of course short campaign performances are not the place to look for substantive positions. Turning to his record and his actual policy proposals, they’re fine, in a generically centrist kind of way. Nothing too upsetting, nothing too exciting, and not a lot of clarity about how to get there from here. So to go back to my first impression, I am totally giving this guy the benefit of the doubt. That’s framing.

While I’m not well justified in being deeply impressed with Obama (yet), the same review has turned up nothing that would justify readings of him as an extreme leftist (my dissertation is on communists, I know those when I see them), a Muslim terrorist, or any other kind of active threat to our democracy. Substantively he’s pretty much your standard Democrat, disagreeable perhaps, a little on the green side, but not at all frightening. Where does that stuff come from? Racism looks like a good answer this time around, and there’s some of that. But I remember a lot of fretting about the doom John Kerry represented, and you don’t get any whiter than John Kerry. The fact is that from deep inside the constellation of Republican frames (social conservatism, neo-conservatism, libertarianism, market fundamentalism) there’s nothing any Democrat as such can say that doesn’t sound scary insane. When Democrats look like socialists, no wonder the specter of real communists produced mass hysteria early in the Cold War. Boo! Happy Halloween!

This is reciprocal. I have friends who see Hitler behind every neo-con and the menstrual hut behind every social conservative. I have a friend who’s pretty sure Sarah Palin is the worst thing for women since footbinding. Like Helen of Margaret and Helen, she just doesn’t have a frame that can make sense of Palin; or rather, the frame she has makes Palin look demonic. And it’s not that she’s considered the alternatives and decided against them; she simply can’t see another way of seeing. Which is an admirable position of integrity, in my view, but disabling in a more analytical frame.

This demonization is unavoidable for Palin, perhaps even productive; because she’s framing herself for her own audience, that fraction of the Republican constellation who on the fringes understand themselves to be embattled by the sinister forces of godless leftism, yada yada, and toward the center oppose the selfishness of liberal ‘rights talk’ by framing individual property, rights and liberties in terms of virtuous participation in and obligation to historically continuous community. Therefore Bob Ritzema is quite right in a previous comment about one positive frame for Palin: she

represents not a new type of woman, but a very old type, one that many traditionalists would quickly recognize. From a Jungian perspective, she is an archetypal figure, one represented by such manifestations as the frontier woman and the Amazon. As I understand it, this is the woman who situates herself not behind the protective barriers of civilization but out where danger resides. She is strong in a direct, assertive way, not in the seductive, deceptive manner that is a common stereotype of women in patriarchal societies–and is respected as such, though sometimes feared as well. Space is created for her not only by her willingness to go beyond the confines of the protective-oppressive system of society, but also by some recognition that the men who are supposed to provide protection are not always adequate to the task. The Palin story seems to fit this prototype in lots of ways, e.g. living in Alaska, being a hunter, the “pit bull with lipstick” image, the Russian bear across the straits, fighting corruption, and refusing to accept earmarks.

Christina Hoff Sommers elaborates this frame historically in a short paper for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, nicely contrasting liberal and conservative notions of feminism:

The classical feminism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries embodied two distinct schools of thought and social activism. The first, egalitarian feminism, was progressive (in the view of many contemporaries of both sexes, radical), and it centered on women as independent agents rather than wives and mothers. It held that men and women are, in their essential nature, the same, and it sought to liberate women through abstract appeals to social justice and universal rights. The second school, conservative feminism, was traditionalist and family-centered. It embraced rather than rejected women’s established roles as homemakers, caregivers, and providers of domestic tranquility–and it promoted women’s rights by redefining, strengthening, and expanding these roles. Conservative feminists argued that a practical, responsible femininity could be a force for good in the world beyond the family, through charitable works and more enlightened politics and government.

Of the two schools, conservative feminism was much more influential. Unlike its more radical sister, conservative feminism has always had great appeal to large majorities of women. By contrast, egalitarian feminists often appeared strange and frightening, with their salons and little journals.

Kay S. Hymowitz talks about “red-state feminism” and notes its opacity to urban liberal feminists. She rehearses Betty Friedan’s critique of “full-time motherhood as a ‘waste of human self’ and home as a ‘comfortable concentration camp’” and argues that in contrast,

central to Palin’s red-state appeal is her earthy embrace of motherhood. She differs from mainstream feminists in that her sexuality and fecundity are not in tension with her achievement and power. If anything, they rise out of them. Instead of holding her back, her five children embody her energy, competence, authority, and optimism…. “She’s a real woman, she’s a real feminist but she’s not strident—she’s like us,” Cheryl Hauswirth, a middle-aged mother from Wisconsin, told Politico writer Jonathan Martin. “She’s strong, powerful and opinionated, all the things a woman should be, while still retaining her femininity, her womanhood.”

Ah, so that’s what all that lipstick, winking and you betchas are about. (Thanks again to The Kibitzer for these last two references.)

Neither the celebration nor the critique of motherhood and domesticity are objective descriptions of womanhood; both are plausible frames for understanding women’s experience, and both fail completely to understand each other. Their contestation looks like a political matter, but the logic of framing has to do with tapping into prejudices that are pre-political. So ultimately reactions to Obama and Palin are diagnostic: what prejudices are we letting ourselves be jerked around with?

UPDATE: for lots more on political framing, in the context of a series of critiques of George Lakoff’s work on liberal and conservative metaphors, follow the links at Mixing Memory.

Feminism, conditions, Palin

Thanks again to Gary for elevating the level of analysis in the commentary on my recent post about Sarah Palin’s counterintuitive relationship to feminists and conservatives (my point being, roughly, that all women are not liberals and all conservatives are not men). Gary noted that the relationship is only counterintuitive according to liberal mythology, and remarked that “it seems like liberals are at long last required to acknowledge another sort of feminism, one that conservatives have always accepted. It’s something like has happened with environmentalism. Peel away the partisan cruft from environmental notions and you have something that everyone is always already supporting…. To me it seems that there are several legitimate claimants to the idea of feminism and that the unbiased observer would have to include them all in any comprehensive definition.”

My target in the post was what I very loosely called “pop feminism,” by which I meant that basket of commonplaces about women’s oppression by patriarchy celebrated as self-evident truth by folk liberals and derided as self-evident crap by folk conservatives. Gary is quite right that feminism understood as an interest in the condition of women encompasses a much wider variety of positions, ranging from entire satisfaction with the special power and authority already enjoyed by women in traditional social relationships to critical incredulity toward ‘woman’ as a category of being. My own feminism is of the latter sort, although I would not dream of denying the conventional solidity and real consequences of gender constructs and therefore accept the situated logics of the former sort and all points in between.

In fact, as a historian and social analyst I think it’s very important not to let critical ideals, let alone habits of mind, feed back too quickly into the selection and interpretation of the data. Perhaps it helps that I was trained as an intellectual and cultural historian, so I always already know better than to take the truthiness of any particular conceptual schema too literally. But it should be that studying anything about the past or any other instance of ‘otherness’ ought to stimulate this insight. (It often doesn’t; why is a long story.) This is therefore the primary mission of my classes.

Back to feminism. Having grown up in a rural area dotted with family farms, and being married to Rachel who grew up throwing cows around on a subsistence farm, I know Gary is correct that there are socially conservative communities in which the strength and authority claimed by Sarah Palin as a woman, wife and mother is familiar and comfortable. The most common division of labor assigns men to the public and women to the private sphere, but in practice the borders of those spheres are quite fluid and contextually negotiable. Things need doing and everyone pitches in. It is never surprising to see one of these women whose interest is aroused appear in public to represent it, nor would she be stigmatized for doing so. But her authority to shape the family’s discourse at home often means that she can rely on her men to agree with and represent for her.

A hard, impermeable boundary between the public and private spheres is, as rigorous feminist history has repeatedly shown, enabled only under very particular conditions of relative prosperity in a basically static economy. Keeping a private home and dominating a woman there is an expensive luxury, both for the family and the society. We’re talking about withdrawing capable people from productive labor (unfetishized child-rearing is not labor-intensive) and expending effort on supervising them. Even the guarantee of reproductive exclusivity afforded by feminine domestic bondage is a luxury afforded only under relatively flush conditions. There is a class dimension to the feminine condition.

An example of how this works has been gradually coming into focus in my modern world history classes this semester (our themes are community and agency). We started by reading an excerpt of a set of rules from the Miu lineage, a rural southeastern Chinese family during the Ming dynasty (Kevin Reilly, ed., Worlds of History: A Comparative Reader, 3rd ed. vol. 2). On the face of it this document demonstrates the absolute control elder men enjoyed over every aspect of family life in this patriarchal agrarian / commercial society.

But not so fast. Rules are ideals, and generally not everyone’s ideals. Since there is no need to legislate what is already being commonly done, rules are inherently in tension with practices. Each one, in mandating or sanctioning conduct, identifies its transgression as a thing that happens often enough to be worth regulating. (Less frequently, rules are hysterical reactions to imaginary threats; this requires a deeper excavation of the real practices that are being symbolized by the imaginary ones. Witch scares are a famous example of this.)

When the Miu elders complain that “most men lack resolve and listen to what their women say. As a result, blood relatives become estranged and competitiveness, suspicion, and distance arise between them. Therefore, when a wife first comes into a family, it should be made clear to her that such things are prohibited,” they are attempting to simplify by fiat an ordinary situation that they are describing as in practice being quite complicated. Apparently, their experience is that the women they’ve arranged for their sons to marry do not arrive from their own families in a condition of abject subordination, nor are those sons so well imbued with a habit of masculine command that feminine disruption is quickly snuffed out as it ’should’ be. Perhaps this should not be surprising, given that elsewhere in the rules the training of both sons and daughters is assigned to the women of the household. Indeed, we learn here that these outside wives are able swiftly to detect and exploit latent fissures and conflicts within the family.

The document describes a strict hierarchy of functions and responsibilities. Women are house-bound (if not foot-bound) and assigned familiar duties like running the kitchen. Although they are apparently excluded from the formal decision-making of the family, they also supervise the servants and calculate the grocery expenses, which might be described as managerial functions, and as we’ve seen, they are successful enough in exerting informal influence to inspire a plaintive attempt to reassert patriarchal order. The young men too are subject to patriarchal discipline, with the promise of more power and responsibility later; note that they do not choose their own wives, nor in this rural setting could they expect to get a concubine, which was a status requirement and welcome release for elite men but this farming family saw as a divisive frivolity.

Nevertheless it’s tempting to read our value of individual autonomy back into this document and see these women as distinctively oppressed. But individual autonomy is by no means a self-evidently primary value. It is antithetical to the community, order and continuity the Miu all valued and worked toward in their own ways. It was within this frame that their gendered strategizing and positioning occurred.

It’s this reading-back that led my students at first to prefer the life of the women the Miu warn against: “Women from lower-class families who stop at our houses tend to gossip, create conflicts, peek into the kitchens, or induce our women to believe in prayer and fortune-telling, thereby cheating them out of their money and possessions.” These women are not house-bound, seem to go where they please, are involved in the public economy, and have influence. But weren’t they forced out of their homes by economic necessity? And what’s this about the Miu women having money and possessions to be cheated out of? There are some trade-offs here between difficult autonomy and relative ease within carefully ‘husbanded’ community; but no one was choosing their position, not even the Miu elders.

I wouldn’t want to call the strong-minded effectiveness of the Miu women feminism, nor would I want to call the more contingently autonomous lower-class women feminists. We can see their thinking and practices as adaptations to their environment; they took the opportunities that were afforded to them and pushed for more where they could. In this context individual autonomy was the unenviable result of scrambling to maximize family resources under conditions of scarcity, just as the Miu’s division and hierarchy of functions was a way to stabilize and maintain the resources of the community for the relative good of all. In a very rich society these trade-offs would lose much of their sense, as they have for many but not all of us in the contemporary developed world.

P.S.: Rachel the cow-tosser does not like Sarah Palin, who she thinks is a nasty manipulative twink. Sarah is not Rachel’s kind of babe. “She’s a hollow chocolate Easter bunny. She looks nice and you think you’re going to get a great treat, and then you bite into it and you’re like ‘Shoot, I paid $3 for that’.” For every wise and wonderful Miss Marple, the countryside generates dozens of what Rachel grew up with and sees in Palin: folks who are not dumb but narrow, hyperspecialized creatures of their environment, tough, closed and judgmental. Rachel is particularly offended by the authoritarian model of leadership as herding cattle. She thinks that’s what’s happening when Palin “talks about feelings and checks the right boxes: family, God, guns, abortion.”

Persuasion

The art of persuasion is something like getting a car unstuck from mud. It takes patience and attention. If you floor it, you make a loud sound and a big mess but just dig the thing in deeper where it is. What you’ve got to do is rock it back and forth, slowly at first then using the momentum from each rock to get a little farther each time until eventually you get clear. Education is a form of persuasion, as of course is politics, although to say this is not to say that education and politics are the same thing.

There’s always more mud around, so you’re never done with this.

Margaret and Helen

On October 3rd, after seven posts covering family Thanksgiving, Fall leaves and shooting raccoons (and a few even more personal that have since been removed), Helen “Philpot” wrote “Sarah Palin is a Bitch… there I said it.”

Her post has received over 1,300 comments to date. Overnight a blog set up by a grandson to allow his grandma Helen and her best friend Margaret to stay in touch became a viral sensation, complete with a raft of google hits as ‘favorite blog ever’. Less than three weeks later, seven more posts in a similar vein and referrals by the likes of Rosie O’Donnell have produced almost 400,000 blog hits.

Margaret does not post; she prefers the telephone. Helen has a nice direct, pungent style and a good feel for homespun rhetoric. She scores some familiar zingers within the internal liberal conversation, distinguished largely by the saltiness of her language: Palin is a “stupid, conniving bitch;” “a weak, pathetic woman who thinks big hair, winking, baby talk and self deprecation is somehow becoming of a woman who wants to lead the free world;” a hypocrite and “the worst kind of politician.” She’s a sham governor, a bad mother and a whiner.

It’s safe to say that Helen is clueless about Palin’s appeal, even though she has the more conservative Margaret to talk to. She certainly does not think Palin is her kind of babe, a representative of strong frontier womanhood and plainspoken traditional values. Writing from Texas, Helen seems to be more of an Ann Richards kind of poo-kicker than a Barbara Bush kind of matriarch.

The personal politics of this are probably not very interesting. Strong personalities with sharp tongues get attached to the whole spectrum of political passions. But I wonder what void Helen filled in the lives of those hundreds of thousands of folks who tumbled so suddenly to her site and instantly saw there a special voice of wisdom and sanity? Perhaps the aura (or miasma) of virtuous traditionalism Palin exudes could only be dispelled by someone with superior cred, an older woman and a fellow outsider? The best counter for charisma is charisma, and Helen’s got it. But she’s preaching to the choir, in fiery tent-revival style. She’s unlikely to change any minds; the negative rants in the comments show how easy a “fat old woman” is to dismiss if you don’t like what she’s saying. Then again, changing minds is not generally the point of political commentary, as I’ve been discussing for the last few posts.

Sesame Street Palin

Sarah Palin is, as far as she’s showing, ordinary. She’s not dumb but she’s not especially bright. She doesn’t know much but she isn’t completely ignorant. She manages to get some things done but she’s not notably competent; and when she gets things done it’s not clear they were quite what she had in mind. When she talks I hear the muddled, impressionistic conservatism of a hundred satisfactory human beings I know, the perfect counterpoint to the muddled, impressionistic liberalism of another hundred sterling folks of my acquaintance. As I’ve just said in my last post, this disqualifies her for a philosophy degree but makes her pretty effective as a demagogic rhetoritician. Not great at that either, though, just, well, good enough.

What makes Palin special is therefore nothing about herself; it’s that the juxtaposition of her ordinariness and the historic role she’s been thrust into is confusing according to a couple of schemas that ought to have her nicely boxed up. She’s a monster because she’s a historically successful woman who isn’t a feminist; and a conservative proponent of women’s domestic calling who isn’t a housewife. She’s loved by who oughta revile her and reviled by who oughta love her. She’s the one of these things that doesn’t belong here.

As a category-buster, Palin changes the game just by existing, like hermaphrodites change the game of sex and gender. She embodies an attack on a central myth of pop feminism, in many cases a reality, that to be female is to experience oppression and carry at least a latent progressive consciousness. This is not her narrative. Shall we say that she suffers from false consciousness? But isn’t failure to take seriously what women tell us about their lives the characteristic power play of the patriarchy? She’s a woman who’s a feminist’s worst nightmare.

She is empowered, and not despite her femininity but because of it. This is a central myth, and in many cases a reality, of the normative traditional gendered division of labor, as Muck and Mystery reports:

That’s the single most common subject around here when the cowboys run into one another while riding fence and so chat for a bit. She’s our kind of babe. We each know a dozen women much like her and have no confusions about their power. We’ve lived with them all of our lives and know that to a significant degree they run things.

For example, there’s old Ordel who was known far and wide as the best farmer to ever mount a tractor, and the sharpest business man to ever operate a pencil. He rose from being a two-bit Okie fruit picker to owning enough land for a boutique sized European nation. But as he aged his mind faded and his wife, Rita, took to doing most of the talking. It soon became apparent that Ordel’s nose for business was on Rita’s face. Those who knew the family closely had always known this of course. These women have never needed liberation. They are content with domination.

Men are big showy figureheads for these distaff masterminds. Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain. But Sarah disrupts the myth by emerging from behind the throne to sit in it herself; and unlike Rita, not as a regrettable necessity. By default Palin will be showing that women can have it all: marriage, children, global authority. She’s a conservative woman who’s a conservative’s worst nightmare.

Careful what you wish for. To empower women in the public sphere is to empower all women, not just the ones who agree with you. Palin is an icon of feminist accomplishment; she’s just what we worked for, better late than never, warts and all. That she also undermines the program with her conservative views and policies is a cost of doing business in a pluralistic democracy. The tyranny of feminism would require a different political system than we have. But the offset is ironically pleasing. For Palin to subvert the feminist agenda she must first accomplish it; as a powerful woman out of the home she’s a genie out of the bottle for social conservatives. What kind of example is she setting? She can talk family and tradition all she wants, yet there she is in the suit, with the microphone, all eyes on her, executive power and looking for more.

Without being anything much but a hockey mom she’s not what she should be, at all. Fantastic.

UPDATE: For a better explanation of conservative feminism and sharp assessment of some problems with the liberal variety, with great links, check out The Kibitzer.

Palipunditry

I wanted to see if I could get two of my very favorite blogs to work together for a moment. For data we have Mikhail at Perverse Egalitarianism reporting the following utterance by Sarah Palin:

Well, Americans are caring about the problems in the economy of course And wanting to know what those long term solutions are that our ticket can provide and what the other ticket is proposing so when you talk though about what it is that we are proposing and what it is that Barack Obama is proposing again it is relevant to connect that association that he has with Ayers–not so much he as a person Ayers, but the whole situation and the truthfulness and the judgment there that you must question if again he’s not being forthright in all of his answers as to how did you know him, when did you know him, why would you continue to be associated with him!?

If anyone has a right to kvetch about the tortured English here it’s Mikhail, for whom English is among his various second languages. But for an analytic imperative I choose Gary from Muck and Mystery, who thinks that pundits could be doing a much better job of extracting useful information from this stuff rather than scoring easy points about formalist trivia:

I think that there is information in political speech about the ability to think and speak clearly. It’s not always easy to winkle out, and is often ambiguous. Punditry that has real value – if such a thing can be imagined – would be about this very subject. Those who pee in the pool – such as the “snarky intellekchles” in their cottages – would earn raspberries and public scorn.

Gary is teasing me with reference to my last post, and although I enjoy raspberries I’d prefer to skip the public scorn.

Clearly I agree with Gary that for the most part this stuff is a small thing. In that spirit, then, the question is whether we can learn something about Palin’s actual ability to think and speak clearly from the above utterance. Maybe. The first thing to notice is that none of us manage entirely to make sense from sentence to sentence all the time. Thoughts flee or pile up in mid-articulation. Perfection is an unreasonable standard. But what we do look for in competent thinkers and speakers is 1.) a history of other statements that did succeed, and 2.) evidence that the failed statement failed for a good reason.

We don’t have much history on Palin so we’ll have to skip the first test for now. As for the second, in political speech there are basically two good reasons to fail a coherence test. The first is if coherence is not the point, and instead the utterance is a collection of buzzwords designed to produce a pre-rational response. I talked about this in terms of sermonizing in the last post. The second is if an attempt is being made to collate a complex thought on the fly and the elements bottleneck somewhere between the brain and the mouth.

Let’s consider the complex thought possibility first. What would be the elements of it, above? We have Americans caring; problems in the economy; solutions proposed by Dems and Reps. This sorts out pretty readily into the simple thought that folks care about the economy and wonder what the two parties intend to do about it. Fair enough. Then we have Obama’s association with Ayers, specifically Obama’s judgment and truthfulness about their relationship.

We’ll need a little background to sort out this second part. Who is/was Ayers? The implication is that he’s a questionable dude, and by juxtaposition he ought to be questionable in relation to the economy, since that’s what the first part of the sentence was about and we’re offering friendly credit for unarticulated connections. Actually, he was a member of the Weather Underground, and by all accounts an especially effective version of the kind of narcissistic righteous asshole the 60’s counterculture produced in abundance. But he’s mostly over all that now and working for progressive causes within the law, which is where Obama found him. So unless Palin’s thinking is extraordinarily subtle, there is no logical connection between the first part of the sentence, concern about the economy, and the second part, Barack hangs out with mainstreamed former domestic terrorists.

In an analytic philosopher’s fantasy world I just made a decisive demonstration there. In real life I wasted ten minutes I’ll never get back. Political speech is not propositional, it’s rhetorical. In order to see if Palin is showing us something about her ability to think and speak clearly, we need to break down the sentence in terms of emotion-generating words and associations.

Here’s the sequence: economy, care; terrorism, worry. Nice. I care about the economy and I’ve had seven years of instruction in worrying about terrorism, so at the emotional level Palin’s pretty much got me pegged. There are probably a lot more words there than my lizard brain would prefer, but we’ve got a solutions and three proposings, which is good. And although the second part does not logically connect with the first part, the connecting clause asserts “it is relevant to connect that association,” so if I’m nodding along I might as well not stop now. Then we’ve got invocations of truthfulness and judgment, two of the high holy words, and finally three accusatory yous, pointing a finger out at the audience as I tell my students not to do, putting us one-down to her judicial authority for one more splash of productive anxiety before the relief of remembering that the pronoun reference is Obama kicks in.

Bingo bongo, there you have it. Palin is a little raw and mechanical, but she’s showing a precocious mastery of the rhetorical game. She understands that her current agenda is not to govern but to get elected. She has identified and effectively targeted her likely voters’ triggers. She has used just enough words with just enough syllables to fog out everything but the effective buzzers. By demonizing her opponent she has emotionalized and polarized the discussion, which is a classic underdog guerrilla strategy. And she has probably done all of this without thinking it through nearly this systematically, because as John McCain would say, “my friends,” this is electoral business as usual and works real well on playgrounds too.

Palinpsest

It’s something of a cottage industry right now for snarky intellekchles like me to gloat over the incoherence and grammatical incompetence of Sarah Palin. Language Log has a nice careful version of the genre. I am amused. I’m all for it. We are, however, missing the point.

We academocrats are used to a kind of hyperformalized orality that basically speaks in essays. I mean, we actually sit around at conferences and listen patiently to each other drone through readings of our specialized research findings. We get perplexed and offended when only a small fraction of our students want to sit still and take notes attentively while we buzz through carefully constructed, fearsomely overloaded lectures about the peanut market in mid-century coastal west Africa. We are some really strange folks.

“A good sermon differs from an essay in that an essay explains a subject, but a sermon appeals to people…” M.L. King Jr. said. People whose audience is not captive have to think more carefully about the rhetorical fit between what they’re saying, how they’re saying it, and who they’re saying it to. So no, Sarah Palin is not explaining anything coherently. She is sermonizing. Her audience already know what they think (or think they do) and she is not trying to change that; she’s trying to hook into it and activate it in her favor. Her objective is not grammatical correctness or propositional coherence but instant intelligibility, using highly familiar and oft-repeated (call-and-responsable) words, phrases, inflections and gestures to appeal directly to the emotions and prejudices of her target listeners.

Who are not us. Barack does the same thing, but his target listeners’ emotional response is triggered by a different sort of articulation. The point is, in their current public performances the candidates are not trying to govern the country, they are trying to win the election. And rightly so. There’s much to learn from Palin’s self-vulgarized orality about how the Republicans think they can do that — certainly their contempt for the intelligence of their base voter could not be more clear — but her personal ability to think and speak clearly is not part of the available information.

Bailure update

There’s a nice post from Progressive Historians that draws a historical parallel with the collapse of the railway bubble in mid-19th-century England as analyzed by none other than old commie Karl. Marx points out that the speculative crisis is itself merely symptomatic of a crisis of overproduction, which it temporarily masks. Basically, as I understand it, when the market for goods and services saturates, capital has but two places to go: reinvestment on the consumption side in the form of increased wages and salaries; or increasingly leveraged speculation in increasingly shady financial instruments (described, creepily, as “products”) unbacked by production side fundamentals.

The latter works great right up until it doesn’t. Pop! The former carries the danger of inflation, and furthermore requires great discipline for individual capitalists to forego immediate speculative profit in exchange for eventual balancing and stabilization of systemic profits through renewed consumer liquidity and demand. Capitalists seem to understand only intermittently that they need to invest in the health of the consumption side (and not just by exploiting it further through the extension of consumer debt) if they want the production side to thrive. Jim Livingstone has been arguing something like this for a long time. Perhaps that lesson will be refreshed by the current unpleasantness.

Fascist corporatism, on the other hand, is characteristic of bootstrapping semi-peripheral economies and does not look to me like a likely outcome here until the rest of the world finds a way to wiggle out from under needing our economy to work so theirs can. And when that happens, fascism will be the least of our worries.