Emotional Politics

During the headier days of the ’08 campaign, when the world had been thrown an unexpected curve by the nomination of Sarah Palin and pundits scrambled to explain, interpret, or otherwise come to terms with what seemed, at best, a bizarre decision, George Lakoff wrote a piece purporting to reveal the wisdom of John McCain's choice. (http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/articles/contributors/1728)  Lakoff’s argument was, in essence, that metaphors dominate the way we think, and that Palin would appeal to one of the foundation metaphors of the nation generally and conservatives especially:  the family.  Everything else, he said - the "pro-life" stance, abstinence-only attitudes, tough love for criminals, etc. - followed naturally from this foundation metaphor, making Palin a powerful addition to the Republican ticket.  

I know Lakoff's academic research and have used it frequently in my own.  I respect him and his work a great deal and think his explanation was helpful as far as it went.  But, while it offers the appearance of an explanation that goes beneath the surface of appearances – where, all too often in American politics of the last forty years, “truth” and “falsehood” appear pitted against one another in a do-or-die battle (another metaphor George might have pointed to) – the real truth is that the “family as foundation metaphor” doesn’t go far enough toward explaining “the Palin phenomenon.”  For, were appealing to foundation metaphors sufficient to win the day, what would Palin and her rag-tag family group have over  the Obamas, with their obviously healthy marriage, two charming daughters (if you’re really into family values, why not vote to put children in the White House?), and the ancestral checkerboard that this family represented?  At best, it would be a draw.

But the truth is that Palin – whether to the Republicans’ advantage or disadvantage will be argued at least until 2012 –  invigorated feelings in both camps that went far beyond the mere appeal to family, however foundational that metaphor may be to Americans.  Palin was, indeed, a phenomenon, and one has to go deeper than metaphoric cognition to understand why.

Let’s start at the beginning, the most foundational moment of all:  the activity of life as we know it.  Neuroscientists like Karl Pribram (and a host of others) say that all organisms operate on a “search and sample” program:  they search the environment for what they need, sampling as they go.  Plants do this, looking mostly for moisture and light, animals do this, searching for food and water, and so do we.  Of course, in our case, things are a little more complex.  To some degree, all animals operate on an approach/avoidance principle, approaching things which promise them advantages, avoiding things which pose a threat.  But in the case of mammals, the approach/avoidance principle develops into a complex that gives us what we commonly call “emotions.”  This is where the plot thickens.

As mammals, we feel “emotions,” but they are really only one product of a three-part system in the brain made up of the amygdala, the basal ganglia and the hippocampus.  The hippocampus acts as a kind of “switching” device, taking the stimuli the brain receives from all the senses and matching them up with memory – the record of what we’ve encountered in our history of searching and sampling.  If the hippocampus gets enough indication from our memory stores to say that the what we’ve encountered is approachable, it issues a “go” signal:  “go” attack the buffalo; go paint the “Mona Lisa;” go declare your candidacy for President.  If the memory stores indicate enough non-approachable associations, the hippocampus issues a “stop” signal:  “stop” approaching the lion and his family; stop trying to write The Great American Novel; stop imagining that you can, as a liberal Democrat, take the South.

“Go” signals are processed by the basal ganglia and produce feelings we normally call ”motivations;” “stop” signals are processed by the amygdala and produce feelings we call “emotions.”  And over time, the experience of these feelings in humankind, coupled with the host of complex resonances with them that our expanded cortex allowed us to store, has allowed us to develop associations and networks of associations that help us to navigate our daily lives.  Antonio Damasio has shown that, even in our “rational” moments, feelings have a powerful impact on what we decide.  They inform virtually every aspect of our waking (and sleeping) moments,  and – most importantly – they constitute the power that lies beyond all our metaphors, great and small.

Lakoff, along with Mark Johnson, Zoltan Kovasces, Mark Turner and others, has ably shown that metaphors permeate, not only our language, but the very nature of our perceptions.  We not only find our language littered with them –  remarks (like “littered with”) we never intend to be taken literally, but which rely on metaphorical connections to be understood.  We are capable of locomotion, so we commonly say things (like “I don’t follow your logic”) that are based on what “locomotors” use:  paths.  We can perceive inside and outside, so we use container metaphors:  “The verdict filled him with rage.”  We rely a lot on organs of sight called “eyes,” so we say things like “I see your point.”  And so on.  Lakoff has used these insights to great effect analyzing how the conservative wing of the Republican Party has cast its message in metaphorical terms so as to engage its audience at a subliminal level.

But metaphors rely, explicitly and implicitly, on language, whether verbal, signed, body language, or what have you.  I can’t refer to a government or a nation as “the ship of state” without talking, writing, signing, or perhaps miming in some way that is genuinely linguistic.  And though from Plato through Sartre we have tended to see language as one of our rational cognitive functions, we are beginning to understand that language has its roots in feelings.  Uncovering those roots is a complex job that we have only just begun.  But capturing their essence in a metaphor is – perhaps not surprisingly – rather easy.

Imagine the hippocampus, the switching device that tells us when to go and when to stop, as a clutch in a standard transmission on an automobile.  When the hippocampus has decided we can go, it engages the basal ganglia and Action begins:  power is transmitted to the wheels, and off we go down the road to our objectives.  But when it has decided for a “stop” signal, the clutch is in and the power of the engine is transmitted to the amygdala, where it is sensed as an emotion.  Now, in a car, we know enough to take our foot off the accelerator when the clutch is in so that the engine can idle; but idling the human organism isn’t so easy.  If there’s a buffalo to be shot with a bow and arrow, and a lioness between us and the buffalo, the hippocampus will send a “stop” signal; but particularly if there’s a hungry family waiting back at camp to be fed, the hunter’s instinct is going to continue to be revved up, the hippocampus will direct that energy to the amygdalae so long as the lioness is in sight, and that energy will be felt as emotion.  Eventually, the lioness may move away, allowing us to reengage the clutch, the buffalo may move away, allowing the engine to stop racing, or we may move away, choosing to hunt another day.

Over the course of human evolution, emotions and motivations (the feelings we associate with a “go” signal) have become, as Damasio has shown, powerful and, until recently, not fully recognized influences on our decision-making processes.  As humankind developed, feelings interacted with and wove themselves into our burgeoning “rational” faculties – not the least of which was language.  Language built on the vast array of emotions and motivations, using them as the building blocks of a symbolic field – most probably with strong religious elements that helped carry the emotional weight of linguistic expression:  language may well have begun with “packed” holophrases which expressed something like “angry-flash-of-sky-fire-sent-by-the-gods.”  As it emerged, language leaned heavily on a basic feature of all perception:  comparison between elements of our environment, with special attention paid to what should be approached, what avoided.  Metaphor is simply a language-based extension of this feature of perception, and it developed along the feelings-laden lines language first laid down.  One can imagine a remark around a campfire many thousands of years ago in which a member of a tribe or family group expresses frustration at a priestess’s refusal to sanction a move to better hunting grounds:  “She is the lioness that stand between us and the buffalo.”

Which brings us back to Sara Palin.

The greater the emotional power a metaphor has, the better it works.  If I tell you my electrical service has been “discontinued,” it carries less impact than if I say it has been “cut” – even though that’s a metaphorical expression:  no physical cutting has taken place.  So too with political discourse.  When JFK talked of “the New Frontier,” he was evoking powerful associations with the American past which, in part via their then-currency in film and television, helped to convince the electorate that America was “boldly going forth” to achieve a new greatness.  When Ronald Reagan spoke of “an evil empire,” he was evoking feelings associated with everything from Puritan notions of good and evil to Lukasian Death Stars.  And Jimmy Carter, who did much to reintroduce religion into American politics, arguably missed his big chance to energize the electorate to conserve energy by failing to introduce the obvious, but very powerful, parallel that existed between the oil crises of the 70s and the Biblical story of Joseph’s interpretation of Pharoh’s dreams. (In that case, Carter failed on a number of levels, choosing an improbable metaphor for energy conservation, “war,” and stating it as a logical “equivalent,” rather than evoking the power of a real metaphor, like “a battle against wasteful consumption.”)

Metaphor is a mode of expression that takes comparison to a “magical,” sometimes almost spiritual, level, engaging, as Ernst Cassirer once put it, “the power of myth.”  But myths and metaphors are only as powerful as the associations they draw upon.  And that’s where Lakoff’s explanation of “the Palin phenomenon” falls short.  Evoking family metaphors couldn’t have saved Michael Dukakis – or Jimmy Carter, who had homespun Amy to go up against Ronald Reagan’s very non-typical Hollywood progeny.  Nor did JFK have to invoke the family metaphor to garner the votes in the midst of  America’s great Baby Boom:  he rode the crest of a much more powerful wave of post-War American triumphalism, faith in technology and youthful vigor (his word) – all powerful feelings that were already present in the contemporary American consciousness, waiting for the right combination of images and messages to be evoked with or without metaphors.  Feelings, the things that candidates evoke consciously – like the saccharine nostalgia of Reagan’s “Morning in America” motif – and those they may evoke subliminally – the “aw shucks,” appeal of George W. Bush – are what constitute the real currency of political images and messages.  And to understand Sarah Palin’s appeal, you have to look more carefully at the emotions she evoked.  

Some thought that Palin’s appeal was based on Richard Hofstadter's old (and ironically, conservative) saw about America having a streak of deeply anti-intellectual feelings, and one has to acknowledge that there’s more than a small amount of truth in that.  Americans have always liked to see themselves as the no-nonsense, New England farmer types attracted to pithy (metaphorical) remarks such as "If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, etc."   Palin, they say, appealed to Americans who want to "cut through the long-winded crap" (I can hear her saying that in a staff meeting.) and she helped give vent to the frustrations of many who would like to think that complex ideas clutter things up.  Choices are a lot simpler than policy wonks and intellectuals make them sound, the message goes;  let’s get back to basics.  Ronald Reagan evoked those feelings throughout his presidency, and it most certainly helped to George W. Bush to two election victories:  how else to account for an electorate choosing to ignore – until far too late – the obvious intellectual inadequacies of the Bush style?

But Palin's appeal drew on more powerful emotions than mere skepticism about intellectuals and ideas.  It evoked a set of feelings that went far beyond anti-intellectualism, taking that set of attitudes to a new high – or low, as the case may be.   I admit that I was brought up short by McCain’s choice when I first saw how Palin’s naive housewife persona communicated awe and even awkwardness in the face of the role she’d been chosen to play – the same persona that allowed her and her staff to fall victim to the “call from Sarkozy” scam of two Canadian DJs later in the campaign.  But things started to make sense when, in her acceptance speech in the Twin Cities, Palin made her now-famous references to herself as a "hockey mom" and a "pit bull.”  Having lived abroad for two decades, it took me a moment to realize that "hockey moms" were the opposite of "soccer moms:”  they drive pickups, not Volvos, they eat caribou, not tofu, they get their news from the television, not the print media, and so on.  Moreover, and more importantly, they have chosen their moniker as a kind of "in your face" (and, yes, virulently anti-intellectual) response to the snobby, sophisticated, "liberals" they despise.

Strong word, "despise."  But the right one if you listen to the underlying tone of Palin's speech.  Contempt for intellectuals and the Left virtually dripped from her lips when she compared herself and other hockey moms to pit bulls. (Remember pit bulls:  the trophy pet of the urban gang, the neo-nazi and all the rest?)   And the same tone infused her remarks about the media and serving "the American people.”  Indeed, that tone was the hallmark – and I would argue the clarion call – of most of her speech.  Say what you will about foundation metaphors, this was anything but a "family" mom speaking – unless you redefine motherhood as having some deep connection with Dirty Harry.  This was not June Lockhart, Donna Reed, or any of the other mothers we so readily – and often naively – associate with the myth of “the American family.”  This was a snarling attack dog, full of spittle and spite, ready to spring, barely held back by the leash of appearing on national television.  And that’s what the excitement was all about - at least among what the Republicans then saw as the “core” constituency McCain couldn’t guarantee he could deliver.  That's what made the choice of Palin over, say, Huckabee, work.

There is a kind of foundation metaphor here, and a decidedly American one, but it's not family.  It's the Wild West, Dodge City. (Camille Paglia called Palin a kind of Annie Oakley.)  It's "go in and clean up the town" John Waynism.  And worse.  It's Ronald Reagan on crystal, it's Charlton Heston's "cold, dead hands" come back to life gripping an assault rifle.  And, of course, all in the name of things like "American values".

There's nothing new about this:  Americans have always wanted to be good guys who demonstrate to the world how things really should be. That, in fact, is their ultimate foundation metaphor:  the Puritans fleeing decadent Europe (i.e. England, Spain, the Papacy, etc. – everything Donald Rumsfeld evoked when he referred to “Old Europe”) to start over again.  But the real calculus which explains the Palin "phenomenon" is the not the metaphor, but the "foundation emotions" upon which her spin on that metaphor is built.  And clearly, those emotions are 1) resentment, and 2) resentment's pit bull cousin, revenge.

In every one of Palin's pronouncements on "cleaning up Washington" or "bringing change to politics" the foundation emotion was resentment, and in this she followed a long tradition of the disenfranchised on both sides of the political spectrum that goes back through Reagan and George Wallace at least to Andrew Jackson. (In '68, a working class family in my neighborhood had RFK posters and bumper stickers prominently displayed until Bobby was shot. Within two days, they had been replaced with twice as many "Wallace for President" signs.)  People who feel disenfranchised become resentful, and anyone who wants to galvanize that resentment can earn a lot of political capital.  Look at the dominance of the Democratic Party in the South from 1865 to 1968.

What was – and is, where it continues to resonate – troubling about the Palin "phenomenon" was the degree to which it openly, and even gleefully, pits resentment against measured judgment, holding out the possibility of revenge as the reward for fighting liberals.  Her appeal has been a slightly more polite form of the Charles Bronson film formula:  whip up the "I've had it up to here" feelings to a fever pitch, and let them explode into an electoral land (or mud) slide.  "Join me and we'll tar and feather the varmints and run them out of town on a rail,"  is the message.  And abandonment of anything resembling reasoned discussion is its hallmark.

But perhaps the best way to see how much the Palin phenomenon relied on raw, and very resentful, emotions is to see how the winning side did not.  No one can say that Barack Obama’s campaign avoided emotional appeal.  Everything about Obama, from his winning smile, to his “superstar” status to the “Yes We Can” chant beamed with the feelings felt by those who responded.  But notice the word “beamed:”  how different from any word one would chose to characterize the feelings evoked by the Palin phenomenon.  Some research into emotion tries (weakly, I think) to characterize emotions as “positive” and “negative.”  While that distinction completely ignores how anger can be a very positive emotion and love an entrapping one, we need to see that, in and of themselves, emotions that provide some sort of “uplift” do not necessarily guarantee anything else:  think again of the saccharine, and ultimately very shallow appeal of the “Morning in America” campaign; think too about how much the “New Frontier” attitude contributed to things like growing American involvement in Vietnam.  Uplift alone is not enough, and it was perhaps here that the distinctions between the Obama and the Palin phenomena were most glaring

In the place of “run the varmints out,” the feelings of the Obama campaign built on notions of inclusion, cooperation, and mutual respect.  Moreover, those feelings were perceived, rightly in my estimation, as deeply felt by the candidate.  Nothing could have been more illustrative of the willingness of the candidate to see things from the other side’s point of view than the briefly infamous episode in San Francisco where Obama was heard to say that many right-to-lifers and gun rights supporters held onto their beliefs so tenaciously because so much else had been taken away from them.  While right wing pundits tried to make the remark out to be an insult to the intelligence of the anti-abortion and gun lobbies, it was difficult for any but the most resentful – or the most calculating – to ignore the fact that the remark was made as an expression of feelings of concern:  concern about political discourse in America, concern about achieving real dialogue among political viewpoints, and concern about those who felt themselves and their values under attack.  In fact, time and again candidate Obama demonstrated his ability and his willingness to exhibit feelings of generosity, good will and empathy for all segments of the American population, and there is no doubt that the evocation of those feelings helped him to a remarkably ecumenical victory in what had been, up until then, a notoriously parochial electorate.  

The bottom line?  It’s not the metaphors you use (though they can be very important) or whether or not you evoke emotions (everyone does – or, if they don’t, they’re dead Dukakis in a tank).  After all is said and done, it’s the degree to which you evoke emotions shared by the electorate that explains the “phenomenon phenomena.”  However, one only has to look at the demagogues of any century to know that diabolical ends can be served by the evoking of diabolical emotions – whether evoked openly or under the guise of slogans like “run the varmints out.”  To guarantee a more substantive and enlightened approach to the problems which confront us in today’s world, the quality of the emotions one evokes is pivotal.  Of course, the need for wise policy, effective management and imagination cannot be ignored.  Though the Bush administration managed to evoke and sustain emotions of fear and determination that “we don’t get fooled again,” its failure to chose the right venue for confronting terrorism (Afghanistan), to handle non-political problems effectively (Katrina) and to find new ways of dealing with old problems (choose your problem, though financial regulation comes immediately to mind) guaranteed it would lose the support of even those who shared the feelings it played upon. 

But the quality of the feelings an administration evokes is central to its vision for America.  Resentment, fear, hunger for retribution, frustration at the complexities of modern life:  these are among the deeper emotions upon which the conservative political core of the Republican Party has played since the beginning of the so-called Reagan Revolution (which one might argue really began with Spiro Agnew.  They are also the core elements in the more hysterical embodiments of those feelings which, normally consigned to the fringe of any political discourse, have become – troublingly – part of the “mainstream” in America.  I refer here to the media masters of resentful politics:  the Pat Buchanans, the Jerry Falwells, and, the “big daddy” of them all, Rush Limbaugh.  And it does not take a master of political rhetoric to see that, beneath the sometimes thin surface of their “political” punditry, there lies a deep antagonism of precisely the kind Sarah Palin displayed with her hockey mom/pitbull characterization.  The distance between the vengeful view of political retribution – say, towards the “liberal media elite” – implied in the emotions they evoke and the ghastly comments of anti-abortionists who saw the murder of George Tiller as God’s retribution can be measured in micrometers.

It was for precisely that reason that another commentary by George Lakoff – „Progressives Lack a Limbaugh-Like Voice“ (http://www.truthout.org/042609Y) – left me saddened, a bit worried, and convinced I should write this article.  The gist of Lakoff’s piece was that while the forces of the conservative right have a Rush Limbaugh who can rally the troops, progressives do not:  Democrats need to „communicate“ more.  While the sentiment is sound, the association is weak, even potentially dangerous.  To evoke – at length – one of the most regressive voices in American democracy today as an argument for progressives doing a better job of communicating is to slip much too closely to the suggestion that we need a Limbaugh.  But nothing could be further from the truth.

Limbaugh and his ilk are entitled to their political views:  I reside in a country which prohibits the publication of Mein Kampf, and I think that is a serious violation of democratic values.  But in a democratic society, opposition to views one disagrees with must take place in an atmosphere of dialogue – what Obama calls, in his second book, “ a conversation . . . in which all citizens are required to engage” if the perils of concentration of power are to be avoided.  That conversation must be judicious, reflective, open and inclusive, and while it will inevitably – and necessarily – be full of feeling at times, the true aims of those who speak will be identifiable in the feelings they evoke as they do.  Progressive politics in America does not need a Rush Limbaugh – or anyone like him – to rally its forces because, by definition, that kind of rallying point deals in raw emotions, shorthand analysis and simplistic solutions.

Lakoff may complain that he is talking about the absence of a Martin Luther King or a Robert Kennedy, who could galvanize the attention of an enlightened electorate and excite them about the work that lay at hand.  But I would argue that, as noble as the sentiments King and Kennedy evoked were, they were more suited to another time.  Their lofty remarks were motivated by a sense of urgency that gripped America in the Sixties; they were part of a wake-up call that had to be sounded if American democracy was not to founder on the shoals of social injustice.  Today, extreme polarization is the real threat we face; it has, indeed, pushed us to a social and political cleavage almost unheard of since the Civil War.  And in the face of this new, very real threat, we don’t need grand rhetorical sweeps, or cannily crafted metaphors.  We need gravitas.

If I were to look for a figure who, in my lifetime, could command respect, be inclusive, be judicious and avoid raising passions beyond what was appropriate to today’s political dialogue, it would be Barbara Jordan – my preference for the first woman president long before Hillary Clinton was even on the national scene.  Had she lived to realize her potential, the profound seriousness she evoked would have made Barbara Jordan a good leader; like Barack Obama, she would have appreciated the importance, not of launching an agenda of liberal-progressive reform to make up for the last eight years of “darkness,” but of restarting the democratic conversation.

Those of us who would like to see the world move beyond the dictates of monopoly capitalism, knee-jerk militarism and rampant social injustice run the risk of failing to see that none of this can or will come about without consensus.  And consensus has been threatened, not for the last eight years but for the last thirty-five or more, by a precipitous decline in true political dialogue – a decline that has come about in part because rhetoric on both sides has evoked feelings far too intense to allow real dialogue to take place.  Those of us who consider ourselves progressive – I am fairly sure both Lakoff and I count ourselves among their number – may protest that the intensity of our feelings have been justified; but that changes nothing.  Democracy cannot function unless the conversation takes place; evoking feelings of, on the one hand, frustration and resentment or, on the other, righteous indignation, guarantees nothing but a shouting match.

I would argue that, to our great good fortune (and, for many of us, great surprise), we have a figure who can serve progressive politics far better than Rush Limbaugh serves the conservative right.  What’s more, he occupies the White House.

While there are ample opportunities for progressives to complain about Barack Obama’s positions on such things as gay marriage, release of Guantanamo-related memos, even his choice of  a repressive country as a venue for his overture to the Muslim world, on balance Obama’s election seems to me to have been a surprising but clear sign that America is not beyond the pale – a prognosis many of us have been unable to make confidently for a long, long time.  The reason for my (always very guarded) optimism is that the American electorate responded – enthusiastically – to a political message based on the feelings I mentioned earlier:  generosity, good will and empathy. 

But those feelings were embedded within a larger emotional framework that included judiciousness, decisiveness, the need for hard work, the value of “straight talk” and a host of others.  The emergence of that framework, if it is matched by wise policy choices, good management and a healthy dose of imagination – all of which seem to have been present in the early days of a fledgling administration – is a very good sign, indeed, because those feelings are precisely what is needed if the democratic conversation is to begin again.  And, whatever our personal appetites for political gains in areas progressives hold close to their hearts – social justice, economic opportunity, evenhandedness in foreign relations – we must keep foremost in our minds that none of those gains can take place, let alone be truly integrated into our lives, without the restoration of  real, “deliberative democracy” in America.  We have a remarkable opportunity at hand, one which will allow us to contribute to the health of the democratic process and to launch enlightened policy initiatives.  But at an even deeper level, we have the opportunity to reshape the social and cultural landscape, to move from resentment to respect, from revenge to renewal and reconciliation.  Such opportunities come rarely in the lifetime of a nation.  And they are to be seized, not squandered.

But how?

Let’s return for a moment to the notion that, beneath the surface of much right-wing „communication,“ there are emotions like resentment that the Limbaughs and the Palins evoke to whip their listeners into a frenzy.  The „hook“ those communicators often use is as old as the Boston Tea Party, and as American:  discontent with official interference in the lives of everyday citizens – thus the absurd spectacle of last spring’s „tea Parties.“  But myth can work both ways. 

One of the things left on the cutting room floor as the left has tried to reconstruct the „triumphalist“ view of America and its history is that even myths which don’t stand up to a close analysis (America as „the land of the free,“ for instance) can still retain the power to motivate us – even to allow us to aspire to greater things.  What is necessary is that progressives begin to recognize, and then build political discourse upon, some of the myths that have motivated Americans to the not inconsiderable achievements they have made in the last two hundred years or so.

Living abroad as I have for two decades, I have had ample opportunity to see the ways in which America falls short of of other nations in such things as commitment to social welfare, ability to work towards domestic political compromise, and wisdom in international affairs.  But, standing between the cultures of Europe and America as I do, I have also seen patterns of behavior that Americans bring involuntarily to their daily lives which from which Europeans – and others – could benefit. advantageously integrate into their daily lives.  Some of these patterns represent the best America has to offer, and they offer a basis upon which the message of political progressives could be built.

To take an almost mundane example:  the American sense of „fair play.“  The Left has all but demonized the notion that Americans believe in fair play, and not without justification, given such things as the role of racism and predatory opportunism in America‘s history.  But non-Americans frequently remark, sometimes almost in a tone of wonder, about the way in which fairness and helpfulness have characterized their personal interactions with individual Americans.  Many years ago I met a Swiss and a Spanish student who, three hours into their first visit to the US, had a flat tire on a crowded freeway.  Gripped by panic about what to do, they were stunned to see a family in a station wagon pull up behind them, ask them if they needed help, and upon finding they were foreigners, take them under their wing for as long as it took to get them back on their way.  True, the two Europeans were equally shocked that the members of the family never introduced themselves, nor was there any expectation that this encounter would lead to an exchange of addresses, thank-you notes, etc. – an example of what non-Americans commonly take to be Americans‘ „shallow“ social relationships.  But what stayed with the students was how natural and unremarkable the offer of help seemed to be for the Americans.  „In my country,“ the Swiss student said, „I could have waited for hours and no one would have stopped.“  The Spaniard nodded his head in agreement.

A similar story was told to me by a French woman who had lived in the US for ten years.   While waiting for validation of her professional credentials as a physical therapist, she worked some months in a fabric store.  „I knew lots about sewing,“ she said, „but nothing about ringing up a sale, making change – all those things you just take for granted in your own country.  But the women working with me were so helpful!  They explained the difference between nickels, dimes and quarters, laughed that the sizes of the coins didn’t necessarily mean anything:  by the end of the morning it was like we were all sisters in a big family.“

„And you know what?“ she went on, „I had the feeling that they really enjoyed having a newcomer to help out.  It seemed to bring them together.  In France, a foreigner is nothing but a problem.“

This last remark brings up another pattern of behavior that is all to easily dismissed by the Left as another „fiction“:  the notion that America is a „melting pot“ in which anyone of any nationality is welcome.  Such things as opposition to bilingual education, immigration quotas and overt racism are said to demonstrate that America is only very reluctantly, and less and less, a nation of immigrants.  But those who make that criticism have rarely been immigrants themselves.  As someone who has twice immigrated into a foreign country (first France, then the Czech Republic), I can say without any hesitation that, relative to the attitudes towards foreigners that exist in many, if not most, parts of the world, Americans can be almost shockingly welcoming.  Ironically, the proof of this lies in the fact that so many immigrants to the US ultimately „mainstream,“ leaving their cultural and linguistic heritage behind and joining the American middle class.  In other countries, this can be well neigh impossible. (One study found that Czechs overwhelmingly believe someone born elsewhere can never become Czech.) 

To be sure, „mainstreaming“ has its price, both for those who either gradually or quickly „launder“ themselves, and for the society as a whole, which could benefit greatly from the infusion of „foreignness“ – especially where linguistic facility is concerned.  But in my trips back home over two decades, I have been struck by the prevalence of strong ethnic enclaves in suburban neighborhoods that, during my youth, were „All-American“ and lily-white.  These enclaves will fade, as did the ethnic neighborhoods that dominated cities on the East Coast a half-century ago.  But others will take their place – and make contributions to the culture that occur with far more difficulty, if at all, in other countries.

And then there is that almost hackneyed old American stand-by, „team spirit.“  When I first arrived in France as chair of a university department that was badly fragmented, I set out to reestablish some sense of coherence and collegiality.  Being American, I leaned heavily on trying to create „team spirit“ among faculty and staff alike, even using the word „team“ from time to time in memos and meetings.  The response those efforts elicited made it clear I was „a stranger in a strange land.“  At best, the notion of building a team evoked bemused smiles; more often, it produced incomprehension.  Europeans – the French especially – have a far stronger sense of community (gesellschaft) than Americans, thus their ability to understand the concept of social welfare as something with benefits for all.  But the idea that they would form an ad hoc collective comes far less naturally to them.  They may be quite willing to act cooperatively towards some mutually beneficial end.  Collectives which exist – like unions and political parties – are facets of the larger collective, and membership in them often goes back generations.  But for Europeans, the idea of generating team spirit where it doesn’t already exist – in something as mundane as, say, a sub-group in the workplace – can seem artifical and contrived.

Americans, on the other hand, can be enthusiastic team players.  Perhaps because their sense of social community is so relatively impoverished when compared with cultures that have been around five hundred years or more, Americans are often eager to join team efforts of all kinds.  And this affords them a potentially powerful tool in taking on ad hoc problems.  Not many cultures enjoy this ability to identify a problem, organize a group to deal with it and „get it done.“

Which is still another feature of American behavior that works greatly to the benefit of individual Americans and the country as a whole.  As one French colleague who had spent time in the US put it, „You can say one thing for Americans:  they know how to convince themselves to get the job done.“   While the power of positive thinking can be a bromide that dilutes important criticisms of all kinds (how many people still think that, left alone, „American ingenuity“ can solve any problem), there is no doubt that Obama and his team chose a slogan – „Yes we can“ – that resonated with the electorate almost as powerfully as Kennedy’s „New Frontier.“  America’s „can do“ attitude is legendary, and all too often it has been squandered on mindless crusades (Vietnam, for instance).  Mustered in the service of enlightened policies, it can energize forces that might otherwise lay dormant.

All of these cultural characteristics are real, and each has mythological stature in the minds and hearts of Americans – along with others, like the American sense of „mission,“ the American love of a challenge, and the American conviction that what we do as a country has moral implications.  And each is capable of being abused:  missionary zeal has contributed to countless foreign policy errors in the last half century, love of challenge has helped perpetuate them, and self-righteous morality has helped to stifle criticism of them.  But each has the power to motivate toward positive ends:  „fair play“ with respect to such things as universal health care; sentiments underlying the immigrant experience with respect to multi-culturalism; „team spirit“ with respect to generating a larger, more inclusive sense of social justice and responsibility; and the „can do „ attitude with respect to meeting the formidable challenges that these and so many other issues represent.

The real lesson to be learned from the Limbaugh-Palin-Fox Network phenomenon is that emotions play a powerful role in American political life.  This is not news.  While we may hope that reason guides our political choices, few political matters would even be considered worth discussing if we didn’t feel strongly about them.  What Limbaugh and his bunch have done is to build their appeal on feelings which in some cases are genuine concerns in a democratic society (special treatment for special groups, government interference in matters of personal conscience, and rampant bureaucracy), but which in many others are variations on resentment of all kinds (racism, moral self-righteousness, blindly viral patriotism).  Many of the feelings evoked by these „commentators“ (they are really demagogues) are destructive, and the real challenge to politicical progressives is to evoke feelings which motivate people towards constructive, truly democratic behavior when they are felt. (Candidate Obama hit the nail squarely on the head when, in his almost infamous recorded remarks in San Francisco, he diagnosed much right wing discontent as fueled by feelings of threat and loss.)

No small challenge.  But not one without some guideposts.  What, in casual conversation, we generally call „emotions“ can, as we’ve said, be divided into two groups:  emotions, based on „stop“ signals, and motivations, based on „go“ signals.  If we look carefully at the feelings (the umbrella-word that covers both groups) evoked by the Limbaugh-Palin crowd, they are almost always of the former group:  they root themselves in aversion (to other races, other religions, political groups, etc.; to change) and, pushed to the extreme, fear.  Progressives have a powerful means of gauging the validity of the feelings they evoke if they assess the extent to which these feelings are based on „go“ signals.  Feelings which, at their root, are based on „go“ signals evoke „approach“ frames of mind – attitudes which, by definition, encourage as to reach out, to explore, to learn and to understand.

Nearly half a century ago, Abraham Maslow concluded, on the basis of years of studying healthy, rather than pathological, features of personality, that human nature was neither „good“ nor „evil,“ but that, given the right circumstances (sufficient nurishment, personal security and interpersonal support), it tended towards growth.  This is what the progressive side of emotional politics must be about:  evoking  willingness to reach out to world around us and engage it as fully as we possibly can.  And for those who might object that this a recipe for Pollyannesque (or in other terms, bleeding-heart liberal) naivete, let’s remember that challenges must be approached every bit as much as opportunities.  An appeal built on the notion of evoking constructive, progressive motivations is not a summons to waltz naively through Elysian fields of utopian brotherhood.  Motivation – constructive, progressive, and deeply-felt „go“ feelings – underlay the appeals of all the great progressive activists of our era, from Ghandi and King to Mandela and Havel.  And we admire those who have made the ultimate sacrifice – the Jean Jaures and Ken Sarawiwas of history and of our own time – for their willingness to approach a challenge, rather than shy away from it.  The real test of progressive politics today is not whether it can „frame“ its message as well as some on the right have done, but whether or not it can evoke feelings from across the political spectrum which encourage approach, engagement and dialogue, all of which are fundamental to the democratic process.  

Dan Shanahan

Charles University

Prague