Why Do Nascar Dads Support Bush?

The Politics of Emotion

Mother Jones -- Unhinging the personal from the political, playing on identity politics, Republican strategists have offered the blue-collar voter a Faustian bargain: We'll lift your self-respect by putting down women, minorities, immigrants, even those spotted owls. We'll honor the manly fortitude you've shown in taking bad news. But (and this is implicit) don't ask us to do anything to change that bad news. Instead of Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake," we have -- and this is Bush's twist on the old Nixonian strategy -- "let them eat war."

Paired with this is an aggressive right-wing attempt to mobilize blue-collar fear, resentment and a sense of being lost -- and attach it to the fear of American vulnerability, American loss. By doing so, Bush aims to win the blue-collar man's identification with big business, empire, and himself. The resentment anyone might feel at the personnel officer who didn't have the courtesy to call him back and tell him he didn't have the job, Bush now redirects toward the target of Osama bin Laden, and when we can't find him, Saddam Hussein and when we can't find him... And these enemies are now so intimate that we see them close up on the small screen in our bedrooms and call them by their first names.

Whether strutting across a flight deck or mocking the enemy, Bush with his seemingly fearless bravado -- ironically born of class entitlement -- offers an aura of confidence. And this confidence dampens, even if temporarily, the feelings of insecurity and fear exacerbated by virtually every major domestic and foreign policy initiative of the Bush administration. Maybe it comes down to this: George W. Bush is deregulating American global capitalism with one hand while regulating the feelings it produces with the other. Or, to put it another way, he is doing nothing to change the causes of fear and everything to channel the feeling and expression of it. He speaks to a working man's lost pride and his fear of the future by offering an image of fearlessness. He poses here in his union jacket, there in his pilot's jumpsuit, taunting the Iraqis to "bring 'em on" -- all of it meant to feed something in the heart of a frightened man. In this light, even Bush's "bad boy" past is a plus. He steals a wreath off a Macy's door for his Yale fraternity and careens around drunk in Daddy's car. But in the politics of anger and fear, the Republican politics of feelings, this is a plus.

el - How much is it anger and fear and how much of it is a Southern machismo?

el - this strategy seems straight out of Eric Hoffer's True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements published in 1951.

Lemas Mitchel in her review writes of: Ten examples of things for which he gives good, mechanistic explanations / predictions. (el - I would choose some other examples.)

1. Noting that movements for the rights of this group or that group often end with finished products/ governments that are WORSE than the formerly existing order. (Africa).

2. Explanations of why it is in the best interest of governments to have citizens that are less well educated. The less well informed are citizens, the less likely they are to hold government accountable for serious mistakes because they aren't aware of what's happening. (United States)

3. If there is no cause, people will invent one. (The Islamic world. Student protestors on university campuses).

4. When people stay caught in religious movements (or any movement too long), then it will divert other energy that could have been used for other more immediately useful tasks. The net result will be backwardness. (Islamic world again. Sub-Saharan Africa and tribal conflicts.)

5. This book makes a clean separation between the Dixiecrats in the American South and the Poor White Trash as the creators of problems for blacks. While he only devoted two sentences two it, [this] could have well been expanded to explain to explain the origin of the Segregation laws (which happened AFTER the Reconstruction governments).

6. He talks about the role of class in assimilation. (The Cubans in Miami have tried to recreate Cuba in Miami because the people the managed to get out were the richest people. But no other ethnic group has gone as far in creating an ethnic enclave because these people were from the lower echelons of their own respective home countries.)

7. Religious conversion is *incidental* to whatever conqueror there is gaining control of the government. (So Christianity was not taken up in Japan because the conquerors did not control the government. But in places where the rapport was made between the government and the colonizers, the subjects were converted almost as an afterthought.)

8. Shows that there is separation between men of action, men of words, and fanatics. Some people are actually capable of going out and getting things organized and done, but may not be the greatest speaker (George Bush). Others may speak very well, but be capable of nothing else (WEB DuBois). And others just like to stay inflamed and create chaos because that's what they do best (bin Laden).

9. Revolutions must take place in certain steps. And there must be people who are *looking* for something to change. (All the talk of radicalism in New England at Harvard and the other Ivy League Institutions may not amount to anything.)

10. [Successful] governments befriend the "learned men" (intellectuals), so that they don't become mouthpieces against the governments/ catalysts for revolution. This system existed for centuries in Mainland China. It exists in some sense in the Western World (Universities. The tenure system. Intellectuals won't go *that* far in promoting the destruction of the system that ultimately keeps them employed.)