Demonization Rhetoric from the Right (Book Notes: America Right Or Wrong)

Sometimes the rhetoric heard from American conservatives almost sounds more like a medical report than a political analysis: America suffers from "decay" and is "sick" because of the "corruption" and "infection" of liberal, subversive elements. Such demonizing rhetoric is harmful to the political process.

In America Right Or Wrong: An Anatomy Of American Nationalism, Anatol Lieven writes about how America’s right uses words like traitors, moral decay, corrupt, and sick to describe their opponents:

The language of these figures is strongly reminiscent of what George Mosse has called the “rhetoric of anxiety” among nationalists before 1914, focused both on external threats to the nation and on moral, sexual and political subversion from within. Its markedly hysterical tone also is similar to that rhetoric. And these attitudes are not just a matter of a few media squibs. In its anti-intellectualism, anti-elitism, antisecularism and antimodernism, this rhetoric strikes very deep chords among that large minority of Americans who feel deeply alienated from the world in its present shape.

As Mosse’s work recalls, closely linked to this traditional nationalist rhetoric of anxiety is one virtually universal aspect of right-wing nationalist language throughout history: its obsession with threats to national virility and with the supposed effeminate weakness of critics at home and abroad: “Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus,” in Robert Kagan’s famous phrase. More crudely, Europeans are “Euroweenies.” Lee Harris, another right-wing nationalist author, sees “Spartan ruthlessness” as the “origin of civilization.” Robert Kaplan calls for Americans to recover the “pagan virtues” in warfighting.

The moral, political, and sexual anxiety was not merely a symptom of European civilization prior to 1914 — it was also an important characteristic of the rhetoric of right-wing nationalists in Germany after World War I. These nationalists fed upon Germans’ sense of loss form the war, powerlessness in the face of crime, directionlessness in the context of a secularized society, and despair over economic conditions.

Fear is a driving factor behind such rhetoric: fear of a loss of power, of a loss of social status and prestige, of a loss of sexual virility and masculinity, of being overwhelmed by “floods” of foreigners or women, and of a decline in national standing. The attacks on others are compelled by a need to assert oneself and identify those who are responsible for so many losses. Medical terminology is employed to create a veneer of scientific rationality to the fears — and to justify harsh measures that need to be taken against the enemy.

You don’t have dialogues with vermin or compromise with diseases. You eliminate them ruthlessly and remorselessly.

 

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