I've been thinking lately about what I want to call the "rhetoric of contempt" coming out of the Republican party and the Romney campaign. It is a racialized and classed phenomenon.
It occurred to me on the day that the Supreme Court handed down the decision upholding the individual mandate for the Affordable Health Care Act and Romney gave a press conference in which he positioned himself (with the capital in the background) behind a podium with a sign saying: "Repeal and Replace Obamacare." That was the same day, you'll remember, that the House voted to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for not turning over records related to a gun-running investigation. It struck me that the motivation behind the decision to label the act with Obama's name, and then to actively and contemptuously deride the act, derives from the effort to indirectly and metonymically heap racialized contempt on Obama, with the idea that a certain segment of the population will not only welcome such derision but will warm to Romney as a result.
I also recall reading, the other day, about a wealthy donor on her way to a Romney fundraiser who suggested that "the common person" who supports Obama (college kids, nail ladies, baby sitters) "just don't understand what's going on." This benighted woman then went on to say, "I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.” "Nail ladies" - read Vietnamese; "baby sitters" - read Latina or black.
Now Romney is using the unhappiness evinced by members of the NAACP at his announcement that he will get rid of "Obamacare," to heap contempt on blacks more broadly, suggesting that if they want more "free stuff" from the government, they should vote for Obama.
Will it work, this rhetoric of contempt? Goodness knows coded racial appeals have been working for politicians a long time (not just Republican, although they tend to do it more often). We only have to look at the Republican party's "Southern Strategy" and Pete Wilson's political advertisements on undocumented immigration. But it seems to me that the contempt being directed at Obama and Holder has taken the racial appeal to a whole new level. Thoughts?
Thank you for this, Paula. "Rhetoric of contempt" is an exact description--and your interpretation of "Obamacare" as an attempt to stigmatize the health care act with a name that is marked as both black and (in spite of everything) foreign hits the nail on the head. I think, after reading your post, that the prominence of this rhetoric explains for me why I hardly ever read U.S. political news without becoming furious: I get doubly angry, both at the contempt itself, that complacent disdain for everyone who isn't rich, white, and powerful, and at the way the media typically reports the contemptuous statements as though they represented a reasonable "point of view" among others. Which I suppose is the point of contempt anyway--unlike a rhetoric of persuation, a rhetoric of contempt is designed to be unanswerable, to make its targets look weak if they try to argue back. It appeals to the love for power and the powerful, and relies on its ability to leave its opponents dumbfounded--like me, outraged but stunned, unable to think of an answer that would tell.
Does racialized, classed contempt have a secret ally in the individualism of "American Dream" thinking? According to the dream, in America every person has the same chance to make their own way, sink or swim. The power of the rhetoric of contempt is to mobilize a racialized resentment against "them" in opposition to anything that might involve sharing, compromise, toleration, communal solidarity. It turns a question of sharing among "us" (say, sharing the cost of health care) into a question of giving what's "mine" to "them." (Hands off my health insurance! Or even: Hands off my Medicare!) (This is a line of thinking I learned a while ago from Hochschild's Facing Up to the American Dream. I wonder what you think of it--and whether it can be applied now.)
The problem with the ideology of individualism and the triumph of meritocracy in America, of course, is that while they are nice myths -- they are just that, nice myths. As I wrote in a recently published essay, "Educating for a Diverse Society," the part of the American Dream that goes unremarked on by those who have succeeded in attaining it, is that for the largest part of our country's history, the American Dream was available only to a very select group of people—namely white men who owned, or were able to beg, borrow, or steal, property.
However much Americans mythologize ourselves, we've never had a true meritocracy. Rather, we've had a society where social, economic and political rights and privileges have been largely distributed according to a person’s racial designation, class status and gender identity. Slavery, immigration restrictions, racially-restrictive housing covenants, bars to citizenship of non-white people, the (past and continuing!) disenfranchisement of women and non-whites, and the internment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II—all of these government-sponsored and/or endorsed practices effectively institutionalized and enforced a situation of propertied white male advantage for the largest part of the history of the country. It was not until the passage of the 14th amendment in 1868 that blacks were granted due process and equal protection, and not until the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 that these rights were finally enforced. Women were excluded from voting until 1920, schools were legally segregated by race until 1954, and people of Asian ancestry were barred from naturalization until the mid-20th century. I'm not revealing history here that most of us don't already know. Rather, I'm just noting that thinking in individualist terms allows Americans to ignore the fact that for much of U.S. history, access to the American Dream has been decidedly group-based. I am also agreeing with you that the ideology of individualism allows us to ignore the fact that, as a country, we continue to think, act, and seek to distribute resources in group-based ways that often have disparate effects on different racial groups.
And as long as we delude ourselves about the extent to which we do think, act, and feel in group-based terms, the easier it is to blame all those "individuals" out there for their "individual" failure to achieve the American dream -- or even just to get a job and afford basic health care.
Thank you for this really thought-provoking post, Paula. I agree with Andrew's comment that contempt has become a dominant affect in contemporary American politics. But insofar as contempt is expressed by many politicians, towards many individuals and groups, in many situations, I'm left reflecting the role of race. What your post makes me realize is that when I hear a politician expressing contempt for Obama (or Holder, or anyone else in politics who's part of a minority group), that attitude tends to register not as racist, but as just one more instance of a politician treating someone else as less than their equal. To be clear, I'm not saying that this response of mine is right--your post has made me feel that there's a subtle discourse of race here that I haven't been picking up ("Obamacare" being a great example). Still, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about racialized vs. non-racialized contempt--their differences, but also whether in the past few years racialized contempt has been appropriated and used in situations where contempt is being directed at groups that aren't necessarily minorities (e.g., teachers, public sector workers).