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nice post, shakran....
more generally, it seems like questions are getting blurred a bit here.
1. within the invert universe of conservativeland, the tactic of projection--directly in particular at the hallucination conservatives call "the left" or a variant thereof---has been very prominent and heavily used. there is a long list of features--generall, conservativeland posits "the left" as the mirror image of itself...in conservativeland, "the left" is a unified bloc that operates in a top-down manner (in the fabrication and relay of official positions)....it uses "the left" as a counterpoint against which it can position its fairly extremist rightwing claims as representative of some variant or other of "mainstream" opinion (this particular device worked better while the right was still in opposition)...in conservativeland, the left is quite extreme (without the slightest bit of evidence to support the use of this adjective) and in that functions as an important device to conceal the right's own shifts away from anything like centrist positions into some bizarre-o twilight zone between the militan movement, the john birch society and far right protestant evangelical church organizations. so "the left" in conservativeland serves multiple functions:
1. it enables a clear boundary line to be drawn between "us" and "them"--which is self-evidently a transposable mode of defintion, as the surrealist theater that is the "war on terror" demonstrates
2. the treatment of "the left" in conservativeland is an exercise in the construction of signifiers that can be used for orwellian moments of "group hate"---so it functions as a mode for directed affect at those groups that fall outside the conservativeland boundary maintenance operations of the moment. in this regard, the construction of "the left" can be seen as a kind of collective mental calesthenics for the real work of sustained manpulation of racism that is at the core of the bushleague "war on terror" and its various marketing subsidiaries.
3. "the left" as conservativeland has constructed it funtions to normalize shifts within the conservative movement both ideologically and organizationally by projecting those same features onto its hallucinated opposite.
4. in conservativeland, "the left" as Other is also always a Persecuting Other, a satanic adversary, a Threat, The Threat...same logic/dynamic you now see in full repugnant flower at the center of the world according to george w. bush
you can see the results of this structure of mapping political co-ordinates onto the direction of affect onto a paranoiac fear of a (phantom) persecuting Other on this board, particularly in the flights into wish-fulfillment of some of the conservative set when they get onto the things they blame on political dissent in america. the logic of this ideological construction explains the recurrent equation of dissent with treason that seems to operate as an important therapeutic story for those few remaining supporters of this administration in explaining to themselves fiasco after fiasco.
another way of seeing this projection game: it has been an element of the far right's attempt to co-opt and redirect petit bourgeois anxiety generated by the reorganization of capitalism.
this redirection is only really possible in informational contexts that treat capitalism itself as an unqualified good--from this it follows that breakdowns and problems caused by restructuring of capitalism have to be explained on other grounds. whence the need for Persecuting Others.
this is yet another register of the ideology of conservativeland that very closely resembles its radical nationalist ancestors.
poujadisme anyone?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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