The school year began a few weeks ago. As is my charge, I am teaching several courses on American politics. This is a fun time time to be leading these seminars because the presidential race provides many rich examples of the concepts we are discussing from the literature.
The Right-wing media has created its own reality. This alternate universe is also swallowing up many young people with its comforting suckers and tentacles. The stakes are high here: if you can capture a young person, socialize them into a political worldview, then naturalize it, the chances are pretty good that you can win the generational struggle. Every culture has to reproduce itself or die. The New Right and the Tea Party GOP are no exception.
In one of my classes there is a nice guy; he seems well-intentioned and very sincere. I also do not doubt that he will turn out to be quite bright. However, last week he offered up a comment that shows how even the most well-intentioned people--and in particular, the most naive and trusting--can be sucked into the spin machine that is the Right-wing media echo chamber.
We were talking about Mitt Romney's specious lie that Obama is giving welfare away to lazy black and brown people. I located Romney's ploy in the context of the Southern Strategy, and how Romney and company have all but admitted that their race-baiting antics are a means to an end, where the goal is mobilizing angry, racially resentful white voters against the country's first black President.
Our young student looked curious and confused. He raised his hand and made the point that "both sides do it."
In keeping with my use of the Socratic method in seminar, I asked "for example? how and why? what evidence do you have for this claim?"
He replied, "Romney is a Mormon and Obama has been obsessively talking about how the White House makes it own beer, and also mentioning beer all of the time as a way of making Romney look boring and to make voters believe that his religion is 'weird' because Mormons are not allowed to drink."
He was very direct and transparent in his belief that these examples were equivalent, and that there was some underlying grand plan behind Obama's "beer initiative."
I pivoted with a question, "do you want to suggest that one's choice to drink beer or not is the equivalent of race in how it determines life outcomes, structures our society, or shapes elections and voting behavior?"
He considered my point. "No. I don't think so. Race matters more."
"Okay," I replied. "And what of the fact that the Republicans and Democrats have fundamentally different voting publics? Could Obama's Democrats use white racism or white racial resentment to mobilize white voters to support him or the party?"
Curious, and the unbelievable nature of his claims still not registering, he said, "probably not."
At peace, thinking we had a teachable moment of shared consensus and discovery, I shared how "both sides are in it to win it, and will exploit any likely avenue to win. The question becomes do you play with something as toxic and explosive as lies about race and racism in order to win an election."
The young man raised his hand again, "but both sides still do it. It isn't fair to just talk about Romney."
I am told that I have an expressive face. In that moment it must have communicated "epic fail" as I raised my brow Mr. Spock style and moved the conversation forward.
Yes, this story is funny. There is dark humor here too: this classroom exchange also suggests something about the power of the media, a person's social networks, family structure, and how political ideologies are learned behaviors that key off of brain structures where some of us are made more "liberal," while others are made more "conservative" and/or authoritarian. Our exchange was also an example of a phenomenon wherein conservatives are much more likely to twist and rewrite the facts in order to fit their standing moral priors and beliefs.
Ultimately, I have no doubt that the facts of our exchange, and how they do not fit empirical reality, were lost on this young conservative. Can the spell of family, the Right-wing media (and confirmation bias) be broken for young Republicans? Or is the spell to deep, the slumber too heavy, for them to ever come out of their waking dream, what is a living political death of responsible citizenship?