I am a new member of this community, though I've been lurking for a few years now. Throughout, I was concurrently conducting research for my sociology MA thesis on the Tea Party and the rise of the 'Hysterical Right.' My experience here so far has been very enjoyable, and many of your discussions and debates, particularly during the 2012 election, informed my own critical analyses.
I thought that to introduce myself to this great and grand community, I might post a few diaries with material culled from my thesis. I won't post the whole thing, of course! I have come across many like-minded people here whose angle and flavor of critical analysis of certain political actors, groups, issues, and topics meshes well with my own. I'm here more for relaxed, informed, well-considered, and collegial discussions than for heated debates.
We always talk of the Tea Partiers and the GOP Crazy as existing in an alternate reality, or a reality bubble, or some such term. That never really worked for me. While those conceptualizations do serve the purpose of establishing the otherness of their reality, they do nothing to qualify this reality, let alone decipher its sociological and psychosocial mechanics. Moreover, those terms imply operational systems that are removed from 'real' reality. But these people are nevertheless operating in 'real' reality. This suggests an extraordinary collective phenomenological system, a psychosocial phenomenon I call 'realishness.'
I should point out that I have come across the term 'realishness' elsewhere, but never to describe a phenomenological system. And I realize that Colbert didn't necessarily coin 'truthiness,' but he is clearly the one who popularized the term and concept.
(Realishness is a component of my conceptual model of 'sociopolitical spacetime' that suggests a particular and unique social mechanics driving the Hysterical Right. I have redacted two brief passages that relate to this overall concept to avoid confusion.)
An excerpt from my thesis in which I introduce and discuss realishness follows below the orange swirly thing for which I really don't feel like thinking up a witty name. Obviously, this is a concept that would benefit from further analysis along with an extended consideration of existing theoretical literature. As such, this concept and how I unpack it are by no means definitive; it's more of an exploration of a phenomenological concept. I will include bibliographic entries of all of the references cited at the end of the excerpt.
I look forward to your comments, but remember, even though I've been lurking forever, this is my first diary, so go easy on me.
UPDATE
Fri Aug 30, 2013 at 6:23 AM PT: First, thanks to whoever rescued this diary; it's now featured in Community Spotlight.
Second, some of the comments here—great ones, if critical, which I can certainly handle as an academic—indicate to me that although I felt this was a stand-alone piece, there is still a substantial amount of context missing. If read within that context (this was one section of the first chapter in which I estabished my terms and concepts, and demonstrated how they work in my conceptual model) many of the questions and criticisms would be addressed, at least to some extent. But obviously I won't post the chapter here. Instead, I might continue with a section or sections from later chapters in which I apply the realishness concept to actual political events with which we are undoubtedly all familiar.
Third, I am not claiming this is a new phenomenon, and I am well aware of similar groups and phenomena in the past—I researched this for four years, after all—but my focus was squarely on the Obama-era right wing. There are, however, new forces and new variables, such as a black president, the news media's turn to truthiness, and social media. Consider this more of a case study using the Hysterical Right to explain a phenomenological conceptual model of sociopolitical mechanics that isn't necessarily new, but definitely more evident and on a massive scale in the years since Obama's election, and therefore easier to analyze.
Thank you again for the warm welcome. I know this can be a tough crowd!
UPDATE 2
Fri Aug 30, 2013 at 12:51 PM PT: From rescued to Community Spotlight to the rec list—not bad for a first diary. Many thanks to all. I blew off "committing sociology" (as Stephen Harper would say) today to hang out here on DKos. A nice way to spend the Friday before a long weekend.
Among my first impressions of the Tea Party was that these people seemed a bit off. There was an inscrutable quality not so much to what they said but how they said it: a mixture of fear, anger, conviction, and resolve. But much of what they were saying was so patently false and often ridiculous that I began to question their sanity; put more fairly, I began to wonder why and how so many people had apparently become conspiracy theorists (or at least believers) so quickly and on such a massive scale. The easiest answer was that they believed the untruths and twisted information being doled out by Fox News and the other usual media suspects.
Still, belief on its own didn’t seem to account for what began more and more to seem like a widespread collective delusional state that went beyond belief into the sociopolitical realm as a self-reinforcing collective phenomenological experience of reality. No amount of debunking could convince the Tea Partiers that, for example, Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and not Kenya, that the notion of death panels was an outright lie (Drobnic Holan, 2009), that the ‘czars’ Obama appointed were simply advisors and not Russian kings, that he had in fact lowered taxes shortly after taking office, or that he [was not planning] to create an army of Brownshirts. (Of course, not all Tea Partiers believed each of these things; these are but examples.) That truth and facts in general often seemed to not register with Tea Partiers’ beliefs as a collective suggested to me that this phenomenon was manifested not so much at the order of individual and collective belief, but rather at the order of reality itself. It appeared that truth couldn’t penetrate what appeared to be a closed ontological and phenomenological system in which the Tea Party existed and operated. What, then, do we call such a system? What are its defining characteristics? How does it form?
The notion of the Tea Party existing in some alternate reality, or reality bubble, or at least in some state in which reality is fluid, began to surface in discussions in the liberal political news media that were critical of the Tea Party movement. (As Stephen Colbert said in his roast of President Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, “reality has a well-known liberal bias” [quoted in Kurtzman, 2006].) One simple and exasperated question was the catalyst for my consideration of reality, and not just truth, in my critical analysis of the Hysterical Right: on the October 8, 2010 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, in a discussion of outlandish statements made by Tea Party–backed Senate candidates Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, Matthews asked, “does reality matter at all anymore?” (NBC News, 2010). He didn’t say ‘facts’ or ‘truth’—he said ‘reality.’ But ‘alternate reality’ or ‘reality bubble’ or ‘bizarro world’ or other such terms for the phenomenon that was becoming evident to me and, clearly, to those in the political news media, never seemed satisfactory. ‘Alternate reality’ and ‘bizarro world’ suggested a reality apart from ‘objective,’ ‘real’ reality; ‘reality bubble’ alluded to an operational closure of this phenomenon, which is more or less accurate, but does not characterize the ‘reality’ that the bubble enclosed. I began contemplating the possibility of the Tea Party’s ‘reality’ as existing in a continuum of the experience of reality—or, more accurately, realities. This experience of reality needed a better term. Once again, Stephen Colbert’s astute considerations of truth and reality surfaced and provided the key.
In 2005 Colbert coined and popularized the term ‘truthiness’ to mean “truth that comes from the gut, not books” and “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true” as defined in Merriam-Webster’s article naming it the 2006 ‘word of the year.’ The American Dialect Society had earlier named it word of the year for 2005 (“Word of the Year 2006,” 2006). Colbert further elaborated on the concept, saying, “Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality” (Rabin, 2006; emphasis in original):
Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don’t mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don’t know whether it’s a new thing, but it’s certainly a current thing, in that it doesn’t seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty… I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true? (Rabin, 2006)
The possibility of this distinction surfaces when we ask what happens to the truthy once it is received, internalized, and embedded in the psyche as part of the understanding of ‘what is’ and, subsequently, ‘where I exist.’ If truthiness is epistemological in nature insofar as it is a quality of truth and knowledge, I posit the existence of an ontological analogue that qualifies reality as informed by truthiness, thereby completing the circuit. From this comes the phenomenological manifestation of existence and operation within this reality that is then reinforced by a collective that exists and acts likewise within this same circuit. This combination of ontological analogue and phenomenological manifestation I call ‘realishness.’ (As the adjective of truthiness is truthy, the adjective of realishness is realish.) The previous lack of such terms is implicit in Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) dilemma of where and when to put quotation marks around ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ (p. 14), writing:
One could say that the sociological understanding of ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ falls somewhere between that of the man in the street and that of the philosopher… He [the man] takes his ‘reality’ and his ‘knowledge’ for granted. The sociologist cannot do this, if only for his systematic awareness of the fact that men in the street take quite different ‘realities’ for granted as between one society and another. The sociologist is forced by the very logic of his discipline to ask, if nothing else, whether the difference between the two ‘realities’ may not be understood in relation to the differences between the two societies. The philosopher, on the other hand, is professionally obligated to take nothing for granted, and to obtain maximal clarity as to the ultimate status of what the man in the street believes to be ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’. Put differently, the philosopher is driven to decide where the quotation marks are in order and where they may be safely omitted, that is, to differentiate between valid and invalid assertions about the world. This the sociologist cannot possibly do. Logically, if not stylistically, he is stuck with the quotation marks. (p. 14; my emphasis)
The terms truthiness and realishness thus resolve the issue of quotation marks. Moreover, the application of these concepts [...] allows the sociologist to indeed acquire some measure of confidence and integrity in the differentiation between truth and truthiness, reality and realishness.
Luhmann (2000) writes that “we can speak of the reality of the mass media… in the sense of what appears to them, or through them to others, to be reality” (p. 4; emphasis in original). This idea can be transposed to the collective phenomenon of realishness: it is what appears to the actors, or through the actors to other actors, to be reality. This is why realishness requires a collectivity, for the experience must be shared in order to appear real. Again referring to the mass media, Luhmann asks, “how can we (as sociologists, for example) describe the reality of [the mass media’s] construction of reality?” (p. 7). We can ask the same question of the Hysterical Right’s construction of reality, though my model presents one possible way in which this happens.
My definition of realishness is a collective ontological and phenomenological state in which cognition, perception, and operation are informed and directed to a significant degree through the reception and internalization of truthy narratives.
REFERENCES
Berger, Peter L, & Luckmann, Thomas. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. London: Penguin.
Drobnic Holan, Angie. (2009, December 18). PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: ‘Death panels.’ PolitiFact.com. Retrieved from http://www.politifact.com/...
Kurtzman, Daniel. (2006). Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. About.com Political Humor. Retrieved from http://politicalhumor.about.com/...
Luhmann, Niklas. (2000). The Reality of the Mass Media. Stanford: Stanford UP.
NBC News. (2010, October 12). ‘Hardball with Chris Matthews’ for Friday, Oct. 8th, 2010. NBC News. Retrieved from http://www.nbcnews.com/...
Rabin, Nathan. (2006, January 25). Interview: Stephen Colbert. The A.V. Club. Retrieved from http://www.avclub.com/...
“Word of the Year 2006.” (2006). Merriam-Webster. Retrieved from http://www.merriam-webster.com/...