The Right Never Takes A Vacation From Propaganda

by tristero

One of the less noticed rhetorical strategies of the right is what could be termed micro-propaganda. What I’m referring to are offhand or nearly offhand remarks with a rightwing bias, even entire articles that are so small or trivial that anyone who would take the trouble to complain about them would be dismissed as harping on the meaningless. Cumulatively, however, these little biases add up, and create a nearly unconscious, but utterly ubiquitous, atmosphere of bias against anyone or any cause to the left of Lieberman.

Now the proximate subject of this post – an unimportant article in the Times Book Review – may elicit comments along the lines, “How could you waste even a single pixel and my precious time on this” but the topic – the ubiquity and insidiousness of rightwing propaganda – is a crucial one.

Richard Brookhiser,the senior editor of National Review, was provide with an entire page of the New York Times Book Review to discourse upon, I kid you not, the marginal jottings of John Adams in his books. Could anything be more trivial or less ripe for rightwing Wurlitizing? Ahh, but that’s why they pay Brookhiser the big bucks.

In keeping with the scholarly conceit of pseudo-academics like Gingrich and others, Brookhiser types up his overall impression of Adams’s notes with an atavistic partisan spin: “What he [Adams] most dislikes is breezy confidence; the pieties of both left and right set him off.” [Emphasis added.] This positions Adams as a paragon of dispassionate disinterest, calmly far above the fray. But this is total poppycock. First of all, the “dispassionate observer” bears no relation to the actual Adams, which can easily be verified by reading what Franklin thought of Adams’ awful diplomacy in France during the war, or by what happened later to Franklin’s nephew Benjamin Bache during Adams’ presidency. More importantly, the modern notions of “right” and “left” really don’t apply at all to Adams’ politics.* It’s an artificial conceit that distorts Adams’ beliefs beyond recognition and a sign that stealth rightwing propagandizing is Brookhiser’s real intent.

Brookhiser also sets up with his phrase the expectation that we will receive a balanced, even-numbered set of examples of Adams skewering equally “the pieties of the right and the left.” In fact, we encounter only three main examples (Adams’s marginalia in his own books don’t count, as he is above the fray, remember?). Two are clearly from people Brookhiser considers left – Rousseau and the “English feminist” Mary Woolstonecraft – and one whom he apparently considers right, Henry St. John.

About the “lefties” – again, this is Brookhiser’s labelling, not Adams’s and certainly not mine – Brookhiser quotes Adams at his sneering best. “Ha! ha! ha!” smirks Adams at Rousseau. “This foolish woman,” Adams rants against Woolstonecraft.

As for Adams on the presumed righty Henry St. John, Brookhiser starts by informing us that Adams thought “more highly” of him than he did of Rousseau, and Brookhiser describes St. John’s “supple attacks on the Whig establishment” which made him “popular in revolutionary America.” So how bad could St. John be if the Patriots of 1776 made him popular? And indeed, the Adams marginalia hardly mock St. John – “not always” is about as close to mockery as Adams gets.

The meta-effect is clear. Mock the left, respectfully disagree with the right, whose ideas are worth thinking highly of.

Yes, the article is so monumentally trivial I risk a howl of outrage from Bob Somerby by bothering to waste time on it. Yes, the propaganda is subtle and not the main point. But you multiply this stuff in dozens and dozens of different places and it starts to add up. As I come across them, I’ll point to more examples.

The lesson to be taken from this is that the right never, ever, rests from fomenting their bad ideas. Contrast Brookhiser’s nonsense with Sean Wilentz’s heavily detailed and genuinely dispassionate book on the evolution of American democracy and you’lll get a sense of the difference between the fake erudition of the right and the reality-based scholarship, not of liberals, but of the rest of us. Wilentz may be a liberal, but his book isn’t. And that’s the goal of all genuine scholarship, not the snake oil Brookhiser’s peddling.

*Correct me if I’m wrong but don’t the terms “right” and “left” derive from the French Revolution and, in Adams’s time, referred only to the internal political issues of France? In any event, “right” and “left” as we know them have nothing to do with John Adams, Ben Franklin, or anything connected with American politics in the 18th Century.