How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words

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In summary, the article discusses how the conservative Republicans have used a strategy of segmenting reality and focusing on individual moments to deflect attention away from larger issues, such as environmental protection and affirmative action. This strategy was seen in the Rodney King beating trial, where the defense slowed down the film and focused on individual blows rather than the event as a whole. This same approach was also evident in two cases recently decided by the Supreme Court, one involving an endangered species and the other involving affirmative action. The article argues that this narrow focus on individual actions ignores the larger systemic issues at play and ultimately leads to opposing conclusions. The final example of Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma also highlights this same pattern, as the focus shifted to him as an individual
  • #1
RageSk8
How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words
By Stanley Fish, New York Times, August 13, 1995

DURHAM. N.C. When the verdict in the first Rodney King beating trial was announced many were amazed at the acquittal of the police officers, especially since their actions had been filmed by an amateur photographer. How could a jury ignore the evidence of its own eyes? A part of the answer emerged in the account of the defense strategy. It had two stages. First, the film was slowed down so that each frame was isolated and stood by itself. Second, the defense asked questions that treated each frozen frame as if everything in the case hung on it and it alone. Is this blow an instance of excessive force? Is this blow intended to kill or maim?

Under the pressure of such questions, the event as a whole disappeared from view and was replaced by a series of discontinuous moments. Looking only at individual moments cut off from the context that gave them meaning, the jury could not say of any of them that this did grievous harm to Rodney King. This strategy - of first segmenting reality and then placing all the weight on individual bits of it - is useful whenever you want to deflect attention away from the big picture, and that is why it has proved so attractive to those conservative Republicans who want to roll back the regulatory state. On every front, from environmental protection to affirmative action, large questions of ecology and justice are pushed into the background by the same segmenting techniques that made it easy for the jurors in Simi Valley to forget it was a beating they were seeing.

As examples, consider two cases recently decided by the Supreme Court. In Babbitt v. Sweet Home, the question was whether an E.P.A. regulation against "taking" an endangered species includes acts of "habitat modification" or whether words like "take" and "harm" refer narrowly to single assaults on single animals by single hunters.

Those taking the broader view agree that when you destroy the last remaining ground on which the piping plover breeds, you make it "impossible for any piping plovers to reproduce." Those on the other side, the side of developers and logging interests, reply that no single plover will have been targeted and no living plover injured.

"Taking," they insist, describes only "acts done directly and intentionally to particular animals." One side recognizes indirect effects caused by large-scale patterns of action taking place over time. The other side recognizes only effects caused in a particular moment by the intentional behavior of individuals. Beginning from these two perspectives - not on the issue, but determinative of the way the issue will be framed and seen -- the two sides come to predictably opposing conclusions.

Just about everything remains the same when the topic is affirmative action. In Adarand v, Pena, the question was whether the policy of giving financial incentives to prime contractors who hire minority subcontractors is constitutional. Those in favor of the incentives justify them by invoking constitutional history and the history of discrimination in the contracting industry. They remind us, in Justice John Paul Stevens words, that the "primary purpose of the Equal Protection Clause to end discrimination of the former slaves," and they report that even today certain groups remain entrenched in the building trades while ethers are virtually shut out.

Those opposed to the incentives reject arguments from history and specifically reject the argument that historical patterns of discrimination have impaired the life chances of African-Americans as a group. They say it is individuals, not groups, that are protected by the Constitution, and they would allow remedies for discrimination only in cases where there has been "an individualized showing" of harm, a harm inflicted discreetly on a specific person by a specific agent at a specific time.

The idea is that even though different histories may have brought us here, we are new all Individuals who enter life's race with equal opportunities and therefore any injury we suffer (at least if the law is going to recognize it) is injury done to us by an individual and not by impersonal forces either in the past or present. Harm in this model can only be imagined as a discrete event: you hit me over the head with a baseball bat. No Rube Goldberg accounts of cause and effect allowed.

The Rodney King beating, endangered species, affirmative action - - three very different issues, but all subject to the same analysis which reaches the same conclusion: either a particular person at a particular moment did it or no one did it. Blows can only kill one by one, and not in relation to other blows in a sequence. Birds can only he taken one by one and not by the destruction of the environment essential to their survival. Persons can only be discriminated against one by one, and not by the massive effects of longstanding structural racism.

One more example to clinch the point. In the first aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, rumors of an Arab suspect were followed by the usual mutterings about an Islamic terrorist culture, but when Timothy McVeigh surfaced, talk of holding culture responsible was strongly denounced by the very same people engaging in it because the culture now under the spotlight was their own.

Immediately Mr. McVeigh was detached from everything and everyone around him and proclaimed to be "merely an individual", and more pointedly, an individual "kook," someone acting out of some inner and private compulsion and not in response to the values and goals of any group.

He may have worn the same clothes as those other guys, and held the same views, and listened to the same radio stations, and read or wrote the same anti-government pamphlets, and marched in the same woods with the same guns, but what he did (if he did it) he did entirely on his own, uninfluenced by anyone or anything. Just as we are to believe that Rodney King received each blow in isolation, and the piping plover experienced no harm when its habitat was degraded, and minority subcontractors suffered no disadvantage by centuries of exclusion from the trades they were now "free" to enter.

The question is, why do arguments like these often have so much force? At first glance it seems odd, Even bizarre, to discount the cumulative effects of many blows, or to deny that habitat degradation constitutes a harm to individual birds, or to announce that massive patterns of societal discrimination leave minorities in the same position as everyone else, or to decide that white Timothy McVeigh talks like a militia member, walks like a militia member, thinks likes militia member and hates like a militia member, what he does has nothing to do with the militia culture.

How is the trick done? Well, first of all by a sleight of hand. The eye is deflected away from the whole -- history, culture, habitats, society and the parts, now freed from any stabilizing context, can be described in any way one likes - but why is the sleight of hand successful? Why don't more people see through it?

Because it is performed with the vocabulary of America's civil religion - the vocabulary of equal opportunity, color-blindness, race neutrality and, above all, individual rights. This was also the vocabulary of civil rights activists, anti-McCarthyites and liberals in general, many of them are now puzzled and even defensive when they hear their own words coming out of the mouths of their traditional opponents.

Their mistake is to assume that the words mean what they did in 1960, when in fact they have been repackaged and put in the service of the very agenda they once fought, When the goal was to end Jim Crow practices that kept blacks in the back of the bus and out of schools, "individual rights" was a powerful slogan in support of change. But now "individual rights" operates to maintain the status quo by ruling out as a consideration the very history that made the phrase a rallying cry in the first place.

When the goal was to make discrimination illegal, "color-blind" meant removing the obstacles to full citizenship, but "color-blind" now means blind to the effects of what has been done in the past to people because of their color, When the goal was to provide access to those long denied it, "equal opportunity" was a weapon against old habits and vested interests, but new those same interests have learned how to say "equal opportunity" and mean maintenance of all conditions that still make it a myth.

Liberals and progressives have been slow to realize that their preferred vocabulary has been hijacked and that when they respond to once-hallowed phrases they are responding to a ghost now animated by a new machine, The point is not a small one, for in any debate, especially one fought in the arena of public opinion, the battle is won not by knock-down arguments but by the party that succeeds in placing its own spin on the terms presiding over the discussion.

That's what the conservatives in and out of Congress have managed to do with old war horses like "individual" and so long as they are allowed to get away with it, the opposition will spend its time insisting that it too is for the individual or for color-blindness or equal opportunity - and before we know it all the plovers will be dead and all the subcontractors will once again be white.

Stanley Fish, a professor of English and law at Duke University, is author of the forthcoming "Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change."
 
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  • #2
Professor Stan should stick to English. His writing style is gripping and he can spin a good yarn, but the purpose of law is justice, impartial and unbiased. This kind of partisan justice, wherein the right or wrong of a decission is determined solely by asking which party made that decission, must not go unchecked.
 
  • #3
Originally posted by LURCH
Professor Stan should stick to English. His writing style is gripping and he can spin a good yarn, but the purpose of law is justice, impartial and unbiased. This kind of partisan justice, wherein the right or wrong of a decission is determined solely by asking which party made that decission, must not go unchecked.
I think we read that in a completely different way. I read it as saying that the right-wing steals justice from people by manipulating the language.
 
  • #4
No, we read it the same way. He is indeed saying exactly that; "The RIGHT steals justice from people". I'm simply saying he's dead wrong, not only in his conclusions but in his methodology. Once he establishes that conservatives are unjust, he uses this to show that certain decisions are unjust (they must be; they were made by conservatives), then he shows all these unjust decisions to prove the injustice of conservatives!

His use of the Rodney King trial is a good example. The outcome was unjust because a conservative defense coucil clouded the truth. He ignores the fact that deffense councils don't render verdicts; juries do. Unless he can prove that all the jurors were conservatives (which I highly doubt), his assertion that conservativism is to blame falls flat.

He also ignores the fact that the jury saw the evidence most of the public did not. So the assumption that the verdict was unjust is also baseless.

And he ignores the O.J. Simpson trial altogether. This case of a liberal attorney using racial prejudice to acquit a murderer (by manipulating the language) is appearently acceptable, cause it was done by a liberal. That's what I mean by "partison justice".
 
  • #5
Uh huh...and you are wrong, of course. While everyone tries to do it, the right-wing is so very much better at manipulating truth and lies to make any case they want.
 
  • #6
Originally posted by Zero
Uh huh...and you are wrong, of course.
I think he's right on.
While everyone tries to do it, the right-wing is so very much better at manipulating truth and lies to make any case they want.
And the left is highly adept at ignoring uncomfortable truths. Touche'
 
  • #7
Originally posted by Zero
Uh huh...and you are wrong, of course. While everyone tries to do it, the right-wing is so very much better at manipulating truth and lies to make any case they want.

Uh huh...and you are wrong, of course. While everyone thinks the right wing is so much better at manipulating the truth they miss the superbly orchestrated manipulations of that hidden entity that hides itself within the left, because it is much better at creating great big smokescreens and pointing fingers on the one hand while hiding the crossed fingers of the other behind their backs. BAHAHAHAHA!
 
  • #8
Originally posted by kat
Uh huh...and you are wrong, of course. While everyone thinks the right wing is so much better at manipulating the truth they miss the superbly orchestrated manipulations of that hidden entity that hides itself within the left, because it is much better at creating great big smokescreens and pointing fingers on the one hand while hiding the crossed fingers of the other behind their backs. BAHAHAHAHA!
Part of the brilliant manipulation of teh right-wing is teh creation of a 'left-wing' myth.
 
  • #9
Originally posted by russ_watters
I think he's right on. And the left is highly adept at ignoring uncomfortable truths. Touche'

Hmmm...the right-wing would have to actually produce a truth now and again, for us to ignore.
 
  • #10
Originally posted by Zero
Hmmm...the right-wing would have to actually produce a truth now and again, for us to ignore.
Thats telling - you think "truths" are things that come from the mouths of politicians. I'm talking about things that don't come from the mouths of politicians. Realities of the way the world works.

Neither the right nor the left "produce truth," they just respond, react, and/or use them.
 
  • #11
Originally posted by russ_watters
Thats telling - you think "truths" are things that come from the mouths of politicians. I'm talking about things that don't come from the mouths of politicians. Realities of the way the world works.

Neither the right nor the left "produce truth," they just respond, react, and/or use them.


Come to think of it, you do have a point...the difference, as I see it, is that certain radical elements decide to work backwards, and decide what they want to prove, and use any 'fact'(often lies work better, and they are willing to use them too) to back up their claims. I think this sort of thing explains why the "radical right-wing"(NOT Republicans or true conservatives in general) get along so well with extremist religious groups. Both sides approach every issue with the attitude of "I am 100% right, and if you disagree, you are not only wrong, you are evil."


*edit* I think ALL radical groups do this...it is just that the radical arm of the political right holds a lot more power than any other radical group.
 
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1. How did the right hijack the magic words?

The right hijacked the magic words by strategically using language and framing issues in a way that appeals to their target audience and promotes their agenda. They have also invested heavily in think tanks and media outlets to spread their messaging and control the narrative.

2. What are the "magic words" that have been hijacked by the right?

The "magic words" that have been hijacked by the right vary depending on the context, but some common examples include terms like "freedom," "family values," "patriotism," and "personal responsibility." These words have powerful connotations and are often used to evoke an emotional response in the audience.

3. How does the right's use of language impact society?

The right's strategic use of language has a significant impact on society. It can shape public opinion, influence policy decisions, and perpetuate harmful stereotypes and biases. By controlling the narrative and framing issues in a certain way, the right can sway public perception and promote their agenda.

4. Can the magic words be reclaimed from the right?

Yes, the magic words can be reclaimed from the right. This can be done by challenging and redefining their meaning and using them in a way that aligns with progressive values and goals. It is also important to educate the public about the deceptive tactics used by the right and promote critical thinking when consuming media and political messaging.

5. How can we combat the right's hijacking of the magic words?

There are several ways to combat the right's hijacking of the magic words. First, it is crucial to be aware of their tactics and the language they use to manipulate public opinion. We can also challenge their messaging and offer alternative narratives that align with progressive values. Additionally, supporting independent media and fact-checking information can help combat the spread of misinformation and propaganda.

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