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“Quote” of the Week: “An Investment in Keeping the Hierarchy as it Is”

Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.

Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage or privilege or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you.

That’s Isabel Wilkerson, from an essay in the New York Times Magazine of July 1 2020 entitled America’s Enduring Caste System.

Enterprise Journalism in the MAGA Age

Axios reported back in November that “The decline of local newspapers accelerated so rapidly in 2023 that analysts now believe the U.S. will have lost one-third of the newspapers it had as of 2005 by the end of next year — rather than in 2025, as originally predicted.”

I’ve written a lot over the years about the shrinking of the journalism profession in the United States. It’s a serious problem, in part because it has resulted in less, well, journalism. And I’m thinking here of what is called “Enterprise Journalism.”

What is that? You ask. To which I respond by turning to Wikipedia. (I rarely use Wikipedia as a source for anything, but I think they got it right in this case.) Their entire entry for “Enterprise Journalism” reads like this:

Enterprise journalism reporting that is not generated by news or a press release, but rather generated by a reporter or news organization based on developed sources. Tied to “shoe-leather” reporting and “beat reporting,” enterprise journalism gets the journalist out of the office and away from the traditional news makers. It also enlists some of the traditional traits of good investigative reporting, such as reading documents.

Enterprise journalism does not involve reporting which is based purely on press releases or news conferences. On the other hand, this kind of reporting involves stories where a reporter unearths a story on his/her own; a lot of people refer to these as ‘scoops.’ The enterprise reporting goes beyond simply reporting events; it discovers the forces that shape such events.

That tried-and-true journalistic trick of “reading documents” is a lot of what Nygaard Notes does, actually. But the point I’m trying to make in this issue of the Notes is not that we should all read more documents, although that’s a good idea, no doubt.

No, my point in this issue of Nygaard Notes is to point out that real, useful journalism is possible. Yes, even in an era where journalism is declining and the resulting lack of time and money is forcing reporters to increasingly rely on press releases created by public relations officers, or press conferences featuring powerful and familiar public officials, it is still possible to learn a great deal from the propagandists who present themselves to the public.

Sometimes it’s even possible to catch a glimpse into the deepest nature of the polarization in the United States about which we hear so much. Sometimes the lesson can be learned from a single sentence uttered on camera by a high-ranking public figure.

Such as a comment uttered on October 26th 2023 by the man who many consider to be the most powerful individual in Washington DC apart from the President. And that would be the new Speaker of the House, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana.

Speaker Mike Johnson

On October 25, 2023, far-right Republican Congressman Mike Johnson (LA-04) was elected as the Speaker of the House.

NPR quickly labeled him “An ardent conservative who embraces far-right policies,” noting that “Critics have voiced concerns over his conservative policies.” Indeed, his fellow Congressman, the ultra-conservative Matt Gaetz, immediately bestowed upon him the nickname “MAGA Mike” and the Huffington Post remarked that “onlookers suggested the moniker was, unfortunately, a good fit.” MAGA, of course, stands for “Make America Great Again,” and has become the standard short-hand for the fascist-flavored Republican-led program that is increasingly prominent as the 21st Century unfolds.

Shortly after Johnson was elected Speaker, The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) described him as “a lawmaker who is out of step with the rest of the country on virtually every topic of importance to the business of governance today, from LGBTQ+ rights, to MAGA extremism and election denialism, to abortion, and gun violence prevention.”

All of that is true, but HRC President Kelley Robinson notes that it’s not a matter of specific policies with Johnson, but that “he’s been obsessed with restricting people’s freedoms, rolling back progress and harming marginalized people for literally decades.” And, while MAGA Mike’s targets are many, he seems particularly concerned about sex.

CNN reports that, “before he became a politician, Johnson partnered with an anti-gay conversion therapy group” called Exodus International, which “was a leader in the so-called ‘ex-gay’ movement, which aimed to make gay individuals straight through conversion therapy programs using religious and counseling methods.”

In 2022 Johnson told The Louisiana Baptist Message that he and his wife Kelly “have been working in ministry side by side and together for our whole marriage.” The Huffington Post tells us that Kelly runs a counseling Service called Onward Christian Counseling Services, the founding documents of which include a “Statement of Faith” concerning Marriage and Sexuality. Here’s an example of what is included in this statement:

“We believe the term ‘marriage’ has only one meaning and that is marriage sanctioned by God which joins one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture. We believe that God intends sexual intimacy to only occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other. We believe that God has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. We believe and the Bible teaches that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God.”

When one of the most powerful people in Washington appears to accept, if not embrace, such extreme views, it doesn’t take a lot of enterprise reporting to alert the general public. MAGA Mike turned to Fox News to explain himself. Sort of…

“This Is Not about the People Themselves.”

Perhaps it was the vehemence of his anti-gay, anti-trans views, or maybe it was the ready availability of the rich historical record of MAGA Mike’s long-time efforts aimed at Othering gay and transgender people. Whatever the reason, LGBTQ rights became a focus of the corporate media in the early days of his Speakership.

NBC News, for example, noted on October 26th that “The unexpected elevation of fourth-term Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana to speaker of the House on Wednesday swiftly prompted unforgiving criticism and fresh scrutiny on the once obscure representative’s views on LGBTQ rights.” ABC, CNN, the New York Times, and the LA Times all featured Mike’s sex- and sexuality-related views and acts in their coverage.

For the newly-elected Speaker, all this attention required a response. The response came in Johnson’s first interview as Speaker, which was conducted the day after his election, on October 26th. The network was Fox News; the interviewer was Sean Hannity. It didn’t take Hannity very long to get to the point.

Hannity said to Johnson, “Already, the press, the left have come at you and come at you hard. . . Specifically, [as an example], you once worked for the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian advocacy group, and comments you had made both in writing and advocacy for this group about homosexuality, calling it sinful, destructive, and not supporting gay marriage. Quote, ‘No clear right to sodomy in the Constitution.’ You have been getting hammered on this and I want to ask you about it. I want to know exactly where you stand. Some of these comments were 15 years ago.”

Mike replied, irrelevantly, that “I don’t even remember some of them…” Then he launched into the following description of his history of legal work attempting to undermine Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015:

“I was a litigator that was called upon to defend the state marriage amendments. If you remember back in the early 2000s, I think there was over 35 states, somewhere in that number, that the people went to the ballot in their respective states and they amended their state constitutions to say marriage is one man, one woman. Well, I was a religious liberty defense lawyer and I was called to go in and defend those cases in the courts. Let me state this very clearly, and there’s been questions about this, let me say where I am. Anybody that knows me will tell you this is true. I am a rule of law guy. I made a career defending the rule of law. I respect the rule of law. When the Supreme Court issued the Obergefell opinion, that became the law of the land. I respect the rule of law, but I also genuinely love all people, regardless of their lifestyle choices. This is not about the people themselves.”

At the beginning of this issue of the Notes I said that, even in the modern age, where most of what we call “news” is managed and presented to us by professional politicians and spin-meisters who seek to obscure their intentions and mislead the voting public, even in such a propaganda-rich information environment, it is still possible to gain important insights into the nature of our society. Sometimes, I said, such insights can be learned from a single sentence uttered on camera by a high-ranking public figure. A figure like Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who offered a very telling sentence in his defense of his record of what the Human Rights Campaign calls an “assault on LGBTQ+ Americans’ ability to live their lives openly and honestly.”

And that sentence is the one I emphasized above: This is not about the people themselves.

To understand the meaning of this sentence, it helps to think Systems. That’s what the following essay—in fact, this entire issue—is all about.

Not About Feelings, Not About Individuals

I said in the previous edition of Nygaard Notes that the fundamental dynamic of the far-right movement symbolized and (sort of) led by Donald Trump is Othering. I wrote about Othering at length in Nygaard Notes #646, but if you don’t remember, here’s a brief definition from the online educational platform MasterClass that I think says it well:

“Othering is a social process of marginalization through which a person highly values their own group while denigrating and excluding anyone from a group different from theirs. This process lies at the heart of many societal ills, including racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.” I’ll go further and say that almost any identifiable characteristic can be used to advance an Othering project, as can be readily seen by anyone who attends a Trump rally or reads about Project 2025, which I talked about at length in the previous issue of this newsletter.

Note that the emphasis of Othering in the above quote is on groups. That’s very important, as Othering can best be understood as a sociological problem. That is, it’s about groups, and specifically about which groups are “in” and which groups are “out.” Which groups are dominant and which are subordinate.

Much of the best theorizing about Othering that I’ve seen up to now is centered on specific groups. How is race, for example, used in the Othering process? How is gender used? Othering is insidious, and at different times will utilize any characteristic which can be used to assign people to their “place” in a socially-stratified system. Immigration status, national origin, class, religion; the Othering project will use all of these, and more, to do the job. And as we observe the various ways that Othering plays out in different contexts, patterns begin to emerge.

If we consider that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and, really, any other -ism or phobia you can think of, can function as a tool of Othering, we can substitute the word “othering” for the words “race/racism/race prejudice” in the following quotes, and this invites us to consider that there are systemic forces at work here, whichever form of Othering is being utilized.

It’s Not About Feelings

A sociologist named Herbert Blumer said it well in a paper called “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position”, published in 1958. (It’s a remarkable paper; I’ve mentioned it before.)

He said that “race prejudice exists basically in a sense of group position rather than in a set of feelings which members of one racial group have toward the members of another racial group.”

This very key point is underlined by author and activist john a. powell when he says that “Othering is not about liking or disliking someone. It is based on the conscious or unconscious assumption that a certain identified group poses a threat to the favored group. It is largely driven by politicians and the media, as opposed to personal contact. Overwhelmingly, people don’t ‘know’ those that they are Othering.”

The late philosopher Charles W. Mills repeatedly made this same point; he said that racism is “a set of misleading views that distort social realities in ways that serve to create, perpetuate, and justify racial domination and unfair racial advantage.” This is a structural understanding of racism, and it contrasts with the individualistic understanding which Mills tells us reduces racism to “a racially-based ‘ill-will’ that is the product of the individual’s vicious heart.”

In his 2004 essay Racial Exploitation and the Wages of Whiteness, Mills called attention to “the crucial reality that the normal workings of the social system continue to disadvantage blacks in large measure independently of racist feeling.” [emphasis in original]

This comment makes tons of sense if we keep in mind a principle from Systems Theory: That a system is the unavoidable outcome of organized intentions. The same principle helps explain a third relevant point made by Mills. As he was discussing the organized intentions of our system of white supremacy, Mills pointed out that “Economic structures have been set in place, causal processes established, whose outcome is to pump wealth from one side of the globe to another, and which will continue to work largely independently of the ill will/goodwill, racist/antiracist feelings of particular individuals.”

But who gets to decide which social groups “belong” and which groups are comprised of Outsiders, of people designated as The Other? Blumer speaks of a “running process,” saying that “The sense of group position is clearly formed by a running process in which the dominant racial group is led to define and redefine the subordinate racial group and the relations between them…” Picture here House Speaker Mike Johnson on the Fox Network. He wasn’t talking about race—his targets seem to be anyone who falls outside of what Johnson says is the acceptable view of sexual identity and behavior—but the Othering dynamic is the same.

Blumer again: “We note the relative unimportance of the huge bulk of experiences coming from daily contact with individuals of the subordinate group. It is the events seemingly loaded with great collective significance that are the focal points of the public discussion.” Such as the election of a Black president in 2008. Or the moment when white people lose their position as being the absolute majority in the United States. Or, in the case of Mike Johnson and his fellow theocrats, the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

Blumer continues, “The definition of these events is chiefly responsible for the development of a racial image and of the sense of group position. When this public discussion takes the form of a denunciation of the subordinate racial group, signifying that it is unfit and a threat, the discussion becomes particularly potent in shaping the sense of social position.”

Remember, when Blumer refers to “racial groups,” we can substitute any identifiable group deemed by the dominant group(s) to be a threat and thus deserving of Othering via the running process mentioned above.

So, let’s return to the comment that MAGA Mike made in his interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News upon becoming Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Asked to defend himself against charges by “the left” and “the press” that his work opposing LGBTQ+ rights was a problem, Mike Johnson said “I respect the rule of law but I also genuinely love all people, regardless of their lifestyle choices. This is not about the people themselves.”

We’ll leave aside for the moment the implication that gender identity and sexual orientation are “choices” (and bad ones at that!) and ask the obvious question: What is his anti-gay work “about,” if it’s not about the people themselves? Answer: It’s about groups. Mike Johnson is playing—and is aware that he is playing—his part in the “running process in which the dominant group is led to define and redefine the subordinate group and the relations between them.” He’s not working to Other specific people, be they James Obergefell or Jeff Nygaard. He loves us! He’s simply working to marginalize, to render invisible, to deny the existence of people like us, people who don’t know their place in a socially-stratified culture.

The far-right, fascist crowds that pack Trump rallies want to Make America Great Again. They want to return to a mythical past in which individuals compete for membership in the In-Group. A ruthless, competitive past in which respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness were granted to the winners and the losers were cast aside because they were deemed undeserving.

Mike Johnson—and MAGA followers in general—want to have it both ways. He wants his “love” for individuals to absolve him from responsibility for the pain and suffering caused by his actions. In terms of social justice it doesn’t matter if Mike Johnson loves the people he has worked so hard to Other. What matters is that he has worked for years, at the systems level, to reinforce the power and status of the dominant group, while attacking the subordinate groups.

MAGA Mike Johnson is correct when he says that the work he is doing is not about the people themselves. It’s not. He, and the larger right-wing project of which he is a part, simply want to restore and maintain a rigidly-stratified social order that they feel is slipping away. Isabel Wilkerson explains that this project “is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources—which groups are seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence—who is accorded these and who is not.

In other words, it’s about Caste. The importance of this concept—Caste?! In the United States of America?! In the year 2024?!—is something I’ll be discussing in a future edition of Nygaard Notes. Stay tuned.