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“Quote” of the Week: “Because Conservative Is Common Sense.”

The strategy of the right for decades has been to build support for a set of philosophical principles that lead people to believe that “conservative is common sense.” The strategy has been remarkably successful, as evidenced by an article on the front page of the New York Times Business section of February 13th. The article was headlined “For Trump and Fox News, New Policies Are Simply ‘Common Sense’.”

The article notes that “The phrase common sense has become a constant refrain on Fox News,” citing a study showing that “the term common sense was mentioned nearly 500 times on Fox News in January . . . an increase from around 200 per month in the years prior.” The article went on to say that “The flood of common sense comments on Fox News echoes the language Mr. Trump and his new administration have used to justify his policies…”

Here are the final two paragraphs of this article:

“Mark Levin, a Fox News host and close ally of Mr. Trump, seemed to recognize the echo between the White House and Fox News when he raised the president’s catchphrase on his show. ‘What Trump is proposing is not radical, it’s common sense, as he puts it,’ Mr. Levin said. “When he says common sense, for many of us, it means conservative.

“Because conservative is common sense.”

 

Tending The Soil, Challenging The Narrative

I work at a place called RLM Arts. RLM stands for Ricardo Levins Morales. It’s a remarkable place, built on the work of this remarkable artist. I have described it in the past as a “radical art studio,” but it’s so much more than that! I encourage you to visit the RLM website and look around.  You’ll find posters, note cards, buttons, zines, coloring pages, videos, and more.

What is it all about? What is Ricardo up to? It’s not easy to describe the many trails that he travels (or blazes) but surely a big part of what he has been up to – for more than a half-century now! – is tending the soil. And what, you may ask, does that mean? The answer can be found in Part 5 of a 24 page zine/pamphlet called Tending The Soil–Lessons For Organizing. You can find it on the RLM website, but here I offer you the text of Part 5, which is entitled “The Soil is More Important Than the Seeds”. Listen here to Ricardo’s voice:

One of the most important insights that cultural organizing has brought to movement struggle is the idea that the soil is more important than the seeds. Almost anything will grow in rich, nutritious soil, whereas it’s hard to get anything to grow if the soil is barren, toxic and won’t hold moisture.

The seeds are our projects, our initiatives, our campaigns, our organizations, our institutions that we want to build. The soil is the compost of beliefs, ideas, values, and narratives that create the environment in which we’re working. For example, if you’re trying to win a decent contract and more funding for school teachers, it’s going to be hard if “everybody knows” that teachers are greedy, lazy, indifferent and don’t care about kids.

The right wing has been hammering in that message, instilling that into the soil. In fact, for forty years, the right has devoted themselves largely to preparing the soil. That includes saying stuff that sounds ridiculous, fighting for things that aren’t winnable yet, because they’re investing in the future and ten years later it won’t sound ridiculous and they’ll win.

The question I would pose to you is: What stories, what narratives, what beliefs – if they were widely disseminated in the soil of our communities – would make it easy to win? Just imagine it for a moment: what would make victories easy if everyone believed it?

Now, we’re fighting against the weight of all these toxic narratives that people have internalized. We’re the only ones who can plant the seed of the tree that one day we want to live under. We need to be preparing the soil in which that tree can grow.

Ricardo talks about seeds that won’t grow unless the soil is fertile. In the Propaganda model that I use in Nygaard Notes I talk about ideas (seeds) that don’t make sense unless a large number of people share a general set of ideas about how the world works (the soil). I refer to the seeds as Overt Propaganda. The soil I call Deep Propaganda. I use the word Propaganda in its original sense of any speech designed to persuade. It didn’t become a generally derogative term until sometime after World War I (as I explained in 2002, in Nygaard Notes #172).

The success of Trumpism is due in no small part to the enormous energy put in by the reactionary Right to tending the soil. The next essay offers an example of how this works.

Trump, Common Sense, and Deep Propaganda

On January 29th an American Airlines plane and an Army helicopter collided in Washington DC, killing 67 people. Speaking to the press the next day, President Trump and his vice president used the tragic occasion to tend the soil in their own way. It’s worth listening closely to what they said.

After expressing sympathy for the friends and families of those who lost their lives, the President said, “Don’t concern yourselves with the facts! Instead, let me tell you how to think about this event.”

OK, he didn’t say that. I was paraphrasing. What he actually said was this: “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we’ll probably state those opinions now…” (Don’t you think my paraphrasing was pretty accurate?)

Pete Hegseth, the new defense secretary, was present at the press briefing (one wonders why he was there, but he was). And he underlined the Deep Propaganda that showed its face in the President’s spin on the tragedy. Hegseth, speaking in code, made it clear that he agrees with the President that the marginalized Others whose inclusion is the “I” in DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) would not be included in a “Make America Great Again” future. Here’s how he put it: “The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air traffic control or whether it’s in our generals or whether it’s throughout government.”

Note that the Secretary’s response only makes sense if you believe that members of marginalized groups are not, and cannot be, “the best and brightest.” The Overt Propaganda here is the idea that only Good People (indeed, the BEST people) will be allowed access to positions of power, prestige, and responsibility. The Deep Propaganda upon which that idea rests is the idea that people are defined by their membership in groups, and marginalized groups are—and should be—marginalized, because the people in them are not Good People. Certainly not The Best People.

In case the Defense Secretary was not clear enough, Trump called on his Vice President, JD Vance, to phrase the racist point in other words. Vance complied, saying:

“Something the president said that I think bears reemphasizing, which is that when you don’t have the best standards in who you’re hiring, it means, on the one hand, you’re not getting the best people in government, but on the other hand, it puts stresses on the people who are already there. And I think that is a core part of what President Trump is going to bring and has already brought to Washington, DC is we want to hire the best people because we want the best people at air traffic control and we want to make sure we have enough people at air traffic control who are actually competent to do the job.”

The Overt Propaganda here is: To allow the into the workplace the incompetence and lack of intelligence that characterize members of marginalized groups is not only dangerous in itself, but it’s contagious, as it “puts stresses” on the Good/Best People “who are already there.”

All this crazy DEI stuff is actually preventing competent (i.e. white) people from getting these important jobs as air traffic controllers, Vance says. Here are his exact words:

“If you go back to just some of the headlines over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin. That policy ends under Donald Trump’s leadership because safety is the first priority of our aviation industry.”

(If you don’t know what the Vice President is talking about, just Google “reverse racism air traffic controllers.)

The Deep Propaganda here is that Black People in Responsible Positions = DANGER.

No Evidence, But it “Could Have Been”

So much for the opening acts. The headline act, Donald Trump, came back to the microphone and a reporter asked him this question: “Mr. President, on DEI and the claims that you’ve made, are you saying this crash was somehow caused and the result of diversity hiring? And what evidence have you seen to support these claims?”

To which Trump replied, “It just could have been. We have a high standard, we’ve had a much higher standard than anybody else, and there are things where you have to go by brainpower, you have to go by psychological quality and psychological quality is a very important element of it. These are various, very powerful tests that we put to use and they were terminated by Biden, and Biden went by a standard that’s the exact opposite. So we don’t know.”

A few minutes later the President noted that “It’s all under investigation.” The reporter followed up, saying “I understand that. That’s why I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash.”

“Because I have common sense,” Trump replied, “and unfortunately a lot of people don’t. We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level. When you have 60 planes coming in during a short period of time and they’re all coming in different directions and you’re dealing with very high-level computer work and very complex computers.”

I will here quote myself on the subject of Common Sense. Back in 2006 I wrote that “All of us have certain basic ideas about how the world works. Many of these ideas are received unconsciously, at very early ages, from the various doctrinal institutions that surround us. These are institutions like our education systems, the mass media, and advertising. When we let these ideas reside in our minds, undisturbed by new information, for a long, long time, as many of us do, they can go beyond being simply ‘ideas,’ and can harden into attitudes, beliefs, and conceptions about the world. By this I mean that they can become stronger and deeper than mere ‘ideas,’ and can begin to seem like ‘common sense.’ They can become so familiar and useful that we stop thinking about them. At this point, I call them the ‘ABCs of Propaganda.’ That is, they are our basic Attitudes, Beliefs, and Conceptions about the world.”

The “very strong opinions and ideas” stated by Trump and his acolytes in their press briefing (supposedly about an aviation disaster) are intended to reinforce the Propaganda ABCs upon which the Othering Project that we know as Trumpism is based.

The logic and power of Trumpism has everything to do with the historical moment of which it is born. It’s a moment when many members of the privileged classes are terrified and feeling abandoned. Large numbers of people in, or wishing to be in, the dominant group are looking for leaders like Trump, leaders who offer a sense of group identity, who promise to clarify exactly who is Us and who is Them.

And that’s what Trump is doing every time he insults, demonizes, excludes, targets, blames, accuses or otherwise scapegoats an identifiable Other. He’s fertilizing the soil and reinforcing the Deep Propaganda which tells us that we must—in the name of Making America Great Again—separate the winners from the losers, the in-group from the innumerable out-groups, the virtuous from the wicked, Us from Them.

And how do we know who belongs in which group? It’s just Common Sense.

If you want to read the transcript of this very revealing press briefing, it can be found online HERE.