Demonic (2 page)

Conservatives don’t cotton to slogans. When they finally produce one, it’s never the sort of rallying cry capable of sending people to the ramparts, such as “Yes We Can!” or “Bush Lied, Kids Died!” “27 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong” is a wry observation, not an urgent call to battle. “Annoy the Media, Vote Bush!” barely qualifies as a suggestion. Conservatives write books and articles, make arguments, and seek debates, but are perplexed by slogans. (Of course, another reason Republicans may avoid bumper stickers is to prevent their cars from being vandalized, which brings us right back to another mob characteristic of liberals.)

By contrast, liberals thrive on jargon as a substitute for thought. According to Le Bon, the more dramatic and devoid of logic a chant is, the better it works to rile up a mob: “Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use of violent affirmations. To exaggerate, to affirm, to resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings.”
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Liberals love slogans because the “laws of logic have no action on crowds.” Mobs, Le Bon says, “are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas.”
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He could be referring to the
New York Times
and other journals of elite opinion when he describes periodicals that “manufacture opinions for their readers and supply them with ready-made phrases which dispense them of the trouble of reasoning.”
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You will see all the techniques for inspiring mobs in liberal behavior.
There are three main elements to putting an idea in a crowd: affirmation, repetition, and contagion. The effects take time, Le Bon says, but “once produced are very lasting.” It’s the same reason annoying TV commercials are so effective. “Head On! Apply directly to the forehead. Head On! Apply directly to the forehead. Head On! Apply directly to the forehead.”

Affirmation is the creation of a slogan “free of all reasoning and all proof.” Indeed, the “conciser an affirmation is, the more destitute of every appearance of proof and demonstration,” he says, “the more weight it carries.” This is “one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds.”

Affirmation only works if it is “constantly repeated, and so far as possible in the same terms.” The power of repetition “is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged. At the end of a certain time we have forgotten who is the author of the repeated assertion, and we finish by believing it.”

Short slogans endlessly repeated create a “current of opinion” allowing “the powerful mechanism of contagion” to operate. Ideas spread through the crowd as easily as microbes, Le Bon says, which explains the mass panics common to rock concerts, financial markets, street protests, and Prius dealerships. “A panic that has seized only a few sheep,” he observes, “will soon extend to the whole flock.”
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Liberals have it down to an art: The cacophonous method of yelling until conservatives shut up just because they just want to go home, the purblind assertions—No WMDs in Iraq! Civilian Deaths! Violence at Tea Parties! Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!—and overnight the entire mass of liberals is robotically repeating the same slogans.

It isn’t only in their incessant street demonstrations that liberals talk in slogans. This is how liberals discuss serious policy matters with the public. It’s as if they’re speaking to a vast O.J. Simpson jury, mesmerized by a pair of gloves and a closing argument that rhymes (“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”). Conservatives talk the same on TV as off TV—unless they are inarticulate politicians using sound bites to avoid saying anything stupid. But regular conservatives talk on TV as if they’re having a normal conversation with their friends or neighbors. Liberals don’t know
how to do this because they don’t have normal friends and neighbors—only fellow demonstrators. Their self-image is as little Lenins, rousing the masses at the Finland Station, which is why they always sound as if they’ve gotten control of the PA system and are broadcasting from Big Brother, Inc.—or if they’re Al Gore, addressing a kindergarten class.

Here, for example, is Stephanie Bloomingdale, of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, being interviewed on MSNBC about the union’s beef with Governor Scott Walker: “Well, America, we need all of you to help us with our fight. Because this is a fight to reclaim the values of the middle class. This is the movement of our time. And we need people all across America, working people, to stand up and say, this is the time we need to restore economic justice. And we know that the only—that the union movement is the only thing that stands between unbridled corporate greed and a true economic democracy. And we—what I would like to say is, America, stand with us, stand with us who are fighting for justice and economic justice in our society.”
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The next night, Katrina vanden Heuvel was engaging in the same sort of “Internationale” hectoring: “People are waking up. And they’re in the streets. There are going to be fifty rallies around this country. Maybe a million people in the streets of this country. And what are they saying? Enough! You’re giving our people’s money away. Invest in our country, invest in jobs, invest in education. Keep cops on the street, keep teachers in the classrooms. Enough with these perks for corporations. There’s a movement called U.S. uncut, which is inspired by an article in
The Nation
. If we can recoup from the very richest who brought us this financial crisis and from corporate tax dodgers, we can balance budgets in a fair way. Justice, fairness, concepts that may be coming back to America in this moment.”
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The advantage of slogans like these—“working families,” “economic justice,” “unbridled corporate greed,” and “invest in our country, invest in jobs, invest in education”—is that liberals never have to talk about the actual issues being discussed. You’d never know in the fog of jargon that the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, was only asking government employees to start paying 6 percent of their pension contributions (up from zero percent) and 12 percent of their health care insurance (up from six percent).
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Similarly, the pro-abortion movement depends on never ever using the word “abortion”—only cant, such as “choice,” “family planning,” and “reproductive freedom.”

The Left’s robotic speaking style helps explain why liberals have never been able to make a dent in talk radio, despite many tries. Apparently, even the people who get bused in to their rallies can’t be paid to listen to liberals hectoring them on talk radio. Being endlessly lectured by deadly earnest liberals is boring. Ask any Cuban.

Based on their public commentary, it appears that not one liberal has the vaguest idea how the economy imploded. The only thing liberals know is—as President Obama explained—“Republicans drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.”
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(It was always a “ditch” and not a “pond” because a pond would have been offensive to Teddy Kennedy.)

A liberal would stare at you slack-jawed if you explained that the federal government, via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, forced politically correct lending policies on the banks—policies that were attacked by Republicans but ferociously defended by Democrats—and that the banks’ suicidal loans were then bundled into mortgage-backed securities and dispersed throughout the entire financial system, which poisoned the economy, bringing down powerful institutions, such as Lehman Brothers, and destroying innumerable families’ financial portfolios.

In light of the Democrats’ direct role in creating the policies at the heart of the nation’s financial collapse, it’s not surprising that they prefer metaphors to facts. What’s strange is that the image of a car in a ditch is sufficient for the bulk of Democratic voters and commentators to adjudge themselves experts on the economic crisis and refuse to listen to explanations that aren’t images of Bush driving a car into a ditch.

Image is all that matters to the mob. Obama can take in the biggest campaign haul from Wall Street in world history, as he did in 2008, but the mob will never believe he is in the pocket of Wall Street bankers. The top-three corporate employers of donors to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and
JPMorgan. Six other financial giants were in the top thirty donors to the White House Dream Team: UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse Group.
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In 2008 alone, Goldman Sachs employees gave more to Obama—nearly $1 million—than any other employer, with the sole exception of the entire University of California, which has 230,000 employees—ten times more than Goldman.
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And still Republicans are called the Party of Wall Street. Bush let Lehman Brothers go under—what else do Republicans have to do?

Liberals latched on to the image of Bush, Cheney, and even Representative Tom DeLay as “oilmen” to blame them for everything from Enron’s collapse to blackouts and high oil prices.

In 2006, Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed “oilmen” in public office for high oil prices—and hearing Pelosi try to craft a syllogism is like watching Michael Moore attempt ballet. She said, “We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.” That’s all liberals needed to know. Two “oilmen” in the White House—cause and effect. Strangely, though, a barrel of oil costs the same on the world market for all those other countries that were not being run by “oilmen.”

A few years earlier, she had blamed Bush and DeLay for the blackout throughout the Northeast United States and parts of Canada—presumably because they are both from Texas—saying they had “put the interests of the energy companies before the interests of the American people.”
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In fact, the blackout was due to a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing whatsoever to do with oil.

The
New York Times
’s Paul Krugman has written more than a dozen columns making hazy connections between Bush and the corrupt and collapsed Enron—“Some cynics attribute the continuing absence of Enron indictments to the Bush family’s loyalty code”
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—despite Bush’s having absolutely nothing to do with the company, other than being from Texas. By contrast, Krugman was on Enron’s advisory board while he was writing encomiums to Enron in
Fortune
magazine.
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Once a year, when I don’t feel like writing a column, I think I’ll reprint Krugman’s column singing Enron’s praises—although, again, in fairness, he was being paid by Enron at the time.

Democrats wouldn’t make such absurd statements if absurdity didn’t seem perfectly logical to their base. This is how Democrats communicate with their constituents: They use mob tactics to rile up the irrational masses. Crowds can’t grasp logic, only images. “These imagelike ideas,” Le Bon says, “are not connected by any logical bond of analogy or succession, and may take each other’s place like the slides of a magic-lantern which the operator withdraws from the groove in which they were placed one above the other.”
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Republicans love Wall Street—oh look, Wall Street just made historic campaign contributions to Obama; he must be really cool.… Republicans hate the poor because they’re trying to block government policies promoting easy mortgages.… Oops, I wonder why the economy just tanked. It’s because Bush drove it into a ditch! Enron collapsed and Paul Krugman says it’s Bush’s fault. Krugman was paid by Enron and Bush wasn’t? Bush lied, kids died! … Oil prices went up under Bush—it’s his fault—he’s an oilman! Oh but then oil prices went down under Bush.… Hey, look over there! A shiny object!

Despite their perennial enthusiasm for revolution and “change” in almost any form, Le Bon says, crowds are wildly conservative when it comes to scientific progress. Want to scare a liberal? Mention nuclear power plants, genetically modified fruits, new pharmaceuticals, food irradiation, or guns with plastic frames. We could probably get a crowd of liberal protesters to scatter just by coming at them with a modern vacuum cleaner. It certainly works on dogs and cats. The Left’s abject terror of technological development is yet another mob attribute.

Le Bon says that the mob’s “unconscious horror” of “all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted.” While mobs go about changing the names of institutions and demanding radical changes to society, he says, when it comes to scientific progress, crowds have a “fetish-like respect” for tradition.
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Thus, according to Le Bon, if “democracies possessed the power they wield today at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways, the realization of these inventions would have been impossible.” It is lucky “for the progress of civilization that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.”
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Our liberals are even worse than Le Bon imagined. Democrats don’t merely want to block scientific progress, they want to roll it back. Al Gore’s global warming fantasy book
Earth in the Balance
called for the worldwide elimination of the internal combustion engine within twenty-five years.
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(Which, if nothing else, would have ruined Obama’s “car in the ditch” catchphrase.)