The Bush Gang's One-Two Punch of Two-Tier Marketing

Congress released a report today that says the Bush's administration's spying on Americans was probably against the law. A Bush administration official was quoted as a counter to the report saying administration's interpretation of the law is correct and proper and will hold up in court.

The Washington Post story describing the report and the administration response provides just the kind of message that Republican propogandists would want. It targets the upper tier of their basic two-tier propaganda/marketing segmentation in which the masses are marketed demagogic messages that place the body in jeopardy, while elites receive Scholasticist messages marketed at the mind. This particular story obviously will target the latter segment, and the smaller segement within the top-tier interested enough to read the paper on Saturday.

The message for the masses on warrantless spying was delivered last week by President Bush: Would You Rather Die or What? In his message he insisted this illegal spying is required when dealing with terrorists. Strong, heartful, heavily-backboned cowboy hero that he is, he has sworn himself to protect the American people from near certain death at the hands of terrorists and their weak misguided liberal friends who would insist on rights even for killers. As usual, the populist message is couched in black and white terms of good vs. evil (strong male republican leadership founded on Good principles which will defend and protect the body from evil versus the weak female democratic non-leadership founded on Evil unwilling to defend the body of the people against Evil).

The more elite are meanwhile treated with articles like the one in the Post. For them there is a constant stream of obfuscating statements that remind them of the vexed bureaucratic white collar regime they must navigate at work, an environment where right and wrong is a matter of power and who wins depends on which side has the better lawyers. Many simply tune out because to focus on the details and hair-splitting interpretations is to take too much time from the increasingly demanding rigors of the speed-up at work. Some enjoy the reportage on bureaucratic infighting and will follow every bulletin and update.

Of course, some right-wingers like both the stimulation of the body and the mind. Murdoch's Molechs, i.e., O'Reilly, etc., engage in "intellectual" defenses of the politics of the right-wing body all the time. The "intellectual" David Brooks likes getting hot under the collar as much as he enjoys feeling smart when he repeats the Scholasticist arguments provided by him by the right-wing tanks, those simple-minded, slash and burn arguments that echo the populist marketing prong in slightly trickier language.

The right has been practicing this two-tier marketing approach profitably since the Nixon era when it first developed its "southern strategy," a strategy it still employs and which must therefore be one of the longest-lived marketing campaigns ever. Since then, many high-end brand names have appropriated and refined the strategy. Gucci, for instance, found it could sell its logo emblazoned T-shirts to the masses in the malls, and continue to sell its haute couture lines to the elite without a negative impact on the brand profile. The cross-pollination and evolution of branding strategies between business and politics (which are actually one in the same these days) has given us right-wing T-shirt slogans for the mall crowd, and smartly tailored, quasi-academic screeds for those who prefer to think of themselves as "right wing thinkers."

The Right has identified some issues it finds particularly successful which are strongly keyed to the stimulation of the body, commonly referred to as "wedge issues." These issues, which it generally wheels out during elections are Guns, God and Gays. The issues stress visceral emotions, primarily fear and disgust, connected with the maintenance of control and power of one's body, and the bodies of one's family. On the flip side, the issues call forth the possibility of performing valorous acts against one's enemies in order to preserve the bodies of one's family and fellows.

For example, families with a gun in the house are protected against criminals who would kill them and liberals who would take their guns (which would permit criminals to kill them), families with a Bible in hand are protected from the gray moral relativism of secular humanists who maliciously mock their values and advocate what they deem to be unnatural and sinful acts that threaten the very basis of the patriarchal regime, acts such as abortion and the homosexual "lifestyle." Under the logic of the body any counter arguments to such closely-held beliefs are instantly ruled out of order, anti-God, anti-family, or anti-patriotic because to tolerate such arguments would place the body in jeopardy. All kinds of jeopardy. And overlaying it all is resentment at those (liberals) who would put their bodies in jeopardy, and a wish to humiliate those liberals for doing so.

These wedge issues do have an elite component: there are "intellectual" arguments attached to gun ownership, abortion, homosexuality, and moral values, and these arguments are vigorously advanced as well. These arguments mostly rest upon a conviction that with God in His Heaven and His Commandments Followed all will be Right with the World. For those right-wingers that do not wish to invoke Him as justification, the rationalizations are made under the Cartesian Either/Or (Autocracy vs. Anarchy), Tradition for the sake of Tradition, or under the inviolate rules of that other God popular with the crew at the country club, the Market God. This unsentimentally but always correctly God assigns value through the workings of an Invisible Hand, and, miraculously tends to support those in power, especially those in dominant positions of power, which is a very nice theory indeed for those in power.

So how can the Left hope to win against what seems to be massively-funded, comprehensive and dominating marketing strategy?

I'm going to have to get back to you on that one.