Eugene Volokh is too reasonable. Maybe. Regarding Republican mailers alleging liberals are hot for an old timey Bible banning:
Whether the usage is actually misleading depends on how people are likely to perceive it. If the literal meaning is clearly extremely implausible (such as that the liberals would actually criminalize private possession and distribution of Bibles), then people are more likely to recognize the alternative meaning. And this is especially so if the usage is in a medium that’s known for hyperbole (such as political mailers), then I suspect that people will discount it in some measure. This is why, having read both the cover separately and the cover and the insides together, it seems to me that the flyer is likely to be understood as making a plausible allegation — that liberals are seeking to ban the Bible from public schools (at least in most contexts) and from government-run displays — rather than a wildly implausible one (that they’re seeking a total outlawing of the Bible).
A very popular fiction genre in the United States is (what’s a good name?) tribulit. Christian tribulation/persecution fantasy. Unkinder critical terms - raptureporn and such - have been applied. I don’t read the stuff; I’ll bet Volokh doesn’t either. The snippets I’ve seen are stand-out dreadful. But never mind the literary criticism. Jerry Jenkins (of LaHaye and Jenkins Left Behind fame) has a recent novel, Silenced, the plot of which involves - well, I’ll let you read the news today oh, boy: Silenced Times (PDF). [And you really might want to click the Silenced link. It goes to the book site, which is dramatic. Not safe for work if there is any sort of no-cymbals policy in your work place. Or just turn it down. Site needs a fast connection.]
Does the audience for this book realize it is just fantasy? Total fantasy? That worrying about secular, left-wing conspiracies to ban the Bible is like worrying that Kerry is really The Walkin Dude? Matthew Yglesias on the two epistemologies problem: “you talk with rightwingers and you see that you basically share the same vague normative goals, but disagree about what’s happening in the universe.”
When Democrats find it funny to wear Republicans for Voldemort baby-tees, they don’t literally think Republicans are for Voldemort. Maybe Republicans readers of Silenced are also capable of discerning the point where fiction stops and political reality begins - namely, political reality would be the stuff outside of the covers of these sorts of book. (I’m not sure to what extent these books draw theological lines that are implied to be mappable onto partisan lines, left and right, to be honest.) The devil is in the details of the real world reception of this stuff. When I visit the Amazon page for LaHaye and Jenkins The Mark: The Beast Rules the World, the book info appears under a banner ad for the Paris Hilton Collection. That’s sort of funny. Maybe Left Behind literature just expresses allegorically (or however you want to categorize it) revulsion with - alienation from - perceived decadence of American culture.
Speaking of false consciousness studies, Michael Bérubé had a series of pretty interesting posts last week about Thomas Frank’s What’s Wrong With Kansas??
Full disclosure: Mr. Frank himself wrote me a nice little letter to accompany my publisher’s copy—what, you think maybe I buy my books? – in which he said that he knows that it’s not “fashionable” to speak of false consciousness but that someone’s got to point out just how much damage the right has done, or something like that. The proper reply, I think (aside from “hey, thanks for the free book!”), is to point out that “fashion” isn’t the problem here. The reason that lots of cultural-studies people stopped talking about “false consciousness” at some point between Raymond Williams’s 1973 essay “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” and Stuart Hall’s 1986 essays “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity” and “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees” wasn’t that it became “unfashionable.” Rather, it was because it began to look as if, in trying to understand why the dominated classes participated so eagerly in their own domination, left cultural theory was simply inventing the same wheel over and over again, and worse, it was a weird kind of triangular wheel that didn’t actually work on the road.HAVING SAID THAT, though, I should get to the damn point. I don’t think, in the end, that What’s the Matter with Kansas? relies wholeheartedly on a theory of false consciousness. There are moments when it sounds otherwise – say, when Frank speaks of Kansas conservatives as “deranged” (and conservatives in the media were, for some reason, quick to pick up on this) – but I actually don’t mind these moments: it seems pretty clear to me that Frank is addressing this book to other liberals and progressives rather than to the Kansas Cons themselves, and you know what, I too think some of the Kansas Cons’ political senses are just deranged. (Ordinary economic libertarianism combined with cultural conservatism I can understand; people appointing themselves Pope or conducting searches for the bodies of all the people Bill Clinton killed with his own hands I do not understand.)
So yeah, there are times when the book sounds as if it’s always the economy, stupid – as when Frank insists that for the New Right, “cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements – not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars – that are the movement’s greatest monuments” (6). But his own work shows that for many heartland conservatives, it really is about the cultural anger; it’s a cultural anger that is marshaled to cultural ends, and they don’t mind being impoverished by the economic agenda of Bush’s crony klepto-capitalism. On the contrary, for them, their immiseration is but another sign of their Election: they understand that they must live in poverty and tribulation on this earth, because they are serving a higher calling … That isn’t false consciousness, folks. It’s true consciousness – the true consciousness of a theocratic right wing in which people really do think that their “fundamental interests” lie in prosecuting those never-ending culture wars.
Getting back to Volokh’s point: “Whether the usage is actually misleading depends on how people are likely to perceive it.” What do you think?
I admit the joke will be on me if it turns out Kerry is The Walkin Dude, after all. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with Kansas. That’s where the good people went to take refuge from The Walkin Dude, after all. Abigail Freemantle? She was in Kansas, wasn’t she?
Oh, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve been making jokes about Amazon Associates on our other blog. I think you should know: if you buy anything from the Paris Hilton collection through the link above, I get my cut. That’s only fair. This whole secular decadence thing ought to turn a decent profit.
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