StickWithANose

As the casing is slipped around the political sausage of Health Care Reform emerging from the grinder that is our House of Lords esteemed Senate, it is important to take note of the profound emptiness of the political concepts that dominate popular discourse. This first decade of the 21st century has provided us with ample opportunities to see that concepts such as ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are empty vessels whose primary function is to hide the fact that the terms themselves are essentially meaningless. Some of the founding principles of American conservatism involved limited government, balanced budgets and an aversion to the dreaded “nation-building.” However, throughout Bush’s disastrous term in office, the conservative faithful dutifully defended Jr.’s massive expansion of government surveillance, un-constitutional power grab for the executive branch, trashing of the federal budget with un-funded wars and tax cuts to the wealthy totaling over $2 trillion, and not one but two nation-building projects that he screwed up at every turn.

Likewise, Obama’s first year has witnessed a sad continuation of many of the most egregious Bush policies, and [predictably] there are those defending Obama in the name of defending the “progressive” movement despite the fact that he has rejected “progressive” policies at every turn. With this in mind, I encourage you to read Glennzilla’s post on Obama defenders in which I think that he gets to the heart of the problem. It is not policies or ideologies at play in contemporary politics but branding. It is a kind of political branding that ties the Dear Leader [whoever it may be] to one’s cultural identity and belief system… To link the Dear Leader with an ambiguous “us” locked in a mortal battle against an equally ambiguous “them”… We live in the era of Affective Politics:

Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar in kind to those whose reaction to Obama is dominated by their view of him as an inspiring, kind, sophisticated, soothing and mature intellectual.  These are personality types bolstered with sophisticated marketing techniques, not policies, governing approaches or ideologies.  But for those looking for some emotional attachment to a leader, rather than policies they believe are right, personality attachments are far more important.  They’re also far more potent.  Loyalty grounded in admiration for character will inspire support regardless of policy, and will produce and sustain the fantasy that this is not a mere politician, but a person of deep importance to one’s life who — like a loved one or close friend or religious leader — must be protected and defended at all costs.