ENGL/COMM/WRDS: The Rhetoric of Fear » April 11th: McCarthyism Part 1

April 11th: McCarthyism Part 1

Plan for the Day

Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956

Don Siegel, who directed Dirty Harry, turns a pseudo-B film into an A film.

Siegel’s film surfaces the fear of loss of identity and then locates the threat to that identity, not in some stock Martian menace, but in our own souls.

Kevin Jack Hagopian

I wanted to repeat this from last week because it’s important to recognize one of the critiques of McCarthyism is that it reflects the internal fears of Americans. McCarthy gets (and deserves) plenty of blame, but he was tolerated by his Party and, as shown by his funeral, loved be many constituents. This is an example of the give-and-take between a politician and the masses: they may lead, but we allow them to lead.

Psychoanalysis

We briefly touched on this last week, and I wanted to make sure you understood why it’s important. We’d need a few semesters to just get through Freud completely, so this isn’t a definitive discussion. However, there is a Freudo-Marxist critique that materializes (no pun intended) through members of the Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) and those adjacent or following that attempts to reconcile Marx’s focus on class struggle with the internal psychological struggles of the masses fighting repression. You might have encountered discussion of Freud where one’s desires are in conflict with assumed moral behavior, and these discussion often jump to the conclusion that EVERYTHING is sexual repression and fear of castration. Or, as Freud famously describe in his 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams, all dreams have definitive real world references.

Psychoanalysis, like Marxism, has undergone revisions, so, to attack Karl Marx or Marxist-Leninism or Stalinism to stand in for the entirety of (neo-)Marxist critique is shortsighted. It would be like attacking Darwin’s late-19th century beliefs to refute the past 150 years of evolutionary science…who would attempt such a fallacious approach?

Three Important Terms to Consider

  • Id: the unconscious, unorganized part of one’s personality; often accessible through dreams.*
  • Ego: (overly simplified definition) the conscious part of one’s personality. From Freud: “The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions” (p. 25).
  • Super-ego: the mainly conscious conscience of one’s personality that embodies ideals, goals, and confidence; it also prohibits drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions; is an internalization of culture and cultural norms.

The above three Freudian terms have a rather complex relationship to one another and their supposed development is also quite difficult to describe. However, for our purposes, what do the three suggest about a person’s relationship to others? What is the cultural significance of these personality components? What do they have to offer for analysis on fear appeals?

The “Freud on Seuss” video is a good gateway to psychoanalysis.

Terms for Discussion (probably beyond our scope)

  • Compensation: taking up one behavior [may be embodied in an object] because one cannot accomplish another behavior [often a behavior considered normal].
  • Confabulation: in psychology it means to replace fact with fantasy unconsciously in memory.
  • Displacement: An unconscious defense mechanism, whereby the mind redirects emotion from a ‘dangerous’ object to a ‘safe’ object. In psychoanalytic theory, displacement is a defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion (or, perhaps, action) to a safer outlet.
  • Identification: the act of seeing oneself as similar to or (rarely) identical to another person or object. Often the process of identification completes a subject as when one sees himself or herself represented in another figure (a parent, friend, celebrity, avatar, etc.).
  • Manque à être: (via Lacanian psychoanalytic theory) literally, “the want to be”; we’re born into the experience of lack, and our history consists of a series of attempts to figure and overcome this lack, a project doomed to failure” (Lapsley and Westlake 67).
  • Scopophilia: “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey, 1975, II. A. para. 1; p. 8). Similar to voyeurism.
  • Transference: unconscious redirection of feelings for one person to another.

If there’s a lull in the conversation, we can return to Laura Mulvey. (from Video Games and American Culture)

Neo-Marxism & Lacanian Psychoanalysis

I think these critical theorists and psychoanalysts still have something to tell us and offer us tools for analyzing mass motivations that cannot be empirically enumerated. Remember, the so-called American psyche has a right to its own truth and can’t be bothered with the facts, and, as Asimov explains, rejecting expert opinion is important to this group. The anxieties of a group appear in the discourse and what’s between the lines of their discourse: it’s not just what’s said but how, when, where, and to whom it’s said that matters. A linguist will interpret (via discourse analysis) interactions between speakers and audiences in usually close observations. This method can be traced to Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on semiotics. Although there is much overlap between the science of linguistics and rhetorical theory, a major difference is that rhetoric has traditionally been concerned with public address. One can do a discourse analysis of a politician (c.f. the PBS McCarthy documentary on McCarthy’s demeanor during the Army-McCarthy hearings) and will probably be able to identify rhetorical moves, especially because there is no communication situation devoid of rhetoric. A rhetorical analysis of a politician or public address (written or spoken) seeks to identify that attempt(s) at persuasion and the way a speaker/text conveys meaning–often contested–and seeks to identify the probable meaning(s) and influence(s) on an audience. Both rhetoric and linguistics will be concerned with the cultural construction of meaning.

Rise of Right-Wing Anxiety

Since the rise of MAGA-Trumpism, Lacanian psychoanalysis has been employed to understand both Trump and his followers. Something about Trump’s style and content speaks to this group. One theory is that this group feels incomplete and is desperate for a fantasy that completes them. Claudia Leeb’s “Mystified Consciousness: Rethinking the Rise of the Far Right with Marx and Lacan” analyzes this through a Marxist-Lacanian lens, and a synopsis of her article (article cited below) claims,

“White, male working-class Americans…embrace the ideology of the far right to fulfil the unconscious yearning to be whole again. This ideology provides them with fantasies that compensate for feeling non-whole or inadequate, such as achieving the American Dream of economic success, finding fulfillment in an afterlife through religion, hatred of ethnic minorities and disdain for women.”

“Understanding the current rise of the far right using Marx and Lacan”

Recently, losing UFC fighter Jorge Masvidal praised Donald Trump after his fight (4/08/2023). Trump and DeSantis were in attendance at UFC 287 in Miami. UFC and MMA, in general, are hugely popular sports along with the NFL. What comment can be made about the praise in relation to the material from this class?

  • Trumpism and the deflection of criticism
  • Ron DeSantis as Top Gov
  • An anti-racist film set in Florida about banning Shakespeare

Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”

This is THE text people read, point to, write against when addressing conspiracy theories and demagoguery in American politics. We should discuss the context of the article–Cold War, post-McCarthyism, post-JFK assassination–but it still speaks to the American psyche in ways similar to Asimov. In fact, the year before this article came out, Hofstadter published the Pulitzer Prize winning book Anti-intellectualism in American Life.

  • p. 77: “It is the use of the paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
  • “Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric.”
    • {Truth isn’t relevant to these believers}
  • p. 78: Past conspiracies “of international bankers [and] in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I…”
  • p. 79: “It attracted the support of several reputable statesmen who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it.”
    • Doesn’t sound familiar…glad that doesn’t happen anymore.
  • “Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.”
  • pp. 79-80: “The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal.”
    • Think of this as some people hold their nose and vote…
  • p. 80: “…the Christian millennium might come in the American states.”
    • projected fantasies
  • p. 81: “…the modern right wing…feels dispossessed: America has largely been taken away from them and their kind…”
    • “The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers…”
    • “Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence…many point of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.”
  • p. 82: “…Communist agents…the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.”
    • “The paranoid…traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.”
    • Apocalyptic terms.
    • “…what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil.”
  • p. 85: “The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal…”
    • “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts a projection of the self…”
  • p. 86: “The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.”
    • “…the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.”
    • “Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests…not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.”
      • “A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen.”

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. Freud, The Ego and the Id. 1923.

Lapsley, Robert and Westlake, Michael. Film Theory: An Introduction. 2nd Ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006 (1st edition published in 1998).

Leeb, Claudia. “Mystified Consciousness: Rethinking the Rise of the Far Right with Marx and Lacan.” Open Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2018, pp. 236-248. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2018-0022

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16.3 (1975): 6-18.

“https://www.cc.com/video/p4wwfh/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-summer”