Frank Luntz is the master message-smith whose advice to Republicans has largely shaped their anti-health care reform messaging. I'm working on a post about him right now, another installment in my series on propaganda and how Republicans have been using it effectively to kneecap healthcare reform and other issues of national interest.

Katie Couric interviewed him recently. Luntz is a smart man. I don't like his ideologically inspired work, but I admit he makes some good observations about American attitudes right now. There is also much he says that is poorly qualified and ideologically slanted. Time allowing, I'll comment on some segments of that interview later.

"Oh, Look, Ma - They're Angry!"

There is much there that is discussion-worthy. Nevertheless, I found this bit particularly disingenuous: he goes on about how people are angry and expressed that anger at town hall meetings this summer - as if the messaging that he himself created had no relationship to that outworking. This summer's town hall protests were fueled, first and foremost, by Republican propaganda and overt disinformation, much of which was authored by Luntz or riffed directly off his messaging work as a political consultant.

Emphasizing this, as if it were a phenomenon that sprang organically from populist anger, he says his "focus groups are getting louder. They're already angry when they walk in there."

Of course they are. They've been fed a diet of lies and had their emotions stoked by Frank himself, and the GOP leadership which has taken their talking points word for word from his playbook. One cannot then point to the fruit of the tree one poisoned and say, all innocent-like, "Oh look! That's poisonous fruit!"

For Luntz to remark that "the public is angry" is like an aggressive parent who says to their picked-on-yet-indecisive 8-year-old, "You're not gonna take that lying down, are you? You're gonna stand up for yourself and fight, right? You oughta punch the punk." And then in the meeting with the principal that follows that acting out, says, "Well, he was pretty angry, you know..."

Gee. Wonder why.

People en mass can be goaded to act out in exactly that manner. Given "permission" by authority figures or authoritative organizations, they check their otherwise sound judgment at the door and indulge in the sanctioned liberty to go ballistic. Shout others down, physically intimidate people, phone in anonymous death threats: joy! We have a rationale that justifies it, and even official guidelines about how to disrupt town hall meetings. Let's run with this before someone notices we're having tantrums and being bullies...

Politics as second-grade recess playground. It's not much of a stretch, as analogies go.

Blind, or Conniving?

Luntz strikes me as a smart man, certainly an observant one curious and attentive to the world around him. Does he really not get the connection between his work on messaging, and the acting out of those messages in the public forum? Perhaps not. People very engaged with their work and ideologically oriented often have notable blind spots about actions and consequences. I'd like to think that's so in Luntz's case, because otherwise he is a totally dissembling S.O.B. who is beyond cynical about the social effects of his propaganda work.

Luntz seems to have some measure of clue, so I'd like to think there's an ethical person in there as well. I'm hoping his blindspots are simply that, not dissemblance.

More on Luntz and his messaging efforts in part 3 of my Propaganda series, which I should have online this week[1].

The earlier installments are:
1. How Angry Citizens Become Tools of Republican Propaganda - Part I
2. The 4 Reactions Health Care Propaganda Relies On

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1. For those keeping track of such things, I have two pithy series underway right now. One is on propaganda, the other is on authoritarianism. From here on out my goal is to post on each theme in alternating weeks. This week I'm due for part 3 in the Propaganda series, regarding messaging. Next week, look for part 3 on the Authoritarian personality.

NY bomb plot suspect Najibullah Zazi


Since World War II we have routinely shared intelligence with the British, even co-locating our efforts in some intelligence facilities.  U.K. intelligence recently alerted US authorities to a terrorist bomb attack plot, which the Telegraph announced was stymied.  Good. Intelligence works as it's supposed to, and bad guys are caught.

But here's the troubling comment in that report:

"The British discovery also came at just the right time - the US had threatened to sever intelligence links over the release of Lockerbie bomber Al Megrahi."

We did what? Because we are officially miffed at the Lockerbie business, we are willing to cut off our noses to spite our faces in regards to cooperative terrorism intel work with the British?!?

As it frequently does, the Telegraph fails to cite sources or authorities for inflammatory facts alleged, so I want to take that statement with a grain of salt. But if the allegation is true, I am outraged.  I understand the game of political brinksmanship and threatening actions that will never really take place in order to make a point or coerce an uncooperative partner.  But sometimes threatened actions take on a life of their own.  That's a foolhardy place to go if you can't afford to pay the full price of engagement.

We have no business even thinking about playing this game of chicken with our US/UK shared intelligence. There is too much at stake on many levels, not only the obvious hot spot of terrorism, but especially in that regard given our present need for hypervigilance in the matter.

This is not a time or appropriate manner to threaten to take our marbles and go home.  In spite of ourselves, the Brits saved our butt on this one.

Now, who was that American bonehead who came up with the threat to "sever intelligence links" as part of our official hissy fit over Lockerbie?  He or she needs some basic instruction in Appropriate Leverage 101. And a spanking.

Not necessarily in that order.

On Friday I wrote a piece about the Ft. Hood shootings. In it I discussed how we have not in fact lost lives to Islamic terrorists since 9/11 (not on American soil, at least), but we have, sadly, lost large numbers of people to mass killings and shootings carried out by an assortment of psychopaths, sociopaths, and otherwise unbalanced persons since that date, none of whom were motivated by religious extremism.

One of those instances I mentioned was that of the notorious Beltway killers, also called the "D.C. Sniper", a pair who killed 10 people and terrorized many more with their random, stealthy shootings. In a footnote to that post, I see a news report this evening that the mastermind of that duo, John Allen Muhammad, is slated to die by lethal injection tomorrow night, Tuesday November 10. It is unlikely he'll receive any reprieve.

In contrast to so many death row sentences, he is not spending decades awaiting execution, but is being pushed relatively swiftly through our ponderous legal system. (He and his sidekick Lee Boyd Malvo were arrested in 2002).

Wheels grind slowly but exceeding fine, and all that.

HIV virions budding from cultured lymphocyte cell

What is an HIV virus that doesn't cause HIV?

It might be the key to medical cures based on genetics.

Since we've decoded the human genome, a tantalizing prospect has loomed before researchers and the medical community: gene therapy. If we can understand what genes cause an illness or defect, and if we can repair or replace them with a more desirable alternative, then we can correct problems at a cellular level. Gene therapy is non-invasive. The body fundamentally reforms itself, and new cells that grow after treatment follow the new, improved blueprint in the altered DNA.

We grow new cells all the time, not only when we're healing from an injury. For instance, our constantly regenerating skin gives us entirely new palms every 24 to 48 hours. In fact, our entire bodies rebuild themselves about every 7 years. Why not take advantage of this constant growth and replacement cycle to literally build "a new you", free of whatever was ailing you?

Scientists have been thinking about this for quite a while.

Two Gene Therapy Obstacles

This approach to medicine and genetics faces two major challenges. One is our as-yet limited knowledge about which particular genes are responsible for a given set of traits, symptoms and syndromes we have identified. Simply mapping the human genome is not enough: this gives us a map, yes, but as they say, the map is not the terrain. Does this bit of genetic code here affect your reaction to stress, or does it control your affinity for alcohol? Deciphering these linkages is an ongoing process. We're making progress, but so far have only scratched the surface.

The other major hurdle is how to alter genes once we know what section of code is relevant to a problem.  DNA can be segmented - removing a related chunk of code, like pulling a clause out of a sentence - and a new segment spliced in its place.  This process involves specialized enzymes and careful gene mapping to identify the segments being tweaked, and lends itself best to laboratory manipulation.

Yet DNA can be changed in another way, as well: it can be rewritten in place in a human body, physically altered in situ. If we can rewrite the genetic code in place, nothing needs to be removed and reinserted.  Ideally, once initiated, DNA alteration would continue automatically within the subject's own body.  But this neat solution is significantly more challenging. How do we work on the submicronic level to rewrite a body's genetic code?

HIV to the Rescue

The answer, surprisingly, may be HIV. Viruses survive by attaching themselves to host cells and rewriting segments of DNA to replicate themselves. HIV is so pernicious in part because it infiltrates the body so thoroughly and does such an aggressive job of reprogramming the host's genetic code and replicating itself.  Unlike most viruses it can even penetrate stem cells, to reformulate the code of the basic building blocks of the human body.

Now, in a ground-breaking therapy, a team if French scientists have stripped the HIV virus of its deadly components and used it as the vehicle to carry tailored genetic code into two host bodies.

Read more »

It is still too early to know many firm details about Army Major Nidal Hasan's attack on fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood yesterday. It is not too early, though, for anti-Muslim sentiments to be stirred up.

This singular attack has become a Rorschach test of projected motives and fears of domestic terrorism. The Arab American Institute, an advocacy organization for the Arab American community, is bracing for backlash with their carefully worded homepage message today[1], which emphasizes that thousands of Arab and Muslim Americans serve in the military and have put their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vitriolic spew in countless internet comments and blog posts demonstrate that they are right to be concerned. Such reminders as the AAI offers will probably go unheeded by fearful, xenophobic Americans looking for a dog to kick.

We have been reaping this bitter harvest most notably since 9/11: persons with Arabic-sounding surnames are pulled aside in disproportionate numbers for security checks in airports, and profiled in other ways by law enforcement agencies. Arab Americans report a higher incidence of harassment and assault because of their ethnicity since that date. These hate crimes occur even if the person is not Muslim. In fact, only 24% of Arab Americans are Muslim; the vast majority are Christian, but this non-evident fact does not trump the obvious ethnicity of a foreign-sounding name or cast of features. That is sufficient to make this population of over 3.5 million Americans into a target for persons who think terrorism can be predicted on the basis of a person's appearance or ethnicity.

Real Threat Levels?

Some fear-stricken people and bigots have claimed it is "more likely" we will suffer attack by people who are from the Middle East, since we are at war over there and that is the home of the 9/11 terrorists. Yet in the violent attacks and mass shootings that have occured here since 9/11, none have been acts of terrorism in the sense of "kill random Americans and create fear to send a message in support of a cause."

We've had various unbalanced shooters attack students in such places as Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech, two African American snipers on a killing spree taking advantage of post-9/11 tension to terrorize people, although they were sociopathic killers not literal terrorists. A quick google scan shows too many mass attacks to list here. We have no lack of tragic killing sprees in this country.

Read more »

How is it that Bush and Cheney could take us to war in Iraq with constantly shifting rationales, unleash the NSA to spy on the country at large, and with the aid of foot soldiers like John Yoo cobble together shoddy legal findings as flimsy justification for torture and other abuses of executive power?  How is it that partisanship has grown so bitter that the wheels of Congress threaten to seize?  Why does one side in our always-contentious political landscape feel today so strongly that they have lost "their" country and must take it back from those liberals who are not "real Americans?"

There is a common element running through these and other scenarios. It is the factor of authoritarianism: a personality construct and set of behaviors certain people exhibit and are drawn to. Authoritarian followers march behind their leaders blindly and loyally, ready to unleash aggression upon any that question those leaders. Authoritarian leaders believe the ends justify the means, and blithely embrace manipulation, aggression, deceit, and force to get what they want at any cost.

This goes beyond any mere political difference between liberals and conservatives. Social science scales which test for personality traits have found that approximately 25% of the general population is wired this way.[1] Not surprisingly, authoritarians like order and tradition, and traditional authority. They gravitate to patriarchal forms of allegiance. Authoritarianism may manifest differently in differing political systems (such as in China), but in the U.S., authoritarians are typically drawn to conservative party politics.

Fundamentalist Christians and the evangelical right were drafted wholesale into Republican politics to get Ronald Reagan elected in the 1980s. That infusion of Christian conservatives was revitalized under born-again Bush II. Since then, this set of traits has become even more prominent and entrenched in the American right wing. This broad authoritarian streak accounts for why the GOP and its close media affiliates like conservative talk radio have become so rigid in their orientation that the Republican party has shed moderate conservatives in droves over the last decade.

Authoritarian abhorrence of compromise and the tactics they use to gain control at any cost are at their heart anti-democratic. The more powerful this element becomes in politics, the more damage is done to our democracy. That is my concern in exploring this aspect of contemporary politics. To frame that discussion,  I'll be looking at the authoritarian personality, then at how these individuals and groups behave, then their political/religious affiliations, and finally at specific authoritarian actions that are subverting constitutional principles in the service of their bid for power.

Next in series: Pt 3, The Authoritarian Personality

Part 1 of series: Authoritarians and Conservative Politics

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1. See subsequent posts for discussion of this data, related factual claims,  and links to source material.

Part 2 of a Series: How Angry Citizens Become Tools of Republican Propaganda.  (See Part 1 here.)

Angry Health Care Town Hall Aug 2009

The national health care debate is a great example of propaganda influencing how people think about an issue. How is it that so many people can have their passions whipped into a frenzy about something, and not realize that they have been intentionally led into that state of being?

To understand such broad-scale manipulation of feelings and opinion, we have to first understand how we interact with information presented to us. This harkens back to Walter Lippmann's quote in my last post: that we react not to the world around us, but to a representation of the world. To pictures, in Lippmann-speak. The way we imagine the world based on those pictures determines how we will react to it.

We react to the world as we perceive it through our senses, out of which we form our impressions and thoughts: our mental picture of what we are dealing with. And we react not merely to the stimulus as such, but to what it evokes within us, and the pictures we associate with that. Who has not felt an upwelling of emotion when a song played, and reminded them of a certain someone? Or been disturbed - pausing, tensely alert - when hearing an unexpected noise outside? We feel things before we respond to them rationally, whether that feeling is simply registering a sensation, or a full-blown emotion.

What comes in to the space between our ears - whatever path it takes to get there - affects us in many ways. It is often unnoticed, because this manner of intake is pretty much the only way we humans can interface with the world around us. We are like fish who do not notice the water we swim in. So pervasive is this sea of input that we become oblivious to just how much we take in every day and how it affects us and our moods, thoughts, and mental state. We are generally blind to the nuances of that input unless we are paying special attention to it at a given moment.

So where does that leave us as social, political animals? It leaves us subject to the emotional resonance of what we take in in our world of affairs. How things come to us, how they are presented, has a profound impact on our perceptions and thoughts. That impact can evoke powerful emotions or subtle associations that color our thinking. We are thinking creatures, but we are also feeling creatures. Not surprisingly, emotions usually underlie whatever rational conclusions we come to.

Our Enlightenment Heritage

The Thinker, by Rodin (Nicolas Perez, Wikimedia Commons)

Rational thought has been an ideal for the mature American adult in public discourse since the Enlightenment Age era of our Founding Fathers. The ideal for the rational thinker is to ask the right questions about a topic, research it with facts from sources as unbiased as possible, then on the basis of that information (and, if appropriate, some ethical or moral values as underpinning), form an opinion that is supported by the facts as we know them.

In perverse reality, people almost always feel an emotional reaction to a subject first, then cobble together a rationale that justifies that feeling. That is, they do the Rational Thinker process in reverse: first the emotion-based opinion, then reasoning backwards to a premise and cherry-picked facts that can plausibly support that stance.

This is a very human response and a very common one - but it is intellectually sloppy. It results in muddy thinking about issues on the basis of partial knowledge and misinformation presented (or invented) by whatever sources bolster the emotion-based stance. This is the perfect recipe for flawed conclusions stemming from faulty logic and missing facts.

Such a result is ideal for ideologues and partisans who want to "activate the base." But it is a disaster for reality-based policy work and anyone who hopes to evolve real solutions to problems that confront our nation.

The Emotional Process Propaganda Relies On

People who want to sway how others think, and propagandists in particular (who do this with a vengeance), intentionally exploit our emotional reactions. They count on the fact that when an emotional resonance has been hooked, at least four critical things happen[1]:

• We will probably not notice this with our conscious, logical (critical) mind. People are more inclined to react first, and think later.
• We go by default into a reaction mode that, properly prodded, lets one emotion cascade into another: a worrisome assertion evokes fear which stirs anger or outrage. Once we are in the grip of this cycle, our critical brain effectively checks out of the argument.
• If we have been whipped up enough emotionally, we will want to relieve our emotional tension by taking physical action. Propagandists know how to direct that urgency for action into channels beneficial for the propagandists' purpose.
• We will rationalize how we feel. In a process called "motivated reasoning," we will pick and chose factoids from what we know that support how we feel, and ignore evidence to the contrary or rationalize its significance away.

The process of hooking an emotional reaction can be very subtle. Indeed, in the beginning it generally must be subtle, because we are not yet emotionally reactive, and many (though not all) of us will logically question overtly outrageous claims or exhortations. But subtle opening volleys can easily get in under our radar even if we are on guard against this sort of thing. A simple example is how we respond to survey questions, which, not coincidentally, can also be used to influence how people think about a topic (see discussion of "push polls" here.[2])

A Single Word Can Influence Our Reaction

Pollsters and social scientists know that how a question is worded has a huge impact on how it is answered. Ethical pollsters take great pains to ask neutral questions. Changing just one word or phrase in a question can yield substantially different results in the responses to it. For instance, asking "Do you favor or oppose the war in Iraq?" gets one set of responses; asking "Do you favor or oppose the war in Iraq as a means of fighting terrorism?" garners another.  Terrorism evokes emotional reactions, and when the war is framed that way, more respondents say they favor the war.

Obviously, then, questions and statements that resonate with emotional responses can be used to bypass our more critical thought processes. This is not to say people don't weigh a question in their minds. It is to say that what they weigh and how they assess it can be influenced by how the subject is presented. Ask someone to comment on a skewed picture of a fact, and they will focus on the skewed picture, not the underlying fact (and probably not even notice the skew, depending on their personal biases.)

In this way, discussions are subtly (and not so subtly) controlled by the person who establishes the framing: that is, how an issue is defined, how it is presented, and what words (hence, emotional reactions) describe it.

In part 3 of this series, I'll look at the work of Frank Luntz, and how his strategy memo created for Republicans framed the language - and, intentionally, the emotional reactions - which define our present discussion of health care reform.

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NOTES

1. See generally Propaganda and Persuasion (Jowett and O'Donnell 1999) and Age of Propaganda: the everyday use and abuse of persuasion (Pratkanis and Aronson 2001) in Sources.

2. For a recent and very overt example of a push poll question (one intended to lead public thought in a certain direction), the Republican National Committee has provided us with this example from their fundraising survey distributed earlier this year. Although masquerading as a legitimate survey, and producing results that might (and probably will) be quoted as poll results, this instrument is actually what is called an "involvement device." (See comments here for discussion.)  Its purpose is to engage readers' concerns enough that they are roused to action (see bullet points above about creating a need for action) and contribute to the cause, in this case the RNC. Most of the questions in the survey are slanted, but this is the most outrageous:

"It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you?"

(The complete survey is here.)

This particular piece of chicanery was so egregious that when questioned, the RNC felt it necessary to actually apologize for it, calling it "inartfully worded." One wonders what the artful way is to word such questions as that.

SOURCES

Bardes, Barbara A., Mack C. Shelley, and Steffen W. Schmidt. "American Government and Politics Today 2008: The Essentials." Google Books, 2008.

Begley, Sharon. "Lies of Mass Destruction: Why We Believe Lies, Even When We Learn the Truth." Newsweek, August 25, 2009.

Cawiser, Sheldon R., and G. Evans Witt. "20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results." National Council on Public Polls, 2009.

Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O'Donnell. "Propaganda and Persuasion."  Google Books, 1999. 

Pratkanis, Anthony, and Eliot Aronson. "Age of Propaganda: the everyday use and abuse of persuasion."  Google Books, 2001.

Weigel, David. "RNC: Our Survey Was 'Inartfully Worded'." The Washington Independent, August 27, 2009. 

------. "RNC's Health Care Survey." The Washington Independent, August 27, 2009.

An acquaintance of mine - let's call her Lisa - went to two town halls this summer along with friends to protest "Obamacare."  Lisa, a Republican, sought out the town halls of Democrat representatives not in her home district, but nearby so she could protest "socialism" where she felt it was being promoted: by Democrats, in Democratic districts, under the guise of health care reform.

She was not a constituent. She did not go to have a dialog. She went to shout her anger and "be heard."

When it was suggested that she and the other angry citizens who disrupted these events were part of something orchestrated by the insurance lobby, she became irate. "No insurance company told me to go do that," she declared. "It was my idea, and my friends'. We want to fight this thing."

I understand why Lisa thought she was acting as an independent Angry Citizen.  But frankly, the depth of ignorance in her perceptions and assertions is absolutely breathtaking. Worse, it is shared by the fractious herds of like-minded Angry Citizens who shouted such profundities in August as, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"  - a pugnacious defense and endorsement of their beloved government-run socialist health care program, and the very same sort of thing they had come to protest against.

The cognitive dissonance in such scenarios is enough to make a thinking person's brain explode.  To spare myself just such an experience, my chosen remedy is to blog a bit about this phenomenon now. (I was too busy defending myself from imminent brain melt-down during August to muster anything cogent on the topic.)

Played Like a Cheap Fiddle

Now, at the remove of September, I think it is time to prod a bit at the citizenry's muddy thinking and unfettered emotionalism that enabled lobbyists and GOP leaders to play them like a cheap fiddle.  There are two groups that together created the August hysteria that largely shut down any real policy debate or discussion of real issues about health care.

One is the mass of individuals who tossed their brains out the window and ran on poorly rationalized ("justified") anger, swallowing lies whole and letting falsehoods become their basis for decisions and action.

The second, and more despicable, is the coolly calculating horde of propagandists and politicos of various stripes who planned and followed a strategy to mislead, stir up emotion on that basis, and point the impassioned result at the goal of derailing healthcare reform.  This is the group that is really to blame for fomenting and directing the angry herd response that resulted in town hall meetings so raucous that dialog was shouted down, congresspersons received death threats, and many meetings were canceled.

Fears, Exploited

Together, these instances perfectly illustrate how those in power manipulate security concerns to generate fear and its close cousin anger.  The end result is the expansion, consolidation, and reinforcement of power, and in this case the defense of their status quo.  It is a pattern that repeats again and again in American politics: conservative politics, at least, seems stuck in a chorus line singing "be afraid!," and has been for most of a century, now. (Indeed, the perverse longevity of this "approach" to politics and policy is one reason for my continuing fascination with the intersection between security, fear, and power.  I continue to be boggled by how few question the dynamic at all.)

So. Now that I have framed my interest in this issue, and made some claims about people being tools, I'll start getting into the whys and hows of that in my next post in this series.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with this thought from Walter Lippmann, a well-known columnist, reporter and writer from the 1920s and '30s, whose masterpiece Public Opinion dissected some of the dynamics of propaganda and politics well enough to inspire generations of Madison Avenue ad men and ambitious politicians.

"[W]hat each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him....The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do...[W]hat is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?"

- Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922)

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This post originally appeared at Cogitations | Examining the Nexus Between Security, Fear and Power.