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February 04, 2005
All joking aside...
...and we don't yet know the effects of our blithe assumption that people like kilroy are 'merely' a joke.
You want to reach out to a large group of people you suspect exists, but the only way to realise them as a coherent group would be by appealing to instincts whose existence the PR-machinery that cloaks politics will not acknowledge, cannot acknowledge. This is one of the the dubitable benefits of liberalism, of course: there are certain things you just cannot say.
So how do you go about it? You can learn a lot from T.Blair here. "Make a mistake". Say something you shouldn't say, the resulting "controversy" is bound to be mired in "opinion", "debate" and the rest of the media machinery. What happens to the person who "made the mistake" doesn't even matter, what matters is that the object has been achieved, the latent grouping has been galvanized, it now knows that it exists, and knows that certain people in power know that it exists. Now, leave a trail...launder the "mistake" with apologies, or by passing the baton publicly from the original agent to another party.
Everyone knows what's going on. A conspiracy that can't be proven, a plan that hangs on apparently accidental or misinterpreted words publicly spoken. A clandestine teledoxy, comprehensively deniable, using open public channels of communication to organise around 'unacceptable' causes...Just a word that slips out, an appearance with the wrong people, a series of little mistakes. They know, of course, that the problem with liberalism is that the worst it can do is to disapprove, and it does that very loudly, alerting everyone who needs to know. The liberal audience is all-too-happy to accept the apology, because they know it couldn't possibly be true, no-one really thinks like a fascist, that was all a long time ago. But the other audience, the silent minority (or majority?) knows different.
And these people have their eyes open, they don't miss the signs, in fact they've been waiting for them, so it's no joke.
"But what if they won't go? What then?"
Posted by robin at February 4, 2005 01:24 PM