Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [6]
The Persecution Formula
The war on Christmas fantasy has three elements that make it effective. First, O’Reilly postulated a slippery slope. Today, it’s holiday trees and municipal parades. Tomorrow, it will be legalized drugs, gay marriage, socialism, sex with fourteen-year-olds, and so on. The slippery slope magnifies small issues. Isolated instances of Christmas-spirit downers would not, on their own, catalyze the kind of passion required to dominate cable news. Mayor Bloomberg’s “holiday tree” reference and the absence of a particular float in a Denver parade didn’t affect many people, and even those affected did not suffer hardship serious enough to merit national news. But legalized drugs, gay marriage, socialism, and the rest affect the entire nation. By arguing that “holiday trees” contributed to such an abhorrent future, O’Reilly astronomically raised the stakes. As he explained, “The struggle today is not about Christmas, but about the spirit of our country.”10
Nonetheless, the slippery slope argument only goes partway. A gradual drift is a tenuous and abstract threat. To make the scenario more frightening, O’Reilly offered a second element: the secret plot. He explained, “But if the secularists can destroy religion in the public arena, the brave new progressive world is a possibility.” The addition of villainous conspirators made the slippery slope seem both plausible and frightening by suggesting that a sinister hand would guide the nation step by step from “holiday trees” to the “brave new progressive world,” reframing innocent “Season’s Greetings” as an ominous scheme by influential enemies. Thus, a seemingly innocuous policy was merely the first slippery step in the bad guys’ “very secret plan.”
The conspiracy would have been menacing enough on its own, but to instill mortal fear, O’Reilly painted the clash as an epic battle between “us” and “them,” where the “us” were the traditional conservatives who made up his audience and the “them” were the radical secular progressives. For starters, he adopted martial vocabulary like “culture war” and “Christmas Under Siege.” But in a move that was both significant and strategic, O’Reilly also appropriated the language of the civil rights movement to present Christians as a persecuted demographic. He told listeners:
I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday and the celebration. I am not going to let it happen. I’m gonna use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that . . . And anyone who tries to stop us from doing it is gonna face me.11
Meet Bill O’Reilly, fearless champion of the diminished, the denigrated, and the uncelebrated.
O’Reilly’s language of persecution turned the conspiracy-driven slippery slope into a pitched battle between traditional Christians fighting for the survival of their religion and secular progressives seeking to destroy it. In game theory, such a conflict is called a zero-sum game, which means that one side’s gain is the other side’s loss. In O’Reilly’s game, every victory by the evil secular progressives erodes the fundamental rights of the righteous Christians whom they despise. Every “Season’s Greetings” becomes a form of discrimination that must be fiercely opposed by people of conscience, people