Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [99]
In other words, Glenn Beck’s stories are the perfect vehicles for delivering the persecution politics fix. Beck makes sense of mysterious events by framing them with riveting melodramas of villainous intrigue. Those melodramas are particularly compelling to people who harbor feelings of intolerance: the portrayal of minorities and “elites” as storybook villains alleviates their cognitive dissonance by rationalizing their intolerance.
Metanarratives and the Persecution Frame
There’s still one piece missing from this picture, however. Clinical psychologists tend to approach mass paranoia as a collection of individual neuroses. Thus, psychologist Michael Bader discusses Tea Party activists as if they were his patients, each struggling with his or her own paranoid fantasy. But as we discussed early in the book, the paranoid style is not a disease of the mind, it’s a disease of society. Beck’s stories are not the individual fantasies of millions of Don Quixotes whacking away at their own private windmills. Rather, his stories collectively make up a single epic saga shared by many of his admirers. Beck’s Don Quixotes don’t see themselves as solitary knights on their own quests. They are an army of Don Quixotes who have joined forces to battle the Great Progressive Windmill Menace.
Furthermore, we’ve seen that what Beck calls the progressive movement is just another name for the fictional conspiracy of minorities and liberal elites that has haunted right-wing persecution tales for decades. The Don Quixotes crusading against secular humanists, militant homosexuals, black radicals, illegal immigrants, and secular progressives have been fighting variants of the same great imaginary Culture War since the 1970s.
In other words, persecution politics is more than a collection of appealing stories told by various raconteurs. Such stories are simply episodes in a single communal narrative that has been seducing Americans for years. This narrative provides conservatives a persecution frame rich enough to make sense of almost any significant social phenomenon or political issue in the country—from gay marriage to health care policy to the secularization of Christmas. When Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly present political events as steps on a slippery slope concocted by malicious conspirators, they don’t arbitrarily choose any old conspiracy theory to frame these events. They present them in the context of the epic battle between liberal conspirators and their white, Christian conservative victims.
Postmodernist social theorists call such grand explanatory stories metanarratives. A metanarrative is essentially a big myth that binds a community’s values and stories into a meaningful whole. Just as an individual might make sense of his or her own life by creating a personal story, metanarratives make sense of life, the universe, and everything by turning a whole society’s culture and history into a communal story. For instance, medieval Europeans made sense of their world using the metanarrative of Christian theology, which relates an epic conflict between good and evil, God and Satan. Later, Enlightenment thinkers sought to replace the religious story with a new metanarrative that pitted science and reason against ignorance and irrationality.cj
During the Cold War, the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union provided a popular American metanarrative. There were good guys—the freedom loving, God fearing capitalists of the USofA—and bad guys—the despotic atheist communists of the Evil Empire. Every political event, from antiwar protests to the United Nations to national health care, could be understood within the frame of this epic conflict. Even seemingly unrelated events were often subsumed under it. Thus, Jerry Falwell saw the “hand of Moscow” in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.
While the Cold War raged, another metanarrative began