Happy Monday!! As with every Monday, today’s post was written by Stephen Hall. Thank you Stephen, as always.
Just a thought this day in celebration of the wonderful world of villains. Too often villains are only mentioned alongside heroes, but they deserve a column all of their own without having to share the limelight.
Why? Because without heroes, there really are no villains. That is not to say that there are not people who do bad things, but that people who do bad things in the absence of meaningful opposition are not villains, they are just bad people.
Villain: 1 : a character in a story or play who opposes the hero; 2 : a deliberate scoundrel or criminal.
And those definitions are precisely the point, that a villain is a deliberate character, a fictional creation of a story, not merely a someone who is evil and harms people. A hero may overcome many travails, challenges, and opponents, but a hero does not necessarily need a villain to oppose; a villain may only exist in opposition to a hero.
With that in mind, let us peruse the typical political villains held out solely to manipulate the low information voters of America. The political villain is a caricature of the opponent, a cartoonish exaggeration of often irrational and untrue political positions.
The purpose of the political villain is the generate money, buzz, activism, and votes not in support of one’s position but opposition to the cast villain.
A number of people are dumbstruck trying to understand the appeal of WV’s Don Blankenship in the current primary, but it is easily explained when you realize that he keeps campaigning against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton with they blatant and hateful attacks on the coal industry which is a mainstay of the West Virginian economy.
Of course, one might be inclined to ask why Obama and Hillary are central to a race in which neither of them are involved. The answer involves echos of elections recently past, where Trump beat Hillary in the state largely because of the latter’s attacks against WV coal jobs.
Why ignore your actual opponents to pretend to fight against such ghost villains or has-been politicians? There are several reasons.
For one thing, a politician seeks name recognition, and as the saying goes there is no such thing as bad press. If you are talking about your opponent, then you are legitimizing their candidacy and raising their profile, which is counter-productive.
Secondly, the politician raises themselves to the same level as their villain opponent, the more famous the villain you are opposing, the more important the politician themselves must be. It carries an attached status to be running for a legislative office to be based upon opposing a president, particularly a disliked president.
Further, an effective tactic in a primary is to act like you are already the incumbent as a form of self-fulfilling prophesy the candidate who ignores his opponents can appear as if he were already the front-runner even if he is not ahead in the polls. It is harder to appear as the challenger, so if you can force your opponent into being the challenger you gain an advantage.
Finally, people want to join in opposing the villain, so they will throw their support behind the person presented as the champion fighting said villain. The candidate is cast in a favorable reflection of the bad light cast upon the villain.
The Don Blankenship campaign is filled with the political villain motif. In addition he sought a double villain, attacking the villains of establishment Republicans in the person of Mitch McConnell and the foreign villain of the nation of China through McConnell’s wealthy Chinese relatives.
I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time in light of Trump’s success in going after the Republican establishment and complaining about jobs being shipped off to China, however, people are always touchy when you go after someone’s family.
The response from the left was also predictable in immediately painting Mr. Blankenship as one of the left’s favorite villains, that of labeling him as “racist” for referring to their specific ethnicity. It was not helped by his awkward use of “China persons” in place of Chinese.
While the right employs specific named villains, the left likes to use more generic villain labels, so this situation set itself up for the “racist” label, but that is no different than those same accusations against Donald Trump.
The left used this as an opportunity to slam all Republicans as racist, not just Don Blankenship, and not just the Republicans in West Virginia, because the polls showed a slight rise in the poll numbers occurring after these ads.
Of course, that rise in poll numbers could easily be a recovery from a more precipitous drop in his numbers after a debate with his opponent, or because of a positive effect from one of the villain effects mentioned earlier, but the left chooses to believe that interpretation which reinforces their own version of the political villain.
We are all familiar with the left’s villain labels: racist, sexist, ageist, straight, white, male, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, phobiaphobic, ammo-sexual, deplorables, bitter clingers, Bible-thumpers, science deniers, et cetera. It is not merely vulgar name calling, it is vilification.
So what?
Well, what mistake does every villain in every story always make? They monologue!
Which is interesting, because it means that every time you attempt to explain something to a leftist, whether it is the electoral college, the second amendment, or the branches of government, they are hearing nothing but a villain’s monologue.
You never listen to a villain, because you just know that villains lie. So when your opponent is nothing more than a villain, their statements only exist to try to trip them up and catch them in their lies. There is never a possibility entertained that the villain might not be lying.
Thus is created the communication barriers between people, it is not that people have been reduced to name calling, it is that they have been reduced to cartoon villains and those names are just labels for their villainy.
Once you decide that corporations are villains, then any scientific study paid for by corporate funds is merely false propaganda. It must be dismissed. But not those studies funded by the good, heroic corporations and foundations on the other side. They are seekers of truth. Those network media corporations, the collegiate industries, the leftist funded foundations, and others are the heroes of the story.
Ever wonder that so many people, mostly on the left but sometimes on the right, so often refuse to answer questions put to them? Questions are confrontation, it is intimidation, it is a direct threat to them.
It is not a threat because it is a question. It is a threat because it is a confrontation from a villain, not a person. Watch their reactions. It is like watching someone being physically attacked with words. It is not that they are ashamed or reluctant to answer; it is a fight or flight response to a threat. It is why they do not want freedom of speech, because it is to them the villain’s monologue.
They band together in marches and do not engage alone, because together they are a band of heroes. They shall overcome the forces of darkness, the villains of this story. They will change the world. Just ask them, they will tell you and they will tell you the villains they are fighting.
Because there are no villains without heroes. Villains cannot exist but in opposition to the heroes. If you label the entire other political side as villains, then your side are the heroes.
But, that’s just a story. Villains only exist in stories.
