by Barak Fravasi
The first thing you’ll want to do is get in touch with your most passionate grievances. Next, look for those grievances concerning which you have no questions and which you find confirmed daily by items in the news and/or interactions with people you see or imagine seeing each day. Then, identify that special grievance about which you are willing to admit, if only to your partner or a particularly sympathetic friend, that you can be “quite irrational sometimes.” It is this grievance that may be able to serve as the foundation for your Right-Wing Nut Practice (or RWNP).
At this point you may wish to wait a day, or at least take a break, because the second stage of developing a sustainable, satisfying RWNP requires you to disengage with the strong emotions that allowed you to identify the appropriate foundation. What you must do instead is to ask yourself what social or political remedies for this grievance have been tried in recent memory or are already in place. Think carefully about: whether any of these remedies were adequate or would have been adequate had more resources been made available by the government; or would now be adequate were they to be tried (again) today with only slight modification(s). If any such remedies exist you will need to go back to the beginning of the previous paragraph: your grievance was insufficient as a foundation for a successful RWNP.
If, however, you were unable to identify any such remedy, you are ready for the next stage of what advanced practitioners call “building out” your Practice. Ask yourself whether your foundational grievance could be remedied by a more extreme social policy or political decision than has been tried in the recent past or is being tried presently. Think hard, because if the answer is “No”, that no such remedy is possible, then you are not developing a good RWNP but only a species of hopelessness consistent with any number of moderate practices on the Left and the Right. But if you can think of a remedy that is both extreme and (in your mind) practical, you are ready to begin the build-out of your RWNP.
Although not absolutely essential to a successful Practice, many authorities recommend you pause at this stage to refine your grievance so that no current “mainstream” remedy can be said to “come close” to the social or political outcomes you desire. The purpose of this refinement is to strengthen your Practice and it is an especially good idea if you spend time with friends who enjoy debate, or people with any academic training in philosophy. Such refinement will not be difficult if you’ve followed the process of identifying a foundational grievance honestly, and the refined position will likely be more easily articulated, and therefore more easily defended, as a bona fide RWNP.
Notice that we have said nothing here about finding a model for your Practice, either in the form of a public or quasi-public figure, or in the form of a local mentor. Although your intuition may suggest you need a person on whom you can model your Practice, it is an unfortunate fact, specific if not unique to RWNP, that many public and quasi-public figures, especially elected officials and media celebrities, are not simply poor RWN practitioners personally, but are very often inauthentic in their practice. Advanced practitioners are nearly unanimous, therefore, in teaching that a sustainable, satisfying RWNP must begin not with a model but with a strong foundational grievance.
Now we move to the further, and eventually to the full, articulation of your political position. To do this you will need to identify and consider:
- the mainstream (merely) conservative point of view concerning your grievance
- the mainstream (ridiculous) liberal point of view concerning your grievance
- the radical leftist (cartoon) point of view concerning your grievance
In distinguishing your position from those of the mainstream conservative, mainstream liberal, and radical leftist positions, you will need to find elements to incorporate into your position that are categorically opposed to elements of each of these three positions. Notice that we speak here of your position and not your beliefs. Perhaps the most important lesson at this stage of the development of a successful RWNP is to be mindful that we want to work on our political position and become attached to it so strongly that, when properly carried, it will eventually reflect back upon and transform our beliefs in certain useful ways.
Perhaps an example will be helpful. Let’s suppose that your foundational grievance concerns the imbecility of the American electorate. In identifying this grievance and making sure it can serve as a foundation of your RWNP, you may have a number of beliefs and commitments that, down the road, would lead you to moderate your passionate attachment to both innovative political remedies and extreme political positions that would of great help in building out your Practice. You might believe in the The Golden Rule, for example, or in the sanctity of the Bill of Rights as a document fundamental to the soul of America. Unfortunately, these beliefs make the articulation of a robust RWNP very difficult when they are allowed a causal role in developing the details of a political position. Therefore, we do not attempt to articulate or even attend to a great number of our beliefs once we’ve identified our foundational grievance, and we proceed to develop only our political position (and not assess our beliefs) using that foundation. Later, we will find that this position, when properly reinforced by particular opposing positions, can cause use to reduce our commitment to our previous beliefs and, in particularly successful cases, to revise these beliefs significantly.
So now, let’s suppose that, having made a productive and focused effort, you have arrived at: 1) a grievance to serve as the foundation for your RWNP; 2) a remedy or set of remedies for the grievance distinct from those that have been tried or are currently being tried; and 3) a political position built upon the grievance and the remedy that is distinct from those of mainstream conservative and liberal positions as well as those of the lunatic left. The next and final phase of developing the basics of a rich and sustainable RWNP is to find what experienced RWN practitioners call the “foundational targets.”
A foundational target is an element or aspect of the system of American democracy and/or American institutional arrangements that would need to be abandoned, or at least radically reformed, in order for your political position to win the day. While many RWNPs find their foundational targets in principles associated with the Constitution, an equal number use the Constitution to support their position (e.g. while having a particular government regulation or regulatory body as a foundational target). There is some debate between expert practitioners about the relative merits of foundational targets are that more or less stable over time. For example, some argue that identifying a foundational target in the Constitution is better for a life-long RWNP, while others think the prospect for rapid and/or sudden change in a particular government body or regulation improves focus and energy, even when there is the possibility that the RWNP may have to be abandoned in the case of the successful dismantling of a particular regulation or institution. How one thinks about this controversy may depend as much on the age of the practitioner, and his/her previous political experience, as on the merits of particular foundational targets, so for the purposes of this introduction we will not explore the controversy further.
Having laid the foundation for your RWNP and built out a political position upon it and identified a foundational target, you must now develop the temporal aspects of your Practice. With unemployment and underemployment rates at historic levels, it is common to hear contemporary RWNP coaches and television spokespeople insisting on daily attention to your Practice, but of course this has not always been the recommendation of experts. In earlier times, a great number of well-known advanced practitioners devoted as little as one day per week to their RWNP, although in such cases the Practice was always highly developed and the exercises extremely productive (usually involving a good deal of writing or other forms of communication). What all accomplished practitioners agree on is that the choice of tempo for a sustainable, life-long, satisfying RWNP is crucial, because we know that many novices have had their Practice ruined not for want of an excellent grievance and a robust political position but by bad temporal choices. Therefore, here are a few questions that you should consider when deciding the temporal features of your Practice:
- Is your RWNP something you wish to share with others and, if so, do you want those others to be like-minded or adversarial?
- Do you want your RWNP to include “activism” and, if so, what sorts of activities do you aspire to (e.g. cafe discussions/arguments, letters to newspaper editors, postings on the Internet, local protests, national protests, underground activity, etc.)?
- Do you intend your RWNP to generate income and, if so, do you aspire to turn your RWNP into a second (or first) career? (Here a word of caution is in order. While the job market for RWNP-suitable careers in radio, television and other media has been growing since the turn of the century, the average salary for these jobs has been falling, and after an upturn in university openings for those who achieved a certain degree of excellence in their Practice, the largest number suitable jobs in education remain at the secondary and community college levels. All this by way of noting that with RWNP, as with many forms of principled practice, money may be a poor reason to pursue it.)
- Finally, is your RWNP something you wish to last a lifetime, or just for a fixed period of years, and how much/little revision would you like it to require in a given year/term/decade/etc.?
By answering these four questions, after articulating the other elements of your particular RWNP, you will be able to decide more sensibly the forms that your Practice will take, and the routines that will be necessary to sustain it. Fortunately — and unlike the foundation and political position at the heart of your Practice — your routines can be experimented with and modified over time, depending on your aspirations, and without necessarily effecting a crisis in your Practice.
A well-developed RWNP, carefully attended to, can be the source of a richer social and intellectual life as well as a form of therapeutic practice that ultimately reduces one’s anger and bitterness about one’s misfortunes and/or mistakes in life. At the same time you should always enjoy, and be mindful of enjoying, your reflections upon your RWNP as you experiment with new routines and expand the scope of your technique.
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