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Why Not Include The Bogomils, Too?

While his [Perlstein’s] specific examples remain off the mark — it is bizarre to assert without evidence that Romney launched his campaign at the Henry Ford Museum so he could be attacked by the liberal media — maybe there is something to the idea of winning over conservatives by railing against the right bogeymen. ~Jim […]

While his [Perlstein’s] specific examples remain off the mark — it is bizarre to assert without evidence that Romney launched his campaign at the Henry Ford Museum so he could be attacked by the liberal media — maybe there is something to the idea of winning over conservatives by railing against the right bogeymen. ~Jim Antle

Bogey, as some may know, derives from the Bulgarian bogomil, which was the name attributed to the supposed founder of a dualist sect described by various Byzantine sources and thereafter became the name of the sect.  The historical question of Bogomilism is vexed, and some people today are not at all persuaded that there were any dualists in Bulgaria or Byzantium at all, but that Bogomil became a name (along with the much older Syrian ascetic sect of the Messalians) that was associated with the religious practices of certain people who seemed to be noted for their asceticism.  I have my own thoughts about all that, which I won’t go into here, but I am more interested in talking about the anxiety about Bogomils.  This anxiety was so great that it entered into the cultural consciousness of Europeans by way of the Cathars in Italy and France and eventually became synonymous with the scary and frightening monster in your closet and any sort of monster that a demagogue or propagandist might use to frighten you into supporting him and his cause. 

It was this anxiety that, in twelfth century Byzantium, led to a series of heresy trials of various clergy and laymen who seem to have been guilty of certain canonical irregularities, idiorhythmic asceticism or idiosyncratic spiritual practices, but who did not actually subscribe to the doctrines enunciated in the Synodikon as the essence of Bogomilism.  That is, they may have been heterodox or disobedient, but they were not dualists in any meaningful sense.  The point here is that the portrayal of bogeys has no necessary, substantial connection to the real things being referred to as the bogey and it doesn’t need to have one.  Today people will invoke a political bogey, such as France (screams of terror erupt in the distance), because of what they think it means to vilify France in a certain way and not necessarily because of much to do with France itself. 

When Romney’s ridiculous strategy proposes bumper stickers that say, “First, not France,” the other country might as well be Morocco or Bhutan for all that anyone in this country actually knows about France.  The statement is about American supremacy, and he might have chosen any other country for his contrast.   In Romney’s imagination of what conservative voters believe (and he may be right about many of them), France evokes first of all ideas of arrogance, pomposity, stupidity and venality (incidentally, the French anti-American view of Americans is almost identical and has just as much merit).  But it doesn’t matter whether these things do apply to France or not–what matters is that Romney sets himself against arrogance, stupidity, etc. 

For the slightly better informed, France evokes the idea of a fairly heavily socialised economy and disenchanted Muslim immigrants, which would not really be frightening to Americans except to the extent that Romney can convince people that the Democrats would like to replicate the French model (and there is just enough plausibility to this that it might be an effective message).  But fundamentally the reason why these ideas resonate with some conservative voters, to the extent that they do, is not that they are well-acquainted with the details of French society and politics, but because they have an image of an economically sclerotic society that is collapsing from within and they know that they don’t want to live in that sort of society.  (Of course, if they didn’t vote for a party that dismantles domestic manufacturing, indebts us to our chief future rivals and invites mass immigration, there might be less reason for them to fear any of these things, but leave that for another time.)  Invoking France here has far less to do with France, which is simply a foil here, than it has to do with reinforcing Romney’s own rhetoric of American dynamism, innovation and success.  Romney’s stupid anti-Europeanism, like many other prejudices, has to do mainly with showing the virtues of the person invoking the prejudice.  He wants to show that, while he may be (recently) from the strangely more Europhiliac Northeast, he nonetheless shares the same ignorant and presumptuous disdain for the home countries of our civilisation that many of his countrymen do.  If John Kerry could be mocked for “looking French” and belittled for having French cousins, Romney will make sure that he makes a point of deriding France in particular (even though Spain and Germany have had relatively far more sluggish economies in the last decade).  Since he is even more of a flip-flopper than Kerry ever was, he must work extra hard to distance himself from anything that might associate him with Kerry’s French connection.  Attacking France may actually have less to do with rallying conservatives against a bogey (Francophobia may be widespread, but it is pretty shallow) and more to do with rallying them to Romney as the embodiment of everything that the bogey is not. 

For the well-informed, France has no really scary or worrisome connotations, because it refers to a medium-sized western European country with its share of serious problems and at least a few virtues.  But then Romney isn’t trying to appeal to the latter, now, is he?

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