Again Ann Celter

Since the polls have been in favor of him, the Democratic candidate Barack Obama has faced repeated, and often violent attacks, of Ann Coulter, who suspects him of being too favorable to terrorists. Little known in France, this journalist is very present in the media space. Each year she sells tens of thousands of copies of her works, her website is prized (www.anncoulter.com) and her verbal outrageously allow her to be regularly talked about. Recently, she has decided to rehabilitate Senator Joseph McCarthy, responsible for a witch hunt for memory in the 1950s. Ann Coulter sees it on the contrary the symbol of the attacks of which the real American patriots were victims who fought against the communist threat. The end always justifies the means, she explains very seriously. Its favorite target ? Liberals (Liberals), in the American sense of the term, that is to say democratic voters. For the past ten years, she constantly has repeated the same credo: Democrats have been a danger to America.

Approaching the 2008 presidential campaign, no one will be surprised to see that it is recurrent by recently publishing a book with unambiguous title: “ If the Democrats had a brain, they would be republicans “(If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d be republicans). Written in a hurry, in the form of maxim for a hurry, the text takes up the traditional cutting targets. The Clinton couple, first of all, to whom she owes her media fame. His work, High Crimes and Misdemeanorspublished in 1998, attacked the turpitudes of President Clinton and constituted one of the summits of the couple’s systematic denunciation company, started by conservative circles since the early 1990s. The candidacy of Hilary Clinton offers Coulter the opportunity to extend this pamphleteary line. More generally, it is the democratic elites who are then scratched: senator Edward Kennedy or the former White House candidate John Kerry embody, in his eyes, the arrogance of the beautiful souls of the Democratic Party, the “ Liberal in limousine “(LIBERALS LIMOUSINE) it is said in the United States, the equivalent of the “ left caviar ” In France. Finally, actor George Clooney, whose political convictions are increasingly audible and visible in films which reconnect with the cinema of the 1970s, entered the Liberal Purgatory of Coulter.

This gallery and the murderous tone of the author are less interested in us than the way in which the rhetoric of Coulter is structured, which has repeated the same themes for ten years. First of all, she disseminates a dual and Manichean conception of American society, locked in the conservative/liberal opposition (Liberals), we/them, very/bad. She intends to return to the Liberals what she considers to have undergone: mockery, systematic denigration, the violence of representations. And it must be recognized that this revenge speech finds some support points in American political history. For a long time, and before the repeated victories of the conservatives demonstrated the political ineffectiveness of a systematic denigration, we mocked in the United States the very idea of being still conservative. When the historian Richard Hofstadter formulates the idea of a paranoid tradition in the United States in the 1950s, he obviously thinks of the Conservatives and their “ psychological problem », Responsible for irrational and violent behavior according to him. Liberals have long considered that economic development would make traditional forms of thought disappear. From this permanent denigration, conservative activists have kept a tenacious bitterness, a fierce opposition. The idea that there are two irreconcilable America is a response from the shepherd to the shepherdess, and Coulter makes the answer particularly noisy.

With virulence, Coulter also believes that liberals are no longer part of the nation because they are too cosmopolitan and attracted to foreign experiences. Conversely, explains Coulter, the conservatives are the heirs of eternal America, whose simplicity of manners is cardinal virtue. The reproach is recurrent: the Democrats complicate simple things, weigh too much the pros and cons, hold convoluted reasoning … During the 2004 presidential election, during television debates, George W. Bush liked to say that he was going to decipher (decyphere) The words of his democratic opponent John Kerry. Coulter continues, moreover, to portray the liberals as pathological liars, who have lost any link with real America. This anti-intellectualism is a lasting feature of American conservative thought. The systematic use of experts and scientists by liberals appears to be an extremely dangerous evil. Coulter thus denounces the relativism of the 1960s which, according to her, gave birth to the idea that there are still poor in the country of abundance, to the creation of theories to systematically excuse criminals or to the negation of the role played by God ! Faced with this repertoire of ideas drawn from the social sciences, which they also consider absurd as each other, it claims to be common common sense and the common man.

Coulter finally claims a return to the hierarchy and reaffirms the need for an immutable order. As a number of activists, she strongly believes in transcendence and is wary of individualism which would be her own end. In this sense, the churches form in his eyes a place of sociability which allows individuals to identify with a common cause. Only atheism and cold materialism of the liberals, explains Coulter, prevent them from becoming aware of this obviousness. The family constitutes the other immutable structure of society. The defense of the private sphere is at the heart of the mobilization it claims. It is no coincidence that questions related to intimate, such as abortion or sexual questions, were the fellowships of the social protest of the conservatives. The public sphere, whether it be school, university or workplace, is most often perceived as a threat to the family. At the idea of an autonomous public sphere, a concept dear to liberals in the progressive tradition born of the French Revolution, Coulter hopes to oppose a reproduction of public space by blurring the limits between private and public.

This populist discourse can obviously lend to smile. Coulter extravagances discredit a priori the value of his prose. However, this speech ended up becoming performative. Democratic candidates for the 2008 presidential election avoid using the word “ liberal For fear of passing for representatives of a cosmopolitan elite, more concerned with his personal interests than the defense of America mainstream. For their part, the Conservatives succeeded in the symbiosis between these populist diatribes and a well -prowled economic and political program. As Thomas Frank recalled, in his work What’s the Matter with Kansas (2004), this ideological conglomerate allows conservative elites to attract the votes of the most disadvantaged strata of the population. The air of nothing, Coulter ended up counting in the American political debate.