Occasionally, a high profile line in print or from a speech has, when viewed from a somewhat oblique perspective, more import than would suspect. A tip-off of sorts, like cultural Nazca Lines that appear part of the landscape from ground level but that provide surprising meanings when viewed from a height. These "Curious Lines" entries are devoted to overlooked clues implicit in snippets of text or speech.
My initial offering has to do with South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott and his closing speech Day One of the 2020 Republican National Convention. First, a brief synopsis of how my attention was drawn to a line in this speech.
I am not an avid fan of American politics. As such, I admit to never watching much of any convention by either party. I never watched Bill Clinton or Bush or Obama. I've probably seen a total of 30 minutes live convention broadcasting in the last 30 years. Basically, I figure that it's more efficient (time being valuable) to spend 10 or 15 minutes reading summaries than spending a couple of hours watching these things.
In any case, Scott's speech had gotten high marks from both conservative and progressive pundits, but one talking head read a few highlight quotes, and I heard:
"Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want a cultural revolution. A fundamentally different America. If we let them, they will turn our country into a socialist utopia."
I thought I must have heard this incorrectly. The last line could not be right. So I looked up a transcript of the speech. The transcript read exactly the same. Well, I still wasn't convinced. Perhaps the transcriber had made a simple error. I pulled up a video of the Scott speech. I was surprised. What Scott said was exactly the same as the transcript.
Now, if Noam Chomsky sees this, he'll have a field day with it, but allow me some simple observations. Here's where I'm going with this.
Utopia is a noun. The word utopia means (quoting Merriam-Webster), "A place of ideal perfection, especially in laws, government, and social conditions." My question thus becomes, "How could turning America into a utopia be a bad thing in Senator Scott's mind?"
Evidently, the adjective "socialist" is some kind of deal breaker. And what that implies is most interesting. Scott (or his speechwriters) see "socialist utopia" as a kind of oxymoron. He must believe, given his words, that utopia is not a desirable thing if it incorporates aspects of socialism. Scott views "socialist utopia" as inimical to his preferences, although the very definition of utopia describes ideal laws, government, and social conditions. Taking Scott's perspective to its logical conclusion, Scott therefore does not really see "ideal lives for all" as something towards which society should strive. Given the GOP's comfort with current socioeconomic inequities in the United States, I suppose this should not be surprising. What's surprising is what these few lines expose about utopia being a GOP anathema.
Lifelong struggle and inequality are the noble, American-approved status quo. These are to be maintained as they are preferable to any kind of utopia, because utopias by definition have some kind of leveling socialist features.
Sometimes a line here and an implication there reveal more subtext than the author, speaker, or speechwriter intended. People say things out loud that really belong in whispers. I think, in this case, what these lines reveal is that striving for utopia and the increasingly Social Darwinist GOP worldview do not blend. American life should be, evidently, about struggle and stratification.
My closing thoughts regarding Scott's curious lines are that, first, this speech was undoubtedly vetted by multiple GOP'ers. So everyone was on board with framing a utopia as a bad outcome since it contains socialist elements. Considering how many people in the United States were a paycheck away from broke before the pandemic, and how things have gotten worse, this is quite a speech-writing commitment to the one-percent.
Second, and more importantly, the import of defining utopia as a bad thing is truly extraordinary. The people striving for utopia are "the other." They are alien, they are outsiders, they are the opposition. Americans don't strive for "socialist utopia." They are supposed to strive for something else, presumably the status quo en route to record inequality.
Third, and most unsettling, when people write lines into speeches like this, the speeches aren't really being written for the population of a democracy. They are being written for the leadership and constituents of a plutocracy that is quite comfortable with being a plutocracy.
Bob Dietz
August 26, 2020
