What Are We Fighting For?

By Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet. Posted January 27, 2005.

Best known for her brilliant analysis of corporate marketing in No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies — a book once described as "the Das Kapital of the anti-corporate movement" — Naomi Klein has long been a voice for moral accountability in the media.

Since 2003, the 34-year old Canadian has found a new calling: speaking out against the war in Iraq. She offers a unique perspective on the U.S. occupation as an unholy marriage of free market theology and imperial ambition. In her internationally syndicated column — which appears in The Globe and Mail in Canada and The Guardian in Britain — Klein exposes the sadly under-covered economic colonization of Iraq in the name of "reconstruction," which is no less brutal or devastating than the Pentagon-led destruction of the countryside. Be it Paul Bremer's illegal "reforms" or spurious debt-adjustment programs, the United States is busy transforming Iraq into an outpost of the neoconservative empire, ensuring its continued enslavement to U.S. interests long after the troops have returned home.

In her writings, Klein has been equally outspoken when taking the anti-war movement to task for errors of omission — especially its relative silence on Bush's economic agenda in Iraq. In her interview with AlterNet, she speaks eloquently and with passion for the need to refocus the movement on demands for both genuine democracy and economic revival coming out of Iraq.

She spoke to AlterNet from her home in Canada.

Naomi Klein: "... the anti-war movement allowed itself to turn into an anti-Bush movement."

Lakshmi Chaudhry: What is your take on why the Democrats lost in 2004?

Naomi Klein: The Democrats didn't fully understand that the success of Karl Rove's party is really a success in branding. Identity branding is something that the corporate world has understood for some time now. They're not selling a product; they're selling a desired identity, an aspirational identity of the people who consume their product. Nike understands that, Apple understands that, and so do all the successful brands. Karl Rove understands that too.

So what the Republican Party has done is that it has co-branded with other powerful brands — like country music, and NASCAR, and church going, and this larger proud-to-be-a-redneck identity. Policy is pretty low on the agenda, in terms of why people identify as Republicans. They identify with these packets of attributes.

This means a couple of things. One, it means people are not swayed by policy debates. But more importantly, when George Bush's policies are attacked, rather than being dissuaded from being Republicans, Republicans feel attacked personally — because it's your politics. Republicanism has merged with their identity. That has happened because of the successful application of the principles of identity branding.

The difference is that Bush fully inhabits his character, his character being the most powerful enduring character created by Hollywood: John Wayne, who in turn actually modeled himself after McCarthy. There are no more powerful icons in American culture. And it's not something Bush does for campaign commercials, or just something he does when he plays dress up. It's a 24-hours-a-day performance. Kerry tried to counter that by playing dress-up a couple of times, wearing costumes and things like that. A real honest populism could answer that fake marketing. Instead, the Kerry campaign just did bad marketing.

So the answer is not to beat the Republicans at their game but counter it with something real.

When you have genuine conviction standing next to extremely expert and successful marketing, it exposes the latter as marketing. Whereas when you have bad marketing next to expert marketing, it actually makes the other person look good. The more Kerry tried to be a third-rate John Wayne, the more believable Bush looked as John Wayne.

You've also taken on the Kerry campaign for their failure to tackle Iraq. How did that play to the GOP's advantage?

Karl Rove understood that if he wanted to galvanize his base, he should make sure they could vote for the things that stirred the strongest passions — which in his analysis were abortion and gay marriage. The Kerry campaign took the exact opposite approach. They felt that the best strategy was to muzzle their base on the issue that they cared most passionately: the war in Iraq. And the campaign so took for granted their loyalty that they ran a pro-war campaign.

Lakshmi Chaudhry is senior editor of AlterNet.

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