Political conversion as intrapersonal argument: self-dissociation in David Brock's Blinded by the Right.

• Author: Waisanen, Don
• Position: Critical essay

"The choice of a social identity rarely occurs in tranquility.... The crisis may culminate finally in political disassociation, and the displacement of previous associations by a different configuration of social attachments, sometimes a new invention, sometimes a rehabilitated memory."

--Edwin Black

Wherever one looks in current affairs, there are political converts who leverage arguments about personal change toward public causes. Political converts and party-switchers such as Ronald Reagan, David Horowitz, Arianna Huffington, James Jeffords, and Dennis Miller--to name only a few of these types of advocates have both produced and been influenced by discursive webs of social transformation. More than simply expressive claims about one's party preferences, political conversion narratives are nexus points between identities and movements. These stories justify and extend one's political change as support for larger collectives and interests. In 2004, for example, the Republican Party had former Democratic Governor Zell Miller deliver its keynote address at the Republican National Convention to buttress President George W. Bush's campaign and policies (Files, 2004).

Political converts stand before the public as persuasive models and embodied arguments, wedding their experiences of change with political purpose. They also play indirect roles in politics. In recent years, many former Marxists like David Horowitz, a conservative journalist and activist, turned up on George W. Bush's doorstep, as "team members assembled to help craft and carry out President Bush's governing philosophy" of turning the Republican party into "the party of caring" (Kosterlitz, 2001, pp. 1296, 1303). Indeed, terms like "compassionate conservatism" would never have even been created without the intellectual resources and experiences drawn from these converted elites (p. 1297).

As argument forms with public consequence, this essay examines the right-to-left political conversion of Washington insider and journalist David Brock. Brock was a conservative journalist (in)famous for his coverage of Anita Hill during the Senate hearings over the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and another series of writings that set in motion conservative campaigns to unseat President Clinton from office in the 1990s (Bruni, 2002, para. 1). Yet just two years after Brock (2002) wrote his tell-all conversion autobiography, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, former President Clinton (2004) was publicly praising him for recanting conservatism (p. 565). The text was also celebrated by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota), who threw a book release party with James Carville, Paul Begala, and other Democrats, publically declaring: "To any Republicans out there: If you are willing to disavow your past and change your ways we'll throw a party for you as well!" (as cited in Grove, 2003, p. C03).

In this analysis, I demonstrate that conversion narratives can be constructed through an interpenetrating framework of self-dissociative argumentation. This finding demonstrates how identity transformation is an argumentative process. Brock's dissociative discourse gradually presents an unveiling of a moral, authentic gay identity in the author's shift between political movements. Although Brock certainly makes his conversion rhetoric public, the story is framed as a process occurring within and about the self, particularly through Brock's "internal" struggle to maintain allegiance to a conservative movement hostile to his gay identity (Brock, 2002, p. 44).

Whether they are presented in a book, on a television appearance, or in a speech to party faithful, conversion narratives are rituals with rhetorical significance in American political life. They thus give us critical insight into how political identity can be formed through self-targeting arguments that reinforce or extend particular political paradigms. In the following sections, I discuss my definition of political conversion and situate the topic with work in identity studies. I then explore the literature on dissociation to construct the concept of self-dissociation in political conversion. To provide some context for the analysis, a short overview of Brock's life is provided. The remainder of the essay demonstrates and draws implications from four key self-dissociations in his book.

Political Conversion

Deep interdisciplinary literatures analyze religious conversion narratives (Booth, 1995; Caldwell, 1983; Gooren, 2007; Griffin, 1990; McGee, 1998; Rambo, 1999; Spencer, 1995). Secular and political conversion accounts are less charted, though some explorations have been made (Bond, 1973; Branham, 1991; Brown, 1994; Fabj, 1998; Golden, Berquist, & Coleman, 1989; Jensen & Hammerback, 1986; Walsh, 1990). Scherer (2006) argues "that figures traditionally identified with religion, such as 'conversion' ... persist within secular rationality" (p. iv). In the early-twentieth century, for instance, the Women's Social and Political Union appropriated and modified traditional conversion narratives in its periodical pamphlets to create new modes of self-representation and converts for the suffragist cause (Hartman, 2003). Bailey (2008) finds that George W. Bush adopted a traditional religious conversion narrative to stake a claim to the presidency and influence public policy. That conversion narratives have become such powerful resources in the political realm thus beckons critical attention.

Stories such as Brock's might be partially explained by several key terms, including mortification, apologia, and confessional discourse. Yet conversion most captures the sense of transformation constituted in such a narrative. Religious conversion is typically defined as "a radical reorganization of identity, meaning, and life" (Travisano, 1970, p. 600), "the process of changing a sense of root reality," or "a conscious shift in one's sense of grounding" (Heirich, 1977, pp. 673-674). Quite simply, conversion is a fundamental personal and public turn, a deep change from one state of being, knowing, and acting to another.

For this essay's purposes, it is enough to define political conversion as one's private or public assertion of or justification for changing from one political ideology to another. Confessional discourses in politics, for instance, may or may not evidence conversion. An individual may assert she or he is sorry for past mistakes and turn away from former allegiances, without necessarily converting to a new political affiliation. I believe that major policy changes can also constitute a type of political conversion to particular causes that can occur without party changes. President Jimmy Carter's political transformation "from a dove to a hawk" over the course of his administration is one such example (Aronoff, 2006, p. 425). For the moment, I focus on an account where a personal transformation coincided with a party change.

At the same time, Brock could have kept his political conversion to himself (i.e., through exclusively intrapersonal communication such as private journaling), though it would be hard to imagine such a scenario, given how subsequent actions would likely generate some form of public announcement. But as much as Brock writes about the intrapersonal processes by which his conversion was constituted, his writing also acts as a public justification for that change--both reflecting and performing the dissociations employed to construct his new political identity.

Scholars know that selves are formed through continually reconstructed biographical narratives (Giddens, 1991), emerging in processes of communication. But the communication discipline still has much work to do in creating an adequate vocabulary for dealing with identity (Pearce, 2007, pp. 171-198; see also Jasinski, 2001, pp. 192-193; Zarefsky, 2009, pp. 445-446). Examining several religious and secular conversion narratives (including Brock's), Anderson (2007) argues that identity is a rhetorical achievement, moving beyond a naive modernist essentialism "that mortifies the self at play," or poststructural readings that simply analyze the concept in terms of its presupposed fraudulence (p. 168). (1) Conversion rhetoric thus has much to tell us about how communicative identity is formed and leveraged as a persuasive technique. Similarly, Lake (1997) writes that as much as identity claims are conjunctural constructions, arguments about authenticity can be legitimate, providing a coherent, grounded self from which to engage in new acts.

Following these works, I argue that identity is a continual process of argumentative construction both informing and being informed by a rhetor's temporal conceptions of a self. In this "dialectical site" (Lake, 1997, p. 68), it is critical to track the degree to which an author uses essentialist or constructionist argumentation, which may thwart or advance the potential for further arguments about identity. This is not to deny the role that factors such as biology may play in human development; rather, this perspective gives scholars insight into the symbolic contours of identity transformation. As such, my position acknowledges that stabilized core identities--which are constructed through argument processes--can provide people with perfectly legitimate, coherent grounds for living, so long as they remain open to further communicative possibilities.

In Brock's case, however, dissociative conversion rhetoric largely serves to naturalize an ontological self that is beyond criticism. In his transformation, Brock (2002) writes that conservatism had blinded him from seeing his real, true self, "suggest[ing] a theme of initial innocence that was betrayed" by his blindness to the nature of conservatism (p. 285). Across the text, Brock mostly employs essentialist terms to argue his conversion involved finding an authentic core identity, while the conversion...