Mitt Romney and the (Mormon?) Rhetoric of Philanthropy

Laura Thain — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:16:26 +0000

At issue from the moment Romney stuck his neck out as a Presidential hopeful, his extraordinary personal wealth has become one of the primary issues covered by various news media as we march closer to the November election. Epitomized best, perhaps, by a cleverly Photoshopped image that initially made rounds as a campaign gaff, “RMoney” has anything but hip associations—rather, it has inspired vast discussion about the rhetoric of prosperity and philanthropy in the midst of economic recession, both real and imagined.

A less-addressed topic, I think, is how LDS-sponsored sources can inform this debate as it takes place in the mainstream media. Though Romney is not the first Mormon politician to garner national attention (most recently, Jon Huntsman achieved national recognition; former Michigan governor George Romney, Terrel “Ted” Bell, and Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson all held influential cabinet positions in the past), he is arguably the most successful. As such, there has been a resurgence of public interest in Mormonism. The constellation of this interest and the general discussion of the “cult of prosperity” as emblematized in the Occupy protests has resurrected the age-old stereotype of Mormons as wealthy white businessmen—and Mitt Romney, the unexpected champion with the potential of either salvaging or savaging the economy.

Serious discussions of Romney’s finances go as far back in the news archive as early this year, with no little attention paid to his philanthropic contributions, which are outlined to some extent here. Most critics of this breakdown cite the LDS Church as an artificial inflator and use this to deny Romney as a legitimate philanthropist. I’d like to suggest that we consider a different angle of this kind of rhetoric. Rather than addressing where philanthropic money goes, could we not equally question the rhetorical role of philanthropy in political discourse?

I’d like to cite here the search entry for “service” on mormon.org, a website designed for non-church members investigating Mormon belief. The rhetorical focus here is not necessarily on the benefit provided to those who receive charity, but those who give it—as the article asserts,

“Jesus Christ said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” This doesn't mean we have to die to show our love for our friends. We lay down our lives every time we put someone else's needs before our own. These actions, whether great or small, let us feel the happiness of connecting with our brothers and sisters and remind us that God often allows us to be the answer to someone else’s prayers.”

The emphasis on first person pronouns—we and us—and the lack of third person pronouns create a philanthropist-oriented rhetoric—not one in which the philanthropist is repaying a tangible debt to society, but in which he is repaying an intangible spiritual debt and thus further securing his own happiness. This necessarily reorients the rhetorical situation outside of the immediate--concrete social and political dynamics--into a supernatural realm, even as the superficial rhetoric addresses the need for humanitarian aid. The less obvious implication of this, however, is the way it defines the humanitarian/philanthropist as a catalytic wedge. He is empowered to create and control change, but encouraged to do so on an individual level; thus, he satisfies his obligation to his fellow man but is not encouraged to contemplate the situations by which the imbalance is created.

In this way, comparing the private philanthropic contributions of Obama and Romney is a fruitless exercise when it is really the rhetoric of philanthropy—and I’ve quoted from informal Mormon doctrine above, but the principles are, arguably, extant in nearly every Christian denomination—that is itself the flaw. Without the power to enact systemic change, I would argue, it runs a great risk of further increasing the power discrepancy between the giver and the recipient. For me, there is no amount of philanthropy that can fully mediate wealth on either side, regardless of how it is distributed, as long as this power dynamic remains in play.

Excuse me, but there's some prejudice on your face

ladysquires — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:16:29 +0000

Photo credit: Pargon, Flickr Creative Commons

There are plenty of negative things to be said about the Tea Party, particularly in the wake of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally: that the movement's appropriation of the words and images of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln represents the deployment of unreconstructed white privilege at its worst, that it is controlled by corporate and media elites with a vested interest in obstructing a Democratic agenda (note the Tea Party's inexplicable support of the Citizen's United decision, which seems completely out of step with their populist ethos though perhaps somewhat consistent with the libertarian ideal of unfettered markets).

Yet I'm noting, with increasing annoyance, a problematic elementary school nastiness in criticism of the Tea Partiers and their ideologues. Note the photograph above, which was posted on Flickr as part of a series called "Teabonics." The argument of this particular photo and a few others like it seems to be that Tea Partiers are fat and stupid and therefore don't deserve to be taken seriously. Such a reading seems to be confirmed by the first comment, which says, "Resisance is Conservative for Fat Ass." And while, yes, I agree that there is a dismaying irony in signs like the following, given the draconian new anti-immigration laws in the Southwest, I find myself asking, "Really? Is this the level to which we must descend?" (Forgive the hackneyed syntax. I did not want to be accused of ending my sentence with a preposition).

Photo credit: Pargon, Flickr Creative Commons

Such tactics might not merit concern if they weren't being legitimized in corners of the blogosphere that I had previously found quite lucid and respectable. I came across the first photo on the widely popular humor site Political Irony, which accompanies the image with a link to the site LOLGOP, a blog (which is designed to look like the Drudge Report, performing a sort of rhetoric before you even get to the content) that makes the claim that "there may have been only 87,000 people there, but they ate for 1,000,000." LOL indeed. As far as I can tell, that claim is as unsubstantiated as Michelle Bachmann's assertion that 1,000,000 attended the rally and appears to be simply a jab at the rotundness of certain attendees.

Let's take stock of everything that's wrong with that, shall we? First of all, this line of critique makes several aggressively sizest assumptions about the relationship between larger body size, intelligence, and human worth. Furthermore, it eclipses the presence of the many progressives who happen to be fat (or poor spellers). Then we have the Flickr album labelled "Teabonics," obviously a pun on the term "ebonics," which was used for a time to describe African American vernacular speech. In other words, this pun posits a relationship between the quality of one's grammar or spelling, intelligence, and worth as a human being, a logic that has historically been used to exclude African Americans and other minorities from the public sphere. Given the relationshisp between illiteracy and poverty, this is also a logic that erases anyone from a lower socio-economic background.

In other words, this critique--"LOL, Tea Partiers are fat and uneducated"--enacts the same forms of prejudice found within the Tea Party itself by making overt arguments about what types of people and voices count in the political arena, i.e. no fatties, no poor and/or uneducated people, and by extension no one who fails to embody hegemonic ideals of middle class respectability. And don't worry, there's sexism in there to. Among the taglines on LOLGOP is the following: "Sarah Palin is the porn industry's idea of what a businesswoman looks like." Ok, sure, this could be a critique of the way in which Palin has been sexualized by the media, but I doubt it. Devoid of context (and there is no link on that entry), this appears to be a dig at Palin's appearance. How droll. As Melissa McEwan of Shakeville so aptly states, the sexist attacks (most recently in the Vanity Fair piece) on Palin's appearance and performance of motherhood are infuriating precisely because they "compel feminist/womanist women to come to her defense, or, at minimum, point out the absurdity of the coverage. (Bauerlein also tweeted: "'Sarah, these aides say, seemed comforted by having the children around, and she seemed lonely when they were gone.' Truly a monster.") To have feminist writers mock the paucity of legitimate criticisms in a hit piece on Palin can't have been the point."

As the wise man said, before removing the splinter from your friend's eye, first attend to the log in your own.

viz. - classism

Mitt Romney and the (Mormon?) Rhetoric of Philanthropy

Excuse me, but there's some prejudice on your face