Keith has posted a couple of provocative pieces on these
pages in recent weeks. The first one (American Counterpoint 1/31/17) was
entitled "Trump Pro and Con", and the second (AC 2/21/17) "Outline for a Democratic Opposition Strategy". I'm going to
conflate these two articles, and my objective is to troll them for insights
into America's current political dynamic. There's room for hope here, but only
if enough of us can shake off the ugly media-induced stupor we seem to be
falling into.
It's
my judgment that my blog partner
represents the best of his Party in the sense both of an honest
commitment to core values and a sound problem-solving
intelligence. At the same time, though, he - again in my judgment - at times
himself falls prey to the various odd manias, phobias, reality distortions and
self-delusions that have so damaged his party and exposed it to its recent well-deserved
electoral defeat at the hands of someone who should never even have been in the
running. The Democrats' own self-degradation, as I see it, paved the way for Trumpism. Thus, the manner in which Keith sorts through all
this, separating the good from the bad, may be instructive to all of us here who
are presently scratching our heads in the effort to divine the future of our country.
Victory's Poison
Chalice
What the Democrats do now is
important because it's also my observation that the Republican victory was
shallow, and that any show of genuine political vigor from a renewed Democratic
Party stands a good chance of turning
the tables again by 2020. Victory was probably the worst thing that
could have happened for the Republicans, because it's likely to short-circuit whatever
dynamic energies might otherwise have risen to the surface to rid that Party -
my Party - of its dogmas, know-nothing smugness, and tired approaches to critical problems. The
theory of democracy - a sound one in my view and I think Keith's - is that
healthy contention invigorates political combatants, gives them new ideas, sweeps
aside pedantic ideologies, and propels everybody, even if against their
own will, into a promising new space.
The
other side of this coin, of course, is the darker reality that should this
process break down and abandon America's political factions to their present
state of bitter dysfunction, then the poison already seeping in around the
edges will spread. Destructive forces have
always lurked at the fringes of both parties, and these elements are sensing opportunity in current ominous stalemate.
Serious Liberalism
Let's start
with the upside. Keith opened his 1/31 article by putting his cards on the
table. He called himself a "serious liberal" and made reference to
his personal history of activist support for civil rights, environmental
protection, and other causes to which most of our political factions give lip
service but which for the most part only the political Left has worked consistently
over the years to advance. Keith unsurprisingly expresses extreme distaste for
Donald Trump's character, attitudes, style, behavior and politics. He then,
however, makes a remarkable declaration. He says "I respect the voters" (italics mine) and proceeds to paddle against the current of his
own bias to examine Trump's policy prescriptions objectively in an attempt to
discover what it was about Trump that attracted enough votes to win the
election. Keith does not undergo any epiphanies during this exercise, and he
certainly doesn't alter his basic conclusions, but he does present a
constructive role model to members of both parties who seem furiously
immobilized by their biases right now.
Likewise,
in his 2/21 posting Keith attempts to step back from anti-Trump hysteria. In
crafting his outline for an opposition strategy, he says "we need to
take a calmer and more calculated approach than has yet materialized". This is not really an invocation to compromise as such, but rather to rationalism and a willingness
to consider all policies consistent with the Party's core values, even where
they overlap with Trump's or those of traditional Republicans. The list of policy and strategy
recommendations that follows is generally left of center but includes certain
ideas with which many of us on the center-right would concur. In other words,
there is common ground here upon which, in theory at least, a civil governing coalition could form.
Unserious
Liberalism
Unfortunately,
I see few signs that Keith's rationalism is even vaguely representative of his
party right now. I have never in my
lifetime observed such a vituperative storm of irrational abuse visited upon a
new president as Mr. Trump has suffered. He brought much of it on himself, of
course, by his boorish style and carelessly inflammatory rhetoric, but his opponents have gone so completely
overboard in their overreaction as to be looked upon as people in spiritual
meltdown. This is alarming and dangerous.
The most
visible manifestation of frenetic liberal partisanship today may be among
professional entertainers, for whom acute outrage seems on its way to becoming
chronic and debilitating. Like many people, my wife and I surf the late-night
talk shows before drifting off to sleep most evenings and we watch the various
comics: Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, O'Brien, etc. The experience used to be
reliably soporific. In recent months, however, not one of these people has been
able to get more than fifteen seconds or so into his opening routine before
unleashing the initial bitter Trump jokes which often accelerate from there. The
newest arrival to this dotty company is TBS's Samantha Bee, whose sudden
ascendency in the nighttime funny business seems powered almost exclusively by a
non-stop anti-Trump lather.
Turning to what one might expect to be a
marginally less politicized sector of America's cultural establishment, our
actors and musicians are if anything even worse. The endless series of self-congratulatory
award shows these folks put on for themselves - Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, Tonys,
MTV Awards, etc., etc., - have long been
platforms for overwrought liberal posturing. Since Trump's appearance on the
political scene, however, either Trump jokes or teary-eyed denunciations of him
have become de rigueur among honorees mounting the stages to lay
hands on their prizes. It's interesting to note that TV viewership for this
year's Oscars was down substantially from previous years, almost certainly reflecting
at least in part a weariness among the public at having to endure leftish political
sermons from celebrities who have just spent more on their couture for the night than
many families do on food and housing in a year.
Democracy's
Facilitator Is Broken
Maybe entertainers can be forgiven, however, because they are generally not taken all that
seriously in the first place. The people whose bias is harder to overlook are
our journalists. The founders and guardians of American Democracy have over the
years always proudly pointed to a free and robust press as essential to our system
of open politics, an idea enshrined in our Bill of Rights. The underlying concept is that voters must have a relatively unhindered flow of accurate information if
they are to be expected collectively to exercise sound control over their
government.
One of
the most frightening things coming out of this recent election was the rapid
popularization of the term "fake news". Why did this notion suddenly
blossom? The phenomenon has been around for a long time, of course, known as "disinformation" by the
world's intelligence agencies, who have long used it as a tool for influencing
and destabilizing foreign governments, and in some cases controlling domestic
politics. Disinformation comes naturally to totalitarian politicians and was used to good effect by
the Nazis in the years leading up to World War II. However, it was the Soviet Union's
intelligence services that developed disinformation into the high art form it
became in the post-war period under Joseph Stalin and his successors. They
routinely employed it in their own country and wherever possible in foreign
countries that became targets for their
many campaigns of influence and destabilization.
It's
interesting to note that concerns about disinformation were usually dismissed by
the liberal pundits of the day as stemming from anti-Soviet hysteria. It's of
further interest and a point of irony that Vladimir Putin should be at the
center of our current fake news controversy, since he honed his political skills as a KGB
agent during the latter Cold War years when the Russian disinformation machine
was operating full-tilt under KGB auspices.
I'm
pretty sure it was the Democrats who first introduced the fake-news meme into
public awareness during the recent election. They were angry at the
demonstrably false stories about Hillary
Clinton, President Obama and other Democrats that kept popping up in the
right-wing press. Examples would be the narrative that Obama was a foreign-born
Muslim, or that Hillary ordered the murder of Clinton White House Deputy
Counsel Vince Foster in 1993. While their outrage was understandable, Democrats
conveniently overlooked the fact that
the fringe Left also has it media outlets which have long been sources of politically-motivated
false news stories that had a way of leaking into the mainstream.
One of
the most far-fetched of these that gained a fair amount of traction had George
Bush, in collaboration with his "Neo-Con" backers, personally
authorizing the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 to garner support for their
subsequent "War on Terror". This, in turn, was a plot to justify
either imposing a Fascist state on America, committing genocide against
Muslims, or seizing control of Middle Eastern oil fields, depending on which
version of the theory one subscribed to. Surveys conducted in the last years of
Bush's presidency showed a surprising number of registered Democrats actually
gave credence to much of this. Conspiracy theories and the fanciful
"news" stories supporting them were part of the anti-Bush and
anti-Republican media barrage that, together with the financial collapse and
the Iraq quagmire, helped pave the way
for the Democrats' electoral landslide in 2008.
Enter Trump
In 2017
Donald Trump was quick to spot the hypocrisy in the Democrats' attempt to hang
the fake-news odium exclusively on him and his supporters. Using the new bully
pulpit he now controlled as President, he turned the charge around on his
opponents in the Media and accused them instead
of being the ones to spread fake news. And he had a point, although less
in the sense of de novo fabrication
of news than of selective reporting and politically-motivated distortion. The
most effective lies are, after all, usually 90% true. Trump has repeatedly singled
out CNN as among the worst offenders for this sort of thing.
I've
found it interesting and, in recent years,
disheartening to follow CNN's evolution. It was founded in 1980 but
really started coming into its own in the early 1990's after receiving a boost from
its extraordinary coverage of the First Gulf War. I grew up in the era when TV
news meant Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley at six o-clock, and that was
pretty much it. I remember feeling very
exited in the beginning by the idea of 24/7 news coverage, and CNN was at the
forefront of this development. Having honest reporters out gathering the news
on a continuous basis and feeding it back to all of us was a breathtaking idea.
This seemed like a true engine for
democracy because it would guarantee a knowledgeable citizenry. The
informed "Wisdom Of Crowds" would rationalize and optimize politics
in our democratic system. The idea was truly thrilling.
Dumbing Down With Bias
It was also
soon to prove itself naive. Maybe it was for cost reasons, but CNN gradually
moved away from comprehensive news coverage, although it kept the 24/7 format.
What I gradually woke up to was that CNN was distilling the wonderful
complexity of the news day down to a
handful of stories that it kept repeating over and over and over. Then
over again.
I still spent a fair amount of time in front
of my screen watching CNN, but I soon realized that I was getting less and less
actual information from this source. Furthermore, CNN seemed to be obliterating the line between news and "spin".
Commentators would rarely present the facts of a story without a context that
overshadowed the story itself. Rather than giving its viewers a factual basis
upon which to establish a point of view, CNN was imparting the point of view
first and then hammering it home with selective facts, carefully avoiding any
that might complicate the narrative.
I'm
singling out CNN here because Trump has done so and because the network today
is probably the most influential of the liberal media outlets. The fact is,
however, that the CNN-style of
manipulative journalism is becoming
universal, even among time-honored print outlets like the New York Times
and Washington Post. Newspaper headline-writing was at one time a pragmatic
discipline aimed at communicating objectively the gist of a story in as few
words as possible. However, like other aspects of modern journalism, headline
generation has morphed into a political art designed to emphasize a story's
spin more than its content.
To
illustrate, a really fast scan of just one day's headlines (for 3/6/17) yielded the following:
David Letterman calls President Donald Trump Ignorant (ABC)
The Dangerous Rage of Donald Trump (Washington Post)
Trump's Travel Ban is Still Cruel and Still Unconstitutional
(Washington Post)
Donald Trump Reads,
Once Again, From Roy Cohn's McCarthyite Playbook (Daily Beast)
Donald
Trump spends 31 percent of time on vacation, plays golf 8 times in 6 weeks—on taxpayer dime (Daily Kos)
Barbara Streisand Says Trump
Presidency Is Making Her Gain Weight (Huffington Post)
These are
just a few representative headlines, six among hundreds on this one day alone.
Perusing the articles themselves reveals them to contain little informational
content. This is pure spin not even
trying very hard to disguise itself, yet it's being reported in a
traditional format that allows readers so inclined to imagine they're being
informed by objective news reporting.
Is there
any wonder that Donald Trump feels under assault from a biased media?
Then, of
course, there's Fox News. The
preponderance of the mainstream media outlets in America are decidedly liberal
in orientation, but Fox instead reflects the other side. Hopefully that's what
their copyrighted "Fair and Balanced" tagline is meant to imply,
because otherwise Fox represents nothing of the kind. Fox has learned to emulate
CNN in its endless harping on a handful of stories supported by facts molded
into a pre-determined narrative. The only difference is the ideological slant.
Listening
to Fox as a balance to CNN is like trying to counteract damage from a high-fat
diet by consuming large quantities of sugar. Our modern media provides little
in the way of real nutrition and a good deal of poison. The
media's failure is undermining our democracy.
Confirmation Bias Is Powering
Extremism
Cognitive
psychologists employ the term "confirmation bias" to describe the
tendency of humans to seek out information confirming their existing opinions.
A related term the theorists use is "cognitive dissonance", which alludes to the discomfort we all feel upon
encountering evidence contradicting dearly-held assumptions.
Modern
media technology has evolved in such a way that makes it easier for us to
surrender to confirmation bias and
thereby avoid cognitive dissonance. Flipping cable channels or hyper-linking
through web-pages on the Internet allows us, if we choose, to enter a large and
selective universe of people who think much as we do and to screen out the
others. People holding contrary views
appear only in caricatured form as enemies, fools or freaks. They become dehumanized and it's OK to hate them or even contemplate
violence against them. They're the threatening tribe from the other side of
the mountain out to destroy us, like
monstrous foes in a video game.
Last
week I watched an interview that Tucker Carlson conducted with a woman having
the oddly asymmetrical name of Sunsara
Taylor. It wasn't clear to me at the time exactly who Ms. Taylor was, but she
was well-groomed and reasonably attractive except for the Manson-like glare she
affected for the camera. She even seemed well-spoken until you allowed your mind to drift on to
what was being said, at which point your blood went cold. She was calling for
"a mass uprising" to combat
"Fascism in America". She
repeated this at least four or five times.
Giving
her the benefit of the doubt and hoping her to be an ingénue who perhaps failed
to grasp the creepy historical import of her own words, I
Googled her afterwards. It would seem she's no ingénue - she knows what she's
talking about, and what she wants is
blood in the streets. On her Twitter page, she identifies herself as a
disciple of a fellow named Bob Avakian, who is an aging SDS zealot who never
lost the faith. He currently heads a neo-Maoist organization known as the
Revolutionary Communist Party, which is one of the groups fielding the coordinated violent leftist gangs repeatedly
popping up in various American cities and on college campuses to protest Donald
Trump's election and to "fight Fascism".
The
opposite numbers on the Right, of course, are the armed militias, skinheads and
Klansmen eager to have it out with Mr. Avakian and his ilk. These people all
need one another because extreme enemies justify one another's existence and
scare moderate or apolitical people into taking sides. The center atrophies as
more and more people drift to the radical fringes. This is how civil wars get underway.
Are We Being Hypnotized?
Marshall
McLuhan was a communications theorist who died in relative obscurity in 1980.
He had been quite famous for a while in the 1960's, however, because his theories about how media affects
human consciousness spoke to the spirit of the age. I remember reading a couple
of his books at the time and being intrigued.
He talked about media - starting with print - as an almost spiritual
force that re-orders our sensory
apparatus and takes control of our neural pathways in ways of which we're
totally unaware.
I
found myself thinking about him again recently, for no apparent reason, and did
some hasty research to reacquaint myself. I ran across the following passage
from an interview he did in 1969 with Playboy Magazine:
"I
call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby
man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology
as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a
new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our
sensory balance, it also becomes invisible."
This is McLuhan as I remember
him. McLuhan died when the Internet was in its infancy, but the idea of
continuous and universal human interconnection would have set his intellect on
fire. This is McLuhan's "global
village", to employ one his famous phrases, rampaging on steroids half
a century later.
I
would like borrow his term "Narcissus Narcosis" and add to it the
word "parallel" to to describe what I believe to be the media-induced
environment in which all of us are caught up in 2017. This makes the phrase
"Parallel Narcissus Narcosis", which implies separate sensory universes,
i.e. hypnotic trances, in which everything
appears backwards relative to what people in the other universe are experiencing. We can all see
each other, even talk to each other, but everybody on the other side of the
invisible divide seems crazy, because they're seeing black as white and up as
down. Only we ourselves see things as they are. Only we are rational.
This
is, of course, a dangerous false consciousness. It leads to political
dysfunction at the very least and, if not overcome, ultimately to violence,
since people who disagree with us represent
a threat to the very fabric of reality. We have to combat them in the streets.
Escaping The Trap
Which
brings me back to Keith's articles, and,
incidentally, to the purpose of this blog. Most of us, usually without knowing
it, wear our biases like chains. Through selective association and selective
reading, we imagine ourselves to be broadening our life experience when often
what we're doing is little more than tightening the chains.
The
way out of the trap is to embrace the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and
take it as a learning experience. This does not mean converting to the other
side's point of view or necessarily even agreeing with a single thing being
said over there. But it does mean
acknowledging our own limitations and the fact that we're ultimately all
in the same boat here. It also means thickening our skins and putting up with
opposition that will at times appear nasty and stupid, and will often actually
be so. It means trying to contribute our own insights into the common pool of
understanding in the belief that the sum of all this is greater than what any
of us put into it.
This
is the theory of democracy, and it always works if we let it. The alternative
is dismal.
