After the Future

Miscellaneous Thoughts on Impeachment, Culture, and the Surveillance State

It's important that the U.S. have a post-Trump reckoning about how much damage has been done, not just by him but by his enablers. Will the impeachment play some role in that? I doubt it, since the whole point of it is simply to focus on what is already known about what Trump did before and after the insurrection. The people who want to believe his role was negligible and is being exaggerated by Democrats will continue to believe that. Trump's impeachment lawyers can say any nonsense they want and not be held accountable as they would in a normal court of law. The impeachment, unless something surprising happens, will not change any minds. It will be more political theater in a year when we're sick of political theater. A "trial" like this can only work if you have good-faith, objective jurors who want to get to the bottom of things, and that's just not a description of the U.S. Senate.

I think that far more impactful will be real trials or legal proceedings in real courts, which are not broken institutions like the Senate. Already we're seeing how Fox and Newsmax are responding to real consequences for their having no compunction about broadcasting and magnifying Trump's lies. Goodbye Lou Dobbs.

When Trump is indicted or sued, no matter how compelling the evidence presented, there will be some who will not be convinced because they are the type of people who believe the moon landing was faked, Obama was a Muslim non-citizen, and HRC and and her gal pal in elite perversity, Huma Abedin, are Satan worshipping drinkers of children's blood. A good third of the country is unreachable, but there is a third of the country in the mushy middle that leans toward Trump and that is persuadable. I think putting Trump on trial in real courts with real evidence and with a real jury will make a difference in setting the record straight about who Trump is and what damage he has done to the country. Hopefully, all this will play out over the spring and summer as we're coming out of this pandemic nightmare. The two things working together might convince Americans that some kind of positive future is possible with relatively sane, relatively decent technocrats running the government.

On the subject of technocrats, I've just finished Bart Gellman's Dark Mirror, his account of the role he played in the Edward Snowdon NSA whistleblowing drama. Gelllman is no friend of government secrecy or the surveillance state, but he's a fair-minded reporter that brings into focus the complexity of the issues involved, and my reading this book, along with my actually living through the Trump era, has changed my mostly negative perception of the people who compose the so-called Deep State.

Like Gellman, I have always been concerned about potential abuses of the enormous surveillance powers of the state. What came into focus for me in reading his book and listening to the testimony of so-called deep state operatives during the impeachment trial last year was that there are very strong restraint norms in place that actually work most of the time. The resistance to Trump's abuses by the likes of Alexander Vindman, Bill Taylor, Maria Yovanovich, Fiona Hill, and others was all remarkable for representing a culture of integrity and loyalty to the constitution rather than to a single "dude", to use Ben Sasse's term of art.

If these are the people running the Deep State, more power to the Deep State if that's what's required to contain crackpot autocrats like Trump. If anything, I was surprised they were so impotent to prevent Trump from doing the damage he did, and that was because they lived within the restraint norms their culture prescribed. So this was clarifying for me. What matters most is culture, norms, traditions. That culture of restraint held up pretty well against Trump's assault on it. 

Because this is what it comes down to: Whom do you trust? The other day I wrote about why I thought that elites of both political parties were responsible for the fragilizing of our democracy. I argued that it wasn't so much about the individuals but about the culture that shapes the elite ethos in the media, politics, and business. The Neoliberal ethos of much of corporate America, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, and its media in its competition with with the Cowboy white-entitlement ethos of the Republican Party and its media created a political/economic system over the last thirty years that was utterly unresponsive to the needs of most ordinary Americans. Neither party was trustworthy because both were captured by a destructive elite cultural ethos that shaped their policy agendas. It's no wonder that so many Americans have developed a pox-on-both-their-houses attitude to the two-party system. And it's no wonder that the more ontologically dizzy among them would embrace insane conspiracy theories. 

Nevertheless, the Democrats produce people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Stacy Abrams, and AOC. My argument for Bernie over Clinton in '16 was that more than anything the Democrats needed a change in culture and that's just not something Clinton was capable of effecting. (I wasn't sure Bernie could do it either, but he had a better shot at it.) But one of the things that has become clearer during the Trump years is that the Sanders/Warren wing of the party seems to have won the argument with the Neoliberal establishment wing represented by the Bidens and the Clintons--and really Obama, because he pretty much caved to it.

The ethos of the Democrats is clearly moving away from its Neoliberal assumptions shaped in the '80s and '90s toward a new ethos defined by a retrieval of a New Deal social democratic values, which is clearly what is called for in this historical moment. This is a return to its roots, roots that Democrats influenced by the Neoliberal Aspen-Institute elite mindset started to reject in the 1970s. So what we're seeing in the Democratic Party under Biden now is a much needed change in culture. 

That's a culture I can trust in the hands of someone like Biden because he is a decent enough and unoriginal enough guy that I can be assured that he will go with the flow--kinda like Obama did with the Neoliberals. In many ways he's the perfect figurehead for this change of party culture--reassuring to the mushy middle while being smart enough to know which way the wind is blowing. The question is whether he will be able to effect the way the mushy American middle perceives the Democrats' that will be significant enough to prevent Republicans from returning to power in '22--or ever, at least until they return to some level of sanity.

So far so good with Biden. A lot depends on whether events will work to support the marginalization of Trumpism in the next year or so. Those events will be primarily the success of Biden's legislative initiatives and further revelations about the extent of Trump's corruption, and perhaps even revelations about his treason. I realize that people like me might be vulnerable to our own kind of conspiracy theory, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out that Trump was a Russian asset, whether witting or unwitting.  I'm willing to concede, however, that this might be the kind of disinformation that fits my presuppositions. We'll see. The mystery of Trump's prodigious ass kissing of Putin has yet to be explained. 

So back to Gellman's Dark Mirror. The surveillance technology is there, whether or not they are going to be used. They are going to be used, so the real question is whether they will be abused. And the only real constraint is a culture of restraint within the  institutions that have access to these technologies. I was very impressed by the way the culture and its individual technocrats in the national security community pushed back against Trump and his appointees at the time of Zelensky call and in other matters. The culture held, but it would not have held had Trump won another four years in the White House. He could have effected a change of culture by purge and forced retirements. I'm persuaded that at least for now the culture of the surveillance state is basically trustworthy. 

Laws are needed to restrict abuses, but what's more important is a culture of restraint, because if the culture is permissive about abuses, the laws won't matter. The Democrats represent a culture of restraint (Obama's respect for process is exemplary if irritating in this respect) in a way that the Republicans have proved time and time again that they don't. The line from Nixon's Watergate to Reagan's Iran Contra to Cheney's Abu Ghraib to McConnell's cynical obstructionism to Trump's besotted minions storming the Capitol is all understandable because of the fundamentally delusional thinking that is at the foundation Republican Party culture. Even the saner, principled conservative, small-government Republicans are fundamentally clueless about how the world works and what is called for by central governments at this historical moment. 

Nothing is more important in the next decade than that this political culture of delusion be de-legitimated. The surveillance state and the problems of technocracy are going to continue to present serious challenges to a viable democracy, but there is no living without them--especially if we are going into an era of hard-right domestic violent terrorism. The most important thing is that we elect elites who will be stewards of the traditions, norms, and cultures of the institutions that wield these awesome powers. Clearly the Republicans are not trustworthy stewards, and while we must hope that the forces of sanity prevail in keeping them out of power in the near future, we must always be vigilant that the Democrats don't slip into the kind of delusions that shaped their policies while captured for over thirty years by the Neoliberal Washington Consensus. 

The Failure of Democracy is the Failure of Elites

For all our talk of democracy, it's pretty obvious that the country is run by elites in business, media, and politics. The rest of us get to ratify the general leftish or rightish direction they seem to be going, but the actual power of the people is pretty crude and is in effect plebiscitary. Elite thinking is the only thinking that really matters, and all talk about the will of the people is really pretty fanciful.

And so people across the political spectrum are for their different reasons have become extremely frustrated that the political system seems so utterly unresponsive to their will that it's completely understandable that cynicism about politics should be so pervasive. This cynicism has turned toxic in the more populist precincts of American society, and Democratic elites bear much of the responsibility for the loss of the white working class to that was solidly Democratic before Reagan to the current fever dreams of the Right.  

So we can talk all we want about how delusional Trump supporters are, but it wouldn't have come to this if it weren't for a fundamental nihilism or fecklessness among the country's elites--including its Liberal elites. I hold the Bill Clintons, Dick Morrises, Rahm Emmanuels, Larry Summers, and the whole Neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party as significantly responsible for the rise of the Tea Party, Trumpism, and  Q anon--if not quite as responsible as spineless Republican elites like Kevin McCarthy and Marco Rubio or the calculating cynicism of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz and so many other game players like them. Not to mention Rupert Murdoch.

My point here is that the Democratic elites were criminally negligent in their Neoliberal Washington Consensus cluelessness, and that combined with their run-of-the mill Beltway swampiness and their capture by a kind politically correct silliness they gave Fox and Limbaugh enough to work with so that even sane people began believing the worst about them. So I think it's fair to say that If Democracy fails in the United States in the next decade, it won't be caused by White Supremacist militias and Q anon conspiracists, but because of the accumulated failures of elites that created the conditions for their emergence. 

In a very blunt sense, Q anon, insane as its specific assertions are, isn't wrong. Elite culture may not be dominated by Satan-worshipping pedophiles with space lasers made by Jews, but there is a kind of nihilism in which ego, greed, and will to power are simply accepted as normative as the main motivating driving forces in politics, business, and media. Mythologizing that nihilism by way of demonizing it in conspiracy theories takes what is kinda true and twists it into something that just isn't, but that doesn't mean that the kinda true part of it can be dismissed because of the crazy way it's being distorted. 

This is not an indictment of many individuals in business, media, and politics because clearly there are many fine people in each of these areas, but there is a pervasive cynicism about the corruption of our institutions that pervades popular culture for good reason. It's understandable why so many people are inclined to think the worst of someone like Joe Biden even if he doesn't deserve it. But why anyone can think the best of a sleazy crackpot like Donald Trump--that he is a better man, a truer American than Joe Biden or Barrack Obama--is one of the most astonishing feats of political jiujitsu in my lifetime. The irony of Trump being adopted as if he were Michael the Archangel leading an army to slay the Satanic armies is so absurdly whackadoodle, it leaves one speechless. 

During most of my adult life, media--especially prestige fiction, film, and TV--present a picture of American institutions that are run by psychopaths whose ego, greed, and will to power are the ugly truth that determines policy no matter what the decent people who work in these institutions would prefer. There is a feeling that the evil power that they and their institutions represent has a kind of stolid inevitability, that Don Quixotes can break their lances tilting at it and might win a victory here or there, but that the power and inevitability of this evil power is implacable. At best the decent folk are the John Kellys or Jim Mattises who try to provide some check on the worst instincts of the really terrible people who rise to the pinnacles of power in these spheres. But in the end, the good people either are either coopted or purged.

Trump isn't an aberration; he's just someone who daylights, magnifies, and exaggerates what's already there almost everywhere. He's somebody who believes that everybody is as bad as he, as cynical and self-interested in his or her motivations as he, and he's more right than wrong about that when it comes to so many of the people who rise to positions of power and influence in this country. 

Does that sound extreme or overly cynical on my part? Maybe, but it seems pretty clear to me that those motivations are by and large accepted as normative within these elite spheres. People working in these institutions as individuals may be more or less decent, but the institutional ethos is deeply corrupted by the exigencies of capitalism, and it makes sense that those who are most successful in such a corrupt values environment are those who have the least compunction about behaving corruptly. Is there any wonder that decent, but poorly informed people in great swaths of America are inclined see the ruling elites the way they do?

But perhaps that's why I feel a scintilla of hope. Yes, it might prove naive, but it's precisely because Trump has daylighted and magnified for all to see what we have in fact become that maybe, just maybe, especially as more comes out about him in coming months, that we will come to some broad collective resolution to reject elite nihilism for something better. The catch, of course, is whether something better will present itself. Biden might buy us some time, but he's not it. Will it come from within elite precincts of American society or from somewhere else? Don't know. But it's more likely to come from African American people of faith than from a soul-eviserated white elite, imo. Not the Kamala Harrises, but the Stacey Abrams. Not the Corey Bookers, but the Raphael Warnocks. We'll see. 

Quote of the Day: Andrew O'Hehir

Beltway politics are dominated by passionate and often outrageous partisan rhetoric, which cannot quite conceal the fact that Congress has become a useless, paralytic institution that can’t get anything done. Power lies elsewhere, and remains inaccessible. In a similar fashion, angry wars of words between and among self-styled progressives on the Internet do not entirely camouflage the relative powerlessness of everyone involved. Getting into a comments-thread battle or a Twitter-lather about Colbert’s bad joke or Lena Dunham’s fashion-magazine shoot or whatever other outrage du jour conveys a temporary feeling of pseudo-power, much as watching MSNBC (or Fox News) crow about the idiocy of the other side is pseudo-participation in a pseudo-democracy.

I would even take this a step farther and argue that the symbolic politics of the Obama presidency — the same factors that drive right-wingers crazy — are exactly what liberals and progressives like about it. I mean, what other explanation is there? Here we have an administration conducting a worldwide drone war that has killed unknown numbers of innocents, managing an ultra-secretive surveillance state beyond Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams, paying lip service to the existential crisis of climate change while doing nothing about it, and protecting and nurturing exactly the same cabal of bankers who brought us to the brink of financial apocalypse in 2008. For a candidate who ran as the populist embodiment of hope and change to wield such unprecedented and shrouded executive power is an irony that should keep historians of the future busy, providing we have historians or a future. But he personally seems like a cultured, funny, sharp-dressed guy who has gay friends and watches “Game of Thrones,” and the semiotics of his White House are awesome. So it’s all good.

But let’s back away from that, to the position that the mean Republicans won’t let Obama do anything, and so the politics of semiotic awesomeness are the best we can get. That too is demonstrative of our dilemma. We can’t do anything about worsening inequality or the poisoned planet or the total defeat of the labor movement or the broken immigration system or the incarceration of young black men. Our country is too “divided,” we can’t make up our minds about anything. The power to change those things, supposedly vouchsafed to us in the Constitution, has migrated somewhere else. But we can drive Gilbert Gottfried off Twitter for being such an enormous asshole. Change we can believe in. (Source)

Politics as cultural sensibility: impotent outrage.

 

Josh Marshall & Historical Vacuum Syndrome

Josh Marshall has created a firestorm among his liberal readership by coming out pretty strongly against the Manning and Snowden leaks. I think he gives a thoughtful, honest justification for his views, and the key to it is explained in these three paragraphs:

If you see the state as essentially malevolent or a bad actor then really anything you can do to put a stick in its spokes is a good thing. Same if you think the conduct of US foreign policy is fundamentally a bad thing. Then opening up its books for the world to see is a good thing simply because it exposes it or damages it. It forces change on any number of levels.

From that perspective, there’s no [sic] really no balancing to be done. All disclosure is good. Either from the perspective of transparency in principle or upending something you believe must be radically changed.

On the other hand, if you basically identify with the country and the state, then indiscriminate leaks like this are purely destructive. They’re attacks on something you fundamentally believe in, identify with, think is working on your behalf.

Marshall unapologetically associates himself with those in the third paragraph. He defends it by claiming that it is more "balanced". But what does balance mean in a world where power is so asymmetrically distributed? In any event, Marshall's allegiances lead him to write paragraphs like these:

Let me put my cards on the table. At the end of the day, for all its faults, the US military is the armed force of a political community I identify with and a government I support. I’m not a bystander to it. I’m implicated in what it does and I feel I have a responsibility and a right to a say, albeit just a minuscule one, in what it does. I think a military force requires a substantial amount of secrecy to operate in any reasonable way. So when someone on the inside breaks those rules, I need to see a really, really good reason. And even then I’m not sure that means you get off scott free. It may just mean you did the right thing.

So do I see someone who takes an oath and puts on the uniform and then betrays that oath for no really good reason as a hero? No.

The Snowden case is less clear to me. . . . [But] Snowden is doing more than triggering a debate. I think it’s clear he’s trying to upend, damage - choose your verb - the US intelligence apparatus and policies he opposes. The fact that what he’s doing is against the law speaks for itself. I don’t think anyone doubts that narrow point. But he’s not just opening the thing up for debate. He’s taking it upon himself to make certain things no longer possible, or much harder to do. To me that’s a betrayal. I think it’s easy to exaggerate how much damage these disclosures cause. But I don’t buy that there are no consequences. And it goes to the point I was making in an earlier post. Who gets to decide? The totality of the officeholders who’ve been elected democratically - for better or worse - to make these decisions? Or Edward Snowden, some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with and is now seeking refuge abroad for breaking the law?

I don’t have a lot of problem answering that question.

I've always believed that Marshall, like most other mainstream journalists, suffers from what I would describe as Historical Vacuum Syndrome. He is a liberal critic of a system whose rules he basically approves of. He knows they are flawed, but show him a society in which they are not. So, he's right that identifying or not identifying with the government is certainly a factor that will shape your perception of these leaks, but I would add another factor, which is to ask: In which direction do you think our country is moving? Journalists with Historical Vacuum Syndrome don't ask that question. 

If I thought that history was static or that things were headed mostly in the right direction, my position would be similar to Marshall's. I don't think that. I believe American history is trending in a bad direction. I was ready to hop on a more optimistic bus when Obama was elected--I really wanted to; I don't like being cynical--but it became clear fairly quickly that the system is running Obama rather than he running the system. For me, at least, it has become clear that the system has a mind and will of its own, and it's not taking us anywhere good. If you don't believe that, if you believe instead that there is nothing new under the sun, that we're in this static pattern of same old, same old, nothing new here, just business as usual, then you can, like Marshall does, adopt the kind of journalistic attitude that he articulates in his post. Me? Count me among those who favor putting a stick in the spokes. 

Journalists like Marshall would argue that Historical Vacuum Syndrome is a virtue, that they are not in the business of making judgments about historical trajectories. So this leads them to accept the world as it is and play by the rules as they have been developed, no matter how rigged the game has become. "Are they any more rigged now than they have ever been?" they would retort. This is how I see Brooks, Friedman, and almost all the people who have chosen to make a career in American establishment journalism. How could it be otherwise for them? But as such, I'd argue, that they have become coopted defenders of a system that is out of control. The more embedded you are in the system, the harder it is to have any real perspective on it.

That's the difference in the end between Marshall and Snowden. Snowden understands better what's in control and what forces are driving it. He understands the enormity and the asymmetry, and his gesture, while ultimately futile, was an attempt to simply to say NO. 

 

 

What Makes a Hack?

Alex Parene at Salon has an interesting top-ten count down of the biggest hacks on the American media scene today, and I have to agree with him right down the line--from Arianna Huffington, Bill Keller, Ed Schultz, David Gregory, Tom Friedman, Nick Kristoff, not to mention the Atlantic Monthly, Drudge, CNN, and the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival.

What makes a hack? Living in an information world that is suffused with bullshit and happily accepting it as reality. Even being proud to be one of its principal purveyors.  

What makes a hack? It's his or her finger-to-the-air predicatbility. His or her attempt to sound "reasonable" when the premises for everything they say are absurd. It's clueless, elite groupthink and platitudinous conventional wisdom. Why does anybody take it seriously? Anyone with a lick of sense doesn't, but it frames the "conversation", to use the fatuous Tina Brown's phrasing. Here's Parene talking about the Sunday morning talk shows:

The only people I actually know who watch these things do so out of professional obligation.

But people watch these shows. Millions of people. More people watch “Meet the Press” than “The Daily Show.” Most of those people are quite old, but it’s still the case that a significant portion of the American people are learning the contours of the great public debates of our time from David Gregory interviewing Lindsey Graham.

I wrote a few weeks ago that there is no equivalency between FOX and MSNBC, but I agree with Parene's take here: 

MSNBC is more unapologetically liberal than it used to be, it’s still all over the place, with a conservative anchoring its flagship morning show, objective Beltway “straight news” proponents like Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell dominating in the daytime, and weekends full of … prison shows. But more important, it’s not as good as Fox at being compelling TV, which is why millions more people watch Fox every day. (There are demographic reasons for Fox’s advantage, too, but it’s still a huge number.)

There’s a reason Ed Schultz — the most Fox-like of MSNBC’s liberal hosts — has great ratings. That’s also what makes it so funny that MSNBC is supposedly planning on replacing him with Ezra Klein, which is like Fox deciding to replace Sean Hannity with Ross Douthat. Good for respectability. Bad for ratings.

And what's with Luke Russert?

Parene goes on to say: 

I’ll give MSNBC its due: Chris Matthews is probably the worst interviewer on television but he is also undoubtedly one of its most fascinating and watchable personalities. Rachel Maddow is obviously and deservedly a national treasure. MSNBC’s new weekend morning programs, hosted by Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry, seem like a novel experiment in attempting to produce genuinely intelligent television using the medium of cable news and its popular tropes. “The Cycle” is exactly 25 percent great. 

Matthews is a hack, but he's nuts, so I guess Parene finds that entertaining. I don't, and I can't watch him. I"ve not seen the Harris-Perry show, so have no opinion. Maddow is no hack, but I find I can't watch her show either. She just gets on my nerves. The Chris Hayes show has been consistently excellent; it's the opposite of Meet the Press hackery because he has an interesting variety of very smart, knowledgeable people on, many of the Mensches, and he seems to pick only people who won't deliver the usual b.s., and when they do, he's been pretty good on challenging them. 

I don't have a problem with bias; I do have a problem with bullshit--with talking points and platitudes and cluelessness. That's what makes a hack.

See Also "Primitivs, Hacks, Naifs, Fools, & Mensches"

 

How the Beltway Media Thinks

From Dan Froomkin's article on Ornstein and Mann:

Most reporters, however -- including many widely admired for their intelligence and aggressive reporting -- simply refused to blame one side more than the other. Mann said he was struck in conversations with journalists by how influenced they were by the heavily funded movement to promote a bipartisan consensus around deficit reduction and austerity. Such a bipartisan consensus doesn't actually exist, Mann pointed out. But if you believe it does, than you can blame both parties for failing to reach it.

"The Peterson world, I think, has given journalists the material to keep doing what they're doing," Mann said of the vast network of think tanks and other influential Washington groups underwritten at least in part by Wall Street billionaire Peter Peterson

Peterson's vast spending has given rise to an environment of contempt among the Washington elites for anyone who doesn't believe the government is dangerously overextended. And by that reckoning, the Democrats are therefore more out of touch with reality than Republicans, who at least pay the concept ample lip service. . . . 

To the extent that the issue of widespread prevarication has come up at all, many media critics identified the rise of fact-checking as the big new trend of the 2012 cycle.

But Mann and Ornstein said that in practice, the fact-checkers may have made things worse rather than better.

"We had these little flurries of fact-checking -- which I found not worthless, but not a substitute for coherent, serious reporting -- and most of the time it just got stuck in the back of a news organization's output and there was no cost to a candidate of ignoring it," Mann said.

And then there was this terrible irony: "Fact checkers almost seemed obliged to show some balance in their fact checking."

"There was some damn good stuff done, and stuff that really did hold Romney to account," Ornstein said. But no fact-checker intent on "appearing to be utterly straightforward, independent, and without an axe to grind, is going to actually do the job of saying that we're going to cover 20 fact checks on one side, to three on the other."

So, Ornstein concluded: "If you looked at where the scales should have been, and where they were, they were weighted. And they weren't weighted for ideological bias. They were weighted to avoid being charged with ideological bias."

It's hard to exaggerate just how popular Mann and Ornstein were with the press before their apostasy. They were quite possibly the two most quotable men in Washington. They were the media cocktail party circuit's most reliable walking talking points.

And now they are virtual pariahs.

"It's awkward. I can no longer be a source in a news story in the Wall Street Journal or the Times or the Post because people now thing I've made the case for the Democrats and therefore I'll have to be balanced with a Republican," Mann said.

Neither Mann nor Ornstein have been guests on any of the main Sunday public affairs shows since their book came out. Nor has anyone else on those shows talked about the concerns they raised.

 

Related articles

Dan Froomkin: How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign

Traditional White America

I don't know if the real Bill O'Reilly is more of a sendup on himself than his mocking imitator:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

 

And Maher's Two Cents

Elite Media Stupidity: It's Not a Bug . . .

Dougl at Balloon Juice thinks that maybe a big part of the problem lies in that elites in the MSM aren't very smart:

Maybe it’s time to admit that the people at the top of our political/media heap just aren’t very bright. Politics and media are both areas where there isn’t a lot of good accreditation and review of people (the way there is to some extent in law or medicine or academia), nor is there much opportunity for constructive entrepreneurship (you have to be at some large organization to get anywhere) nor is there anyway to get to the top by just beating other people, as there might be in something like sports (I realize there are elections to win, but they are mostly rigged via gerrymandering etc.). Most of it doesn’t pay very well at the beginning, with all these unpaid internships and so on.

I find it amazing that lots of smart people still don't understand that the MSM is closed system whose primary purpose is to serve corporate and shareholder interests. Big media organizations hire and promote careerists who understand that they don't move up the ladder unless they can prove themselves to be a prodigies of the banal and commonplace. The whole media structure exists not to challenge entrenched power but to reinforce it, and no one gets promoted who isn't on board with that.

Maddow and Olbermann have their liberal ratings niche for the time being because the conservative ratings niche is already occupied, and they pose no significant threat to elite power because they cater to a relatively small, toothless group that has no desire or capability to rock the establishment. And they play their role to keep the culture war alive, which keeps most Americans who have common interests otherwise divided and conquered. As long as the American people fight among themselves, they don't fight elite power. The most important thing for entrenched power is to make sure that we're all segregated into our respective tribal silos. 

Stewart v. Maddow

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."  [attributed to Karl Rove]

I don't know that it was so interesting  it required an hour, but Maddow's interview of Jon Stewart did focus on some issues that we've been discussing at ATF in the last several weeks. I'd like specifically to talk about the interview in the light of my posts last week, "Centrist Politics and Rhetorical Virtue" and "The Rhetorical Strategy of the Power Elites."

Maddow had a beef with Stewart insofar as he suggested during his sanity rally that there was an equivalency between what MSNBC does and what FOX does. Stewart defended that position using a weather/climate metaphor. The weather of specific stories might be fine, but the basic MSNBC climate was as partisan liberal as FOX is partisan conservative. As such, MSNBC is a part of the problem as much as FOX is. For Stewart, Left vs. Right, blue vs. red is the wrong argument. The real argument is corruption vs. non-corruption, extremists vs. normal people.

For the Record

. . . about the paper of record

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that "I think this Kennedy School study -- by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories -- is somewhat misleading and tendentious."

Greenwald's response:

I'm not one who wishes for the death of newspapers, as they still perform valuable functions and employ some good journalists.  But I confess that episodes like this one tempt me towards that sentiment.  This isn't a case where the NYT failed to rebut destructive government propaganda; it's one where they affirmatively amplified and bolstered it, and are now demonizing their critics by invoking the most deranged rationale to justify what they did:  political correctness?  And whatever else is true, there is no doubt the NYT played an active and vital role in enabling the two greatest American crimes of the last decade:  the attack on Iraq and the institutionalizing of a torture regime.  As usual, those who pompously prance around as watchdogs over political elites are their most devoted and useful servants.

Perusal of the New York Times was once one of life's daily little pleasures. It's not something I ever do anymore. It's just another media source among so many others. I've come to feel similarly about NPR's Morning Edition or All Things Considered.  I find myself hitting the NPR button in my car from time to time, but then switching to the local sports talk radio because I just can't stand listening to these NPR types. The very tone of their voices irks me. Better to listen to the jocks. Not as painful. I can't quite put my finger on the feeling I have as I read or listen to the non-jocks. It's as if their reporting assumes an imagination of the world that is now a world I would ever want to live in. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing. There are plenty of people I like with whom I disagree. It's more a matter of "Are you for real? You can say that and still take yourself so seriously?"

I didn't always feel that way.  And now I'm not sure I feel this way because they've changed or because I have.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I found this comment #7 at Balloon Juice on another matter, which nevertheless amplifies what I was trying to say:

The problem is that we have no truly serious people in this country. We have one group of hacks, clowns, idiots, and sociopaths, and another group that is afraid of the hacks, clowns, idiots, and sociopaths. Our country may not yet be comatose, but it is certainly paralyzed. The DNC cannot say this because it is the truth, and the truth has been relegated to those people whom no one listens to.

It's the truly un-serious people in the media who seem to take themselves most seriously in their taking seriously that hacks, clowns, idiots and sociopaths. They seem to think that's what journalistic integrity requires. That's what I think irks me about them so--their blithe acceptance of the insanity as if it were normalcy. Their refusal to take seriously the truth tellers, well, because they're not "serious"; they're the ones nobody listens to.

The "Lost" Sensibility

Heather Havrileski at Salon doesn't have it:

Damn you, "Lost"! We went and jumped on your bandwagon way back in the first season, got sucked into your endless jungley maze and suspenseful chords, and waited breathlessly for the next shoe to drop, over and over again. Remember when that was still fun? Remember? Henry Gale's googly-eyed provocations? Michael shooting Ana Lucia in the gut? The impenetrable, nostalgia-inducing mysteries of the Dharma Initiative? Thanks to the brilliant character studies of the first season (we ignored the dumb monsters), thanks to the genius twists and turns of the second and third seasons, we're doomed to do our penance as the whole tale unravels in a messy heap. . . .

Back then, like teenagers at a Baptist retreat, we thought the big, bad world would add up to something, that every confusing twist was laden with hidden meaning. Now we know better. Now we get up in the morning and put on our Sunday best and trudge off to church on the off-chance that the Lord Himself will appear and shine His glory on us in person. Now we watch because we were once "Lost" fans, and here it is the final season, and there are only a handful of episodes left. Even though the long-awaited answers we're looking for are offered in such blunt, unimaginative language that we feel like we're reading first drafts: "I'm a smoke monster." "You're going to have to kill the devil." "It's all meaningless if I have to force them to do anything." And if we wanted to waste six years in a Judeo-Christian allegory, we would've just followed a Jehovah's Witness home a long time ago. At least their Armageddon should be a little bit gripping and suspenseful. (5/8)

Neither does Laura Miller at Salon after watching the finale, and there are many others who felt the show was a "long con". But needless to say I disagree, and I think the difference lies in there being two fundamentally different postmodern sensibilities. Havrileski and Miller represent one, and the Lost writers represent the other. The first is one that with its arms folded and foot tapping, suspicious about everything, fears to be hoodwinked. The second is arms open with second naivete ready to embrace everything that has the slightest scent of truth. Count me in with the second group.

Lost was remarkable for its ability to be both complex and multilayered and yet to end with a theme that was simple, clear, resonant, and deeply human. It was a show that was full of ideas but was never just a head trip. In the end it was about the characters and their relationships, and it was about why those relationships matter and with meanings that might be described as having cosmic import.

Greenwald's Response to the "Citizen's United" ruling

Greenwald is making the Libertarian defense of this ruling arguing that money is, in fact, speech, and he's being, IMO, absolutist about the First Amendment. No constitutional right is an absolute, and it's one thing to defend a principle; it's another to go rigidly fundamentalist about it. 

So again, no value, no matter how sacred, is absolute, and when it comes to "liberty" rights, they have to be held in a kind of tension with "equality" rights. It's one thing to say that we're all free to say our piece; it's another to say that people with enormous resources should be allowed to buy a monster megaphone to say theirs. It basically reinforces the idea that some people are more free than others, and that should never be true in the political sphere, where, I would argue, equality should be the dominant principle. (Liberty, the way I think about it, is the dominant principle in the cultural sphere, not the political or economic spheres, but that's argument for another day.)

If money equals speech, the power of the rich to buy a greater amount of speech creates a fundamental inequality problem, and it diminishes the free speech of citizens with modest means. There's an injury there that ordinary citizens should be able to seek a remedy for, but after today's ruling it would seem impossible to do so.

To argue that laws like McCain-Feingold were ineffective is one thing, but to ban forevermore, as a matter of constitutional precedent, any attempt to limit money spent to influence events in the political sphere by the mega-wealthy is horrifyingly undemocratic. It's another hard slap at the equality principle, which lately always seems to lose in its tug-'o-war with the liberty principle. 

Look, I get there are problems, as for instance with media corporations' ability to use their megaphones in a way that other non-media corporations cannot, but the remedy is not to empower other corporations, but rather to get the media out of the hands of profit-driven corporations.  We need to find a way empower, through subsidies, a more diverse, robust, and non-profit press. A subsidized, non-profit free press sector would lead to a healthier exercise of the First Amendment than our current corporate-owned system.  But that, too, is an argument for another day.

Disease in Remission

For the life of me I don't know why anybody serious is obsessing so much about Sarah Palin this week. This piece by Sullivan is simply silly.  As if the future of the nation hinges on exposing what everybody with half a brain already knows.Honestly, who cares and why feed this media frenzy with a seriousness it simply does not deserve?

Palin represents a disease in the body politic, which for now, for all the fatuous attention it's getting, is in remission. It has no real power; it functions as a distraction. We need to monitor it, and we need to be careful about not creating the conditions that might trigger more serious symptoms to present acutely, but for now, there are just more important things to worry about than this airhead from Alaska and the 25% who think she's so wonderful. This is entertainment fodder for the media, not anything worth an erg of energy beyond that.

The FOX Brouhaha

I'm just trying to understand the administration's calculation in using this attack tactic to deal with right-wing media. Clearly right wing media are never going away. Clearly, while they get a big media share of the news pie, they still only reach a relatively small number of people. And the number of people who identify with Republicans and with its obstructionist program promoted through its media megaphone is down around 20%. So why should the administration care? Why not just let these people talk to themselves, and let them continue along this path which leads to marginalization and irrelevancy to every one with an ounce of sanity and common sense?

The answer: it's a containment strategy. The administration is concerned to hear that after the ACORN incident, mainstream news organizations are chastising themselves for not taking more seriously the news that these right-wing media invent, and the last thing the administration wants is for right-wing nonsense to be taken seriously outside the right-wing media ghetto. That's what they want to nip in the bud before we get full throttle into the kind of thing Clinton had to deal with. The problem lies in how right wing nonsense was covered by the networks and other mainstream media to legitimate what was fundamentally illegitimate.  It's understandable that Obama's people would be looking for ways to prevent that from happening.

If the administration can make the case that FOX deserves to be marginalized, not because it criticizes the administration from a conservative point of view, but because it is not really independent insofar as it serves as the talking-points media arm of the Republican party, then they have a legitimate case to be made that FOX is different and deserves to be shut out until it changes its behavior. The equivalency with MSNBC or with the opinion journalism of Maddow and Olbermann is unfounded.  They represent a Liberal/progressive point of view, but their opinions are not Dem talking points, they are often critical of Democrats, and they simply bear no resemblance in their relationship to the Democrats that FOX news personalities bear toward the Republicans. And most important, while they make no effort to hide their biases, they don't make stuff up. There is no equivalency here, and it's fair for the administration to point that out.

The problem is not that nobody at FOX has no serious journalists--there are apparently a few who qualify--nor does the problem lie in that sometimes they criticize the administration from a conservative point of view.It isn't just opinion; it's abetting and colluding with Republican political strategists. The problem lies in how a problem how these strategists make things up, throw mud on the wall to see what sticks, spread disinformation and confusion, and seek to subvert any legitimate debate with fearmongering and jingoism. They fabricate and distort in the hopes of manufacturing controversy that the MSM will cover, no matter how baseless, because people are talking about it. Think Vince Foster, Whitewater, death panels, Obama is a racist, fascist communist, etc., etc.

The challenge for the administration is not to marginalize legitimate criticism but to quaranteen that kind of baseless fabrication. How do you do the one without the other?  It might not be possible, but I don't begrudge them for trying.

P.S.  See also this bit on Mickey Kaus's take. The point isn't that it's unbiased, but that it's not independent.