Letters to the Editor

• Reading In Context and Multiple Causation

  [Read the article: The Politico: Exhibit A for our broken political press]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Glenn:

  Paul:

  Thus, this complaint misses underlying the point that reality and Democratic partisanship have, over time, come to be one and the same thing. This is particularly evident as the GOP becomes increasingly anti-science, as well as anti-transparency in government. Reality is the enemy of authoritarianism.

  So Democratic partisans don't engage in spin, fact-distortive propaganda and falsehoods in order to promote their political agendas?

  No, of course not. The expression may have been a bit sloppy, but the full context of my remarks should make it clear that I'm saying reality is all on the Democratic side--not that the Democratic side is all reality-based--and that this has come about because the right has abandoned reality. (This isn't a new thing. Back in 1995, Gingrich aboliushed Congress's reality-testing Office of Technology Assessmetn.)

  While one part of my expression may have been a bit sloppy, the point of whole should be quite clear, and you seem to have wilfully ignored it.

  I take it for granted that any social phenomena has multiple causes. This is inherent in systematic thinking, as defined by Shawn Rosenberg (no relation), which roughly correlates with Kegan's Stage 4.

  Applying that directly to the kind of phenomena seen in the case at hand, it's to be expected that (1) some causes will be more noble than others, and (2) that just because one side (in any conflict) becomes dramatically more detached from reality, that says nothing at all about what will happen to the other.

  All that said, however, the predominant (not only) issue in the last election was Iraq--and related issues. The latest Pew poll shows that this is still the case. And here we find that Democrats and independents see the situation realistically--and want the war to end, while Republicans see it propagandistically, think it can still be won, and want it to continue. The background to these attitudes is the PIPA's polling from several years back which showed strong correlations between support for Bush & the war and belief in three fundamental "misperceptions" (to put it kindly)--that Iraq had WMDs, that Iraq was involved in 9/11, or at least allied somehow with al Qaeda, and that a majority of world opinion supported the invasion.

  Nor is this an isolated case. The right has spent billions of dollars over the past three decades building up a think-tank/media infrastructure which is overwhelmingly propagandistic in nature, which has no equivilent on the left. The hallucinatory attack on global warming is a typical product of this infrastructure, as is the attack on evolution, continued baseless claims that homosexuality is "a choice," and so on.

  While not all Democrats are immune to these fantasies, virtually all Republicans either embrace them, or have been forced to mute their objections substantially, and this dynamic has come to overwhelm virtually all others. (Note, particularly how Guiliani has rendered his own social liberalism "inoperative," as Nixon would have said.)

  Newspapers can just go ahead and print DNC Press Releases -- or releases from the Clinton and Obama campaigns -- on their front page without further comment and without editing and be confident that they are printing pure fact? After all, "reality and Democratic partisanship have, over time, come to be one and the same thing."

  There are no facts that reflect negatively on Democrats or which conflict with the political assertions Democrats make? Objective reality and the Democratic Party have now merged and become one indivisible entity, so that to call for objective facts is the same as calling for a full embrace of Democrats?

  That is how I always understand your argument when you make this point, and I don't see what other meaning it can have - "reality and Democratic partisanship have, over time, come to be one and the same thing."

  Well, I'm sorry you took it like that, ignoring the whole thrust of my argument, and taking one phrase out of context. I simply meant that presenting objective reality was tantamount to propagandazing for the Democratic Party. That should have been obvious from the whole of what I wrote.

  I harldy meant that all progagandizing for the party was objective. Indeed, most of my criticism of Democratic propaganda comes about because it often mirrors GOP assumptions more than it reflects reality. For example, the way that Congressional Democrats have accpeted the false frame that cutting funding for the war abandons the troops, rather than requiring their withdrawal. Surely, you know that I've made such criticisms in the past.

  Permalink Thursday, May 3, 2007 08:48 AM