This is the second post brought on by my re-reading of Chomsky's Necessary Illusions. More than the first, I think it highly relevant to approaches to how we talk about politics, and why it is so broken.
When I first started perusing the internet, about four and a half years ago, one of the things I discovered was a lively, vigorous critique of our mainstream public discourse. For years, I'd been frustrated by the nonsensical "liberal media" crap; I had also become disillusioned, however, with its mirror-opposite, oft-heard in the further reaches of the left, that the real bias is conservative. This Hobson's choice of narratives just didn't make sense of the reality for me. Discovering Media Matters for America, as well as some of the better liberal bloggers offered a refreshing alternative to this all-too-sterile false dichotomy.
Over time, however, I have become increasingly frustrated with this alternative as well. For one thing, spending a great deal of capital and man-hours chronicling the factual errors in, say, a Rush Limbaugh radio program or Glenn Beck television show, while certainly rewarding to those who think being factually wrong is enough to condemn them and those like them. It hasn't however, dwindled their audience or market share. The fact that Limbaugh is completely apathetic toward facts; that Glenn Beck seems to enjoy skirting right up to the line of "public nervous breakdown" hasn't brought down either his ratings or the revenue FOXNews enjoys from advertisers. It such a catalog important? Sure. Is it practically effective? Obviously not.
More broadly, the liberal critique of our mainstream political discourse, mired in an on-going frustration with its shallowness, its callowness, its obsequiousness toward the corridors of power, errs because there is an implicit assumption that the discussion, either of politics or policy, is open to the public at large. It is not, and has not been. It is a conversation for elites, done by elites, with the assumptions and prejudices of the elite standing in full force behind it. If it is more shallow, more ridiculous perhaps, now than in recent memory, that perhaps says much about the intellectual status of our current crop of elites.
Take, for example, the most recent Beltway tempest, the President's deficit-reduction commission. Pres. Obama created it to recommend policy choices in the face of mounting public debt. Critics of the Obama Administration used operating deficits as a stick with which to beat the President during the recent campaign.
Yet, anyone who has paid any attention to our public life over the past three decades knows several things. First, no one in power in Washington really cares about deficits, in and for themselves. President Clinton managed to not only balance the budget, but budget surpluses his last two years in office, due in large measure to slightly higher marginal tax rates and a bustling economy brought on by the rise of the high-tech sector in the middle part of the 1990's. No one cared all that much about the surpluses, either.
Second, the American public doesn't care about the deficit. Some do, to be sure, and it will be easy enough to find all sorts of voters fulminating on the necessity of our federal government to operate within its mean. For the most part, though, our current need is greater attention to the unemployment situation, its stagnant nature. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool conservative economist understands that in order to address unemployment, the feds need to spend money. That means, of course, running an operating deficit. Addressing the deficit at this point in time is not only politically unpopular, but would be economically disastrous.
Unless, of course, one considers who the real stakeholders are. The banks, the bond market, those corporations who wish to shed their reliance on bad investment decisions from earlier in the decade without paying a legal or financial price for doing so are the ones who want the federal government to stop spending money. They want the deficit addressed now so that, first of all, tax increases can be off the table (no one wants a tax increase during a business slump). Second, and more important, the real issue is dismantling much of the social safety net, a project begun tentatively during the Reagan years, and gathering steam since. With our current economic situation so dire, and huge deficits looming in to the near future, ridding the federal government of the cost of supporting the needy seems like a great opportunity, not to be missed.
In other words, none of this is about the deficit. The recession is an excuse, a debate point to be used over and over to insist that we can no longer afford these once venerable and even necessary programs. It has happened in Greece, and is already happening in England, where the national health service and public assistance was both far more advanced and is even now being trimmed by the Conservative-Liberal alliance in power.
It would be nice to believe that our pundits and commentators serve the public at large. They do not. Our public discourse is ridiculous not because it is liberal, or conservative or factually inaccurate. It is ridiculous because, at its heart, it isn't public. When we read a column by David Broder or Charles Krauthammer or even Jonah Goldberg or E. J. Dionne, we are not reading something for the public at large. We are, rather, overhearing, at a distance to be sure, the private conversation within elite circles over the narrow range of policy options available to us.
Spending time pointing out how wrong Rush Limbaugh is wastes our time and energy precisely because that is what those in positions of power want us to do with our time and energy. Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage are all useful idiots, tools to be used by the elite to keep us either cheering on their nonsense, or pointing out how wrong/morally vacuous/politically nihilistic they are.
I'm not sure what the solution to this problem - if it even is a problem - might be. I do know that saying, yet again, that some pundit said something stupid/wrong/evil not only does no good, it takes our eye off the real issue. These folks get paid a lot of money to be stupid/wrong/evil. We should probably be paying more attention to their employers than to them.
Virtual Tin Cup
