Intellectual Conservative
In a world where you can believe what you want to believe because you want to believe it — and your beliefs can be shared by others who want to believe what you want to believe too — there’s no room for genuine dialogue and debate.
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Now, we all know that differences exist in every election, and the political rhetoric that gives expression to these differences can at times be extreme. Pacifists routinely get tarred as Unpatriotic Pinkos, just as law and order proponents get unfairly labeled as the New American Gestapo. Exaggerations and excesses are as much a part of this country’s political dynamics as motherhood and apple pie. To rail against these as injurious to the very system that gives them voice in the first place is to understand nothing about how politics is actually conducted in the real world, with real people.
But, it’s also true that at some point a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. Exactly when that threshold is crossed isn’t always clear, but like the Supreme Court which can’t define pornography but knows it when it sees it, that threshold exists. Bill Clinton helped cross one line by making “penis” a word of common, every-day usage, where previously an endless series of euphemisms were employed when publicly speaking about it. Now, thanks to Bill and Monica and a box of cigars, even fifth-graders can talk openly about the exit point of the male reproductive system, oral sex, and a myriad of other once-forbidden topics without the slightest hint of social inhibition.
And so it is with politics in general. Questioning one’s patriotism once merited a full-blown investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Now, thanks to the excesses of McCarthyism, it’s just the first arrow in the political quiver of both the Right and Left which simultaneously condemns Code Pink and General Petraeus as disloyal subversives....
To illustrate what I mean, we first need to recognize a tendency that misinforms a lot of political analysis. When thinking about the world in which they live, people tend to mark the beginning of history with the moment of their own birth. Those for whom the Great Depression was the defining experience of their lives never quite saw the country the same way as those born in the post-WWII era. Baby Boomers like myself, whose perspective was shaped by the fifties and sixties, carry a different image of the country from those born into a post-Carter world of high technology and seemingly endless economic growth.
Each of these generations, and sub-generations in between, measures the flow of history from their own starting point. Forget about the fact that politics in the 19th century was in many ways infinitely more brutal than it is today. I wasn’t around when Grover Cleveland ran for president, so it’s not a touch point for me. My point of reference is Kennedy-Nixon. For others it’s Carter-Reagan, or Bush-Gore. In doing so we arbitrarily pick an election and use it to evaluate the propriety of all future presidential campaigns. It’s the same reasoning science uses in demonstrating or refuting man-made global warming. Start with the 1880s (an exceptionally cold period), and everything that follows is warmer. Start with the 1990s (where temperatures reached a peak), and the last 10-15 years have been “cooling.”
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The Internet has forever transformed American politics in some good, but many bad ways. It’s beneficial in that it’s a source of alternative information that keeps the Dan Rathers of the world from perpetrating election year hoaxes on the American public. And, it’s an excellent way for like-minded people to come together in like-minded ways to pursue like-minded goals. But the yin to this yang is that instead of isolating the real kooks as non-Internet modes of communication tended to do (it’s not quite as gratifying to wait days or weeks for a letter to be returned, or a magazine to arrive — assuming one kook could easily find another kook to communicate with in the first place), the Internet has made it possible for kooks everywhere on the planet to get together in real time and operate in a virtual world of their own making.
Almost anything can be said on the Internet without fear of retribution or condemnation. The person saying it doesn’t need to reveal their identity, and can lie about their age, gender, even nationality. In this medium facts are no longer immutable anchors of information, but wholly fungible delusions that assume concrete status if and when enough people choose to believe them. Not only was Bush personally behind 9-11, no plane flew into the Pentagon that day. So, where did all the passengers on that plane go? Modern-day “facts” don’t require coherency or consistency, so the answer is “Bush was behind 9-11.” That’s all the response required to end the discussion, and move on to another delusional topic.
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Things will change only when reality slaps us in the face again, and we no longer have the luxury of playing in the fantasy worlds of our own creation. The same people who supported “torture warrants” in the aftermath of 9-11 now decry the lack of due process afforded to non-uniformed military combatants captured in the Middle East. Slam another plane into a skyscraper, set off a bomb or two in a major American city, and the people today who condemn warrantless wiretaps will clamor for the political heads of those in power who “didn’t do enough to protect us from our enemies.”
Watching this spectacle unfold will be the American public who, except for the hardest of the hard-core kooks, will at least temporarily return to the real world and look for real solutions to very real problems. Their only hope is that in the intervening time we haven’t elected a bunch of kook-supported clowns to office who wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to confront a real problem other than to pander to the world community, or talk it to death with meaningless rhetoric. (more)
