By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, June 24, 2017
Events are turning me into a radical skeptic. I no longer
believe what I read, unless what I am reading is an empirically verifiable
account of the past. I no longer have confidence in polls, because it has
become impossible to separate the signal from the noise. What I have heard from
the media and political class over the last several years has been so spectacularly
proven wrong by events, again and again, that I sometimes wonder why I continue
to read two newspapers a day before spending time following journalists on
Twitter. Habit, I guess. A sense of professional obligation, I suppose. Maybe
boredom.
The fact is that almost the entirety of what one reads in
the paper or on the web is speculation. The writer isn’t telling you what
happened, he is offering an interpretation of what happened, or offering a
projection of the future. The best scenario is that these theories are novel,
compelling, informed, and based on reporting and research. But that is rarely
the case. More often the interpretations of current events, and prophesies of
future ones, are merely the products of groupthink or dogma or emotions or
wish-casting, memos to friends written by 27-year-olds who, in the words of Ben
Rhodes, “literally know nothing.” There was a time when newspapers printed
astrology columns. They no longer need to. The pseudoscience is on the front
page.
Nor are the empty conjectures and worthless hypotheses
limited to Donald Trump. Yes, pretty much the entire world, myself included,
assumed he would lose to Hillary Clinton. Indeed, a not-insignificant segment
of the political class, both Democrat and Republican, thought the Republicans
would not only lose the presidency but also the House and Senate. Oops! I
remember when, as the clock reached midnight on November 8 and it became clear
Trump would be the forty-fifth president, a friend called. “Are we just wrong
about everything?” he asked. Perhaps we were. But at least we had the capacity
to admit our fallibility.
There are few who can. Conjectures and guesswork continue
to dog Trump in the form of “the Russia thing,” the belief that the president,
his “satellites,” or his campaign worked with the Russians to influence the
election in his favor. Months after the FBI opened its investigation into
whether such collusion occurred, no evidence has been found. The charge itself
is based on an unverified and gossipy and over-the-top memo prepared by a
former British spy for Democrats.
Compounded by Trump’s own mistakes, the Russia story has
now traveled so far afield from the original suspicions that we in Washington
are no longer all that interested in the underlying charges. What concerns us
instead is the possible obstruction of justice in the investigation of a crime
that seems not to have taken place. And yet Russia continues to dominate the
headlines, command the attention of pundits, generate rumor and insinuations
from people who ought to know better.
The certainty of our best and brightest is immune to
disproof. Back in May, for example, I attended a dinner with two experts in
British politics. These men were not only observers in the upcoming elections,
they were participants, and they reflected the conventional wisdom at the time.
Theresa May, they projected, would win a major victory on June 8. Her majority
might be as high as 100 seats. May’s caution was an asset, Labor was a wreck,
Corbyn was frightening. At least the part about Corbyn was true. The rest was
false, as I was rather surprised to discover when the voters actually had their
say.
The list of misplaced confidences goes on. After the
initial vote on the American Health Care Act was called off, the consensus was
that the bill was doomed. “Don’t look now but the Republican health care bill
is in trouble again. Again,” reported CNN on May 2. It passed two days later.
For weeks prior to Tuesday’s special election in Georgia,
we were told that Republicans were in trouble, that the polls looked bad for
Karen Handel, that a “referendum on Trump” would motivate Democrats in this
swing district to support Democrat Jon Ossoff. That evening, cable anchors
warned that the night would be long. The race would be close, and winner might
not be announced until the following morning. The Real Clear Politics average
showed Handel barely ahead, with a margin of two-tenths of one percent. The
race was called by the 11 o’clock news. Handel won by 4 points.
What had been billed as a no-confidence vote in Trump’s
presidency quickly became, after Handel’s victory, no biggie. Yes, Ossoff may
have doused in gasoline and set alight more than $20 million of Hollywood and
Silicon Valley money. And yes, had Ossoff won, this special election would have
been covered as a harbinger of the Resistance’s coming triumph over the
autocrat in the White House. But really, now that the authors of the email
bulletins I receive each morning think about it, Republicans shouldn’t be too happy
with the result. After all, both Democrats and Republicans have won special
elections in the past only to lose their majorities.
True, but Republicans also won special elections in 2001,
and expanded their majority the following year. So which is it? We won’t know
until — and I know this is a radical concept — the actual midterm election
takes place. Which won’t be for more than a year. And by which time, a
seemingly infinite number of things might happen. But come on, who wants to
wait? So much more fun to pretend to be in the know, to assert with absolute
confidence one’s theory about the world, proclaim one’s virtue, despite all
evidence to the contrary.
“Like a bearded nut in robes on the sidewalk proclaiming
the end of the world is near, the media is just doing what makes it feel good,
not reporting hard facts,” Michael Crichton once said. “We need to start seeing
the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It’s not
sensible to listen to it.”
As the editor of an online newspaper, I am reluctant to
agree with Crichton entirely. There are still news sources, liberal and
conservative, even in Washington, that seek to report rather than explain or
analyze or decipher the context and implications of facts. Sometimes these publications
carry opinions, such as the one you are reading. Sometimes they have a little
fun. And that is fine, so long as they are upfront about it, and are “half a
step up from Daily Caller.”
But please, please, please be wary of the supposedly
nonpartisan and objective experts who have looked at the DATA and determined
which course history will take. In fact, be more than wary. Run in the opposite
direction.
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