The Decline And Fall Of American Political Debate

By John Daniel Davidson

Thursday, September 24, 2015

In July, Salon published a sprawling interview with cultural critic Camille Paglia, who remarked of the Planned Parenthood videos how disturbing it was that the liberal media had tried to ignore and bury the story. “That kind of censorship was shockingly unprofessional,” she said.

She talked about how liberals think they’re open-minded but in fact are very resistant to new or opposing ideas. The Planned Parenthood videos, she said, were just “a recent example of the persisting insularity of liberal thought in the media.”

“But here’s my point: it is everyone’s obligation, whatever your political views, to look at both liberal and conservative news sources every single day. You need a full range of viewpoints to understand what is going on in the world.”

That Paglia would say this at all is a sign that most Americans no longer read news sources that span the ideological spectrum. This is of course part of a larger problem. For years it’s been remarked that we no longer have one American culture but many, that we’ve become Balkanized into a dizzying array of interests and identity groups separated by race, ethnicity, religion, and much else.

But we’re also separated, increasingly, by the news and commentary we read and watch. To the extent that it informs us of what’s going on, and why, and what to expect, our fragmentation and insularity has reached a dangerous tipping point: we no longer agree on what’s real.

Take Two Recent Examples

Consider two news stories from last week. The first was about Ahmed Mohamed, the high-school student who brought a homemade alarm clock to school to impress his teachers and wound up getting arrested on suspicion of bringing a bomb. The Internet outrage mob erupted with righteous indignation, tweeting under #IStandWithAhmed and decrying Ahmed’s arrest as more evidence of rampant Islamophobia in America. A breathless headline at Vox declared, “It’s not just Ahmed Mohamed: anti-Muslim bigotry in America is out of control.” At Salon: “We must learn from Ahmed Mohamed: These are the true perils of Islamophobia in democracy.” And so on.

David Harsanyi and others on the Right noted that Ahmed’s arrest was a perfect example, not of Islamophobia, but of authoritarian bureaucracy in our public schools, of which there are endless examples. Routine overreaction by nervous school administrators and police is a huge problem, “But that’s not why the Ahmed Mohamed story blew up,” wrote Harsanyi. “The 14-year-old who was arrested in Irving, Texas, for bringing a homemade clock into school has become an orchestrated media event meant to teach the proles a lesson.”

Media Matters rounded up all the conservative commentary on the Ahmed story and chalked it up to “blaming 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed for his own arrest.” Of course, Harsanyi and others had explicitly blamed our authoritarian education bureaucracy. But the fix was already in: skepticism about the role of Islamophobia was proof of just how virulent Islamophobia is in America today.

The other story was what Carly Fiorina said during the GOP debate about those Planned Parenthood videos. One of them shows a baby, she said, “its heart beating, its legs kicking,” having survived an abortion but left to die in a metal dish. That very night, the media rose up as with one voice and declared that Fiorina was lying: the Planned Parenthood videos don’t show that at all, Fiorina’s description was “pure fiction,” and “no such video exists.”

Trouble was, as The Federalist explained, one of the videos shows exactly what Fiorina described. Later in the week, Carly for America released a video contrasting graphic footage from the video with pundits’ claims that Fiorina had made the whole thing up. No matter. For liberals, it was too late: Fiorina had lied to score political points, end of discussion. For conservatives, it was obvious that the media was carrying water for Planned Parenthood, pretending the videos don’t show what they clearly show.

This dynamic is now more or less routine—and it works in both directions. When thousands of children from Central America showed up at the U.S.-Mexico border last summer, many conservatives were convinced it was all orchestrated by the Obama administration, despite plenty of evidence that larger forces were at play. I wrote about the border crisis in these pages, and was denounced by some readers as ignorant and naïve for suggesting it wasn’t an Obama plot to funnel illegal immigrants into the country. Since then, certain factions on the Right have arrived at epistemic closure on the immigration issue.

The larger problem is that those who read Salon and Vox will have a radically different understanding of the Planned Parenthood and Ahmed stories than those who read The Federalist and National Review. It’s fair to say they will never agree on even the simplest facts of each case. They won’t agree, ultimately, on what’s real and what’s not. If they can’t agree on that, they can’t have a conversation. All they can do is try to silence each other.

We’ve Seen This Before

There is an historical precedent for this, going back almost a half-century. “Best of Enemies,” a recent documentary about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal’s televised debates during the 1968 Democratic and Republican national conventions, is really about contemporary media and the state of American political culture.

Early in the film, Richard Wald, a former top executive for ABC News, explains that in the late 1960s the purpose of TV news was to cement public opinion, not disrupt it. The idea of putting Buckley and Vidal, who hated each other, on screen for a live political debate was simply unheard of. ABC did it, not because they wanted to fundamentally alter the role of news media in America, but because they were last in the ratings and had nothing to lose. Unlike NBC and CBS, they couldn’t afford wall-to-mic convention coverage, so these debates would be the next best thing.

Buckley and Vidal met ten times over the course of the two conventions and spent most of their time attacking one another. Much of the debate footage is online, but the documentary plumbs the motivations of each man and the profound consequences of their televised battle. Of Vidal, Heritage Foundation historian Lee Edwards said, “I don’t think he was really interested in conducting a debate about the issues, or about the parties, or about the policies, or about the platforms of the two parties. What he wanted to do was to expose Bill Buckley.” In this Vidal succeeded, but not quite in the way he’d hoped.

The infamous moment came while they were debating the Vietnam War. Buckley compared opponents of the war to Nazi appeasers. Vidal, an opponent of the war, responded: “The only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.” Back then, calling someone a Nazi was taboo (unlike today, when it is mostly ridiculous). Buckley lost his temper. He leaned toward Vidal, shaking with anger, narrowed his eyes and said: “Now listen, you queer, quit calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

That moment, together with all the rancor and ad hominem attacks that had led up to it, inaugurated a new era in American media: the end of the old, sober centrism and the beginning of open ideological warfare. It didn’t happen overnight, but ABC’s success—the Buckley-Vidal debates propelled them to No. 1—didn’t go unnoticed, and on-air political debates between liberal and conservative pundits gradually became a regular feature of TV news programming: “The McLaughlin Group,” “Capital Gang,” “Crossfire,” and all the rest. The personal, vituperative tone of the Buckley-Vidal debates became the now-familiar register of political punditry.

From Two-Way Shouting to One-Way Mockery

This is beginning to change, but not for the better. Instead of shouting each other down the way they did on “Crossfire,” the new pundits are more apt to sneer and mock in the style of Jon Stewart. There’s little to be gained in arguing with an opponent but much to be gained by mocking him. What this means in practice is that we tend to seek out news and commentary that more or less reflects our own opinions back to us. Reading the news becomes an exercise in confirmation bias.

The proliferation of online opinion journals has been partly a welcome and positive good. But it’s also narrowed our shared cultural vocabulary, reducing the number and kinds of authorities to which members of different ideological camps may appeal. This very essay, for example, by virtue of being published in The Federalist, will for many otherwise intelligent and broad-minded people be enough to dismiss it out of hand. You simply can’t trust those people. (What’s more, media loyalties have by now become powerful signaling devices. Posting a piece to one’s Facebook or Twitter feed, if it comes from the wrong sort of site, could provoke stern rebukes from one’s peers.)

A certain logic sets in: some writers, and perhaps a great many of them, are not to be read because they’re not making good-faith arguments. Their publishers are in the business of advancing an agenda, probably at a financier’s request, and they all can be safely ignored. So we arrive at this unhappy place: why would a loyal reader of (or writer for), say, The New Republic ever read anything in The Federalist or National Review, except to sneer at it, mock its author, and impugn the motives of its publisher? The same goes for conservatives who refuse to read the New York Times or listen to NPR. Ignorance of the other’s argument, in this case, is a point of pride. The enemy is dangerous, after all, and must be stopped, not argued with, not taken seriously.

This is even happening within our major political parties. They do not want to hear what others have to say. On the Left, witness the Black Lives Matter activists shouting down Sen. Bernie Sanders. On the Right, Trump supporters and the #NRORevolt rage against so-called “cuckservatives.” Our fragmentation isn’t limited to media preferences anymore; the Republican and Democratic coalitions are eating each other.

Hindsight Will Be 20/20

One last point: we’re doing this, trying either to silence or ignore our enemies, with barely a trace of shame. In 1968, Buckley and Vidal each considered the other man to be dangerous, someone who must be exposed and silenced. But it marred their debates and diminished them both, and afterwards they knew it.

In his closing remarks of the final debate, Vidal lamented that viewers had not heard much about the important political questions of the day, nor had they really got a good sense of what each of them was really like. Buckley was mortified at his outburst and regretted it for the rest of his life. Vidal obsessed over it, watching and re-watching the debate tapes for years.

The question for us today, in our era of fragmented intellectual isolation, is whether someday we will regret it. I think we will.

Squeaker of the House

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Newt Gingrich, who is not above cultivating a little bit of mythology about himself, used to say that when he was a youngster considering a life in politics, he didn’t want to grow up to be president of the United States — he grew up wanting to be speaker of the House. Which he did, achieving a measure of modest but genuine success in the role: Those weren’t Clinton budget surpluses, but Gingrich surpluses. (Transitory though they were.) Gingrich has a weakness for thinking of himself in world-historical terms, and he may in fact find his final repose in an interesting footnote: the last speaker of the House to be a figure of any significance.

And, of course, he ended up wanting to be president.

Speaker of the House John Boehner has announced his intention to retire, which has those members of the House Republican leadership who are fool enough to want the job — which is to say, the members of the House Republican leadership — grasping at his gavel. The plot of the Shakespearean succession drama is fixed as the stars: The entertainment wing of the conservative movement prepares to rain brimstone upon Republican whip Kevin McCarthy, the presumptive front-runner among House leaders, or Paul Ryan, a conservative hero until the day before yesterday now cast into the outer darkness for various heresies related to his being an elected lawmaker rather than the host of a radio program. Expect Louie Gohmert or another conservative standard-bearer to shine for a moment before opinion settles on some disappointment or another, and expect the vast majority of the American electorate to go on not knowing who the speaker is or what he does regardless of who is elected.

On the subject of Representative Gohmert, his statement following the speaker’s resignation is on point: “Due in part to the massive shift in power away from the most accountable representatives of the people to a president and five judges, we have needed leadership with vision for the future that did not continue the downhill slide.”

As Gohmert notes without quite saying so, these United States are in the process of transforming the form of their union government from that of a democratic republic to that of a unitary autocratic administrative state. Barack Obama and other progressives have hastened that transformation in no small part because they consider the American constitutional order in purely instrumental terms rather than as a good in and of itself. Sometimes the constitutional order serves progressive ends and sometimes it constrains them, which is why President Wilson despised the Constitution and President Obama simply ignores it when he believes it necessary, adopting as he has — with rather less fuss than one might have expected — a Gaullist rule-by-decree model. The familiar ratchet effect is in operation: The Left in power expands the state, particularly the executive, and the Right in power does not reverse the turn, in part because conservative politicians like power, too, in part because reversing those expansions is difficult, and in part because even if conservatives win the fight there’s not much juice in it.

As my colleague Charles C. W. Cooke points out, the lack of an American king and an American prime minister has not prevented the traditional English contest between crown and parliament from sneaking into American politics. And the crown is winning.

This isn’t only a matter of executive opportunism and legislative sloth. The waxing of the president and the consequent waning of Congress is a result of the deep psychological structure of mass democracy on the American scale, probably an inevitable one. American democracy was born in the New England town-hall meeting and in state assemblies, relatively intimate venues where following the operations of government was non-cumbrous. A population of more than 300 million with worldwide interests is a very different sort of thing. From the very beginning, the mere scale of the American project ensured that most Americans would find it incomprehensible: How many Americans at the time really understood that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton went into the Philadelphia Convention plotting to abolish their government and set up a new one? How many can identify the main points of contention between Senator Cruz and Senator McConnell?

Our Congress manages perversely to be a little too big and a little too small at the same time: With 535 representatives and senators, it presents a large cast of characters to keep track of (The Wire tested our national intellectual limits on that front), but each of those 435 House members represents on average more than 700,000 constituents, ten times as many people as the typical British MP. Senator Cruz and Senator Boxer have between them about as many constituents as François Hollande. Strange as it is to contemplate, Jimmy Carter governed five times as many people as Julius Caesar.

On the subject of famous J.C.s, the visit of Pope Francis to the United States illustrates a similar phenomenon. Unlike Islam or Buddhism, the Catholic Church is for purposes of public consumption personified in one man — not Jesus Christ, but the pope. Catholics account for only about one out of six people walking the Earth, but the pope is a figure of fascination for many more than that. Most people, including most Catholics, don’t really know very much about what the Church teaches or how it operates, but they know who the pope is, and how they feel about him. Most people, including most Americans, don’t know very much about what the American government does or how it operates, but they know who the president is, and how they feel about him. Popes are consulted about public-policy matters in which they have no particular expertise, and presidents are expected to have opinions on moral questions, economic questions, military questions, and scientific questions beyond their ken. Thus governance is transformed from an undramatic but necessary administrative process into a heroic quest.

President Obama even seems to have incorporated his own version of an infallibility doctrine.

The president did not come to dominate American politics to this degree because the Constitution invests him with such princely powers, or because some law was changed somewhere along the way that set the presidency on its current course of metastasis. The president first dominated psychologically and culturally, and then came to dominate politically and legislatively. Ironically enough, Ronald Reagan — the great crusader against expansive government — had such an expansive and attractive personality that he left his successors a presidency much larger and more vivid than the one he inherited from Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. (Ford’s modest conception of himself and his role produced a presidential quip for the ages: “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.”) When they write the history of American democracy, we’ll be obliged to admit the embarrassing truth that we lost it because it’s so much easier to pay attention to one man than to a congress of them.

Speaker Boehner’s successor inherits a diminished role in a diminished institution, and it isn’t clear that there is much of anything he will be able to do to help the national legislature recover its self-respect, which lags so far behind its self-importance. Congress no longer has the power to return the president — and the presidency — to its proper role. That power, too, is now in the hands of the president, which is why it is unlikely that our national slide into autocracy will be reversed until the current political equilibrium is disturbed, which is to say until certain danger encounters uncertain danger.

Hillary Now Blames Her Lawyers

By Shannen W. Coffin

Monday, September 28, 2015

With polls showing that a majority of Americans believe that she is lying, Hillary Clinton has been more aggressive in addressing questions about her private e-mail server. But with each new appearance, more questions are raised than answered. Her latest interview with Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd is no exception.

For months, Mrs. Clinton has insisted that she, and she alone, had the power to determine whether her e-mails were required to be preserved as federal records. In her initial press conference at the United Nations in March, she explained that “for any government employee, it is that government employee’s responsibility to determine what’s personal and what’s work-related.” Her campaign website reinforces that contention, arguing that the “Federal Records Act puts the obligation on the government official to determine what is and is not a federal record.” And the Department of Justice recently told a federal judge the same thing: “Under policies issued both by the National Archives and Records Administration and the State Department, individual officers and employees are permitted and expected to exercise judgment to determine what constitutes a federal record.”

Despite months of consistent reliance on this defense, Hillary now admits that she never exercised any judgment to determine what constitutes a federal record. Instead, somewhat astonishingly, Hillary didn’t review a single e-mail to determine what she had to preserve and what she could delete. When asked by Todd whether she could say with 100 percent certainty that she didn’t delete anything that she was supposed to preserve, Mrs. Clinton responded: “All I can tell you is that when my attorneys conducted this exhaustive process, I [did] not participate. . . . I didn’t look at them.”

Clinton’s contention about the role of federal employees in record preservation always had a grain of truth to it. Given the sheer volume of documents created by the federal government, the Federal Records Act depends on individual officers and employees to make the initial determination of whether a particular e-mail or document created or received by them qualifies as a public record. Hillary Clinton never made that determination while she was secretary of state, instead removing all of her e-mails en masse upon her resignation. Now we know that she didn’t make that determination even after she left the State Department.

Whatever the responsibility of a federal employee to determine which records are official, then, Hillary Clinton did not exercise that responsibility. She asked her lawyers to do so. That explains why Mrs. Clinton could not swear to a federal court that all of her official records had been returned to the State Department, instead merely asserting “on information and belief” that her lawyers had complied with her instructions. Even giving her the benefit of all doubts, Hillary Clinton can’t tell the American people whether she returned all of her official e-mails to the State Department, because she simply doesn’t know.

Or does she? Missing from Clinton’s 30,000 returned e-mails were at least 15 e-mails with Sidney Blumenthal that Blumenthal provided to congressional investigators. Clinton has never explained this discrepancy. Add to that a recent Associated Press report that another tranche of previously unidentified e-mails — this one a series of exchanges with David Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command, between January and February 2009 — were recently turned over by the Defense Department to the State Department inspector general.

Rather than explain the latest gap, Mrs. Clinton remarkably cites it as evidence of her compliance with the law. Brushing aside her e-mails with Blumenthal, Tony Blair, and other contacts outside the U.S. government, Clinton speciously told Todd: “All of the e-mails that I sent were intended to be in the government systems if they were work-related. That’s why I sent them to people at their work addresses.” The whole reason we know about the e-mail chain with General Petraeus, she claimed, “is because it was on a government server.”

The real reason we know about the e-mail chain with General Petraeus is that someone at the Defense Department blew the whistle on Clinton’s public claims of full transparency. It is not because Clinton complied with federal law; her compliance has been woefully inadequate. By relying on officials outside the State Department to preserve her e-mails, Clinton failed in her basic duty under the Federal Records Act to “make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities.”

The law did not place upon General Petraeus a duty to preserve the records of the State Department. It placed that duty squarely on Hillary Clinton. Her claims of 90 percent success — “that 90 percent of my work-related e-mails” were on State Department servers — hardly allay any doubts. Were such a “success” rate evidence of complete transparency, the State Department would not still be producing documents to the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Yet as recently as last Friday, it produced more than 900 additional Clinton e-mails. “Close enough for government work” isn’t a defense that inspires confidence in a presidential candidate.

More questions are likely to come from Mrs. Clinton’s latest explanations. She told Todd, for instance, that she “do[es] not communicate with the [Clinton] foundation.” Reports that Sidney Blumenthal was being paid $10,000 a month by the Clinton Foundation while surreptitiously advising Hillary Clinton would seem to directly contradict her claim. And it is hard to believe, more generally, that Mrs. Clinton had no communications with a foundation run by her husband and daughter while she was serving in government. Should the FBI be able to recover her deleted emails, as recent leaks suggest, Mrs. Clinton will have even more questions to answer.

The “drip-drip” of which Mrs. Clinton complains is fast becoming an open spigot. She’s done very little of late to stop the flow.

Liberals’ Aversion to Debate

By David Harsanyi

Friday, September 25, 2015

Liberals are done with debating. Not always. Not everyone. But enough.

This week, for example, while thinking about the pope’s take on global warming, I tweeted out this comment: “Celebrate climate change, an externality of the greatest poverty destroying program in the history of mankind.” There is plenty to disagree with in my observation, I admit. Although I believe what I wrote to be true, I sent it out partly to elicit exactly the sort of reaction my tweet got — with one person (a Slate writer, not some anonymous critic) calling me a psychopath, and another calling me sociopathic, among other things. I don’t mind the insults (perversely, in fact, I sort of enjoy them), but I do mind that the debate is over.

Conservatives may be ethically compromised, uninformed, or — if liberals are in a generous mood — mentally unstable, but they can’t be for real. At least, that’s the sense I increasingly get from the left these days. Blame it on social media.

When a group confuses its politics with moral doctrine, it may have trouble comprehending how a decent human being could disagree with its positions. This is probably why people confuse lecturing with debating and why so many liberals can bore into the deepest nooks of my soul to ferret out all those motivations but can’t waste any time arguing about the issue itself.

Are you also corrupt? Probably. Bought off by Big Oil, Big Food, or Big Something or Other? Washington is teeming with Manchurian candidates, because no one could possibly be this malicious on his own. Why should liberals debate a point when they can debate your imaginary sugar daddy? Why else would conservatives “hate workers”? Why would they “bet against America”? Why do they want to destroy democracy? Why would conservatives vote against their own interests? Someone pays them to lie.

Or maybe you favor inequality, injustice, rape culture, and poverty because privilege clouds your sense of decency. If you were born wealthy (anything over 130 percent of the poverty level or so), how can anyone expect you to have empathy for the destitute? You certainly don’t possess the life experience or skin color to challenge leftist economic doctrine. For inexplicable reasons — that can’t possibly have anything to do with a genuine belief in supply-side economics, a belief in property rights, or an aversion to punishing success — tens of millions of you spend your political lives protecting the interests of billionaires for no other reason than that you hate the poor.

You hate a lot of things, don’t you? Like half the country, you’re furtively racist and irrationally misogynistic. The American idea is erected on a foundation of intolerance, according to one of the most celebrated thinkers on the left. You hate black people, sure, but also brown people. So this bloodlust manifests when you oppose the president on foreign policy, for instance. (Then again, maybe it’s the Israel lobby paying you off.) You’re not anti–Iran deal; you’re pro-war. Just as you’re not pro–Second Amendment; you’re pro–mass shootings. You’re not concerned about terrorism or (genuine) illiberalism; you’re a bigot. You’re not pro–school choice; you’re anti-children. You’re not pro–traditional marriage; you’re anti-dignity. You’re not pro–entitlement reform; you’re anti-retirement.

You’re not in favor of a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to climate-change policy; you’re anti-science. Skeptic. Denier. Psychopath. Why do you hate Earth?

Don’t like Big Government? You’re a nihilist. Forget what your policy does; watch your tone. Transphobic. Homophobic. Eleutherophobic. Sure, you may claim that you want to save unborn girls from the scalpels of Planned Parenthood, but your real goal is to control women. Even if you’re Carly Fiorina.

Or maybe you can’t see things clearly because you’re hooked to the most addictive opiate imaginable, religion — which, let’s face it, you probably don’t properly understand or adhere to correctly. Here, let them tell you what Jesus would do. Are you part of some regressive denomination that follows doctrine and hasn’t been poll testing on the left, that isn’t always pleasing to millennials’ ears, that hasn’t evolved properly, or that still clings to “religious freedom”? You’re a modern-day Orval Faubus, probably. We can sue you into compliance or mock you into the 21st century, because clearly you’re too selfish to be part of our future.

What conservatives (and some libertarians) possess are not arguments but corrupt and nefarious ambitions. Defend yourself. What you can’t possibly have are legitimate differences of opinion.