E.J. Dionne gets it right about the deep ambivalence of the conservative movement toward truth and factual accuracy, which are selectively invoked as absolute standards for the media when it's strategically useful but completely set aside when it comes to claims from the White House:
Conservative academics have long attacked "postmodernist" philosophies for questioning whether "truth" exists at all and claiming that what we take as "truths" are merely "narratives" woven around some ideological predisposition. Today's conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations -- and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward. Just a modest number of failures can be used to discredit an entire enterprise.
The Media Research Center is the perfect illustration of what happens when you start treating the truth as relative. For instance, it recently published a study that Media Matters points out defines "[a]ny news story not dominated by unadulterated Republican spin [as], by definition, a case of 'liberal bias.'" Or consider Josh Marshall's analysis of how the Bush administration seems to believe that its disagreements with experts who hold contradictory views are simply reflections of differing ideology:
If you're a revisionist -- someone pushing for radically changing the status quo -- you're apt to see "the experts" not just as people who may be standing in your way, but whose minds have been corrupted by a wrongheaded ideology whose arguments can therefore be ignored. To many in the Bush administration, 'the experts' look like so many liberals wedded to a philosophy of big government, the welfare state, over-regulation and a pussyfooting role for the nation abroad. The Pentagon civil servant quoted above told me that the standard response to warnings from the Joint Staff about potential difficulties was simply to say: "That's just the Joint Staff being obstructionist." Even if the experts are right in the particulars--the size of the deficit, the number of troops needed in Iraq--their real goal is to get in the way of necessary changes that have to be made.
In that simple, totalizing assumption we find the kernel of almost every problem the administration has faced over recent months--and a foretaste of the troubles the nation may confront in coming years. By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration's hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality. When they went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction and nation-building was done. And much the same can be said of the administration's take on economic policy, environmental policy, and in almost every sort of policy question involving science. Muzzling the experts helped the White House muscle its revisionist plans through. But in numerous cases it prevented them from implementing even their own plans effectively.
Everyone is compromised by bias, agendas, and ideology. But at the heart of the revisionist mindset is the belief that there is really nothing more than that. Ideology isn't just the prism through which we see world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is. For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is...well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because "the facts" aren't really facts, at least not as most of us understand them. If they come from people who don't agree with you, they're just the other side's argument dressed up in a mantle of facticity. And if that's all the facts are, it's really not so difficult to go out and find a new set of them. The fruitful and dynamic tension between political goals and disinterested expert analysis becomes impossible.
And of course there's the famous passage from Ron Suskind's New York Times Magazine article on the Bush administration:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
The worst part is that the liberal vanguard is following movement conservatives down the rabbit hole. It's a rapidly shrinking "reality-based community" out here in, um, reality. Send reinforcements!
This article resonates with my thinking about the rhetoric that followed the Terri Schiavo case. Am I crazy, or did the conservative attacks on judges have parallels to the rhetoric of the radical left?
Many who opposed the Schiavo verdict claimed judges are the priests of a secular ideology that invades all of society. This unnatural ideology brainwashes americans into homosexuality, abortion, pornography, divorce, murder, atheism, etc.
They argued that the Schiavo case reveals the truth about secularism, that it's fundamentally a kind of violence: it's a force that wants to kill the weak and the helpless (the unborn, the sick, the elderly).
Now, take this argument, swap secularism with capitalism, judges with the police, the unborn with the poor, and it sounds like anarchism 101.
Posted by: Jason | May 31, 2005 at 11:03 AM