Although the followup string of claims is vaguer until we come to Rob Stein, the same can be said about all of them, as well Stein's presentation, which was hardly novel, as we shall shortly see. But first, let's look more closely at the vaguer parts:
This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics.
That's only one part of the story, actually. It's not just that Republicans/conservatives "deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics"--that's just the tip of the iceberg. First of all, it doesn't stop when the campaigns are over, and second, it's not just a matter of tactics, but of strategy, ideology, and conviction. Contrary to Alexander's thesis, it's conservatives, far more than liberals, who are convinced of their own superiority, particularly their moral superiority, which thus entitles them to do all sorts of bad things for a good cause, and still regard themselves as virtuous people. Which helps explain why they have such a long history of playing dirty and tilting the playing field to boot. Of course politicians of all stripes do this to a certain extent. Part of it is simply the nature of the beast. But there weren't many Congressional challengers in 1946 who won election by deliberately spreading rumors that their opponent was a Communist. One who did was Richard Nixon. Lying and dirty tricks were so central to his politics that they eventually resulted in his forced resignation, in order to avoid impeachment and conviction. And as if that weren't bad enough, graduates of his administration--Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld chief among them, emerged with a conviction that Nixon had been wronged, and needed to avenged.
A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public.
Allegedly? Alexander's piece was published February 8--exactly one week after Huffington Post ran a much-linked-to story, "Frank Luntz Pens Memo To Kill Financial Regulatory Reform", which reported on various aspects of the memo, such as:
He insists that "the status quo is not an option" and that members of Congress, when addressing the crisis, "never forget its impact on your audience." Luntz even advise his audience to promote themselves the agents of change.
So, a memo designed to help Republicans kill financial reform is to be sold by self-styled agents of change saying "the status quo is not an option"? (Underlined and bolded in Luntz's memo.) Sure sounds like manipulating information and misleading the public to me. But there's more:
In addition to tying regulatory reform to a massive government takeover, Luntz's memo includes several other data points and messaging suggestions as a blue print for the legislation's defeat. Opponents, he writes, would be well served to link the package to the financial industry bailout (which, it should be noted, is fundamentally not part of the legislation). According to accompanying polling data, 52 percent of voters said they would be "much less likely" to vote for their member of Congress if they voted for a financial reform bill that contained a fund to bail out banks and Wall Street.
More precisely, point 17 in the memo says:
It's not "reform." - This is not a reform bill. It is the "Stop the Big Bank Bailout bill." This is important.
So what if the two have nothing to do with one another? So what if the folks who loved the bailout and got billions of dollars from it are fighting the reform bill tooth and nail? And so what if Luntz himself works for companies that would be regulated by the bill, as Think Progress pointed out:
- Luntz client Ameriquest Mortgages: The proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) would eliminate predatory mortgages. Ameriquest, America's "sub-prime leader," has been prosecuted by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal for inflating property values so borrowers could get bigger loans, imposing upfront fees without reducing interest rates as promised, and intentionally deceiving lenders with hidden penalties and interest rates on final loan documents.
- Luntz clients Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns: Under proposed financial reform, big banks, like Luntz clients Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns, would face a new structure designed to police financial products, prohibit predatory ones, and require clear forms and disclosures. The CFPA would also help regulate hidden bank fees and other bank abuses.
- Luntz client American Express: The CFPA would regulate the credit card industry, preventing predatory interest rates and fees.
So what--in short--if Luntz isn't just pushing deceit for the benefit of GOP lawmakers, but for the benefit of his corporate clients as well? So what? Luntz isn't concerned with the truth. He's concerned with "words that work." And not just words. Next in the memo, point 18, reads:
Small business ownership is about the American Dream. The most popular images of small business owners both projected optimism with signs saying "grand opening" or "open."
Two images illustrate that point. One of them, Politico noted, featured Michigan Democratic Congressman Mark Schauer and his wife, Christine, in front of their retail store. Politico noted:
Schauer, incidentally, voted for the Wall Street reform legislation. He also opposed the bailout.
It'd be really bad timing if Luntz's memo had come out a few days after Alexander's op-ed, but since it came out beforehand it simply goes to show that Alexander is completely divorced from reality.
Still, I suppose one could argue it's just one example, and what does a single example prove? Even it it's an example that the entire national GOP listens to?
But what about a decades-long example? How about global warming? As I've noted on a number of occasions, there is no serious debate over global warming in the peer-reviewed literature. Historian of science Naomi Oreskes examined 928 abstracts over the period of 1993 to 2003, and didn't find a single one that challenged the thesis of human-caused global warming. As she reported in Science magazine in December 2004, ("Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change"):
The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.
There are some scientist skeptics, but they're virtually all outside the field. A Pew poll last July found that 84% of all scientists believed global warming is being caused by humans, compared t0 49% among the general public. In a recent article at Huffington Post, "New Poll Results Reveal the Impact of Decades-Long Climate Confusion Campaign", James Hoggan, co-founder of DeSmog Blog wrote:
A new report published jointly by Yale University and George Mason University finds that Americans are much less concerned about climate change than they were just a year ago. Fifty-seven percent of Americans polled believe climate change is happening, compared with a figure of 71 percent in October 2008, a 14 point drop.
The reason ought to be clear. The climate confusion campaign - waged by the like of Americans for Prosperity, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Petroleum Institute and American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) - is alive and well, and obviously still inflicting damage.
According to the study, only 47 percent of Americans think global warming is caused mostly by human activities, a 10 point drop. Only 50 percent of Americans now say they are "somewhat" or "very worried" about global warming, a 13-point decrease.
The report, "Climate Change in the American Mind,"[PDF] reveals that Americans are increasingly distrustful of scientists, politicians and the media concerning climate change. The public's trust in scientists dropped nine points from 83 to 74 percent, while trust in the mainstream news media's coverage of climate change fell from 47 percent in 2008 to 36 percent now....
That's not "alleged". That's cold hard facts. And--contra Alexander-- Hoggan does not condescendingly blame the public:
This research underscores my view that climate advocates are incompetent communicators. With all the science in the world behind us, and a good deal of the public credibility, we still can't win a debate with people who have all the facts working against them.
Why do we bring a knife to the gunfight with the likes of CEI and the API? As someone recently said, it's like the Boy Scouts taking on the Mafia.
Returning to the end of the above-quoted paragraph in Alexander's op-ed:
A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush's presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors.
The conservative reinvention of the foundation, the think tank and the media outlet as both separate and inter-related intentional tools of hegemonic struggle had been noted well before Stein earlier progressive critics, by conservatives themselves, and by objective experts--although not specifically using the term "hegemony."
Progressive examples include a range of research, including the book No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America's Social Agenda, by Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, published in 1996, which doesn't simply identify organizations, but describes how they act in a coordinated political fashion. Conservatives themselves have trumpeted the conservative invention of the "Overton Window", developed by Joseph P. Overton, who worked from 1992 to 2003 as a researcher, author and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy's senior vice president. Simply put, it's an analytical device for conceiving of public policy as a tug-of-war (or hegemonic struggle, whatever) between left and right, without necessarily thinking about the actual content of public policy. (The classic example Overton used re "education policy" was all about privatization vs. his paranoid fantasy of state brainwashing, with nothing at all about pedagogy, curriculum, educational philosophy and all that sort of boging stuff.) In my diary, "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future-Pt. 4", where I devoted a long segment to discussing the Overton Window, I first introduced this ideological-struggle viewpoint, and then wrote:
Needless to say, this is not how think tanks have traditionally thought of their missions. They neither considered themselves far outside the mainstream of political thought, nor did they think they had perfect solutions handed down from on high to bring to the unwashed masses. They were much more involved in mucking around with imperfect solutions, cobbling things together as best they could, and engaging in dialogue more than propaganda. For the most part, this is still how most think tanks consider themselves--and that's a problem going up agains the Overton Window model...
There are a variety of reasons why progressive think tanks still largely reject the Overton Window approach, while conservative think tanks embrace it, but one of the most fundamental is simply that liberals care about ideas in a way that conservatives generally do not. This goes back all the way to the Enlightenment--or even the Renaissance, if not earlier--with liberals pushing for the exploration and development of new ideas, and conservatives warning that it will all end in ruin. Conservatives, OTOH, care a great deal about loyalty, hierarchy, tradition, and running things, which also tends to make them rather keen on wars, and fighting in general, as opposed to sit down together with others and trying to work things out--which also, of course, involves thinking. No doubt Alexander would find this statement "condescending" on my part, but there's an enormous literature out there backing this up. For centuries now, conservatives have tended to rally round churches, the military, the landed aristocracy and other owners of property, while liberals have rallied round educational, artistic and scientific institutions. It's only natural that liberal think-tanks should be more university-like, while conservative think-tanks are more Vatican-like... as in going to war against the Reformation.
Seen against this broader historical backdrop, it's not the least bit surprising that conservatives and liberals would organize and practice politics differently, or that conservatives would do precisely the sorts of things that liberals have noticed them doing--treating politics more like a matter of war than liberals tend to, and finding their greatest source of strength in doing so. Alexander can try all he wants to characterize this as a liberal narrative based on condescension--but first he has to deal with the inconvenient fact that it's largely true.
Of course, truth is no proof that liberals aren't condescending, but since it is true, one can't simply point to liberals saying such things and take that alone as proof of condescension. What's more, it should be noted that a lot of those who've written about such matters from the left have done so to try to alter liberal and progressive behavior to more effectively counter what conservatives are doing. Because people have been writing about this for quite some time now, with very little change in how the left responds to the right, there is quite a bit of frustration with the liberal/progressive/Democratic establishment, large donors and foundations. It's a subjective judgment, of course, but I would say that there's a lot more of this sort of frustration than there is condescension.
This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For example, Chris Mooney's book "The Republican War on Science" argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.
This is a highly deceptive paragraph. For one thing, Chris Mooney's book is a deeply fact-based, but it would utterly destroy Alexander's thesis to acknowledge that, because then he'd have to deal with the fact that liberals have good reason to see conservatives as engaged in hegemonic warfare. If Alexander were interested in debating matters at the level of accepting Mooney's facts but contesting his interpretation, he might be someone interesting and worthwhile to debate. (Quick--call the condescension police!) But he's not interested in that. Mentioning Mooney's book is just rhetorical trope, nothing more. The fact that such a book exists is all that matters for Alexander's argument: "See, liberals are saying mean things about us!" And for Alexander, pretty much any mean thing is the same as any other mean thing. Because, as Mooney himself notes, Alexander has completely screwed up that actual arguments of his book:
He gets my book's arguments almost entirely wrong. First, I don't argue that conservatives "disregard evidence." The problem is that they make up their own evidence, using their own "scientists" to do so. They then use this pseudo-expertise to disregard expertise and consensus-a very different thing.
Second, I never argued conservatives were arguing "cynically." It was obvious they believed what they said on matters of science. After all, they had their pseudoexperts to bank on.
Finally, I clearly distinguished between distorting the facts of science on the one hand, and making economic, moral, and policy arguments on the other. So a sentence like Alexander's last one completely misses the boat: "Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies." This stuff has nothing to do with the arguments of The Republican War on Science.
There's a lot more I could say about this particularly mendacious paragraph, but after quoting Mooney himself, I no longer feel the burning need I once did. Still, I do have to point out this: the sentence bolded above doesn't just get Mooney's argument wrong, it gets just about everything wrong. It's conservatives who invented the game of identity politics, and they're the ones that feel like any criticism of anything they (or some other conservative) say or do is a totalistic assault on their very being, hence criticize any conservative argument or set of arguments and it becomes "conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically."
It would be good, of course, if Alexander even bothered to produce one example of some liberal somewhere actually arguing that "Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing" is nothing but corporate propaganda, and therefore doesn't even need to be factually examined by anyone. But why should he bother with a single example? After all, his implicit claim is not that some liberal, somewhere, sometime made this argument, but that the hated liberal narrative Alexander has identified means that liberals do this all the time--one might even say, "invariably."
So long as conservatives feel that their very identities are at stake, it will be exceedingly difficult to have rational arguments with them for the reason just illustrated: They are psychologically predisposed to hear particular arguments about facts (not just "X", but "my argument was X") as categorical attacks on their character and virtue, if not their very beings. I do not think that all conservatives think this way, but certainly a good number of them do, particularly those who are given places of prominence to do battle against liberals.
Alexander gives a similar sloppy treatment in mixing up arguments in his next paragraph:
This worldview was on display in the popular liberal reaction to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Rather than engage in a discussion about the complexities of free speech in politics, liberals have largely argued that the decision will "open the floodgates for special interests" to influence American elections, as the president warned in his State of the Union address. In other words, it was all part of the conspiracy to support conservative candidates for their nefarious, self-serving ends.
Alas, this diary is getting too long already, and I'll have to leave untangling that one to you readers as an exercise. I'll just say one thing: John Paul Stevens a conspiracy nut? Who knew?
I want to finish in a somewhat different vein by examining the end of his argument about this first liberal narrative:
It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years' worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: "What do these people really believe? I mean, they're not stupid -- life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they're not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?"
In Krugman's world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of "these people" -- only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.
If one actually bothers to click the link, and look at Krugman's words in context, then Alexander's argument is suddenly in a world of hurt. Because unlike Alexander, Krugman is not compulsively given to sweeping generalities and vague mischaracterizations of other people's work. He wrote the words quoted above following references to some specific examples:
This morning's Wall Street Journal opinion section contains a lot of what one expects to see. There's an opinion piece making a big fuss over the fake scandal at the EPA. There's an editorial claiming that the latest job figures prove the failure of Obama's economic plan -- something I dealt with in the Times. All of this follows on yesterday's editorial asserting that the Minnesota senatorial election was stolen.
All of this is par for the course; the WSJ editorial page has been like this for 35 years. Nonetheless, it got me wondering: what do these people really believe?
Thus, not to get too Chinese boxy about it, in Alexander's world, in Krugman's world, "there is no need to take seriously the arguments of 'these people' -- only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives." But in the real world, in Krugman's world, not so much. He at least took the arguments seriously enough that he wrote an entire op-ed refuting one mendacious WSJ editorial. He also took the arguments seriously enough to link to a detailed refutation of another. Perhaps you can fault him for not linking to a detailed refutation of the WSJ claim that Franken stole the Minnesota Senate seat, but sometimes you just get tired of refuting the same old lies over, and over, and over again. After even Pawlenty and Coleman finally gave up, Krugman had every reason to consider a simple link to the WSJ editorial as sufficient to make his point. At this point, no sane person needed a refutation.
This, then, is the bottom line for Alexander's first narrative: stop talking about us! Because that's what it amounts to, really: liberals and progressives talking about conservatives engaging in hegemonic warfare. Hegemonic warfare is like fight club. You know, the first rule... |
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