Open Left - Greg Mitchell

The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism-Part 2

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:00:00 GMT

This week, Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, took Time to task for journalistic malpractice, in "New TIME Cover on Glenn Beck Ignores Facts, and Worse", writing:

I have no quarrel with TIME magazine devoting a cover to Glenn Beck -- so long as the accompanying story sticks to hard facts and harsh truths. The issue coming tomorrow, online today, sadly fails to do so in an apparent effort to woo the rightwing with a ludicrously "balanced" treatment of equally dangerous and wacko "ranting" coming from left and right.
It starts right away with a first paragraph that claims that only "liberal sources" estimated the protest crowd in D.C. last weekend as about 70,000, while conservatives say up to a million or more. Actually, virtually all mainstream media sources (even some on Fox News) endorse a far lower number. PolitiFact, the nonpartisan fact-checking site, cited an officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department telling a reporter that, unoffically, he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.
If you get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered about 70,000, many of them greedy racists. If you get your information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong, perhaps as many as a million, and the tenor was peaceful and patriotic.
In this nugget TIME's David Von Drehle revealed his method. The "left" says one thing, the "right" another and, hell, who is to know the truth? He returns to this late in the piece by raising the crowd estimate gap again and explaining it as merely "who do you trust?"

Of course such coverage is anything but responsible. If you're going for "balance" rather than truth, then you only encourage the most unscrupulous to make the most outrageous claims. Then your "balance" will inexorably move the "sensible center" ever further in their fact-free, crazed direction. Any kindergarten teacher can explain this in detail, if necessary.

In sharp contrast to Time's egregious malpractice, Salon ran a deeply significant piece about Beck, exposing the nature of the man who's had the most significant impact on his recent devolution-- Cleon Skousen, described as "a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised." In fact, no less than J. Edgar Hoover and the elders of the Mormon Church regarded him as a dangerous crank. So if Time had wanted to ask the right questions, they could have had Hoover and Mormon elders representing the "left" as "balance" to Beck supporters. This article, "Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life", not only provides a striking contrast with Time's journalist slop, it also provides a valuable complement to Tim Wise's highlighting of Ayn Rand's hero-worship of sociopathic killer, which inspired Part 1 of this diary mini-series.

Together, these two stories, about Rand and Skousen, are not simply stories about the advancement of conservative ideas. Indeed, they are actually the exact opposite-they are about the destruction of conservative ideas by the rightwing lunatic fringe.
As Zaitchik explains Skousen is

Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

At one level, Skousen doesn't sound that different from dozens of other conservative authors:

"Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).

Okay, so that sounds kooky if you know anything about American history, particularly the intellectual history of the Founding Fathers and their intellectual milieu. But no more kooky than dozens, if not hundreds, nay thousands of other rightwing writers. They all have a tenuous relationship with reality, at best. What's more telling is just how far out Skousen's ideas were at a relatively early point in time. And this can be gleaned by how other rightwingers-more ultra-conservative than conservative-viewed him at the time:

W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

Skousen worked for the FBI for 15 years, but "his posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in nature," Zaitchik writes. He had nothing to do with the FBI's anti-communist activities. Then he began to blossom, as it were:

After retiring from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. "The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government."

This might have been the last that anyone heard of Skousen. But as it turned out, he was an early pioneer of conservative tradition of failing upward:

After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America's enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen's friend and employer Fred Schwarz as "an opportunist," the likes of which "are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally ... Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm."
.....
When Skousen's books started popping up in the nation's high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau's answer was an exasperated and resounding "no." One 1962 FBI memo notes, "During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes." Skousen's "The Naked Communist," said the Bureau official, is "another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed."

It should be recalled that Hoover tried to have Einstein deported as a Communist agent, believing that one of the most anti-authoritarian figures of all time was a willing stooge of Stalin. For years the FBI tried to connect the links via Einstein's brother, whom they believed to have spent years in Russia. In reality, Einstein didn't have a brother-a factthat the FBI learned repeatedly, only to forget it again. So when Hoover calls an anti-communist crusader a nutcase, you can be sure they are very, very far gone.

The story goes on:

By 1963, Skousen's extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had "gone off the deep end." One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen "money mad ... totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.

His extremism was further stoked by historian Carroll Quigley's book, Tragedy and Hope, which he also severely distorted. So much so that Quigley himself eventually gotinvolved in repudiating Skousen:

"Tragedy and Hope," Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley's book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called "The Naked Capitalist." Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America's NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen's nephew Joel).
In "The Naked Communist," Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In "The Naked Capitalist," Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push "U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society." Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch's own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
"The Naked Capitalist" does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited "Tragedy and Hope" author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen's interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen's latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of "inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary." Skousen not only saw things that weren't in Quigley's book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there -- namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen.

In short, Beck's intellectual hero is not a champion of conservative thought, he's a fringe reject of it!

But given how totally conservatism has failed in the real world, what else do they have left but unsubstantiated fantasies?

Conclusion

Back in the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev said he was going to do something terrible to us: He was going to take away our enemy. That's exactly what he did. And since there was no more realenemy out there, the right had nothing left to do, but to start chasing shadows. So long as there was a real Soviet enemy out there, conservatives had something to keep them tethered to reality. Some did much better with the whole tethering thing than others did, most did not. But because there was a real enemy out there, at least there was a reason for elite conservative discourse to keep some degree of reality orientation alive-even in the highly attenuated form of magical missile defense. Now that no such enemy exists, and al Qaeda is revealed as far less dangerous than Goldman Saks, the incentives are all the other way-the wackier the notion, the better it plays to fearful sensibilities that have lost all semblance of grounding in reality.

Conservatism traditionally has been about the preservation of existing social hierarchy, legitimated in terms of social order, which it routinely claims reflects what the Chinese called the "mandate of heaven." This had at least some level of plausibility until the pace of social change began to quicken in the early centuries of the last millennium. In relatively stable societies, it "works" in a sociological sense to ostracize non-conformists and identify with outsiders, the designated "other", the enemy. But as change becomes increasingly ubiquitous, non-conformists become socially valuable-they are the most adept at helping to devise new arrangements that keep society functioning, when the refusal to adapt would bring everything to a halt.

This is the fundamental realization that conservatism, as a philosophy-or school of philosophies-has yet to grasp. Because it cannot grasp this, it repeatedly misunderstands how it might adapt, how it might realize its own most cogent ideal of realizing gradual change that is minimally disruptive. Instead conservatism falls back onto one or another of its far less cogent ideals-of freezing itself in time, or even going backward, and in doing this, it chases fantasies... such as those conconcted by Cleon Skousen, and peddled by Glenn Beck. Do not be fooled, for that is what Beck is: a peddler of used and abused fantasies, crackpot ideas, and nightmares.

HP Lovecraft, anyone?

The Versailles Media Got Nothing Wrong

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:25:54 GMT

(Another diary about Bill Moyers last night. There's a message here: watch his show! Failing that, the full transcript is here.)

The Republican Party is not the enemy this November. They are a pathetic wreck. Hegemony is the enemy, and the Republican Party's recent inability to enforce hegemony has been superbly compensated for by the corporate media.

As Wikipedia explains:

Cultural hegemony is a concept coined by Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. It means that a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class, that everyday practices and shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination.

Or, as I like to put it, "Hegemony is ideology in common sense drag."

A key aspect of Gramsci's theory is that various different cultural institutions each fulfills their own function, often in ways that purportedly have nothing to do with one another-and yet they are actually functioning like various different units in an army-or nowadays an integrated fighting force, involving everything from infantry to satellites in space.

The media is an excellent example of this. In the 1990s, the media led the charge to depose Bill Clinton. As Gene Lyons meticulously documented in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater, the New York Times and Washington Post persistently, repeatedly, and egregiously misreported virtually every major aspect of the so-called "Whitewater scandal." When that failed, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal emerged in its place, dozens of leading newspapers editorialized that Clinton should resign. Sixty percent of the American people disagreed, but they couldn't get a word in edgewise-which is where, when and how MoveOn.org was founded.

In contrast, George W. Bush has not merely subverted the most central aspects of our constitutional order with his dictatorial theories of unchecked executive power, he has shredded the Magna Charta as well as the Constitution, and yet the media persists in lying that only the "loonie left" thinks that there's anything amiss.

That's hegemony for you. And they do it, in large part, by following the supposedly "nuetral" rules of professional journalism. Although he makes no mention of Gramsci, Jeremy Iggers does a masterful job of showing that journalism ethics itself is the problem here in his 1998 classic, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics And The Public Interest. So long as people think that the trouble with journalism is Jason Blair, not Judith Miller and her editors and publisher, then Houston, we have a problem. (Iggers, writing in the 1990s uses early Reagan-era examples, but the comparative misdeeds are eerily similar.)

With all that in mind, here's an excerpt of the discussion that Moyers had last night with John Walcott, Washington Bureau Chief of McClatchy News, one of his ace reporters, Jonathan Landay , and Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher magazine, and author of So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, and Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady : Richard Nixon vs Helen Gahagan Douglas-Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950. It begins on the flip...

BILL MOYERS:There's been all this media frenzy about Scott McClellan's book. Did McClellan, whom you know, did McClellan do a good thing in writing this book?
JOHN WALCOTT: I think on balance, yes. This is one of the first times, I think, that a member of the President's inner circle, one of the Texans who came to Washington with him was regarded as being very close to him, has gone this far in denouncing what the Administration did with respect to Iraq and has come right out and said that they deceived the American people. And that is news.
BILL MOYERS:But you've been - you started writing that five years ago-
GREG MITCHELL: Right.
BILL MOYERS:-six years ago.
GREG MITCHELL: Well, that's what I mean. It's not news-
BILL MOYERS:You were saying that the Press Corps, television and press in Washington, complicit.
GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, that's - again, it's different coming from the chief White House spokesman than coming from me - you know, for better or worse. But you know, I - that's what I mean. I think what's troubling to me is the response to that. The media has not responded by saying, "Boy, we really got caught out here, and we really need to look at what we did wrong. And we're, you know, we need to report on what the mistakes we made and what we - you know, what we've really learned now."
JONATHAN LANDAY: What's disappoints me is that here was an opportunity, once again, but a very large opportunity for major news organizations to do the mea culpa they never did, to admit that they indeed failed to do what they're supposed to do, failed to be the watchdogs they're supposed to be.
And yet we saw exactly the opposite for the most part. And I was just I was left breathless by some of the things that I heard where you heard correspondents say, "Well, we did ask the tough questions. We asked them to the White House spokesmen," Scott McClellan and others. And you say to yourself, "And you expected to get real answers? You expected them to say from the White House podium - 'Yeah, well, there were disagreements over the intelligence, but we ignored them'" when the President made his speeches and the Vice President made his speeches. No, I don't think so.
GREG MITCHELL: Yeah, what Charles Gibson said. We wouldn't - I don't think we would ask any different questions. I mean, it's shocking...
JOHN WALCOTT: Well...
GREG MITCHELL: ...to me that someone would say we would even with the chance to relive this experience and so much we got wrong - going to war is - which is still going on over five years later, all the lost lives, all the financial costs of that. And then to look back at this, you know, this terrible episode in history of American journalism and say that if I could do it all over again, I'm not sure we would ask any different questions.

"The operation was a spectacular success. Unfortunately, the patient died."

The rigid refusal to the rethink anything in the light of such spectacular failure is a testiment to the incredible power of hegemony. It's not just thought, it's attitude bred deep in the bone. It's the very air they breath, the five-star restaurants they eat in, the parties they attend-except when that kill-joy Stephen Colbert shows up. It is, quite simply, not what they do. It is who they are.

They are Versailles. We are America.

The conversation contimued:

JOHN WALCOTT: Well, I'm not - I don't know what questions ABC or anybody else asked. They may have asked all the right questions. The trouble is they asked all the wrong people.
BILL MOYERS:Yeah, if asking the question you all proved that asking the question is not essential unless you ask it to the person who can really tell you what you need to know.
JONATHAN LANDAY: And you have to take the time to find those people. It's not in-
GREG MITCHELL: And you have to play it up a lot.
JONATHAN LANDAY: It's not-
GREG MITCHELL: You can't bury it.
JONATHAN LANDAY: You know, these people are on the - this, you know, this grind to get the thing out, you know? We gotta get it out right away. You know, we got live television going on. We've got, you know, 24-hour cable TV news. We gotta - when do you have the time to sit and cultivate sources to get them to talk to you about what essentially is top secret information?
JOHN WALCOTT: Yeah, but there are some terrific reporters in television - you know, at the Defense Department in particular. Jim Miklashevski at NBC, David Martin at CBS. What I think happened in part was another problem, which is they have sources. Believe me. I wish I had some of the same sources they have. But whatever information came from those unnamed anonymous sources is trumped by Donald Rumsfeld at the podium or Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice saying, "We can't allow the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
BILL MOYERS:Over and over again.
JOHN WALCOTT: Over and over again on camera. And that trumps the kind of reporting that John and Warren Strobel did from these mid-level guys who actually know that there's no prospect of any smoking gun let alone a mushroom cloud. And so when it gets to packaging television news, it's picture driven, it's celebrity driven, and that doesn't allow much room for this kind of hard-nosed reporting under the radar.

Truth be damned. We have our conventions to follow. As Stephen Colbert so painstakingly explained:

The President makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

Back to Bill Moyers:

JONATHAN LANDAY: I also want to say one thing I think that it behooves the media to come out - major companies to say, "Yes, we got it wrong," because if you look at surveys today, the American public has lost an enormous amount of trust in the news media, in the people who are supposed to be watch, their watchdogs over government. And yet the number of people who trust the media is, like, 25, 26 percent.
So at a time when you have this problem, doesn't it behoove you to try and start fixing it?
GREG MITCHELL: There's been numerous opportunities actually just in the last few weeks for the media to do this self-assessment. And you remember the fifth anniversary of the start of the war. Almost no media self-assessment at that time. Pointing fingers at everybody but themselves. There was the 4,000 deaths in Iraq. There was the fifth anniversary of "mission accomplished." Another great opportunity for this. We had the scandal of the Pentagon media generals, as I call them.
We had that opportunity. Now we've had Scott McClellan. There's been at least six opportunities in the last two months for the media to do this long delayed and much needed self-assessment, self-criticism to the American public and it hasn't happened.

In the biz, they're called "news hooks." You have a larger story that needs telling, but to tell it properly, you've got to have people's attention, and at least their potential motivation to listen to a story that's got broader horizons to it. And Mitchell-who knows the biz as well as anyone-was absolutely right. The media has just had an unbelievable series of news hooks on which to hang a serious re-examination of itself-if, of course, they had even the slightest inclination to do so.

But since when did King Louis say, "Off with my head!"?

Let them eat mistakes. God knows that's one thing there's an endless supply of.