The Pseudocracy and Vicious v. Vicious

Because Newt Gingrich has challenged Mitt Romney, the so-called Conservative members of the political spectacle are attacking Gingrich’s candidacy in the media, so much so that other Conservatives are criticizing the attackers.

An example of the former (attacking Gingrich) is Elliot Abrams, who questions Gingrich’s Reagan-bona-fides:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/289159/gingrich-and-reagan-elliott-abrams

At least two elements in Abrams’ piece intrigue: One is that any previous criticism of Reagan means one is not a “Reagan conservative,” but of course what does it mean to be a Reagan conservative now, aside from participating in the hagiography? Second is that a few of Gingrich’s rhetorical ticks were in play in the mid-80s: Instead of simply quibbling with Reagan’s anti-Communism efforts, Gingrich must go too far and call them “pathetically incompetent,” and therein we find one of the ticks: adverb as gilding the lily. A second tick: that ubiquitous “frankly”: “the burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan.”

Examples of Conservatives attacking anti-Gingrich Conservatives are noted here:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/conservatives-criticize-drudge-for-anti-gingrich-assault/

And so, in the pseudocracy, we get hyper-spectacle–one thug, Drudge, going after another, Gingrich, followed by Conservatives chastising Drudge, whose operation arose during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, spectacular melodrama of the highest and lowest sort.

Precisely why so many Conservatives, including Ron Paul, whose operation goes after Gingrich much more fiercely than it goes after Romney, don’t like Gingrich now is a mystery to me. Maybe they just don’t like him; the fellow does abrade. Maybe they recall is rapid rise and fall as Speaker. Maybe Romney was supposed to be “the guy” all along. The reasons notwithstanding, what went around seems to be coming around to Gingrich–and to Drudge. It’s not MAD magazine’s Spy v. Spy–it’s Drudge v. Gingrich, vicious v. vicious. How will this materially affect our lives? Not at all: it’s what goes on when politicians and the media could be discussing things that matter. It’s the spectacle, the pseudocracy.

Newt, Truthiness, and Saul Alinsky

The previous post discussed Newt Gingrich’s bad academic habits. Below is a link to an article by Mark Kazin that describes how Gingrich weds a glib, academic allusion to truthiness so as to provoke mere reaction, not response or analysis:

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/100030/gingrich-alinsky-saul-newt-catholic-carolina

Dear USA: Newt Is An Academic

I’ve worked in academia for multiple decades, and that experience has enabled me to recognize an academic when I see one, even when, perhaps especially when, she or he has taken up another profession.

Hence, if you would understand Newt Gingrich, you probably need to understand him as an academic.  He earned a Ph.D. in history and taught at colleges. 

I hasten–well, saunter, anyway–to add that there are good academics (good people, I mean) and bad academics.

Following is a list of Newt’s academic characteristics; such characteristics may be shared with people in other walks of life, but academics often display them with particular intensity:

1. He loves to talk. I know: “Gee, a politician who likes to talk? Really?”  But most politicians talk just to make political noise and evade questions. Newt likes to talk in order to instruct.  He lectures constantly. He believes he’s always the smartest person in the room, and he needs that belief to sustain his personality.Notice that he almost never let’s himself get in a disagreement in which facts matter.  If he were nailed on facts, shown clearly not to know something, he’d become enraged. One of the hardest things some academics have admitting is “I don’t know.”

2. He has verbal ticks that, to some people’s ears, make him sound smart.  Pay particular attention to the adverbs.  He says “frankly” hundreds of times a day, I reckon. Another one is “astonishingly”–a classic pretentious academic adverb. And the one-two punch of “fairly radically.”  Yes, I know, that combination doesn’t make sense.  It’s getting close to “somewhat unique.” Newt adds these adverbial spices to his cooked rhetoric compulsively.

3. He’s a verbal bully, a familiar attribute of bad academics.  Afraid he can’t win an argument with calm rhetoric, he must always say something over the top.  So, in response to Obama’s having rejected the Keystone Pipeline, Newt claimed that the Obama administration is so out of touch that it thinks it’s governing Mars.  The nuanced truth is that the House of Reps gave Obama an artificially early deadline so that most of the research on the pipeline couldn’t be accomplished.  Whether you like the idea of the pipeline or not, the decision was prudent, and it was forced by the House GOPers. Newt knows this truth. And like a bully, he needs a gang behind him, so now he’s threatening to boycott debates in which the crowd can’t cheer.  He needs to be able to gin up cheering to help him pummel his opponents. Does this sound like a man who is secure in the arguments themselves?

4. He’s trendy.  He’s bristling with new ideas. Way too many–and most of them not very good–like making kids be janitors. I wonder if he’s ever worked as a janitor, or whether he worked as a kid.  At any rate, academics really like to impress each other by letting others know what they’ve just read, or about a new restaurant (usually “ethnic”) they’ve tried, or a play they saw, or whatever.

5. Out of the dust of all his bustling activity, not much is produced.  Of course, we know people like this in all walks of life, but the busy, blustering under-achiever is a well known academic type.  Thus: Newt becomes speaker, invents the contract with America, faces off with Clinton, and . . . insures that he’s not speaker anymore. He runs some kind of online-course scam and . . . gets fined for an ethics violation. He’s never been a governor. He’s never really run a company. How much writing does he do of his books?  How has he really improved anyone’s life?

 

Talking, ticks, bullying, trendiness, under-achievement, and a high (but eternally insecure) opinion of himself: Newt Gingrich, academic.

 

 

Clarence Thomas, Mark Tushnet, and Truthiness

Mark Tushnet in his A Court Divided―The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law (pp. 71-72) exemplifies a sliding scale of truth or truthiness amid our pseudocracy.

“In 1995 I published an essay about a book dealing with [Justice Clarence] Thomas’s confirmation. After presenting what I still think was a relatively sympathetic account of what I thought had happened between Thomas and Anita Hill, I concluded that he had almost certainly lied in denying that anything at all had happened. Under normal circumstances the discovery that a Supreme Court justice had lied about something important in the course of his nomination hearings would lead to an impeachment, but because that outcome was politically impossible, I wrote that legal scholars and ordinary citizens ought to take the position that Supreme Court decisions rendered by five to four majorities when Thomas was in the majority should not be regarded as law at all.  …

“I no longer think that Thomas probably lied. Just as I think that what happened between Thomas and Hill was more complicated than nearly every account suggests, so I think that Thomas’s reaction to the charges against him was more complicated―more like an honestly stated reconstruction of the events, motivated by a combination of outrage and puzzlement about the source of the charges, than assertions of facts that he knew to be false.”

I marvel at Professor Tushnet’s laundering of probable lies. Professor Tushnet thought that Judge Thomas probably lied about his past but now thinks Judge Thomas reconstructed events because he was outraged and puzzled. Judge Thomas, Professor Tushnet now presumes, was more honest than cunning in his misstatements and denials.

Professor Tushnet invokes Judge Thomas’s sincerity and hurt to upgrade Judge Thomas’s accounts to an understandable rationing of truth.  Judge Thomas did “not really” lie or probably lie; he reacted. Judge Thomas’s accession to the Court was blocked, perhaps unfairly or underhandedly. Judge Thomas and his allies, fairly or  unfairly, trashed Professor Hill to unblock his accession. Their denials made a Supreme Court justice of Judge Thomas and a liar of Professor Hill.

Irrespective of how little or how much truth one finds on Professor Hill’s side or Justice Thomas’s side, Professor Tushnet relaxes his standards for factuality in a manner that suits Justice Thomas’s office more than Professor Tushnet’s.  What a facile slide step to sidestep facts and probabilities. Truth-telling is not what can be verified;  untruth is not what cannot be verified. Rather, whatever cannot definitively be proved to be a fully conscious and deliberate lie is treated as a truth. I tell a truth, in this rendering, when I fabricate a self-exculpating account that no one can prove that I do not sincerely believe.

By this account, Justice Thomas did not lie his way around an obstacle to reach the Court. Instead, Justice Thomas broadcast a delusion.

I pass by why Professor Tushnet would not continue to recommend that Justice Thomas’s deciding votes be discounted even if Justice Thomas is merely delusional.

However, I note how Professor Tushnet misstated the “normal” consequences of lying one’s way onto the Court. I am unaware of any U. S. judge [let alone a Supreme Court justice] who has been impeached or removed for lying in confirmation hearings, so I wonder how Professor Tushnet could define any consequences of deceit “normal.”

The “norm” that Professor Tushnet conjured is hypothetical if not fanciful.  The normalization that Professor Tushnet worked in the passage above, by contrast, is neither hypothetical nor fanciful. It is a standard maneuver for camouflaging opportunistic dishonesty by means of [Thomas's] professions and [Tushnet's] presumptions of sincerity amid complexities.

Behold how political exigencies beget professorial expediences.

Professor Tushnet’s literary or scholarly expediences take liberties with truth gratuitously.  If Professor Tushnet would deny that Judge Thomas “… lied about something important in the course of his nomination hearings … ,” why didn’t Professor Tushnet emphasize that Clarence Thomas’s proclivities regarding  pornography or “courting” were not very important for any purpose beyond trashing Judge Thomas’s reputation? Professor Tushnet should argue that Judge Thomas’s opponents blocked his path to the Court with scandal rather than substance. Professor Tushnet should relegate Judge Thomas’s denials to grubby politicking concerning trivia rather than reformulate deceit as transcending abject, deliberate, demonstrable mendacity and therefore more truth than lie.

In our pseudocracy, anything short of an admitted, deliberate falsehood is “true enough.” [I here invoke True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, a monograph by Farhad Majoo.]

Tushnet complicates traditional understandings of “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Perhaps witnesses should in the pseudocracy swear to tell “a truth, a partial truth, and anything but a flat-out lie.” Maybe that would not work.  It’s too candid and straightforward for the pseudocracy.

 

Christopher Hitchens’ Honesty

The Literary Editor and National Editor of The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz recalled Christopher Hitchens’ honesty:

“Like his hero, Orwell, Christopher prized bravery above all other qualities–and in particular the bravery required for unflinching honesty. And as was true of the work of Orwell, the former colonial policeman, this devotion paradoxically lent a certain military coloring to Christopher’s intellectual, literary, and political pursuits. This most intellectual of men valued intelligence, but valued courage far more–or rather, he believed that true intellect was inseparable from courage. It’s commonly said that Christopher couldn’t stand stupidity. That isn’t true: He couldn’t tolerate stupidity married to pretentiousness or dishonesty. It’s also said that Hitchens was intolerant of his adversaries. True, he saw many of his adversaries–the shabby and dishonest–as beneath contempt. Rightly so. But he could be far more than tolerant of those honest men and women who were devoted to causes he found abhorrent: He paid honor to his enemies. We shared a great admiration for his friend Gene Genovese–a fervent Catholic, a man who at different times in his life was dedicated to a vision of the left and of the right that Christopher equally opposed. And we shared a fondness for one of Genovese’s rather martial and uncongenial passages:

 

In irreconcilable confrontations, as comrade Stalin…clearly understood, it is precisely the most admirable, manly, principled, and, by their own lights, moral opponents who have to be killed; the others can be frightened or bought.

 

“Just as Orwell, when an adult, was drawn to his old Etonian classmate, the high Tory Anthony Powell, not because of Powell’s literary promise, but because of his military bearing and position, so Hitchens most cherished what he called (quoting his father) “sand”–grit. Christopher was haunted by his father–whom he called “the commander,” and in a piece I asked him to write on Churchill, he wrote a throwaway line that I’ve always found hugely illuminating:

 

My father, a Royal Navy commander, was on board H.M.S. Jamaica when it helped to deal the coup de grâce to the Nazi warship Scharnhorst on December 26, 1943–a more solid day’s work than any I have ever done.

 

“Of course, in the end, even by these exacting standards, Christopher did perform that solid day’s work with the sand–and the grace–that his terrible death demanded.”

 

 

Newt Gingrich’s Mind is Occupied

Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain sat down with Frank Luntz.

That sounds like the beginning–and the end–of a joke.

Newt had this to say about the Occupy Movement, and I’m using notes I transcribed from a widely circulated video of the event:

The Occupy Movement “begins with the premise that we all owe them everything.” They (the members of Occupy) sit in a “public park they didn’t pay for,” they “beg for food,” and they “use bathrooms they didn’t pay for.”

They set themselves up as “paragons of virtue.” These characteristics, Newt asserts, lead ineluctably to this conclusion: In the U.S., “the Left has collapsed as a moral system.”

What’s amazing about this kind of rhetoric is how thorough it is. Not a single assertion is correct.

I spoke to one of the Occupy Wall Street leaders, to the extent the Movement had/has leaders. He said one main purpose was to get politicians’ attention. Another purpose was to try to make structural elements of society, like taxation, more equitable; in other words, the top 1% and the very wealthy should pay more than they now do in taxes. Nothing about the Movement, even as presented by major media outlets, seems to run counter to these points, with which anyone is free to disagree, of course. Nonetheless, these are the points, not “we all owe them everything.”

True, members of the Movement present themselves as having better political and social ideas than some other people (such as Newt), but they don’t present themselves as “paragons of virtue,” whereas Newt (a nice trick) implicitly does when he suggests he knows the correct “moral system.”

The Occupiers don’t beg for food. They don’t need to. The man I spoke with said they were overwhelmed with contributions, including but not limited to food.

There is a strong statistical probability that at least some of the Occupy members pay taxes in New York City; therefore, some percentage of the Occupy Movement have, in fact, helped pay for the park, which even Newt admits is “public,” and the bathrooms. The temerity of the public in occupying a public park is astonishing; one has to give Newt that.

At what point in United States history has “the Left” been a “moral system”? We may disagree on what “the Left” (that term) means, but we can probably agree, if Newt isn’t in the virtual room, that “the Left” is a political position or a group of political views, not a “moral system.”

Anyway, Newt, who reminds me of some (not all) academic administrators I know, is very good at defeating arguments no one has actually made. It is a kind of autotelic form of rhetorical shadow-boxing.

As breathtakingly complete as Newt is in his falsehoods, he is, alas, a little sad in his larger rhetorical strategy, which is apparently to appeal to a reflex Richard Nixon could count on: the reflex to assume that all “protesters” are without jobs (because the don’t want a job), physically dirty, and presumptuous. In other words, “those goddamned Hippies.”

Here’s the thing, as the TV character Mr. Monk says: Anyone who has taken part in or paid some careful attention to what I will call the demographics of the movement will have an arduous time going for that bait. You would seriously have to desire to be misled. I hypothesize that most of Newts admirers have this desire.

He knows his audience. What I don’t know is how large his audience is. It might be large enough to get him the nomination, and even the White House. Who knows?

Please note that I have resisted the temptation ask any questions about Newt Gingrich’s positioning himself as a worthy judge of morality. Thank you.

Newt’s mind is occupied. I command those demons to get out of his head!

Drowning Government

One of two most famous quotations from Grover Norquist, who is not only famous for being famous (thank you, Woody Allen, who popularized Daniel Boorstin’s thinking in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America) but also powerful for being powerful, is . . .

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”  http://www.rightwingwatch.org/ content/americans-for-tax-reform

[This quotation competes with a variant on Mr. Norquist's witticism: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." http://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=1123439]

If I interpret his waggery correctly, Mr. Norquist wants to murder the American government.  I’m certain that persons of a moderate political persuasion would think (do think) such a statement is extreme.  Mr. Norquist is in the news again, and being criticized, because the Super Committee is about to report and because he met with some “Patriotic Millionaires” who want to increase the tax-rate for millionaires. Apparently one of these millionaires told Norquist that if he wants to live in a country with no government and no taxes, Somalia is available. Money speaking truth to power? Hmmm.  [See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/ 11/17/patriotic-millionaires-grover-norquist-somalia_n_1098473.html]

But what I have not heard or read is a critique that suggests that either version of  Mr. Norquist’s famous quotation is unpatriotic, treasonous, or anarchically radical. If a member of one of the “Occupy” groups were to say, “I want to kill the U.S. government,” imagine how “news”-droners on Fox, NBC, CBS, and ABC would react to the quotation. But because Norquist’s language is couched in the acceptable nest that Reagan built–government is bad–Norquist is given something close to a free pass. Reagan’s operation was pretty good at creating the empty signifier into which people could pour their frustrations and thoughtless reactions; hence “big government,” which Reagan pronounced “big gubment.” Of course, Reagan rightly counted on the fact that his followers wouldn’t notice how much he swelled the Pentagon’s budget, for example. Or the country’s deficit. Imagine that! You reduce revenue by cutting taxes, and the deficit increases. Why, it’s like quitting your job but still using your credit cards. Louis in Casablanca would be “shocked.”

At any (tax) rate, it is potentially amusing to realize that an “Occupy” event intended in part to suggest that the super-wealthy should pay more taxes is portrayed as radical or disruptive while the expressed desire to kill the American government is portrayed as “conservative.” So it goes in the pseudocracy.

For similar “wit” from Mr. Norquist, cringe at http://thinkexist.com/ quotes/grover_norquist/.  Mr. Norquist personifies the sort of bombast that has become acceptable to some citizens and some media.  Indeed, Mr. Norquist passes for a pundit in some circles.

 

 

James Madison Anticipates Frank Luntz

According to Richard Brookhiser, author of the recently released JAMES MADISON (p. 28), Mr. Madison was so displeased with evasions of national government under the Articles of Confederation that he thought that Congress should coerce compliance with small detachments of the army or a few warships to dun delinquent states. Madison proposed that revenues from such coercion be labeled “voluntary” contributions.

NYUK

NY Protests and Changing “Leads” in the NYT

Here is an image that’s been shared widely on Facebook, etc. Note the difference between the articles’ leads:

If Frank Luntz Worked For the Democrats…

I think my favorite image of Frank Luntz, professional sloganeer for GOPropaganda, is from when he was serving as a focus-group moderator (for FAWKES NEWS) and asked a group of GOP voters whether they believed President Obama is a Muslim. I think all but a couple of the group of 30 or so raised their hands to signal, “Yes.” Luntz responded, “Wow!” Why not, “You know he’s not a Muslim, right? You can’t be that gullible, can you?”

The Democrats seem hopeless at the game of sloganeering. I don’t know if that’s good news, bad news, or no news. At any rate, the situation got me to thinking: What if Luntz worked for the Democropaganda?

I’m no Frank Luntz, mister (and miss), but I’ll do my best:

Gay marriage would become “the Faithful Partner Act.”

Taxing the rich would become the “Wealthy Patriots Initiative”

Federal money for infrastructure would become “Smooth Ride Legislation”

Immigration Reform would become the “Liberty’s Lamp Act,” after Our Lady of Liberty in New York Harbor

The EPA would become the “Department of Homeland Preservation”–let’s keep God’s earth clean!

Efforts to limit what corporations and lobbyists give to Congress would become “Congressional Anti-Prostitution Initiative”–keep pimps out of the People’s hallowed halls!

I know, I know: I’m no Frank Luntz. Wow!