All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. —George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

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Have Republicans Gone Crazy, Or Were They Always Like That?

Someone asked me recently whether politics has always been as crazy as it is today, and I said no. I would amend that to say that politics has always been as bad as it is today, and often worse—much worse—but that the particular brand of crazy currently being pushed by the Republican party is new in my lifetime, and possibly new in the history of the United States.

Politics

Considering the broad scope of human history, it seems to me that the one, singular, inescapable fact about politics is that it has, in most times and places, been marked by a staggering level of violence. Here is a hop, skip, and a jump across six millennia of murder and mayhem.

Moses

The bible is one long litany of massacre and genocide. Consider the story of Moses and the golden calf. While Moses was up on Mount Sinai getting the 10 commandments from God, his people made a golden calf to worship. Moses came down and saw this, and got angry, and smashed the tablets. Then he went back up the mountain and got a new pair of tablets from God. (God offers a prophet protection plan.)

Many people know this story; many learned it as children in Sunday School. What is typically omitted from the presentation in 3rd-grade Sunday school classes is what happened when Moses got angry. He asked who of his followers were loyal to him. One faction stood by him. He told that faction to go kill all the others, and they did. They killed 3000 of their own people. This is not a footnote to history. This is one of the foundational stories of the Hebrew people.

Rome

Ancient Rome ran for about 1000 years: 500 years as a republic and then another 500 years as an empire. (The dividing line was around 1 CE.) A while ago, I was looking at a book of Roman history. Towards the end of the republic a tribune named Tiberius Gracchus was trying to push through some kind of land reform. Structurally, Rome needed this reform, but, almost by definition, you can’t reform something without taking some power and privilege away from someone who has it, and the people in Rome with power and privilege didn’t want to give it up.

Gracchus kept pushing, and finally the Senate got fed up and went on a rampage. They killed him and 300 of his supporters. They used clubs. It took them an afternoon. It was the first open bloodshed in Roman politics in nearly 400 years, and it put Rome one step further along the path to empire.

100 Years’ War

From Wikipedia

The Hundred Years’ War was a series of conflicts waged from 1337 to 1453 between the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of France and their various allies for control of the French throne.

In France, civil wars, deadly epidemics, famines and bandit free companies of mercenaries reduced the population by about one-half.

Nation-states

Our modern concept of the nation-state, comprising

• a fixed territory
• a group of people who live in that territory
• a government with sovereignty over that territory and people is quite recent. It is generally dated to the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, or less than 400 years ago.

The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ war and the Eighty Years’ war (not to be confused with the Hundred Years’ War). Before that, a nation was an just an ethnic group, like Russian or Jewish, and a sovereign state was no more and no less that whatever plot of land and group of people some emperor, king, prince, warlord, or local protection racket had got control of.

The Peace of Westphalia didn’t end warfare, of course, but it did establish the principle that there were states, that those states had boundaries, and that wars that breached those boundaries were in some sense exceptional and undesirable events. This was in contrast to the previous situation, where the surface of the earth was one undifferentiated expanse of land and water, with armies sloshing over it in a state of perpetual warfare.

(The fact that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was an invasion of a sovereign state was one of the justifications for the First Gulf War.)

The development of the nation-state led to great advances in warfare. Wars were no longer conflicts between individual kings and armies, but between entire states, with cohesive populations and—eventually—industrialized economies. This allowed us to efficiently and systematically kill 16 million people in World War I, followed just 20 years later by 60 million people in World War II.

The United States of America

The United States is a sovereign state, and has not been invaded in 200 years (War of 1812). But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have violent political struggles, it just means that those struggles and that violence goes on between groups inside the country, rather than outside. And it has been violent.

To start with, we took the continent from the Native Americans, in acts that today would be counted as genocide.

Southern agriculture ran on slave labor. It took a civil war to end slavery, and 3% of the population died in that war.

After slavery ended, we had a century of institutionalized racism. It is difficult to overemphasize how pervasive and vicious this was. It was written right into the laws: statutes said that blacks were required to do some things, and that blacks were forbidden to do other things. Local police policed cities and neighborhoods, harassing, threatening, driving out, or arresting any blacks they encountered. Property deeds commonly had clauses specifying that the property could not be sold to a black person—this was a way to keep white neighborhoods white. Bridges on Long Island were built to block buses. This made it difficult for working-class blacks who relied on public transportation to reach the beach. It was a way of keeping blacks off the beaches without having to post those distasteful (and legally questionable) "No Coloreds" signs.

But you didn’t have to be black to be on the wrong end of a power struggle. The early history of the labor movement is a history of violence and bloodshed, with labor on one side and management on the other.

In The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, a roman à clef about the Brooklyn Mafia, Jimmy Breslin writes

The foundation of the Mafia is its Sicilian blood. [...] It was formed centuries ago in Sicily to protect people [...] Like any such organization, including the police in America, it was most responsive to the needs of the rich Sicilian landowners. [...]

In America, where violence is loved and respected in all sectors, the Mafia leaped and spread to every major city and its suburbs as the nation grew. When the protection-minded Mafia people came to America, they found the landowners had so many guards it was ludicrous. The National Guard shot down women and children during a strike against a Rockefeller mine in Ludlow, Colorado. The fiercest dons of them all threw up their hands in defeat and admiration. "No can match," Giuseppe (Extreme Unction) Magaddino of the Kansas City outfit said. The Mafia was left with only the poor to protect. [...]

In the depths of the Great Depression, with GDP at less than 75% of capacity and unemployment at 25%, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed through the New Deal. It was a package of programs, including

• federal regulation of the economy
• spending programs to create jobs This had the effect of helping some poor people, for which FDR was branded "a traitor to his class". FDR was himself wealthy, and the moneyed classes were outraged that one of their own would do such a thing.

In the 1950s we had a witch-hunt called McCarthyism. This was before I was born, so I learned of it only as history, and as rather archaic 1950s black-and-white TV history at that. But the fact is it is quite recent history. The 1976 Woody Allen movie The Front is a fictionalized account of the Hollywood blacklist. At the end of the film, they roll credits, giving, for many of the people who worked on the movie, the dates that they were blacklisted.

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement finally ended institutionalized racism, but not without its portion of blood in the streets. I have a theory that television is one reason that the civil rights movement finally succeeded when it did. Television brought video of the raw brutality necessary to sustain Jim Crow into the living rooms of Middle America, and they couldn’t stomach it.

At the same time, there was a pervasive sense through the 1960s that the whole system was falling apart. Within the span of a few years, President John F. Kennedy, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were all assassinated. RFK had been a candidate for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. His assassination left the Democrats in disarray, and Richard Nixon went on to win the presidency for the Republicans.

Youth culture was being consumed by sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, which was either good or bad, depending on how you felt about it, but many people felt bad about it.

Crime was rising and the cities were burning. In particular, every summer seemed to bring a new round of riots in the vast urban ghettos where blacks lived.

The Vietnam War was steadily grinding towards its final American body count of 60,000. God only knows how many Vietnamese died; Wikipedia cites estimates ranging from 800,000 to 3.1 million. The National Guard was no longer protecting the landowners against organized labor, it was protecting the landowners against organized students. They opened fire at Kent State and killed four of them.

In the 1970s, the US hit peak oil production, but not, needless to say, peak oil demand. This gave foreign oil producers market power (it’s a little more complicated than that, but not much.) After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Arab states, operating under the banner of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) retaliated against the West by raising the price of oil. Oil jumped from $3/barrel to $12/barrel overnight. That may not sound like much, but in today’s money, it would be like oil going from $100/barrel (today’s price) to $400/barrel, which would blow the economy out of the water.

The jump in oil prices drove the US economy into recession, with both high inflation and high unemployment. This is exactly what textbook macroeconomics says will happen when there is a positive external supply shock to an economy. However, during the 1960s, there was a view that the economy faced a trade-off between inflation and unemployment: roughly

inflation * unemployment = constant

and you could pick where on that curve you wanted to be as a matter of policy. People felt both bewildered and betrayed to suddenly be facing more of both.

Oh, and then there was Watergate.

Have Republicans gone crazy, or were they always like that?

I break current Republican behavior down into two pieces

• because they can
• because they can’t

Because they can’t

Because they can’t is the more important piece: this is the fundamental driver of current Republican politics. What the Republicans can’t do any more is hold power. It has been a long, slow slide, with ups and downs along the way, so it was easy to miss (or ignore) the trend, but the trend is ultimately driven by demographics, which makes it inexorable. It is only going to get worse for Republicans, and in the long run, there is really nothing they can do about it. (In the short run, they can still do a lot of damage.)

In order to understand this, we have to understand

• what the Republican party is
• how the Republican party held power At The New Republicans, Paul Krugman says

Today’s Republican party is an alliance between the plutocrats and the preachers, plus some opportunists along for the ride—full stop.

That is a fair description of the party, but it describes the leadership, not the base. And you can’t win elections with just the leadership, because there aren’t enough of them. The plutocrats are the 1%; I’ll spot you 1% for the preachers and another 1% for the opportunists, but you’re only up to 3%, and you need 51% to win an election. You need a base.

Historically, the republicans did have a broad base. The preachers could be counted on to bring many of their flock along with them. Also, there were people who voted Republican as a matter of personal, family, or group identity. For example, there are people in my family who are life-long Republicans, and as bad as the Republicans are, I’m not going to get in their face about it.

However, for the last generation, the Republicans have assembled their base from two large, disaffected groups: whites and men. (Obviously, there’s some overlap here.)

whites

Starting in the 1970s, the Republican party made a play for the votes of southern whites who felt dispossessed by the civil rights movement. It was called the Southern strategy, and it was unabashedly racist. From Wikipedia

In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to the Republican Party strategy of gaining political support or winning elections in the Southern section of the country by appealing to racism against African Americans.

It worked because it was Democrats (especially President Lyndon Johnson) who pushed though the key civil rights acts at the federal level. Before that, Republicans had not been competitive in the South for a century, because President Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.

The Southern strategy wasn’t just a matter of race-baiting. It interacted with policy issues in synergistic ways. In a now infamous interview, Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968 you can’t say "nigger"—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites... "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger".

President Ronald Reagan was saying these same things—edited for public consumption—when he talked about "welfare queens driving Cadillacs". Of course, there were never any welfare queens driving Cadillacs, or even Datsuns. Reagan just made that stuff up. But it cemented Republican support among racist whites, and it gave Republicans political cover for an ongoing program of tax and benefit cuts. These systematically transfer wealth up the income ladder—from poor to rich—which is what the plutocrats want.

men

The other big wing of the Republican base was the religious right. The United States has a long history of religion, and religious revival, and even religious strife, but the divisions didn’t used to align with party politics the way they do now. For example, President John F. Kennedy was Roman Catholic, and he was a Democrat. We may yet elect another Catholic president, but if we do, I rather doubt that it will be on a Democratic ticket.

There are close parallels between the racial and religions wings of the Republican base. Just as the the black civil rights movement drove whites to the Republican party, the women’s civil rights movement drove men to the Republican party. The flash point was the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

Women had been making steady gains in the public sphere throughout the 20th century: suffrage, right to work, right to contraception, protection from employment discrimination. But abortion was a game-changer. With abortion as a fallback, women can fuck who they want and decide later which pregnancies to carry and which to terminate. It constitutes a HUGE transfer of power from men to women.

The power in question is not political power, or economic power. It is sexual power: the power to choose your sex partners, and to decide whether, when and with whom to reproduce. In the long run, sexual power is the only kind of power that matters, because...you know...you can’t take it with you. The best anyone can do is pass it along.

It is commonly observed that the people who oppose abortion—the people who profess the greatest concern for the lives of children before they are born—seem to be the least concerned for the lives of children (or anyone) after they are born. For example, they oppose the social and welfare programs that could help children. They march in the streets to protest abortion rights, but don’t even notice when congress cuts funding for the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.

Liberals sometimes hold this up as an inconsistency in their position, but it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Their goal is to maximize the burden on the women for having unsanctioned sex. First, force her to bear the child. Then, deny her the resources she needs to raise the child.

coalition politics

So the Republican party became a coalition of two large, disaffected groups: whites and men. The whites pursued racial politics, under cover of tax and spending cuts, while the men pursued sexual politics, under cover of religion.

Over the last generation, the Republicans have delivered—very substantially—on their promises to the white wing of their base. They have cut taxes. They have cut benefits. These things are in the financial interest of the plutocrats, and they were happy to do them.

These things are also in the interest of their base, but only in the sense recounted by an old story (attributed to various nationalities)

A peasant finds a magic lamp. A genie appears and offers him anything his heart desires, on condition that his neighbor will receive double the same wish. The lucky man considers, then asks: "Poke out one of my eyes."

The fact that a large—and politically decisive—faction of the American people is willing to vote against its own direct interests in pursuit of some lost idea of racial superiority drives liberals right up the wall.

In contrast, the religious wing of the Republican base has had to content itself mostly with lip service. Republican candidates do obeisance to their gods, and they can count on the occasional fire-and-brimstone speech, such as Pat Buchanan’s Culture War speech at the 1992 Republican national convention. But they haven’t gotten a theocracy, or even very many concrete policy goals.

Partly, this is because the key issues for the religious right—contraception and abortion—were established as constitutional rights by the Supreme Court. Even with control of congress and the presidency, there wasn’t much that Republicans could do on those issues, and taking control the Supreme Court is a very long term proposition—not that they haven’t been working on it. Republicans have been somewhat more effective at the state level, chipping away at abortion rights with regulations calculated to increase cost and limit access, and pushing "abstinence only" sex education, which turns out to be fairly effective prophylaxis against prophylaxis.

The other reason that Republicans never delivered as much to the religious wing of their base is that the Plutocrats don’t really care about religious issues. They have enough money to attract (or buy) the women they want, so sexual politics don’t concern them so much.

This may all sound like a tempest in a teapot—or excessively analyzed—but it’s not. No human ever willingly gives up any kind or amount of power. Historically, the only way to take power from a human was to kill them, or maybe enslave them. Today, in the United States, we have a nearly unprecedented situation where large groups of people (whites and men) have had power taken from them, yet remain living, fully enfranchised members of society. These people are frightened and angry, and they are fighting a rear-guard action to hold onto what power they still have, and to try to claw back some of what they have lost.

In view of this, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the current political situation is just how little violence has accompanied it. The country has not descended into civil war. We have seen only a few race riots (typically in response to specific grievances, such as the Rodney King riots) and none of the kind of sectarian religious violence that plagues places like Pakistan or Northern Ireland.

Instead, we have seen the legitimate exercise of democracy, as the Republicans pulled together a coalition that managed to get 51% of the vote and hold power for an entire generation. Like any coalition, its constituent groups were in it for different ends, and like any good coalition, all its constituent groups got something in return for their support

• the plutocrats got money
• the preachers got respect
• the faithful got lip service
• the whites got fleeced Actually, the faithful and the whites got something that was even more important to them than their putative policy objectives: they got to be part of the ruling coalition. They got to feel like their people were the right people; the important people; the people on top.

Power is a zero-sum game. The political gains of blacks and women are, symmetrically, political losses for whites and men. When people lose, they feel bad, and when people lose politically, they feel really bad. It is hard to appreciate this unless you have experienced it yourself. It is depressing. It is horrid. Throwing in their lot with the Republicans gave large groups of whites and men a ticket out of this hell, and they took it.

decline and fall

The Republicans had a good run, but it is ending, for the simple reason that they are no longer a majority. There are about as many Republicans as there ever were, but the ranks of Democrats are growing, and are now edging out the Republicans in numbers. Two groups have been especially important in this change: Hispanics and homosexuals.

Hispanics

The United States went through its demographic transition in the early 20th century. The U.S. population is still growing, but that growth is due entirely to immigration, and the biggest immigrant group is Hispanics. Hispanics typically immigrate from places that still have high birth rates and high death rates; when they arrive in the United States, the first—and sometimes second—generations have large families. (I grew up in an area north of New York City. There were second generation Irish families in the neighborhood with 7, 8, 10 and even 11 children.)

This makes Hispanics the single fastest growing ethnic group in the United States. As recent immigrants, they are typically poor, and have a natural affinity for Democratic policies. At the same time, as recent immigrants, they lack the history of black/white racial strife that drove white Americans to the Republican party. So the Hispanic electorate is growing, and their votes are going mostly to the Democratic party.

gays

Another group that has made a difference is homosexuals. Going back to the 60s and 70s, there was no space of any kind for homosexuals in public life. No political party could even acknowledge their existence, let alone compete for their votes. There was a gay vote, in the sense that gays voted, but it wasn’t a vote that gays could organize and direct, or that parties could organize and capture.

Over the ensuing decades, gays gained visibility, and voice. They organized politically. Eventually, the gay vote became important in party politics. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans much wanted to deal with this. For their part, the Democratic party establishment had to be pushed, and prodded, and in some cases shamed into supporting gay rights. But in the end, the Democratic party recognized the importance of gay rights, and the importance of the gay vote, and they backed gay rights, and they got that vote.

In contrast, the Republicans are utterly and constitutionally unable to accept gays. No way, no how, not now, not ever. You’re evil. We hate you. Go away. Nominally, this is because the religious wing of the party considers homosexuality to be a sin. But if that were all that was standing between the Republicans and the votes needed to win an election, they’d have found a way around it. Religions can be flexible when it suits them.

The real issue is much deeper, and completely intractable. In the Republican party, religion is merely a cover for the struggle of men to control women. And despite the religious talk, and the religious posturing, the underlying struggle is not religious. The underlying struggle is sexual, and one of the most important, powerful, and effective instruments wielded by men against women in this struggle is sexual repression.

Sexual repression is not something that you can do by halves. You cannot be preaching hellfire and damnation to women who wear short skirts, while allowing the gays to hold hands and maybe neck in the park. It just doesn’t work. So the Republicans can never accept gays on any basis at all, because if they did, the entire edifice of sexual repression would collapse, and they would lose half their base.

Faced with grudging acceptance by the Democrats on one side, and virulent rejection by the Republicans on the other, gays vote overwhelmingly Democratic. There aren’t that many gays in the population; survey data suggests 2% or 3%. But in a close election, even a few percent can make the difference. Obama’s margin of victory in 2012 was about the size of the gay vote.

Because they can

So the Republicans can’t hold power any more. What they can do is go crazy, and they are. The crazy comes from several directions.

Perhaps the most basic is simply that crazy is what’s left after you take violence off the table. In other times and places, people like the Republicans would be rioting in the streets, or forming militias, or assassinating their enemies. That isn’t happening in the United States today, and what they are left with is incoherent rage. What these people are really upset about is the fact that the president is a nigger, but it isn’t polite to say that. More to the point, it isn’t to their political advantage to say that. Instead, we have this Kenyan Muslim Fascist Socialist nonsense (inexplicably being pushed even by people who should know better, like Donald Trump).

media Balkanization

Another big factor is the disintegration of the media—especially television—as a homogeneous and homogenizing factor in American life. From the 1950s through perhaps the 1980s, television was a huge force in creating and sustaining a middle America. There were three big television networks, and just look at their names: the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Each television station broadcast under license from the FCC, and that license required it to operate "in the public interest". Among other things, this meant broadcasting the news, and "the news" was on a somewhat short tether to reality.

The rise of cable television in the 1980s broke apart this broadcast hegemony. Cable operators do not need an FCC license, and operate in no interest but their own. Equally important, cable channels can target niche audiences in a way that national broadcasters can not. Indeed, this was one of the original promises of a cable system with scores—hundreds—of channels, and cable has delivered on that promise: today we have the SciFi channel, and the fishing channel, and the Spanish soap-opera channel, and...well...hundreds more.

But cable has also created channels that target political audiences, like Fox and MSNBC, and that slant news to a degree that would never have been possible in the old broadcast system. By the 1990s, "the news" was becoming a joke

Charlie Mackenzie: Hey Mom, I find it interesting that you refer to the Weekly World News as, "The paper." The paper contains facts.

May Mackenzie: This paper contains facts. And this paper has the eighth highest circulation in the whole wide world. Right? Plenty of facts. "Pregnant man gives birth." That’s a fact.

—So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993)

You might imagine that media Balkanization would expose people to more diverse views, but it actually goes the other way, due to an echo-chamber effect (the technical term is confirmation bias). People preferentially seek sources that they agree with; as a result, they are not exposed to opposing views. With so many sources to choose from, everyone today can live in their own little bubble, with their own facts and their own reality.

The echo-chamber effect seems to be stronger on the right than the left. At Talking Right—About Torture I wrote

I was listening to our local talk radio station ... [*]

[* in the hopes of understanding why our country has gone off the rails]

and at Euro Delusions, Paul Krugman writes

I’ve been browsing through the collected speeches of Olli Rehn, the vice-president of the European Commission, who has emerged as the face of denialism when it comes to the effects of austerity. What I wanted to do is pinpoint what, exactly, he and those who share his position see as the evidence that their view is right.

but at Revenge of the Reality-Based Community: My life on the Republican right—and how I saw it all go wrong, Bruce Bartlett recounts

I assumed I would get a lot of grief for my comments in the Suskind article and was surprised when there was none at all.

Finally, I started asking people about it. Not one person had read it or cared in the slightest what the New York Times had to say about anything.

I was flabbergasted. [...] This was my first exposure to what has been called "epistemic closure" among conservatives—living in their own bubble where nonsensical ideas circulate with no contradiction.

The rise of the internet after the turn of the century only pushed these trends further. Today, anyone with a computer and an internet connection can put their voice and their views out there, and many do. Cable television balkanized the broadcast world, but the internet shattered it into millions of tiny shards. We can no longer even keep track of what is being said in the media, let alone form any kind consensus.

The internet is also killing off newspapers, partly by competing with them for people’s limited time and attention, but mainly by soaking up more and more of the available advertising revenue. Classified ads were always a major revenue center for newspapers, and the migration of the classifieds from paper to Craig’s List has been an especially severe blow to the newspaper business.

creating reality

On the 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon, Roger Waters sang

"Haven’t you heard, it’s a battle of words?" the poster-bearer cried.

and he turned out to be prescient. The Republicans have recognized that in our current media maelstrom they can say whatever is convenient at the instant with no fear that they will ever be contradicted, or even held to their own words.

For example, Fox News gave cover to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker when he was union-busting, with commentators disparaging those public-sector unions, and those public-sector employees pulling down $50K, $60K, really big money, and this has to stop, and on and on and on...

Within the year, those very same commentators were earnestly explaining why the Bush tax cuts had to be preserved for people at the $250K income level, because, you know, $250K, that’s not rich, that’s just middle class, and these people have mortgages to pay, and on, and on, and on...

This is all (obviously) done right out in the open, and the problem is not that no one sees it, the problem is that no one seems to care. The Daily Show fights the good fight, splicing together contradictory clips and showing them back-to-back. That’s good for a laugh, but it doesn’t shut down the Republicans, or Fox News, or even break their stride.

By the time George W. Bush was in office, Republicans were expressing open contempt for "reality". In Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, Ron Suskind quotes a Bush aide

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 Republican undertaking to "create our own reality" is broadly supported by two other developments

• partisan think tanks
• news-as-entertainment

partisan think tanks

From Wikipedia

A policy institute (often termed "think tank" by journalists) is an organization that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture.

A think tank will typically have some offices somewhere, and some staff. They do research, they write white papers, they give talks. It’s a living.

Some think tanks are funded by governments or clients to do actual research. But others are funded by corporations or billionaires, like Exxon or the Koch brothers, for the express purpose of advancing the political and social agenda of those corporations and billionaires.

Research is much easier when the sponsor tells you the answer up front. You can dispense with all that tedious, ummm, research, and just write down the answer. The sponsor gets the results they want, and you get paid. See how easy it is?

There are many of these bought-and-paid-for research houses, with names like the Heritage Foundation and the CATO Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. They provide intellectual cover for the Republicans when they need to tell a particular lie. They provide a ready source of facts (or "facts"), white papers, quotations, commentators, and spokesmen when the Republicans need to get a message into the media. More subtly, they contribute to the background of things that "everyone knows", which helps to shift the Overton window in directions favorable to the Republicans. The effect of moving the Overton window is illustrated by the statement

Some say the sun rises in the east; some say in the west. Probably the truth lies somewhere in-between.

There was a kerfuffle in 2012 when the Koch brothers made a push for control of the Cato Institute. Libertarians who had long looked up to the Cato Institute as a standard-bearer of libertarianism were forced to confront the fact that in the end, it was merely doing the bidding of its paymasters, and, worse, that those paymasters were not especially libertarian.

Having hot-and-cold running facts is convenient, but if you want to control policy, you have to get your facts out there: you have to get them into the media. The Republicans have been enormously aided in this by the relentless and ongoing shift from news-as-facts to news-as-entertainment.

news as entertainment

Historically, news was about reporting the facts. Reporters were schooled in the "five Ws": who, what, where, when, and why. At some level, people do want this kind of news: they want to know what has happened in their world, and what is happening in their world. It’s a big world, and there is lots going on in it: enough to fill an entire city paper, every single day, with local, state, national, and world news.

But reading that entire city paper would take you a couple of hours each day, and probably no one does that except for journalism professors and maybe some news junkies. Most people can keep up with the facts that matter to them with a glance at the front page, or maybe 5 minutes of radio news at the top of the hour. The 6:00 news on television takes those same 5 minutes of facts, adds bumpers, filler, the weather forecast, 8 minutes of commercials and manages to stretch it to a half-hour broadcast, but that’s about the limit for news as facts.

The fundamental problem with news as facts is that facts just aren’t that interesting. I was on a college campus one week when I was a teenager. I found the room where the college newspaper was produced. There was a teletype machine, with a live wire feed. It sat there, all day long, printing out little slugs of news. At first, I was excited: here was the raw data behind the news! After reading it for 10 minutes, I got bored and wandered off.

With the advent of cable TV came the 24-hour news channels, and the 24-hour news channels need some way to make people watch the television while those little slugs come off of the teletype—if not ’round the clock, at least long enough to make the cable news channel profitable. They need the news to be entertaining.

The news channels made the news entertaining by changing it from something that reports facts to something that tells stories. Facts are boring. Stories are interesting. Stories hold people’s attention. Stories are entertaining.

Stories are actually not a bad way of conveying information: humans are very good at telling stories, and equally good at apprehending and remembering them. But facts alone do not make a story. To make a story you need drama, and to make drama you need conflict.

So more and more, the news is about reporting the two sides of a conflict. I suppose if a house burns down at 123 Main Street, a reporter can still report that as a fact. But for something controversial, like "sun rises in the east", he can’t. If he did, he might be accused of bias. Instead, he has to get a spokesman for the east theory, and a spokesman for the west theory, and report the two conflicting theories. That way, he remains neutral.

You think I’m exaggerating? Not much. Read Mediterranean Diet Shown to Ward Off Heart Attack and Stroke.

This is an important study: published in the New England Journal of Medicine, controlled, large sample size (7447 people), longitudinal (5 years), and it measures real endpoints: stroke, heart attack, and death from heart disease. It shows that a Mediterranean diet—one rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables—can significantly reduce serious health risks. You might think that the New York Times could report these results as, well, results. Facts.

No. It’s not a long article, just 24 paragraphs. But the Times nonetheless gives over three of those paragraphs to the competing views of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, which is pushing—wait for it—a vegan diet.

In a way, I’d almost rather see the Times give those column inches to the man from Hostess, who tells us that really, Twinkies are good for us, or maybe even the man from Philip-Morris. (Are they still denying that cigarettes cause cancer?) That would just be ordinary venal corruption: the press bowing to big corporate interests.

What the diet article shows is a more profound corruption. The Preventive Medicine Research Institute has nothing on the New York Times. No money and no influence. And, needless to say, no study or data to support their own theories. The reporter drags them in not to satisfy any corporate masters, but to create a controversy for his story, and to show that he is somehow "neutral" in this controversy.

By doing so, the reporter abdicates his fundamental responsibility to the reader, which is to identify and report the news—as the reporter sees it. The front page of the New York Times proudly displays their motto, "All the news that’s fit to print", but an article like this one is better characterized by the parody, "All the news that fits, we print", or—as Fox News blithely puts it—"We report, you decide".

There’s nothing special about the diet article. I chose it as an example because it happened to be in the paper the day I was writing this paragraph. Once you know what to look for, you start seeing this phony neutrality everywhere.

op-ed

When you look at actual controversies, the whole thing goes meta, and gets worse. The New York Times has an editorial page, where the editors express their opinions, but I find these to be generally low-entropy. They have rather the character of the minister who preaches on sin. (He’s against it.)

Of more interest is the opposite-the-editorial, or op-ed, page. This is where you find regular columnists and outside writers who have something to say on a topic. What you should expect an op-ed writer to do is express some kind of opinion or view, and then support that opinion with reason and/or evidence. Some writers do this, but others abdicate their responsibility to express and support an opinion, in much the same way that the reporter in the diet story abdicated his responsibility to identify and report the news. Instead, they describe the two sides of a controversy, and then claim that they have some new insight, analysis, compromise, or approach that can solve the problem. They want to make every controversy into a dialectic, with a thesis and antithesis, so that they can provide the synthesis that transcends the conflict. This allows them to look wise and constructive, without having to dirty their hands in the actual...you know...controversy.

This is fine if you can do it, but dialectics that are waiting for a new synthesis don’t come along all that often. For centuries, it was an open question whether light was a wave or a particle; there was evidence supporting both theories. It wasn’t resolved until quantum mechanics subsumed all the evidence into a radically new theory, in which light has characteristics of both waves and particles. This was a true synthesis, but it took 400 years, and it didn’t happen in the pages of the New York Times.

The rest of the time, we have rather more mundane controversies, like whether the sun rises in the east or the west, and a stable of columnists telling us that if we would just set aside our petty differences and accept the wisdom being dispensed by—who else?—the columnist, then we could reach a compromise between these two opposing views and move on. Duncan Black has a series of blog postings cataloging and excoriating these columnists. Black argues that such columnists are afflicted with

a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything.

So we have symbiotic relationships between the Republicans, the think-tanks, and the media. The Republicans fund the think-tanks. The think-tanks manufacture facts that support Republican positions. The media use these facts to construct the conflict-driven stories that they present as news. The media exposure establishes and maintains the credibility of the think-tanks. And if all goes well, the Republicans reap their rewards in election victories and political power.

reality and perception

In one sense, Carl Rove’s claim that the Republicans "create our own reality" is false: there is an objective reality out there, and it exists independently of the Republican party. But in another sense, it is true. No one experiences "reality" directly; rather, what we experience is a model of reality that is construct