Urthshu has some commentary on the dustup at Fox News over a comment by Susan Estrich, and the partisan salting of some online polls. The whole thing got me thinking about how we came to a place in our evolution as an ideologically-rooted nation where a candidate adopting positions on all sides of every issue can seem plausible, and where Democrats can, with a straight face, argue that Edwards won the Veep debate last night. There's apparently no penalty for being patently ridiculous. In fact there doesn't seem to be a penalty with or without a patent.
Such a thing would not be possible were the nation more familiar with itself.
I think it's quite possible that the reason there's such political polarization in the country is that the classically liberal (whig) perspective has been all but erased from three institutional realms: mainstream news media, the entertainment industry and academia. As a result, people are no longer familiar with the values upon which the nation was founded, and assume them to be suspect when they hear them expressed. This is an invitation to radicalization.
If it's rational for the political spectrum to involve some sort of complementary functionality, but one side has been systematically deleted, then the result will be something like a house built entirely out of nails, with no lumber, drywall, etc. (Ultimately there'll be no plumbing, either.) It isn't so much that we don't need nails, but that nails alone just don't do the trick. The result is an incoherent mess, and a big donnybrooke whenever we attempt to get down on all fours with a vital issue and work our way through it.
What do we need to do? Well, we may be doing it already. We need some sort of infusion of the founding values back into those three institutional realms, so that they again have the legitimacy they deserve. It shouldn't be possible for someone like Gary Hart to argue that the founding principles, and therefore the guiding principle of foreign policy, ought to be something like values neutrality when dealing with national cultures based on ethnic identity and led by autocrats. We aren't some neutral observer, and values neutrality really has no serious claim on us. What's more, it was never part of the lexicon of any of the founders.
I've heard recently that even in Hollywood a sizable minority of those under 40 are "conservative." The news media seems at least amenable to the influence of a new internet watchdog, although they resent the imposition on their previously unfettered prerogatives. Academia probably has the farthest to go, because of the role of tenure, but things are changing even there. An attempt by mid-level administration at George Mason University to book a paid appearance by Michael Moore was blocked by a combination of public outrage and faculty intervention. Moore can still speak, but he'll have to do it for free.
It's intriguing to consider what sort of house we might get around to builiding once we have a firmer grasp on who we are, and where we're going. The era of aimlessness may be drawing to a close.
Posted by Demosophist at October 6, 2004 12:58 PM | TrackBack