Once Upon a Time

I just saw a report about a recent interview with Bob Dole, in which he reportedly said he could not have been elected in today’s Republican party.

Not much later, I opened a book I brought with me—It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein (the latter someone I used to regard in the 1980s as extremely conservative)—and read the following:

[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.

 Last night at dinner, the lovely Swiss couple at our table for the first time gingerly broached that “third rail” of conversational amity, politics. They spend four months of each year in south Florida, where their son lives, and it has become obvious during the course of the cruise that they travel extensively.

The dinner discussion was triggered by reports of the bridge that had collapsed in Washington State; they wondered why Americans resented paying taxes that are necessary—among other things—for the maintenance and repair of infrastructure. When we didn’t bristle or become defensive—we agreed that allowing bridges and highways to disintegrate was incomprehensible behavior—they shared their distress over what they see as the appalling rancor, partisanship and short-sightedness of the current Republican party.

I remember when most Republicans were fiscal conservatives and social liberals—when fiscal conservatism meant paying for the wars you fought, and a commitment to limited government meant–among other things–keeping the state out of your bedroom and your uterus.

The next time I hear some yahoo in a tri-corner hat insisting that he “wants his country back” (presumably from the black guy in the White House, and the gay activists and uppity women who think we’re all entitled to equal rights), I’m going to tell him (sorry, but it’s always a him) that I want my party back.

Someone ought to sue the people who currently call themselves Republicans for unauthorized use of the name.

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A Serious Question

Our ship has crossed the pond, and we are moored in St. Malo, in northern France.

While we browse the walled city (despite the cold and rain), I’d like you to consider a question that I find increasingly pressing—and confounding: what must a citizen know?

In other words, what are the absolute essentials, the basic information and skills, needed in order to be a citizen (as opposed to a resident) of a democratic nation-state? There are obviously lots of things it would be nice if people knew, but I’m looking for the irreducible minimum here. If you could wave a magic wand and require an essential curriculum of your own devising, what would that curriculum contain, and why?

This is not an idle question; I really, really want to know what you think.

I’m leaving now. Talk amongst yourselves.

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Just the Facts

As regular readers of this blog know, I tend to harp a lot on the inadequacies of the media and the importance of accurate and complete information. My (frequently unarticulated) assumption is that if people agree about the facts of a matter, they are more likely to agree upon what those facts mean. So facts matter. A lot.

Case in point: yesterday, I shared my frustration about Fox News and its incessant drumbeat about a ‘Benghazi scandal’ the details of which the network neglects to specify. One of the commenters purported to fill in the blanks by asserting that the administration had refused to deploy troops that were within range and might have saved lives.

That would indeed be scandalous, if true. But as most other media outlets have reported, every military official in a position to know has emphatically denied the allegation. (Former Secretary of Defense Gates characterized the belief that the nearest troops could have gotten to Benghazi in time to defend the embassy as based upon “a cartoonish understanding” of military operations.) Unless every military expert from Gates on down is part of a conspiracy to protect the administration, the facts do not support the single concrete accusation being made.

I’ve been mulling over the role fact-finding plays in our political debates, because I’ve been reading a book that has been getting a lot of attention lately, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt’s scholarship is focused upon moral psychology, and the book is an excellent and very accessible exploration of evolutionary morality and the operation of culture on innate human tendencies.

One of the innate tendencies Haidt identifies is a belief in proportionality; that is, a belief that reward should be based upon contribution. Most of us have an innate “fairness” monitor that tells us that the member of the tribe who works hard should be entitled to a greater share of communal goods produced than the slacker.

I think both conservatives and liberals agree with this moral premise. Their dispute is with application—that is, with the facts. For example, if you believe that people are poor because they are lazy and conniving—that is, slackers, you will resent their dependence on public assistance. If you discover that the great majority of poor people work 40 or more hours a week at jobs that simply do not pay enough to allow them to get by, and that those who are “gaming the system” are a very small percentage, you are less likely to feel that you’ve been taken advantage of and more likely to support policies aimed at making the working poor self-sufficient.

There are lots of other examples, but the basic point is: facts matter. Conservatives and liberals (terms that have lost much clarity in any event) share many more moral premises than the pundits and pontificators assume.

What we increasingly do not share is accurate and complete information–and a uniformly credible media.

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Worse Than I Thought….

We’ve been onboard our ship for eight days, and it has been delightful; the sole complaint I have is that our only option for television news is Fox. (This may have something to do with the average age of the passengers, which looks to be somewhere around the mid-eighties, just barely older than the average age of Fox’s audience.)

At home, I almost never watch Fox. I see Jon Stewart’s clips and I read about some of the more outrageous and/or embarrassingly wrong reports that periodically become a topic of broader discussion, but this has been the first time I’ve been exposed to extended “real time” broadcasts.

It’s even worse than I thought.

Earlier today, during a discussion about the (genuine, troubling) IRS scandal, one blond “newscaster” turned to another and said the problem stemmed from the fact that President Obama has total power—“there are no mechanisms to keep him from doing whatever he wants. There has never been such a powerful chief executive.”

I am not making this up.

Blond bimbo evidently never heard of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, the Senate filibuster, Mitch McConnell, the Party of No….

Yesterday, there was a roundtable of some sort about Benghazi. I listened for a good ten minutes in an effort to figure out precisely what the participants believed the “scandal” was. What, exactly, do they think is being covered up? What misdeeds are suspected? What is it that they are insisting is “worse than Watergate?” Not a clue. But one of the hosts signed off the segment by saying “You’ll only hear about Benghazi on Fox, because all the other media are covering for the Obama Administration.”

Really?

Perhaps “all the other media” are hamstrung by that old-fashioned journalism practice called verification—the quaint notion that reporting requires demonstrable facts and that in the absence of anything remotely resembling evidence, responsible news organizations don’t manufacture and air stories, no matter how ideologically satisfying such stories might be.

A research project a year or so ago found that people who got most of their news from Fox knew less than people who didn’t follow the news at all.

I believe it.

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Interesting Factoid

Evidently, President Eisenhower changed the original language in his famous last speech. Out of reluctance to annoy members of Congress, he allowed the draft of his speech to be changed from its original target: “the military-industrial-congressional complex.”

Too bad he changed it, but then, we haven’t paid any attention to the warnings that survived the edit, so maybe it didn’t matter.

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