Post-Reason Politics Part One

I was raised to believe (and to act as if) facts mattered, consequences mattered, the reasons for which people do things mattered, that there was such a thing as causation. In short, I was raised on reason, on rationality, on the ridiculous notion that if what you said didn't line up with what you did, you were lying, at least to yourself, and probably to others. My experience in the blogosphere, and most recently watching the Republican National Convention coverage (not even the convention, just the coverage), suggests to me that our politics are almost diametrically opposed to those ideas, that our politics are post-rational. That's depressing for me, but enables some useful insights.

What actually pushed me over the edge was a combination of this post at BOP News, Shaula Evans' response to this post (scroll down) at the same place particularly and the very interesting analysis of the Republican National Convention by George Lakoff (here, here, here, and here). I know that's odd, since I'm on the same side as these folks.  But if you combine what these folks had to say about marketing and framing with the consistent shock of liberals at the willingness of Bush and his proxies (political or media) to keep repeating a debunked lie, you (or at least I) will reach an epiphany.

The central insights of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove (and, I suspect, most of the right wing machine) into the manipulation of the political process are twofold:

1. Act as if there are no facts. There are simply things that people say or believe, and other things that other people say or believe.
2. Act as if there is no causation. There are simply things that people do and other things that happen. There is no connection.

These central insights can be combined in interesting ways.  For example, there are things that we say people do, and things that we say people believe.  (The "some people say" canard beloved of Fox and George Bush himself)  Or, there are things that we do, and then things that we say happen (tax cuts for the rich generating jobs).  But the essence is that there is no reality, no facts, no causation.  Therefore, there's no shame in being caught in a lie nor any reluctance to persist in the same lie.  To paraphrase Jack L. Chalker:  "No break rule.  No rule for Republicans break."

And the distressing part for liberals, for those of us raised in the tradition of skepticism, facts, and causation, is that it works. Over and over again, it works.  The liberal belief in reason as a driving force for political and policy decisions is useless against an opponent for whom there are no facts and no consequences.  Those of us on the liberal side of American politics believe that if one simply keeps telling the truth, debunking the lies, providing the public with information, showing that there are consequences to actions, that the public will eventually come to see the truth.

But, you know, a lot of them won't.  A lot of them, certainly enough to swing an election, will continue to rely on heuristics, on shortcuts, on faith.   And, as was so nicely limned by all of the folks linked above, those are easily manipulated by people, like Rove, Atwater, and their colleagues in the right-wing noise machine.  The irony, of course, is that the manipulators are not themselves imprisoned by heuristics or their own manipulations.  They understand exactly what they're doing, how to use all of the levers of power that they're wrenching out of the hands of the people, and exactly how they'll benefit.

This suggests that Digby is right, and that, at least for now, liberals need to adopt the tactics of the right-wingers if we want to take back the country from the right-wingers.  Liberals need to become more adept at dirty politics and manipulation of heuristics.  Abandon the notion that taking the high road wins.  It doesn't, at least not against an opponent without shame or scruples.  How many sentences does it take to explain away a simple lie about a complex truth?  Too many for people who think that if you were telling the truth, it would be easy to explain it. 

Am I happy with this answer?  No, no more than I was happy with the notion that there's no compromising with the New Republican Tribe.  But it is the only answer there is right now. 

I have a couple of follow-up posts to this one, outlining (1) why I think people lean so hard on the crutch of heuristics, and why heuristics are almost entirely useless (hint:  it's the same reason), and (2) why the dirty politics + heuristics manipulation tactic is so effective.  Stay tuned.

Update:Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns & Money (I can never remember which is which) notes as well that there's an underlying Schmittian friend/enemy assumption in modern Republican thought.  That was actually implicit in my thinking as I wrote this post, and was something I wrote about a long time ago (in blog years):

The people currently running the Republican party and the Bush Administration are tribal secessionists, not principled conservatives. By way of example on tribalism, a long time ago I read an article tracking the opinions and votes of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and concluding that he's a tribalist -- he votes on the side of whatever tribe ranks highest in his personal hierarchy, not according to any particular judicial principle. That's half of the Republican leadership equation: they will do whatever they have to in order to support their tribes, ranking them by allegiance. As a first cut, looking at the actions of the Bush Administration, I'd say their tribal hierarchy is: the various extractive industries (including the Saudis), military contractors, the financial industry, all other big business, the Christian Right, and then everyone else.

First, if someone with access to a better search engine than I have can find that article on Rehnquist, I'd appreciate it.  I know for a fact it's pre-1995.  Second, just for the LG&M guys, in that earlier post about tribalism, there's a foreshadowing of the critique of Dick Cheney that DJW liked so much.  Third, I really need to do some more reading, as I'm clearly reinventing the wheel.

Comments

[Rob]

I was looking for a post, can't remember where it is now, that described a disagreement between Cheney and another conservative in the 1970s regarding Watergate. The other conservative believed that Nixon had stepped over the line and gotten caught, but Cheney would have none of it; the entire affair was simply partisan conflict, there were no lines, only us and them.

Maybe it was Josh Marshall. I can't remember.

[Luc Courier]

It was described in Rolling Stone, The Curse of Dick Cheney, T.D Allman:

"He claimed [Watergate] was just a political ploy by the president's enemies," says Bradley. "Cheney saw politics as a game where you never stop pushing. He said the presidency was like one of those giant medicine balls. If you get ahold of it, what you do is, you keep pushing that ball and you never let the other team push back."

[paperwight]

For those who may be interested, the URL for that article is:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=6450422

There's also Josh Marshall's Washington Monthly piece, The Post-Modern President:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0309.marshall.html

[Shaula Evans]

paperwight, I never intended to push you over the edge. :)

Glad you liked the comment. I look forward to seeing where you take these thoughts in further posts.

[Shaula Evans]

BTW, there's a related article up on BubbleGeneration right now that I thought might interest you: http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2004/09/how-greenpeace-changed-world-forever.cfm

[R J Keefe]

To say that liberals should take up dirty tricks is like suggesting that fluent, articulate writers make money writing pornography. It sounds easy, but proves almost impossible. To be liberal is in most cases to be incapable of dreaming up dirty tricks, much less perpetrating them.

Post-modern politics is an inevitable byproduct, don't you think, of post-modern journalism? By which I mean that journalism has detached itself from the disciplines of critical thinking that developed it and hooked up with marketing. Journalists keep insisting that stories, e.g., about global warming don't sell. Is that supposed to be the end of the story?

Re-establishing popular confidence in 'truth' and 'falsity' in our free-market world will take a lot of hard work.

R J Keefe

[paperwight]

RJ - The two points you raise are well taken, and I will be dealing with them, at least in part, in subsequent posts. I apologize for not responding directly in comments.

[Jeff Smithpeters]

I'm not a liberal. I'm a Leftist. That's probably why I can dream of this dirty trick, which apparently few others are considering right now: the My Pet Goat television ad.

Do I have spell this out for you?

[Laurel]

your post reminded me strongly of Alisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, and especially the beginning, where he writes about the modern debasement of moral language (so that "you ought to do this" means "I want you to do this").

[paperwight]

It's been a while since I read MacIntyre, and it's probably worth another go. I tend toward the Kantian/Gewirthian axis of deontological ethics myself, but that clearly won't help with the task that needs doing.

Thanks.

[Osama Been Forgotten]

This is simply an extension of the very old game of mapping a "black and white" worldview, versus a real-world composed of subtle shades of grey. It's the flat out denial that there is a political "Centrist" position. It's even a flat out denial that there is a "Traditional Conservative" or paleoconservative position. There is now only the neoconservative position, or everything else, which is framed as "Stalinist" - even on mainstream talk-radio shows.

The upshot of this, is that it does not take a high degree of sophistication on the part of a listener to see through this bullshit. The more widespread this becomes, the more people will begin to seek out other sources of information from other views. There will always be a small subset of individuals who find comfort in the black-and-white worldview - but they choose what has been painted as white, and every day, on closer inspection, find bits of soot, dirt, and grime, on what they wanted so badly to believe was a pure lilly-white field. It requires effort to stay on such a position. Effort to suppress the human conscience.