The Great Sanity Debate

Here's the interview between Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart. It's really great; you should watch it. I want to highlight a couple of things Jon said, some that I really like and some that I really dislike.

One thing that I like is his idea that Fox News' great triumph is having delegitimized editorial authority while exercising extraordinary editorial authority. I also think this is one of the keys to the true difference between Fox and MSNBC: the two most insidious things about Fox are 1) that they lie, 100% of the time they speak, and 2) that they pretend opinion to be fact. The people at MSNBC may be just as opinionated as the people at Fox, but they never try to pretend that their opinions are anything other than opinions. See this post on the Keith Olbermann affair.

I think his argument that he merely makes his satirical critiques while Maddow and her ilk are actually "on the playing field" is wrong, not because he's on the playing field but because Rachel Maddow isn't, really, either. I think what he overlooks is that media people don't build things either, they just comment. Fox is different in this way, in that it appears, according to a fair amount of evidence, to have overtly sponsored the Tea Parties, in a way that I think the relatively more left-wing side of the media just doesn't do. (If I'm wrong about that, it forces me to retract this part of my comment, at least in part.)

My main trouble with Jon's message in this interview is his contention that the main conflict in this country isn't Democrats vs. Republicans or liberals vs. conservatives, but rather corruption vs. not corruption or extremists vs. normal people. My question for him is, largely, define corruption vs. non-corruption, and give some examples of it; likewise with extremists vs. normal people. And in both cases, make sure that the scope of your examples are such that I can't line up one side of the division with either liberals or conservatives. What is corruption here? Not just the $90,000 in a freezer corruption, as he says, and that's an essential point, but what, then? Is it just some kind of conventional impropriety? Or deeper things like a dysfunctional government? And are there examples of ways in which the left doesn't line up pretty neatly with "non-corruption," and the right with "corruption?" (And keep in mind, I reserve the right to consider conservative Democrats not to be exemplars of liberalism.) Are liberals in the "pocket" of unions, one of the right's favorite corruption charges against us? Or do we honestly believe in labor rights? Is it easy to tell the difference? Likewise vis-a-vis extremists, show me the extremists on the American left. If by extremists we mean, as I think a reasonable narrow definition of the term would, persons who don't want to pursue their agenda using the established processes within society, especially the political ones since we're in a political context, I defy him or anyone else to come up with one person on the left who has advocated the potential extralegal overthrow of the United States government. And if you want me to find some on the right, I can, starting with U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R-NV) and continuing from there. There isn't a shortage. If we define extremist a little more broadly, okay, what counts as extremist? I'm a self-avowed socialist, but what I mean by that is approximately the same thing that the second-largest party in the European Parliament means by it, and which is approximately the same thing as the word "liberal"'s conventional meaning in this country. Am I an extremist? What does extremism mean when we're talking about opinions, rather than means? And what's a "normal person"? A person without a defined political ideology? But when did a coherent set of political opinions become a bad thing? Is extremism what happens when your arguments and ideologies are not soundly rooted in public reason, which I think would be a plausible definition? If so, show me the liberals who are making arguments unsound at public reason. Meanwhile, I'll be hauling a truckload of Republican U.S. Representatives who make arguments about the broadest areas of public policy on explicitly religious grounds, something which is defined as being outside of public reason.

I think I would also say that, while I definitely see the American political culture as being home to a fairly sharp divide, I don't think that that part of American culture that is non-political, whatever it may be, is particularly conflict-ridden; at least, it doesn't have very much in the way of arch-conflicts. I think that was a point he made well at his rally: outside of the political context, it's alternate merge, and we're not all that divided; the division is only in the political context. But the political context is an important one, and a very far-reaching one, and if the political world has more conflict than the nonpolitical realm, then isn't the political conflict the main conflict in the nation? Does it mean that we're not as bitterly divided a people as we might seem on election day? Yeah, I think it does, and it's worth keeping in mind that even people one disagrees with so strongly on matters of politics as to make you hold it against them as a person, and I believe there is a level at which that's legitimate, is probably not a bad person in everyday life (though, of course, they could be, as could someone you agree with on political matters).

I thought point about how Anderson Cooper has a specific segment called "Keeping 'Em Honest," whereas that ought to be the main function of the news apart from pure factual reporting was very apt. He went from that point to argue, look, why is it all about teams and supporting the people on your side? Why not just attack bad arguments wherever they may be found? It's a reasonable premise; the problem is the empirical one I addressed at the end of this post, namely, what if all the bad arguments are on one side? And it's more than that: if you respect a person's mental faculties and intellectual honesty, presumably any opinion they hold is one that they believe is correct and that they can defend with good, correct arguments. And therefore presumably they believe that arguments in opposition are wrong in some way, shape, or form. That form can either be the logic of the argument or the premises, and one should keep in mind the distinction. But we should expect that, it is necessary and proper that, it will be only natural that people with well thought out opinions think people who disagree with them are wrong, and therefore either approaching things from an unreasonable set of fundamental goals/priorities/values or making a logically poor argument. Yeah, we should criticize bad arguments whenever they happen. Liberals, in fact, both at MSNBC and at DailyKos or anywhere else, will criticize those nominally on our team just as readily as those on the opposing team, when they make bad arguments. This is usually when they drift toward the "center," but this is again proper because we are liberals.

And finally, a word or two about their discussion of George W. Bush, and whether his bragging about waterboarding makes him "evil," especially in comparison to FDR's Japanese internments. This is one of the reasons why I don't like the word "evil." Is George W. Bush evil? Well, let's see. I think he committed atrocities and shows zero remorse over them. But I also think he probably was making a roughly-speaking good faith effort, to the extent that he was making an effort at all. I think the problem of whether Dick Cheney is evil is a considerably different one, on the facts, but my personal hypothesis about George W. Bush is that he was a slightly simple-minded fellow who does have a fairly straightforward view of What Is Right that the neocons roped in so that they could manipulate him into executing all of their malicious plots. Does that make him evil? Under the Truman principle, Bush has ultimate responsibility for everything the Executive Branch did under him, whether because he did it or because he let Cheney's gang do it. But is he an evil person? I dunno. It's hard to say. That's why I don't like the word evil, or the word stupid, when applied to people. I try never to say, so-and-so is a stupid person. I don't think it's an intrinsic quality; I think it can change, and I think that to the extent that it changes it is mainly about earning it. I believe very strongly that there are stupid opinions and stupid actions, and just as strongly that there are evil opinions and evil actions. And so I believe that there are people who hold a lot of stupid beliefs or do a lot of stupid things, and there are a lot of people who hold a lot of wicked beliefs or do a lot of wicked things, but I have a fairly principled opposition to calling those people "stupid" or "evil."

On a slightly less explicitly moral note, the comparison between FDR and Bush is a telling one, I think. I'm not talking here about "evil" vs. "non-evil," or even "war criminal" vs. "non-war criminal," but rather about "strongly approve" vs. "strongly disapprove." If I look back through history and make a list of my rankings of each President, from strongly approve to strongly disapprove, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gets the most emphatic Strongly Approve, and George W. Bush gets the most emphatic Strongly Disapprove. And yet, what they have in common is that they both can lay claim to some of the worst atrocities in U.S. war history. So what's the difference? The difference is as follows. Both George W. Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt did a very large amount of very bad things in their Presidencies. I think Bush may have surpassed FDR in this regard, and there are other Presidents who are in a similar league. And yes, I think FDR is in the higher ranks of Presidents by the metric of doing bad stuff. But the thing is, he's also far and away President #1 in terms of doing good stuff. Massively. Something close to the majority of all the good things Presidents have ever done were FDR, or at least a percentage wildly disproportionate to his 5% of U.S. history presided over. Maybe 30% is a reasonable figure. No other President comes close. And so, while there is a whole lot to say against Franklin Roosevelt, most notably Japanese internment and the court-packing plan but also some smaller things as well, there is a whole frickin' lot to balance that out. And in my view, he comes out way ahead, especially since every other President after Washington did a fair amount of bad stuff and Washington balanced that by being pretty bland.

But George W. Bush's problem is that he has nothing to balance it. What good did he do? What good things did he do? I think once he added some ocean near Hawaii to a wildlife preserve. Honestly, I'm hard-pressed to come up with another example. He wasn't too bad on immigration, but his motive there may well have been a desire to give big businesses cheap exploitable labor. There's just nothing. Meanwhile, you have a staggeringly all-encompassing array of damage he did. And there's just nothing to outweigh it. So that's why, in my book, two of the biggest war criminal Presidents in US history occupy opposite ends of the rankings.