fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Is Ferguson the Benghazi of the Left?

Of ideology and the obsessive need to impose more meaning on an event than the facts bear out
15696337137_4ed3f5f323_z

A reader posts:

I have a friend who works for one of the networks in the news division. Monday night we were at a game, and he kept checking his email. When asked, he said he was ‘race war to begin.’ And he said it with a certain amount of anticipation, as if to was a football on which he’d placed a bet.

Right now, the media is gorging itself on the Ferguson riots. If it bleeds it leads, and what better way to win those all-important ratings than watching a town burn itself to the ground? Bread and circuses, friends, bread and circuses…

Give it it a week. Ferguson will be yesterdays news and the media vultures will be onto the next scandal. A month from now, no one will remember and no one will care.

Another reader posted yesterday, “Ferguson is the Benghazi of the Left,” a formulation I think is brilliant. What does it mean? It means that for a certain sort of ideologue, a newsworthy event that presents a murky and complex combination of tragedy, stupidity, and fallibility so powerfully confirms a pre-existing narrative that it becomes an obsession. This obsession, which takes on a vivid emotional quality, means that all complicating factors, epistemological and otherwise, that complicate the narrative must be dismissed or suppressed. This obsession is stoked even further by the failure of most people in the country to share it, which, in the mind of the obsessives, only shows that a) there is a conspiracy to conceal the facts from the people, and/or b) the people are too morally corrupt to see what is plain to the ideologues and to share their rage.

The lack of popular outrage may serve as a feedback loop that only redoubles their commitment to pressing the narrative until everybody is sick of it. Even though there may legitimately be something important to the original story — something we ought to be discussing — most people will have dismissed the diehards as axe-grinding cranks.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now