Yes, They Can
But they can’t, because those stunted, unsophisticated Americans out there — the ones Brooks is able simultaneously to look down upon and understand and speak for [bold mine-DL] – don’t want to hear about any weighty matters. ~Glenn Greenwald
Greenwald will get no argument from me that there is something inherently absurd about elite pundits acting as if they were the voices of the Everyman, and he is also right that the defense of the media’s “gotcha” style is self-serving and designed to keep journalists and pundits from having to accept responsibility for the poverty of political discourse in America. (Think of this way: it’s as if a bunch of cooks kept producing terrible, tasteless food, and then justified their bad cooking by saying that it was what the customers wanted to eat.) But this phrasing of part of his complaint against Brooks is telling, since looking down on and understanding and speaking for a certain class of people is exactly what Obama was engaged in earlier this month. The indictment of Brooks extends to Obama as well.
The thing I have found most entertaining about the responses to the debate on Wednesday is the complaint that the “substantive” part did not start until 45 minutes into the debate. Taken at face value, one might think that the problem was with the order of the questioning, and not the content of the first 45 minutes, but at the heart of this complaint is the assumption–a potentially dangerously elitist assumption!–that voters actually care about policy detail and substance. This is the wonk’s self-serving myth. It occurs to me that most voters don’t even watch televised debates and never will (and not just because they are “turned off” by the way they are done), and a great many primary voters actually do vote on the basis of personality (how else can we explain the success of John McCain?) or such insipid, meaningless themes as “change” and “hope” around which large numbers of people rally with no idea what the candidate actually proposes to do about much of anything. Even though you have people documenting how, for example, undecided voters decide in the most irrational ways which candidate they will support, and we can find antiwar and restrictionist voters backing McCain in large numbers, we are supposed to intone very piously that these same people are seriously concerned about “the issues” and are demanding that “the issues” be treated more seriously by the media. Why do “petty” personality issues continually work to drag down candidates? Because there are enough voters who actually do judge candidates primarily on these things and can be influenced in this way. If Brooks’ account is self-serving, there is a kernel of truth in it.
Still, Brooks certainly has engaged in the ultimate expression of pundit’s fallacy. It isn’t just that the pundit mistakes his views for those of the public and then builds up his argument from there, but that he is claiming that he and his colleagues are compelled to talk about things that matter to them only because The People demand the coverage. Of course, the main reason for a lot of the “gotcha” style is simply to go on a power trip, to make national politicians squirm on television or throw obstacles in their path to power. This is what unaccountable gatekeepers always do when they have the opportunity. It is the response of most people who have their own little petty kingdom, wherever someone has leverage or control that others don’t. Fundamentally, journalists and pundits engage in this kind of questioning, just as all kings of their own little hills will act arbitrarily and unfairly: because they can. The idea that they shouldn’t do this and should instead act in the public interest is all very well, but that’s expecting something that isn’t going to happen. It won’t happen because, for one thing, journalists and pundits already think they are acting in the public’s interest, and so we are back to the beginning.
“(how else can we explain the success of John McCain?)”
Let’s look at a voter who is not atypical. Can we say, such a voter works full-time, comes home at night, maybe catches the news, maybe reads the paper (online or off), eats dinner, plays with the kids, kisses the spouse, goes to bed, gets up and goes back to work? Within that context, how would the voter know that McCain isn’t exactly the maverick and straight-talker the media reports him to be? They’ve been hearing bits and pieces about McCain’s stand on the issues for years. How are they supposed to know how many long-held positions he’s abandoned in his quest for the White House?
As you suggest, the petty nonsense gets carried by the news because it attracts viewers and thus sells ads. Sensationalism sells. That doesn’t mean voters don’t want to be informed or want the media to do a better job covering the issues. But as you note, that’s not going to happen.
I’m enjoying the cooking allegory you used to describe output of the punditocracy. You wrote:
“It’s as if a bunch of cooks kept producing terrible, tasteless food, and then justified their bad cooking by saying that it was what the customers wanted to eat.”
You argue that Obama has engaged in the same sort of condescending rhetorical dance as Brooks and the pundits. In light of your allegory, I wish return yet again to Obama’s actual formulation. Conservatives have said that he implicitly denigrated five very different cultural phenomena as “spam”, i.e., poor substitutes for some more substantial material nourishment. Nevertheless, I think that it is quite plausible that the hapless pol intended to describe, in his view, two fine things (religion and gun ownership) and three pieces of what he considers political spam (in his terms: antipathy to others, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-trade sentiment).
Why should I insist that this interpretation of his intent is reasonable? The reason has to do with Obama’s rhetorical style. When parsing speech, the interpretation of a parallelism hinges on where the pauses are. His speech is highly punctuated and replete with the sorts of gaps and syncopations that accompany a chin-stroking, self-consciously thoughtful style. I’ll grant that it’s a bit precious. He makes excessive use of parallelism as a rehtorical device. It’s a crutch that often gets him into trouble, and it shows up in other inapt comparisons that he makes (I don’t agree with all that you said in your post titled “Wacky Comparison”, but why on earth did he think it was a good idea to draw a line between Coburn and Ayers?). Presumably, he long ago developed a bad habit of falling back on a few familiar rehtorical devices, and he now structures his phrases even before he has summoned the content to fill them. We all do this, but he is particular in the extreme degree of his attachment to parallelism, specifically. I think you have picked up on this in various posts.
I would argue that Obama’s style – with its constant interruptions in cadence – sometimes makes it difficult to interpret his parallelisms in a manner that is consistent with what he believes. The pauses are so frequent that it is sometimes hard to decide whether the modifier at the end of the chain applied to the last element in the chain or to all of the elements. Moreover, his overuse of parallelism is itself a barrier to a settled interpretation of his beliefs, because he appears to resort to a rhetorical construct even before he has considered his words and then rushes to add content that he himself later admits was ill-chosen. In light of his stylistic handicap, then, I think that it is actually rather difficult to argue convincingly that the modifier “as a way to explain their frustrations” should be applied to all of the items in the list. It might have applied only to the last three items in the list. It might even have applied only to the last item. I suppose it might have applied to everything, as a lot of folks on the right seem to think, but that’s not even close to a certainty in my view.
Is Obama a condescending snob? Is his cooking up something from the vulgar Marxist school of thought? I’ll concede, of course, that he could have been. But I think there’s quite a wealth of evidence elsewhere – in his writings, in his books, in his speeches, and in his policy platform – to indicate that he doesn’t actually consider cultural phenomena to be of lesser substance than economic prosperity. On the evidence, of all of the various beliefs that have been imputed to Obama in this episode, the one that I think is conventionally left-liberal and that he may actually hold is this: people who enjoy material prosperity do not dispense with religion or culture, but they might be more comfortable living amidst the different religions and cultures of others. This has been mischaracterized as the belief that religious activity becomes more prevalent in times of economic hardship, but that is not quite on the mark. Personally, I am not sure whether this belief is solid or not, but I don’t think there is anything condescending or materialist about the belief itself.
In any case, I’ve been going on too long about what Obama said. The reason I I felt compelled to respond to this particular post is this: whatever one thinks of Obama’s statements, there is a great danger in the rush to interpret and seize upon isolated remarks that is characteristic of “gotcha” style politics. I agree that the problem with our politics is *not* that people are distracted from the “correct” issues and made to focus on the “incorrect” issues. The problem, rather, is that they are urged over and over again to interpret every utterance from a politician within a framework of ideological stereotype and caricature. This is to say that our style of politics lends itself to being corrupted by sophistry. Media criticism does not need to distinguish issues and non-issues. It must, however, attempt to distinguish sophistry from good-faith differences. To be very clear, I don’t mean that one is a sophist if one believes worst about what Obama said. I’m not accusing all conservatives of bad faith. I mean, rather, that anyone is a sophist who promotes the vulgar Marxist interpretation without sincerely believing it to be the case. That covers a lot of people in the media and in the Clinton campaign.
Ironically, one of the rhetorical techniques favored by the Sophists was…parallelism. Sigh. I don’t like the treatment Obama is getting, but I wish he’d stop *asking* for it with boneheaded statements. He probably harbors a deep desire to test his claim that people are hungry to move beyond sophistry – beyond the “smallness of our politics”, as he puts it. I suppose if he keeps saying dumb things that don’t clearly reflect what he actually believes, and still gets elected, then we will have transcended!
People do want to eat terrible food. I mean that both allegorically and literally.
I discussed Greenwald’s view of the media here.