The events in the midwest these past few months have caused me, along with, I'd hope, any thinking progressive who had not already, to take a second look at Naomi Klein's influential best-seller The Shock Doctrine. The way Kasich, Walker, Snyder and others elsewhere have used the large state debts that resulted from the financial collapse of 2008 as a pretext to ram through myriad policies with little to no actual relation to ameliorating debt--but quite a lot of connection to making plutocrats swoon--has been quite revealing.
But circling through the intertubes and gobbling up whatever information on the book I could find, while worthwhile, has been a rather trying experience. Not due to anything Klein's said or done, but instead because of how quickly and almost violently the pretense of media objectivity is shattered upon perusing its reviews.
The one review in particular that's got my blood going is Jon Chait's in the New Republic. I read that review when it first ran nearly three years ago. Back then, I was interested in maintaining a standard of Intellectual Seriousness that, after reading Chait's piece, caused me to regard Klein's work with suspicion. I knew then what I know now, that the New Republic is about as intellectually dishonest and pro-establishment a magazine as you're going to find (outside, perhaps, the Weekly Standard under a Republican President); but I liked Chait's work, thought he was one of the few good'uns, and I trusted him.
So that's the reason I became quite angry when, turning back towards the review for the first time in nearly three years, I found Klein's response, which does a rather thorough job dismantling Chait's piece and leaving one to see him as either unforgivably lazy or, more likely, knowingly misleading. Go ahead and read both pieces. I didn't start the Klein piece necessarily as a fan or sympathizer, but I sure was by its end.
In general, I've found myself over the past year or so feeling that during the era when I aspired to Seriousness I was, to quote some dude named Dylan, so much older. I've since come to see much of the rhetorical constructs of elite journalism--the idea of certain people and ideas being "Serious" (rather coincidentally, the unserious are almost always found on the left)--as a manifestation of class bias and power. I'm younger than that now.
But can you really fault me? Maybe in 2006, before it was so painfully clear to some of us where the real decision-making power in this country resided. But not now.
And how else could you respond to this New York Times review of The Shock Doctrine, with its uninterrupted condescension and rather absurdly blatant misinformation. Just take the opening paragraph as an example:
When Milton Friedman died last year, the acclaim for his work was nearly universal. Even his ideological opponents, like Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers, treated this Nobel Prize-winning economist — who taught for decades at the University of Chicago — with respect.
There's absolutely
no way that a reporter who focuses on economics, and who has reached the professional heights of the
New York Times, is unaware that there's an ideological realm further to the left than Lawrence Summers' neoliberalism, with its fulsome embrace of Wall Street deregulation. Similarly, while Paul Krugman has for quite some time been on the left of the American political debate--in rhetoric more than anything else--he spent much of his career also advocating neoliberal policies. To call them "ideological opponents" is almost stunningly dishonest.
But the real masterstroke of the review comes near the bottom, where the author does a quick pivot and suddenly unleashes a torrent of free-market propaganda so unsubtle and so trite and unthinking that, for a moment, I thought I was in some bizarr0-world wherein the New York Times played the role of a capitalist version of Pravda:
What she is most blind to is the necessary role of entrepreneurial capitalism in overcoming the inherent tendency of any established social system to lapse into stagnation, as all too many socialist countries — and some nonsocialist ones, too — have shown. Like it or not, without strong economic growth and its inevitable disruptions , there is little hope for creating the healthy middle classes necessary to sustain democracies, much less an improvement in the lot of the poor and dispossessed Ms. Klein seeks to represent. And yes, that means some people will become rich and powerful.
Oh, well if that's all she misunderstands, that shouldn't be too hard to fix! I mean,
Jesus; it's as if the author is an evangelical Christian defensively reciting cant on the inerrancy of the Bible.
The Times piece was the one that upset me the most, but more so because, while I've long since realized the Times has its own rather clear biases and agendas, the brazenness of the propaganda was jarring. I'd shrug it off if it came from the Economist or Cato (as similar material did), but--likely from nothing so much as force of habit--I found it almost disgusting to watch the Times sabotage any legitimate claim to journalistic integrity. (To its credit, however--and that I must applaud it for doing this tells you how low our standards have fallen--the Times also ran this review from the highly respected economist Joseph Stiglitz in its Sunday Book Review. And while Stiglitz, being a mere Nobel Prize winner can't claim as much authoritative knowledge as to the brilliance of capitalism as a nameless Times journo, he nevertheless was quite impressed with Klein's book.)
There's a slew of other similarly dishonest and disingenuous reviews you can find out there, along with some fair-minded and evenhanded criticism*. But once you've read one, you've read 'em all. Unfortunately I have read them all, because I seem to be unable to Just Say No. But now that I've finished, I think I'll actually read Klein's book instead and embrace being so very, very Unserious.
*I particularly got a kick out of this review from the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen in the neoconservative New York Sun. Cowen is, supposedly, the liberal media's favorite libertarian economist (it's so telling, isn't it, the desperation with which many elite liberal journalists and pundits seek out some representative of the other side to laud for their reasonability and sing their praises?), but if you click over to his review you'll find a stream of invective--mixed in with laughably partisan swipes at the friggin' New Deal--that leaves him looking like a slightly more erudite version of a New York Post columnist. I suppose by this point Cowen hadn't yet gotten the memo as to the best way to further one's career in the media without having to struggle with the inner-knowledge of being a hack.
(cross-posted at eliaisquire.com)