I am somewhat discouraged these days, because facts and arguments, the ground on which I can fight, is pretty much worthless against perceptions, the ground on which the neolibs fight their ideological battle. Their simple method of mindnumbing repetition of the same outright lies obviously works, and has allowed them to claim as theirs a number of territories which, by all objective measures, should not be.
The dominant media channels, whether unwittingly or actively, carry, amplify and give substance to their discourse and make it very hard for a discordant voice to be heard, because it will not fit in the dominant narrative and will thus be discarded and ignored, just like the outburst of a drunk guest at a dinner party.
At the heart of this is the utter shamelessness of the right, and, more troubling, the endless ability of the left to do nuance (undermining its own arguments by less-than-rock-solid certainty). I say troubling, because the ability to do nuance is one of our main qualities, and giving it up would destroy what we are about. Yet, in the current context, it is killing us politically.
So what can be done?
From the European Tribune
One category of assault is the nonstop repetition of stories like the one flagged by TGeraghty recently: The New Sick Man of Europe, which says explicitly that France is in bad straits because it has been doing less well than Germany for a few months.
This is the most damaging in the short term, because it is carried by the most authoritative sources (investment banks), and thus repeated uncritically, and it both fits in and contributes to the narrative that Eurozone = stagnation = Socialism = Bad / Anglo-Saxon = market = reform = prosperity. You'll always find an eurozone economy slower than the average, and which can thus be labelled "the sick man of Europe", and focusing on this rather than other facts (poverty rates, healthcare coverage, inequality, ...) is certainly an ideological choice.
But, while this is clearly slanted and in bad faith, there is at least some basic link to economic reality, and it is possible to influence these perceptions marginally by focusing on other bits of reality - and it is possible to hope that actual changes in underlying facts (such as a financial crash) will eventually translate into different perceptions. Financial analysts have their biases, but they do try to stick to facts. In fact, investment banks analysts are some of the best sources of contrarian analysis, and most of the data I use comes from sources like them and reports from respectable institutions. The trick is to get that information that does not fit the existing narrative in front of the media to change them, which is quite a bit harder.
The second category of attackers are those supposedly neutral and authoritative journalists that filter and translate the raw data provided by international institutions or financial analysts, and create via their punditry the common wisdom of the day. Using financial analysts as their main source of information - and economic or monetary optimization as the main measure of all things - is the first bias that must be fought, as it immediately creates a subordination of political decisions to economic reality - and the appearance of the necessity of such, a favorite trick of the right. Their pretension to be centrist and neutral while perpetually pushing (again, wittingly or not) the discourse to the right is self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating, and their increasing distance from the real 'center' and from the moderate left allows them to very easily see these as extremists and to casually insult them, vilify their ideas, and label them with the corresponding contempt.
And as they are the gatekeepers, and they support one another in their cosy world (where they also mingle spontaneously with their masters - politicians and media-owners with straightfoward opinions), it is extremely hard to get a countervailing point of view to be heard.
I wanted to point to this week's economic editorial by Eric Le Boucher (Airbus, l'envol des bétises), which mindlessly repeats the same recipes - get States out of Airbus, let the private sector decide and solve the mess created by supposed government meddling, and viciously and erroneously criticize Ségolène Royal's comments on the situation without pointing the obvious truths that Airbus would not have existed without public impetus, that it is precisely the lack of private shareholder guidance in the past few years and the refusal of the rightwing governments to step in that brought it to its current crisis, but I do not have the courage to do the translation work today. The usual concepts are peddled: government is the problem (but, as they are "centrists", they grandly 'recognise' that governments do have some roles, like cutting trees along the roads needed to carry plane trunks - how fucking noble and utterly devious of them); the proposals by the Socialists to actually do something are mocked on principle, and the wider context (such as the Pentagon's assistance to Boeing when it was in trouble a few years ago, via massive military contracts) is ignored.
Instead, I'll add a commentary on Joe Klein's hit piece on leftwing bloggers in Time's blog. Booman already had a takedown on this yesterday, but I'd like to flag one important thing:
Joe Klein chose not to have a realistic description of the left, but to accumulate all the clichés and insults in a tight package. He is not trying to catch as much of the left as possible in his description - he is trying to make a nasty package that has very little bearing to reality - but will then be applied as such to the existing left to smear it. His first argument, for instance is about people that "believe the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world." Many people on the left probably think today that the USA, at least under the Bush administration, is currently a negative force. That's close enough to say that all lefties "fundamentally" think so, and thus are extremists.
Then he goes on to say that leftwing extremists "don’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history." This is at the same time a maddeningly vague statement (how do you define "carefully regulated") and a breathtakingly extremist one ("the best liberal idea in human history"). Thus, if you start bringing up reasonable arguments in either direction (capitalism is not properly regulated today or fire or language were better ideas in human history) you can immediately be brought under the umbrella of "extremist".
And meanwhile, Ann Coulter and her ilk have laughing all the way to the bank because the debate will be on nuances of the statements dropped from nowhere by Joe Klein, and about the "extremism" of minor leftwing bloggers, while these hatemongering, poisonous ideologues of the right spout their insults and slurs publicly in front of the top leadership of their party and nobody calls them to account.
One thing that I note is the absolute shamelessness of these people, and their sheer persistence in their most outrageous positions. Thesecond thing is that they are highly effective in intimidating the media, or simply overwhelming their (low) resistance to bullshit. While I cannot, as briefly discussed above, endorse giving up our ability to grasp complexity and accept nuance, I think we should at least learn the lesson that we must not be ashamed of our ideas, and we must stand by them and fight for them, loudly, persistently and systematically. Nobody else will do it for us. We have to cowe the media, and shame or weary them into doing their job
Yes, government is a force for good.
Yes, taxes are useful. Yes, the rich must be taxed.
Yes, trade unions are necessary and a force for progress.
Yes, many journalists are incompetent or lazy, and some are whores.
Yes, the left has always been better at creating real prosperity for all.
Yes, there is more than money to life.
We have to say these loudly and proudly. And often.