Ralph Waldo Emerson once opined that no one should read any book that is less than a year old. Emerson was wary of fashion in print, and recognized that most books deserve to come and go without comment. In this political season, however, nothing competes for our attention so insistently than does the current practice among the chattering classes of dashing off a quick book about American politics. Sadly, many of these volumes do not pass quietly without comment--as Emerson would have liked--but are mercilessly flogged across the web, the networks, and the cable "news" shows. Members of the commentariat put in their time with Chris, or Lou, or Keith, or David, or Norah, or Wolf, or Tim, offering oxymoronic "instant analysis" and then--at predictable intervals--leverage their pundit capital into a volume which their fellow talking-heads then shamelessly promote. Happily for these pundits, brisk sales frequently follow. The majority of these works are exercises in high synthesis and low analysis and they display a dreary sameness, not unlike the cable news shows their authors populate. Most are regrettably didactic sermons designed to push product as they flatter their readers. They preach to the converted and confirm the essential rightness of the reader's point of view. They are generally a hustle.
Most pundit / hustlers are hyphenates who hold down day jobs with national news outlets or on talk radio while moonlighting as "analysts" for cable news shows. (There are also a large number of "party strategists" and "surrogates"--a kind of political thugocracy--that also appear). For pundits, these books offer a delightful supplment to their incomes, while helping to build their pundit capital. There is an alarming number of these jostling analysts, but above this crowd rises a special few--exalted opinion-makers who have escaped the shackles of the news cycle and are busily building their personal pundit empires.
Arianna Huffington is one of these lucky few--a pundit, whom we are told every Friday by moderator Matt Miller on the public radio opinion program, Left, Right, and Center "transcends the stale categories of our political debate." Huffington, of course, had to travel some distance before she could transcend mere politics. She has, in fact, assumed and then shed a number of identities as she marched toward the one true faith, progressive politics. This is the same Huffington who, during her then husband Michael Huffington's unsuccessfull run in 1994 for US Senate from California, chirped that Republican hegemony would happily deliver the final death blow to an already staggering New Deal coalition.* Since then, Huffington has shed Michael, had a political conversion experience, run for governor in California during the Gray Davis recall circus, embraced progressive politics, collected a bunch of famous and semi-famous friends**, and built a successful brand through her popular web site The Huffington Post. Along the way, through television mostly, Huffington has invented a character, a seer and pundit, known as Arianna Huffington. This Huffington has now delivered her latest offering in print, Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe.***
Right is Wrong is primarily about the world Huffington inhabits--the world of media--and details how operatives on the political right have exploited fear to cow the national media and driven American political discourse into a roiling and hellish cesspool of hate and destruction. Huffington catalogs the failure of the media over the last seven years to confront and critique the radical right's attack on the Constitution: Iraq, swiftboating, torture, Guantanamo, the attack on science, prsidential signing statements, warrantless wiretaps, and all the rest of the sorry litany of the Bush administration. Through all of this, the media has simply failed to engage the execrable tactics of the right. But this is worse than mere failure, for Huffington argues that the media has--for the most part--been an all too willing passenger on this thrill ride to Dante's ninth ring of hell. As a tour guide through the stygian pit of contemporary American politics, Huffington does not disappoint, particularly when she lingers--with a kind of purient horror--over the most outrageous media outriders of the right, people like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. Why, Huffington asks, should someone like Ann Coulter get any media play at all?
The answer, Huffington argues, is that political reporting--and it's vapid step-child, the cable talk show--suffers from a misplaced belief that--in striving for balance and fairness--it should rigorously present opposing points of view. Simply put, the old Crossfire model with a gloss of objectivity. This pursuit for "fairness" is driven, Huffington argues, by a feral fear within the boardrooms and editorial offices of American media of being percieved as liberal or left-biased. Consequently, fairness is then pursued through a misplaced belief that American political discourse is an existential battle between left and right. This insight is particularly compelling, Huffington argues, because the American electorate does not occupy these poles, but sits for the most part in the vital center. (A tip of the conical hat to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. here.) Additionally, Huffington advances the thesis that the contours of this vital center follow the lines of progressive politics. The new center, in other words, has embraced a now mainstreamed progressive agenda--the center just doesn't know it yet (because they haven't heard it from Tim Russert).
What engages Huffington is the question of how the "narrative" of American politics continues to engage this hoary trope of left vs. right. Why does this politics of artificial combat and ginned up conflict, this--if I may employ a fashionable word of the moment--"meme" (Even Russert uses it now!) guide media coverage and ignore real issues that concern real people? Real people--in fact--think this is all one big mean-spirited food fight and many eventually turn away in disgust, and, if they vote at all, do so with a scowl and a bad attitude. (Never mind that the voters overwhelmingly say they hate attack ads and then just as overwhelmingly respond affirmatively to them when it comes time to vote). The "narrative" of right vs. left ultimately, then, becomes a kind of endless regression spiraling downward inside a closed loop. In the end, only those politicians who can master this world-o-memes get serious attention (both postiive and, eventually, negative) in our media controlled discourse. Once elected, these politicians then practice the dark arts of division--after all, that is what has led them to power. As a consequence, political choices are pushed to the ideolgical margins, and an artificial (but genuinely dangerous and destructive) politics fails election cycle after election cycle to apply measured, smart, competent, and reasoned soultions to real problems like health care, foreign policy, or a sane energy agenda. Solution? If only the media would stop playing ball, if only they'd listen to their better angels, things would be different. It's about practicing fearless leadership in a fear-riddled system. We need leaders in media, and leaders in the corridors of power. Just say no to the fear. In the end, Huffington concludes, we--the public--need to demand this, to demand the politics we deserve.
But is she right? While Huffington's mosh pit of media perfidy is generally accurate, and she builds a solid case when it comes to several issues--the ususal suspects like Iraq and health care--this is another volume that does little more than stoke the outrage of the already converted. Is it really just about fear? Will the villagers really take up their pitchforks and storm the castle if they have a rational discourse they can mobilize? Perhaps, but Huffington's analysis is balanced on a thin reed, balanced--in the end--upon a belief that political reporting can, or should, somehow be walled off from its socioeconomic and cultural contexts. But the media is not a thing apart, not an enterprise devoted to some ideal of "objective" reporting of the "truth" but is in the business of producing a cultural product. It is in the business of branding and marketing, and then driving an audience--all through the production of cultural objects and cultural meaning. You may not like the message from the information/entertainment industry, but, and here's the problem: these cultural products resonate with the audience. As Norah O'Donnell of MSNBC recently told Elizabeth Edwards (Edwards was, at the time, trying to deflect a series of questions from O'Donnell about Reverend Wright and return the discussion to her signature issue, health care), "This is a big deal, health care for many Americans. It's [just] not as sexy as Reverend Wright is now." Exactly. (Memo to network executives: Have you considered the synergistic possibilities of, say, having Reverend Wright bust a move on Dancing with the Stars? Hey, it worked for Tucker Carlson.)
Can this be pushed a bit further? Beyond producing cultural objects or meaning, the media may in fact be in the business of reinforcing cultural meaning, reinforcing a common set of cultural rules in a society that has little more than the market relations to hold it together. The media is simply trying to swin through the zeitgeist like the rest of us. We understand the market, we understand conflict and competition--whether its getting into the right school, rooting for our favorite freak on American Idol, celebrating our hyper-individualism, or simply offing everyone in our way when we play Grand Theft Auto IV (1 million units sold in advance of its release). Indeed, we embrace it. Is it too much to posit that our culture, then, is infused with and supportive of, combat and competition, division and strife? This simply may be who we are. There is no guiding intelligence behind this--just a mulitiplicity of choices that bend to the prevailing cultural winds as they aggregate and consolidate the main line. Huffington does make a feint toward a cultural/economic analysis, but falls too easily into the "it's the corporation", or "it's the profit motive" trap. Of course it is. But, aren't we all the corporation? Doesn't media function as much as a mirror as it does a window? We watch, after all, and it is--perhaps--through watching that we recognize and define ourselves.
But wait, there's hope. We don't just watch--we participate through the "liberating" and "democratizing" technologies of the web. If we are to be saved, it will be through viral--we used to call this grassroots--politics. New venues, for example The Huffington Post , will offer the opportunity to connect, to organize, to exchange fresh ideas in an intellectual forum free of the grubby concerns of the market. I don't discount this possibility, there are hopeful signs, but I also don't discount the ability of the market to co-opt, commodify, and then market--cool hunting!--any authentic forms of discourse. All that is solid melts into air. (Consider, for example, the recent spate of television commercials from the likes of BP and Chevron trumpeting their recognition of the dangers of global warming--"we live here too"--and showcasing their dedication to a cleaner tomorrow. Or, consider that the American Mining Industry--coal--helps to underwrite the News Hour on PBS)
The Huffington Post, ironically, offers a cautionary lesson in this regard.**** Although it is argued that sites like Huffington's are the new commons--the town square--in a very real sense, sites like The Huffington Post are more similar to a shopping mall than main street. The Huffington Post is, after all a piece of private property. Have you ever seen people circulating political petitions in a mall--as they can on Main Street? It's unlikely, for malls are aggresively private spaces where no activity takes place that is not sanctioned by the owners. Malls are also aggressively panopticon spaces--highly regulated and highly surveilled. And, sites like The Huffington Post are--like private malls--commercial enterprises engaged in the business of marketing and selling. Arianna Huffington--who owns the means of production in this case--uses her site to advance her financial interests--her absolute right--and "grow" her pundit capital. In a stunning example of this, Huffington promotes her own celebrity appearances (on ABC, or CNN, or CSPAN--but not NBC for the moment as it appears Tim Russert has taken exception to her depiction of Meet the Press and bigfooted her) and then--closed loop alert--invites her viewers to comment on Huffington's appearances (ex: "you go girl!").*****
Yes, the bloggers somewhere out there in the night can respond to Huffington's "guest bloggers" and news items on The Huffington Post, they can participate, but only if they stay within Huffington's parameters. The number of characters allowed for a response, for example, is not particularly generous, all comments are vetted by an unseen set of "moderators" and bloggers can be "banned from commenting" if they violate murky and inexplicable rules. Given the stream of bile and invective that flows through The Huffington Post , enforcement of the rules--against ad hominem attacks, for example--may appear lax. But there are numerous examples of bloggers being banned for seemingly innocuous comments. (Full disclosure--I was "banned from commenting" on The Huffington Post) I fear that The Huffington Post--like a mall--is about building an audience, building a brand. It's just that this brand--progressive politics--may be more palatable than Bill O'Reilly's brand. Yes, you're allowed to make brief comments, but this strikes me as more like bread and circuses and less like conversation. Ultimately, by controlling content--her right as an owner--Huffington is shaping the discourse in the same way she decries in others. As she builds her empire, and shapes the intellectual contours of The Huffington Post to reflect her perspective, the character she has created--Arianna Huffington--may be in the process of becoming the most exalted form of pundit there is: a living meme.
*Michael Huffington narrowly lost to Dianne Feinstein. At the time, Huffington achieved the distinction of conducting the most expensive senatorial campaign in American history, spending 28 million dollars from his personal fortune on the failed bid. The source of Huffington's wealth was a family owned petroleum and natural gas business, Huffco. In 1990 Huffco was sold to the Chinese Petroleum Company, Taiwan.
**Recently, Huffington breathlessly told ABC that she actually took dictation from Larry David "while he was on the set of Curb Your Enthusiasm." The Huffington Post is also fond of sprinkling its site with guest bloggers like Roseanne Barr, Steven Weber, and Alec Baldwin.
***Telegraph.co.uk tells us that Huffington is the 26th most influential pundit on the airwaves today--ironically wedged between Pat Buchanan at 27th and Michael Savage in 25th place.
****Some of what follows is self-plagarizing from an earlier diary--forgive me my sin.
*****Huffington's promotion of Right is Wrong was relentlessly splayed across every page of The Huffington Post for weeks before its publication, and Huffington auto-flogged the book in her "blogs" and every promotional appearance Huffington made in support of the book was trumpeted on the site with with a level of enthusiasm approaching madness.