Subtitled: Do Democrats Help to Accomodate This?
We'll take a look at two articles. The first is an older article by EJ Dionne, about whom, on a separate matter regarding media bias, I wrote Thursdy. The second is by a Washington Post reporter, published yesterday.
My email to EJ Dionne laid out the case as to how he played right into right wing framing. Dionne never responded.
Dear Mr. Dionne:
Your June 22 article, "'The Left' Moves Front and Center," begins with some very damaging, and greatly overstated, stereotypes.
Therein, you suggested that the left; "no longer wants to abolish capitalism, nationalize industry, or destroy the rich (emphasis all added)."
While this it at best an historically debatable statement (once again, doing what the right typically does today when it takes a few vocal proponents who do not accurately represent the whole, as nevertheless indicative of it), it is also a very damaging, and even presently misleading, statement. By insinuating that the left once did want to do these absurd -- and to most (even somewhat historically), extremely radical -- things, you give credibility to decades of damaging republican mischaracterizations of all Democrats and Liberals, today.
What I believe is most often overlooked or misconstrued, is the fact that proclaiming that the left "no longer," wants to do these things does not change this fundamental fact. Aside from being defensive sounding, the statement still implicitly gives credibility to lesser versions of this same suggestion by the right even now; i.e., that Democrats are somehow anti capitalistic or against the rich
Also -- by taking the effort to say the left does not want to do these more extreme things, or is not "any longer" this extreme (again, an enormous and very misleading generalization to begin with in its own right) -- it gives even more credibility to the widespread and similarly damaging mischaracterization that democrats are somehow not pro business.
Again, it is my hunch that it is these latter points that are most easily overlooked, or simply disagreed with because things may tend to be looked at through a "democratic base" or "intellectual" lens rather than the "Middle America and impact of right wing rhetoric and why, in a glut of parroted misinformation and sound bite information age" lens. Thus, again, as I suggested, in part answering your opening question in this very same column as to why the left can't seem to get much respect; because it often helps to inadvertently support right wing mischaracterizations.
Another example, again in this same article, is your claim that the country is now left of center because a majority of people are against the war; thus dictating that being against a war is left of center per se.
But being against a war is not "left," per se. And it is a lazy generalization to assert or imply that it is. It can also be very misleading. Such a suggestion, similar to your characterization of past liberals above, additionally, also plays right into the hands of years of republican framing. (It is also what people like Sean Hannity want to believe. Some time ago, Greta Van Susteren asked Hannity a great question: "What actually [defines] a liberal, Sean?" Hannity was (for once) contemplative. Finally he stated, "[I guess] a liberal is someone who is against the war in Iraq," despite the fact that there were many staunch Republicans, Independents, and not to mention non Liberal Democrats, against the action at the outset.)
Consider an old quote by hero General Norman Swarzkopf, who also believed that the action in March of 2003 was very ill advised: "Any soldier should be anti-war." ("And yet there are things still worth fighting for," is the remainder of the quote.) Do you believe Swarzkopf is incorrect here? Is he saying that every soldier should be a liberal? If not, if every soldier should be anti-war, can it be possible that there could be wars that one should correctly be against, or is it your suggestion that only liberals can somehow be correct?
Proponents of Iraq who tend to believe that opposition to Iraq is liberal per se, confuse the notion of combating terrorism with the best methodology for doing so. And this is exactly what your piece does as well, and again, plays right into this republican framing.
In fact, not clarifying this broader point was one of the Democratic Party's greatest weaknesses in 2004. For example, allowing Kerry to be portrayed as weak because he occasionally used terms like "police action" (as had both the President and Vice President) without similarly clarifying and constantly emphasizing that the words used convey the most intelligent and practical methodology, not the correct intensity, focus, or breadth of effort, and... that... to... tell the voters otherwise is to either once again not understand the issue, or once again purposefully mislead.
Republicans, usually right wing conservatives, constantly played into this, and won a presidential election that they should not have because of it. Again, inadvertently, you are playing right into it here as well. The fact that you may believe that it is "obvious" that liberals are correct, and that it clearly now is a question of methodology, only underscores this further. You undermine this point, and your own point (at the conclusion of your piece, smugly proclaiming that "Liberals" were right) by simply labeling disagreement with our current strategic actions -- consistent with republican characterizations -- as evidence of being "left," instead. That is, you are trying to give unhelpful credit to the "left;" "look, the left was right," which in this manner is only going to have appeal to someone who agrees in the first place, by incorrectly framing and stereotyping the issue in a manner which helps the right's hard fought mischaracterizations and caricatures.
The following is an email sent earlier today to Washinton Post reporter Robert Barnes, with respect to his front page article on the landmark Boumediene case decided yesterday. Barnes' article is not necessarily lopsided, and that is part of the point. That is, the way that we have come to frame things as normal, the various inputs into that framing, and how the media simply goes along with it.
Dear Mr. Barnes:
When you write, in your June 13 front page piece, "Justices Say Detainees Can Seek Release," that Kennedy "joined the Court's Liberal Justices," by whose standards are you making this determination? Those of "Fox" news and the rest of the right to far right wing cadre that over the past decade has come to define almost anything it does not agree with as "liberal" -- a characterization that the media, all too eager to reduce its appearance of "bias," to this same overly influential group, has readily gone along with?
Writing yesterday in Salon, Glenn Greenwald noted:
This skepticism of Government power -- which lies not only at the heart of most key British reforms over the last 8 centuries but also at the heart of the American Founding -- is precisely what has been missing almost completely from the American Right, for which there is now no federal government power too great or too unlimited to embrace. The American right-wing faction which now dominates the Republican Party is defined largely by their insatiable lust for limitless government power in virtually every realm -- spying, detentions, interrogations, and war-making. [The conservative Cato Institute backs up this idea, by the way, at least with respect to the Bush administration, which the predominant Right, and John McCain's campaign, supports.]
Hence, while British conservatives largely oppose a policy merely to allow the Government to detain terrorist suspects for 42 days with no charges, our "conservatives" react with fury over the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of the President's claimed authority to hold such suspects in Guantanamo for 6 years -- really indefinitely -- without providing them any meaningful process at all. In fact, the Bush administration asserted the right to detain even U.S. citizens, arrested on U.S. soil, indefinitely, with no charges or any contact with the outside world, for years, and they proceeded to do so, [Padilla] with virtually no opposition of any kind from our self-proclaimed right-wing defenders of individual liberty or limited government.
But nevertheless, our Right and Far Right, overly influential in defining the debate in America for the past decade (for a number of reasons, not relevant here save as noted below [and as illustrated in the letter to Liberal commentator Dionne above]), labels anyone who does not agree with them as "liberal."
Thus Souter, and Breyer, have become "Liberal," and Kennedy, a solid conservative, a "swing vote," and the Court's "center." And the media accommodates this. (As well as, again, more subjectively, merely labeling Scalia, Thomas, and Alito as "conservatives.") The Far Right (Bill O' Reilly is a classic example, calling NBC leftist, and pretty much everything else the "Far Left") preempts this by engaging in classic projection on this issue itself. While the actual Left, which does not seem to get the importance of actually illustrating and showing a case, or illuminating what is going on, seemingly believing that things are self evident despite massive evidence all around to the contrary -- seems to largely ignore the issue. [With respect to the Justices themselves, Dionne has actually made the case for the Right, and been completely wrong on the underlying issue, at the very same time.]
But that does not change the underlying reality. Which is, as Greenwald's point above illustrates, that the Right in this country has become extremely authoritarian, in a country founded upon principles that are exactly the opposite. And yet anyone who disagrees (and thus agrees with our founding fathers), is now, "Liberal."
Ironically, it was true conservative Bruce Fein, who stated, "the most conservative principle of the Founding Fathers was distrust of unchecked power." That idea seems to be lost upon us, today. And calling the four other members of the Supreme Court, who sided with conservative Kennedy, and did not side with those whom by legal standards hold rather extreme views (Alito, Scalia, Thomas) and a still evolving question mark (Roberts) the "liberals," plays right into this.
But then again, it could be argued, the media has become not so much a check upon power, as it was envisioned to be as the Fourth Estate (and expressed as such as recently as 2004 by then Washington Post Managing Editor Steve Coll), but in large measure, a stenographer, for it.
--Ivan Carter