A simple question with painful ramifications: Have we made progress here at Daily Kos? I'm not asking whether anything at all has been achieved - because anything that brings people together is bound to have some gestalt - but whether we have evolved to become more effective overall as a cooperative community. And based on the persistence of certain flawed themes and strategic errors in content, I honestly can't say that I know the answer to my own question. At best our progress is elusive, and that yields an even more troubling question: If we can't even advance within a community of people committed to the concept of advancement, how likely are our efforts to succeed nation- and worldwide? I present five of the more frustrating examples of how objectively false memes, right-wing terminology, and conservative attitudes continually crop up here on Front Page and Rec List content.
1. Mainstreaming right-wing extremism.
No matter how far to the right the Republican Party careens, we never seem to get the memo that their insanity in itself will not stop them from remaining electorally viable while the public continues to see them as a legitimate option - regardless of whether in any given election cycle they're deemed an inferior one. Every single time they lurch further rightward, we act like this time they have gone so far overboard that they will never again endanger American civilization, and yet there they are in the very next election cycle, doubling down on the crazy and evil while taking power on both the state and federal level.
In this delusional belief that their insanity will in itself disqualify them from American politics, we incessantly give a platform to the most ludicrous and deranged voices among them, and yet it never seems to produce the results we expect. Instead of seeking out the few remaining statesmen among them and empowering them by engaging with them, we put Crazy on a pedestal as a straw man, and are then dismayed when the straw man is marionetted by the GOP machinery into victory or respectable defeat rather than utter demolition. Yes, the Republican Party is in a radicalism feedback loop all by itself, but we are lending energy to it and contributing to the danger our republic faces.
Here is an idea: Imagine there are three Republican candidates in a primary - a moderate conservative, a religious fundamentalist lunatic, and a Norquisling nutcase who sees paved roads as Maoism. No matter how much fun the last two are, exercise some self-control and just pretend they don't exist; and no matter how boring the first one is, shift your own internal Overton Window to the point where they are the crazy one. Go nuts on the moderate - rant and rave in the blogosphere about how their proposal to cut taxes by a tenth the amount of the others is just wingnuttery incarnate. By the attention you pay, you grant political weight.
Even if this person is barely showing in the primary polls, grant them a platform through your own rhetoric - send the message to Republicans that this candidate really pisses you off, even though in the current political frame they're practically a Care Bear. While that may not get the candidate on the GOP ticket, they will probably show better than otherwise, and you will have achieved something that we've failed to do for a long time: Move the Overton Window back toward sanity. It takes effort to defy entropy, and we haven't been exercising any on this front: We need to pull the GOP back toward American civilization, and the only way to do that is to exercise self-control on our own part. Liberals have a tendency to deprecate the power of our own attention, but make no mistake - being granted a share of our interest gives a candidate energy, no matter how hostile the attitude of the interest.
Now, if we did try this approach, how should we handle it when the GOP does nominate absolute batshit? Don't ignore the fact that they're batshit - they already have a platform as a major party candidate - but don't feed into the destructive potential of that insanity by turning their craziness into a matter of quantitative degree. In other words, don't say they're crazy because they want to cut rich people's taxes too much - say they're crazy because they want to cut rich people's taxes at all. They're crazy because they want to nationalize women's uteruses and force them to give birth, not because they support such-and-such specific legislation. Basically, boil it down to value fundamentals so that the extremity of their specific positions does not become mainstream.
BUT do be highly specific if the GOP nominates a moderate conservative - pay extra special attention to the fact that their proposal to cut rich people's taxes by 0.5% is way, way too much. See what I'm getting at? When paying too much attention to the specifics of a Republican candidate's proposals would serve to mainstream extremist positions, be general and value-oriented. When paying attention to specific proposals would move the Overton Window in our direction by strengthening moderation among conservatives, do so. I know a lot of us would be very bored if we succeeded in reengineering our opponents back to sanity, but come on folks, our country can't take much more of the GOP's downward spiral into psychosis. They won't pull themselves back to sanity, and losing elections by single-digit margins only makes them double down, so as usual we have to do all the work for them.
A previous diary of mine on the subject:
Denial Is Our Worst Enemy
2. Giving a perpetual platform to discredited commentators and "news" sources.
This is a corollary of #1 - the incredible and seemingly compulsive habit of several of the most prominent Daily Kos diarists to fixate on the words of people we know to be pathological liars, morons, and psychopaths and keep paying attention to the propaganda organs that give them a platform. Monitoring enemy propaganda is indeed a necessary activity, but a highly specialized one only useful to people directly involved in strategic planning and information counteroffensives - and to be perfectly honest, the coverage such content receives here rarely rises to that level. More often than not it's simply "outrage porn," and only serves to further spread the memes that are being mocked and condemned.
The only proper response of civil society to being confronted with propaganda is to disengage from it - treat it as what it is, a thing with no information content apart from the underlying strategic objectives that motivated it. Treating propaganda as an argument to be continually debunked point-by-point is the road to irrelevance and exhaustion, and I'm often dismayed by the fact that as a community we never seem to have cultivated an understanding of this basic reality.
The only reason to debunk something is because its source has some level of credibility, but if that source has a consistent record of falsehood and deception, and you've more than proven that about them, the next step is to simply close the file on them and let the strategic people deal with it - the content they produce has no intrinsic information value (i.e., it's propaganda). If the subject comes up again, simply note your conclusion: They're not credible, and not a valid subject for discussion in polite society. Be prepared to back it up if requested, but don't make it your mission in life to be an expert in the gibberish spouted by some particular liar or halfwit. And that includes play-by-play sports commentating when some more amenable pundit goes after the target of your ire, e.g., "So-and-so Shreds Whatsisname in WaPo editorial!" That's a total waste of time.
Even more than with politicians, the amount of attention you pay to commentators and "news" sources is their lifeblood. It doesn't matter if the attention consists of support or opposition - they feed on both equally, provided their content is useful to the corporate owners of their medium. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if there were people paid to post on blogging sites who drum up attention for media content by pandering to whatever the local prevailing sensibilities are, posting outrage-toned diaries here about conservative content they promote supportively on right-wing sites, and vice-versa with more liberal-themed content: Standard operating procedure in media marketing.
The solution in the case of fact-free media is much simpler than with politicians: Total ostracism. Pay only enough attention to remain convinced of your judgment that a given source is corrupt, and otherwise brush them off completely and treat anyone who takes them seriously as disreputable. There's no mystery to resurrecting a culture of accountability in journalism - just hold them accountable yourself. Stop behaving like they're entertainment, and you'll stop rewarding them for tailoring their coverage accordingly.
Previous diaries of mine on the subject:
BREAKING: Media Hack #3725 Says Something or Other
Rush Who?
Devaluding Your Own Values
3. Rationalizing the Iraq War and Bush regime.
I really thought we had moved past the point years ago when we described the premeditated Republican murder spree in Iraq from 2003-2009 as a "mistake" driven by "ineptitude." That frame was a false and cowardly refuge from reality from the very beginning that should never have been tolerated even while the events were unfolding, but to still cling to such a revisionist history view of a war after its conclusion and the departure from power of those responsible is even more difficult to excuse.
Iraq was not like Vietnam - there were no legal or moral ambiguities involved. The "justification" was a total fabrication from beginning to end, the propaganda surrounding the lead-up to it was an utter cascade of Big Lies on the level of Nazi or Soviet propaganda, international law and common human decency plainly prohibited it, and its conduct and aftermath were a bottomless pit of atrocity. It was the worst act of treason in American history since the attack on Fort Sumter, not a policy disagreement that spiraled out of control.
These are simply the facts of what happened, and no matter how much some among us may desperately want to smooth over the past, the years 2001-2009 were not a continuation of American history: They were an interregnum where the Executive branch of the federal government operated as an absolute monarchy and police state on the order of Saudi Arabia, Congress was reduced to a rubber-stamp organ, and dissenters were afraid to speak even in conversation let alone on the public stage. The period began with a coup and ended peacefully only because the Bush regime was so internally corrupt it didn't even have the practical option of refusing to leave.
I don't ever want to see the words "mistake," "inept," "incompetent," "fuckup," "clusterfuck," "error," or other soft-pedal terminology used for this horrific period of time and the crimes it engendered ever again on this site. You are not more credible talking like that - you're simply obeying media etiquette, making a tool of yourself, and contributing to the revision of history. Unless you intend to describe the Nazi invasion of Poland as a mistake and its horrors the result of incompetent management, you don't have the right to rewrite the past for your own peace of mind, let alone because it might compromise your prospects for a career in professional punditry to simply tell the truth. Amnesia on our part always serves right-wing politics.
Previous diaries of mine on the subject:
Amnesia and Worse: False History in Our Midst
Reciprocity Nonexistence Syndrome: Sociopathic GOP Partisanship 2001-2011
4. Adopting right-wing nomenclature out of lazy conformity.
Why in the name of George Orwell would anyone who is not a right-winger refer to those trying force women to give birth as "pro-life," people who support increasing poverty as "pro-growth," and people who want to put millions of small business owners into bankruptcy through predatory corporate behavior as "pro-business"? We may consider ourselves beyond the reach of the loaded assumptions in the right's Orwellian terminology, but that doesn't mean the body politic as a whole isn't powerfully affected by allowing these bastards to frame the debate in their own terms. Just because the reality of what they do is the opposite of the words they use doesn't completely eliminate the influence those words have on people's perceptions.
This isn't rocket science: The vast majority of Forced Birthers are nothing even resembling pro-life; Corrupt politicians and political parties are not pro-growth or pro-business; and while we may be entitled to our rights, calling them "entitlements" only serves the people trying to take them away. We have to stop pretending like we're engaged in dialog with people who don't listen to a word we say and have no respect whatsoever for the truth - their terms are lies meant to confuse and disrupt plain moral judgment, and don't belong in anything we say except as a passing comment on the fact of their mendacity. And while we're at it, stop soft-pedaling lies as "misrepresentations," "disingenuousness," etc. When someone says something they likely know to be false, they're lying, period. Stop setting the bar lower to accommodate people who have no respect for the truth.
Previous diaries of mine on the subject:
Speak for Victory: Terminology for Winners
Don't Allow Yourself to Be Defined by Republican Perverts
5. Rejecting the mantle of authority in order to play rebel forever.
This was one of the biggest disappointments of the Occupy movement, and is unfortunately one of the defining characteristics of the left side of the political spectrum: The unconscious impulse to shrink from accepting the responsibility of behaving authoritatively (even in purely social, unofficial capacities) because so much of our political evolution springs from resistance rather than constructive leadership. We want people to free themselves, not be manipulated by us using social control tactics we despise - but some people are just built to respond better to an attitude of authority than one of respect, and instead of competing for those people we just loathe their moral and intellectual weakness so much that we concede them to the right.
So much of what gets written in the progressive blogosphere is built on an unconscious attitude of the outsider, the rebel - a self-important chivalric fantasy of always remaining high above the grime of actual political accomplishment, but riding to the rescue in spotless armor when evil rules the land. And while that attitude may be helpful under some limited conditions - e.g., when Republicans are in control of everything and have turned America into a nightmare - it's not very helpful toward changing the overall course of the country once progressives do have a shot to make things happen. Some people pick up on that attitude, and those so inclined take it as a message that we're not serious, not responsible, not strong: An irrational perception on their part, and ironic given the childishness and criminality of the right, but there's no reason to even put forward that image in the first place.
It's not hard to distinguish between something written in a socially authoritative tone vs. something written in the tone of a whiny malcontent or a plaintive subordinate, and all other content being equal, the authoritative one will be far more persuasive and carry greater weight as an influence on the political climate. When you criticize right-wing politics, do you sound like someone speaking from a truly higher position, or do you sound like some petulant child complaining about how unfair the rules are? Again, even if your points are valid and well-argued on an objective basis, if the tone in which they're conveyed carries the subtle message that conservative authoritarian values are authoritative, you will be undermining yourself and your positions.
You have to take on yourself the mantle of authority when speaking in politics: That's one of the many things that Barack Obama has taught us - that when you approach liberal politics from the position that our values are already authoritative, it has a much bigger impact than speaking like supplicants and refugees requesting a seat at the table of our own government. Politics does not elevate weak constituencies to power through the gracious charity of the strong, it merely recognizes those constituencies that have already achieved power in an unofficial capacity.
We got the New Deal because American politics in the 1930s was already suffused with labor activism, state and local social programs, and highly active Socialist parties. We got the Civil Rights Act because black people were already asserting their rights. And now we lose these things because the ground truth that originally made them possible has eroded, not because Washington is rotten. Speak and act authoritatively on politics, and the results will be a lot more worthwhile than just complaining and hoping somebody cares what you feel.
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In conclusion, we've learned many things here over the years, but the value of that education is questionable if the knowledge and wisdom never seem to have any major impact on the shape and content of what we produce here. What are we doing that is fundamentally different and more evolved from where we were in 2010? There has to be some forward motion, or else we're just doing the same things and expecting the results to improve on their own. I don't think it's too much to ask that we stop undermining what we say with how we say it, and make some effort to show forethought and common sense.