I once believed the editors at the Washington Post published dishonest hucksters like Marc Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt as click bait to reel in their 30 pieces of silver. However craven these two right-wing polemicists might be, I reckoned there was still a market for prevarication and perverse logic that a newspaper drained of classified ad revenue might desperately need to monetize.
But I was wrong. The truth is: Washington Post readers are being subjected to the knavery of Thiessen and Hewitt because newspaper leaders capitulated to the incontrovertible truth that readers no longer read and reason. They read and react. And the tragedy of it is, Thiessen and Hewitt speak their language mostly because they were the linguists responsible for creating in the first place.
But to be fair, it’s not only the irrationality of individual readers that’s at work here. Nor is it just the dishonesty of the bloviators they slavishly follow that matters. The Post didn’t raise the white flag because its editors surrendered to the futility of bonding with an audience unmoved by the traditional American values of responsibility, sincerity, truthfulness, accuracy, impartiality, fair play and decency -- virtues, by the way, that can be found inscribed in the “Canons of Journalism,” the century-old professional code of conduct adopted the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1923 as an ethical guide for the people who bring us the news each day.
The open-eyed and open-minded pursuit of truth is the lifeblood of democracy and of all who love her. But the Post’s on-going empowerment of Thiessen and Hewitt is a tacit acknowledgement America’s political culture has mutated. It’s been captured and corrupted by a moral blindness where victory is all that matters -- for whatever ends, by whatever means. And it’s infested our language.
Thiessen and Hewitt are on a mission to raise an army for a preset political agenda, one for which they are unapologetic in the way that all true-believers are -- or hired guns. They will do whatever it takes to win. And they couldn’t care less what people like me think of them or write about them. “Enlightenment” as a calling for writers is for the history books, as is “persuasion.”
Theirs is a corrupt reality that is not shaped by the pursuit of truth. Instead, their reality is one delineated by the propagation of “truths” that have been politicized.
What separates the two is this: When reality is “politicized,” the distinction between true and false, or right and wrong, is ascertained not by evidence and logic, but by the size of the audience, market-share, or mob that’s been attained. Worse still, it’s a strength in numbers accumulated with little, if any, regard for the origins and nature of the audience targeted for assimilation or the price that must be paid to secure an alliance with it.
“As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side.”
It will come as a surprise to no one those words belong to Donald Trump. He spoke them to the rebel army he’d summoned to stand with him on January 6, 2021 moments before his foot soldiers marched to the US Capitol to rectify the injustice of Trump’s defeat for re-election at the hands of the American people.
Trump wasn’t the only one making self-evident truth a numbers game.
“Just a few weeks ago, analysts thought that control of the U.S. Senate was in play this November and that momentum was shifting to the Democrats. Thanks to their brutal campaign of character assassination against now-Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, those chances appear to be slipping away.”
The voice you hear belongs to Marc Thiessen.
So does this: The Democrats’ “despicable smear campaign of uncorroborated sexual misconduct allegations” against Kavanaugh “has united Republicans and poured cold water on Democratic chances of flipping the Senate.”
And Thiessen again: “The treatment of Kavanaugh wasn’t fair, just or right.” And we know this because, prior to the Democrats’ “horrific treatment of Kavanaugh,” the GOP Senate candidate in Tennessee trailed her Democratic opponent by five points. After the hearings, the Republican led by 14.
Despicable, fair, just, horrific – these are words used to make value judgments. They deserve amplifications on moral, ethical, philosophical and theological grounds. The fact Thiessen doesn’t render one is his way of saying might makes right.
Liberals use numbers too. But when liberals cite polls the numbers are used to tell us what our fellow Americans think. When conservatives cite numbers from opinion surveys it’s to tell the American people that what is true is whatever got the most votes.
Over the past 40 years, I’ve written my fair share of opinion columns. So, I am well-acquainted with the genre. But what Thiessen and Hewitt produce is alien to me. Their dishonest polemics are littered with deliberate falsehoods, misleading comparisons, ad hominem personal attacks, illogical post hoc ergo hoc cause-and-effect fallacies and deceptive, out-of-context reasoning.
Consider Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as one example. There are legitimate criticisms of President Biden’s handling of the Ukrainian crisis, as there are of any endeavor. But you won’t find such good-faith arguments in the right-wing media. Thiessen’s mission, like those of his fellow travelers, is to terminate Biden’s record and policy in Ukraine with extreme prejudice – whatever that policy might be, no matter the specifics.
But discrediting Biden on Ukraine is a fool’s errand, on two counts.
First, Biden’s record in Ukraine is a positive one. Whatever mistakes he has made are deemed by most to be honest ones. The same cannot be said for Biden’s predecessor. Trump’s “mistakes” in Ukraine were deliberate, intentional, impeachable, corrupt and, in my book, treasonous.
After putting the word “alliance” back in the Western Alliance, Biden has received good marks for the assistance in material and training US-led NATO has provided to embattled Ukraine. And the President’s done it without putting American “boots on the ground” or American pilots in cockpits to police a no-fly zone over Ukraine’s airspace. Even Fox News sees the wisdom in these policies.
And second, even Trump’s staunchest defenders know it is folly to condemn Biden for logistical flaws in the delivery of aid to Ukraine, when it was the deliberate non-delivery of Ukrainian aid for corrupt purposes that got Trump impeached -- the first time.
With little to legitimately complain about, Thiessen whines that Biden may have delivered far more aid to Ukraine than Trump did, but he didn’t do it fast enough.
“It took two months and thousands of unnecessary civilian deaths,” says Thiessen, before President Biden had “finally gotten over his pathological fear of ‘provoking’ Russia” by providing Ukraine with the weapons it needs.
Thiessen’s entire theory of the case of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine is based on “politicized truth” not the actual conditions on the ground. Instead of being a serious foreign policy crisis that President Biden must meet, Thiessen frames Biden’s response to Russia’s invasion and devastation of Ukraine as a political re-admission exam, one that must be passed if Biden wants a second term.
“This is a critical moment for Ukraine,” says Thiessen. “But it is also a critical moment for Biden. The fate of Ukraine and the fate of his presidency are inextricably linked. It is Biden’s war now. He’d better win it.”
Too bad Thiessen didn’t think a similar link existed between the fates of Ukraine and the Trump presidency that made its own link between US aid and the acts of Ukrainian corruption demanded to secure that aid.
Once the moment arrives when we cross the boundary separating current events from history, those who will chronical our present in the decades to come are almost certain to call out as a leading cause of the rottenness of American politics the degrading – and downgrading -- of intellectual integrity.
That might sound pretentious, pompous, even naïve. But it’s not. Intellectual integrity is the load-bearing support beam that holds up our political culture, or at least the culture I see in my mind’s eye that values and rewards fact-finding, truth-telling, logical-reasoning and the blessings of justice and fair-mindedness. In short, a civic culture where rivals are opposed but also respected and understood.
Academics who reside in ivory towers are not the only ones concerned about the loss of an indoor voice when we meet one another across a divided aisle to do politics. The Founding Fathers worried about this too. They were building a democracy from scratch, and they had precious few prototypes as models to refine. This fact alone made them fear the debasement of political discourse. This was the calamity the framers kept uppermost in their minds when they penned the Bill of Rights and its own version of Robert’s Rules of Order, the First Amendment.
The First Amendment delivered the bad news to Congress that it could not curtail – “Shall make no law abridging” – the freedoms of speech, press, peaceable assembly and the petitioning of government for a redress of grievances.
These cardinal rights are straightforward enough. Far more complicated is the proviso that promises citizens they are free to worship the god of their choice unmolested by the state. That grant of freedom, however, was immediately married to a prohibition against any single faith assuming -- in both its meanings, belief as well as behavior -- that it was one and the same with the state and with that state’s laws.
However complicated in concept, the combination of religious freedom and separation of church and state demonstrates the belief-system that gave life to the Constitution with its Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights is to our civic religion what the Ten Commandments are to the Judeo-Christian religion. They are what secures these two underlying orders, the secular and the spiritual.
Furthermore, the First Amendment is to our civic religion what the First Commandment is to those faith traditions that observe it. They are the foundations upon which all else follows.
“I am the Lord thy God, you shall have no other gods before Me.”
“Democracy dies in darkness.”
Democracy is this nation’s monotheism, the worst political system there is — except for all the others that have ever ever tried. Democracy is the only fit political system for a people who believe it is a self-evident truth that all human beings are created equal. It is the only fit political system for a people who believe everyone is endowed with certain inalienable rights by the mere fact of their existence -- among them the one we keep forgetting about, the pursuit of happiness.
Finally, democracy is the only fit political system for this nation that believes “We the People of the United States” did ordain and establish democracy as the guiding light, imperfect and unfinished though it might be, to form a more perfect union.