Speechless: Why Citizens United and Its Critics Are Both Wrong

[Author's Note: I wrote this essay a while ago, and I had hoped to actually publish it somewhere so that it could reach a wider audience, because I think this angle on the question of corporate personhood is important. But I now believe I'm unlikely to find a market for it, because it's too lengthy and rigidly philosophical to have a place in any popular magazine, but too brief, playful and topical to have a place in a philosophical journal, which I have no access to anyway. So I'm just putting it out as a blog post, instead, and hoping for the best. Fair warning: at five thousand words, it's longer (and perhaps drier) than blogs are supposed to be.]

Religion and Liberalism

Jacques Berlinerblau, writing recently for the Washington Post, provided a list of topics worth watching by those interested in the interplay of religion and politics. While it is an insightful list and the author’s knowledge of religious trends can’t be disputed, his first item seems to rely on a misunderstanding of activism coming from the political left. Berlinerblau anticipates what I believe is a very unlikely scenario – the union of Occupy movements with progressive people of faith. He writes:

“Ever since the rise of the religious right… observers have been wondering when (or if) the religious left would ever re-mobilize as a political force to be reckoned with.”

That parenthetical is important. I think that the question is indeed if it will, and that the answer is no. Religious institutions and religious people will not find a welcome place in liberalism, at least not without a major breaking point. It’s not as though there is any fundamental incompatibility between liberalism and religious belief, but virulently anti-religious atheists do comprise an extremely vocal minority of the liberal wing of American politics. Their input makes the landscape of liberalism very inhospitable to religion.

As a person who tends toward liberal thinking but also holds a degree in religious studies, I find this to be one of the more unfortunate elements of the modern liberal movement. I’ve heard liberal commentators flatly state that there’s no God, as if they had personally taken a complete tour of the cosmos and found it empty of a spiritual realm. Self-aggrandizing atheists tend to hold themselves up as being exceptionally resistant to the self-delusion of religionists, while failing to acknowledge that such a cock-sure rejection of so much as the remote possibility of the existence of a god is dogmatic in equal measure as religious belief.

And such brusquely dismissive attitudes also strike me as markedly illiberal, especially in light of the often annoying tendency of liberal movements to show no discretion in what voices it invites to contribute to its aggregate monologue. Berlinerblau for some reason entertains the possibility that the heirs to the Occupy Wall Street movement might allow “the progressive faith communities that eventually joined its ranks [to] come to play a pivotal role in [their] leadership or activism.” But why would a group that is actively shunned by a portion of the liberal movement come to have a managerial influence when no other has ever done so? Religious institutions are the last things I would expect to give direction to the movement, and I don’t expect anything whatsoever to do that.

Yet Berlinerblau continues his remarks by saying : “Were they to do so, fairly obvious synergies would develop around issues such as poverty, corporate greed, the environment, and health care, to name but a few.”

I have no doubt that that would happen, in theory. But synergies, no matter how obvious, are quite alien to liberal activist movements. They are characterized instead by a series of disjoint voices jostling together, generally being permitted their own agendas. Religion alone would tend to face a unique uphill battle as an exception to that trend, so if it aspires to a pivotal role, it will have enough difficulty contributing its own voice, let alone attempting to synthesize with those of other groups.

October Horror Post #2

I've let almost two weeks lapse since making the first in what was supposed to be a series of posts throughout the month related to the topic of horror. I really need to start getting into the Halloween spirit now.

I am continuing my way through 2008’s Fear Itself television series, and most recently watched the episode “Skin and Bones,” which is by far the best of those that I have now watched. It’s strength rested largely on the makeup effects, as applied to creating an antagonist that was frightful in initially subtle ways. The story is a familiar one, and apparently an increasingly popular one. It is essentially the same as the charmingly bizarre 1999 film, Ravenous, though “Skin and Bones” is executed in a quite different way.

I believe that a part of the latter’s appeal may be attributable to the earnestness of its director, Larry Fessenden. Each episode of Fear Itself has a special feature consisting of interviews with that episode’s director and actors. While several directors thus far have had something interesting to say about horror, its role, and its appeal, Fessenden’s initial commentary is far and away the most striking to me. He says:

“I love horror because it really is just part of my psyche. I think it’s the way my brain in wired. When I walk down the street and I see a fence post, I imagine someone impaled on it. I see life through this filter of real despair and have always had an awareness of death and of the fragility of life. I really think horror is a psychological genre, and people who are drawn to it, I think, have some sort of existential experience with life.”

That notion of imagining horror in mundane contexts is powerfully familiar to me, but I had never really connected it to an affinity for horror as a genre of film or literature. I have, however, considered how it may relate to my strong sense of empathy, my philosophical and spiritual tendencies towards stoicism and asceticism, and my experiential curiosity.

The wiring of my brain may be a bit different from that of Fessenden’s. I don’t have a particularly common tendency to imagine horrible outcomes from a third-person perspective. Rather, there are situations in which I cannot suppress thoughts about the terrible things that could happen to me, and what that would be like. It’s usually associated with the perils of the modern world, though the sight of wild animals may prompt me to imagine, and almost fantasize about being mauled or maimed by them. If I see a hydraulic lift, I immediately and vividly imagine having an arm trapped in it as it lowers. Many such things primarily impress me with the damage they can do, and their practical use is only an afterthought.

Often, my psychological focus almost rises to the level of impulse. I visited my former employer recently, and he showed me a bowl cutter that he had recently gotten running. It is an extremely old item and has no safety catch, so the blades can be turned when the lid is raised and they are completely exposed. He gleefully demonstrated its operation, and I stared at the whirring blades and felt as though I was willfully denying the impulse to reach out towards them. I actually have a certain sense of fear when I use dangerous hardware, because I worry that I might injure myself intentionally should my conscious mind forget to safeguard me against my id, or whatever it is that acts against the basic instinct for self-preservation.

I’m not sure why my mind works this way. I know I am not alone in it, given Fessenden’s comments and given the fact that my ex-girlfriend, for one, attested to the same tendencies. But I’m equally certain that it is not common enough to be called ordinary. But maybe those who do have such vividly dark imaginations have other things in common as well. Maybe an appreciation of the artistic depiction of such unsavory fantasies is one of them.

Something that actually frustrates me about modern horror fandom is that audiences seem to have a distinct lack of empathy. So much of the most popular horror is better identified as “torture porn,” and the people who love it seem to be indulging in pure, base voyeurism. I worry that a lot of theater-goers are more prone to put themselves in the position of the perpetrator or horror, rather than the victim. I may be misjudging them, though. It may be that they still find the things on screen to be genuinely disturbing, but that that registers and is expressed differently.

Ultimately, I can only speak for myself, and what I’d say to defend my interest in material that is shocking or just psychologically or thematically dark is that I want to be disturbed by what I’m seeing. I want to vicariously put myself in the place of someone who is fleeing for his life, suffering torments, going insane, and so on. The fact is that horrible things really do happen every day. And I hate the feeling of being insulated from them, of being trapped in my personal fantasy world of relative comfort and pleasure.

When the real world as I experience it is such a fantasy, I compensate by seeking out the fantasies that stretch to the opposite extreme and depict extraordinary fear and hardship. In one case that may be watching a scary movie, and in another it may be simply imagining what it would be like if my hand got caught in the meat grinder. And in other cases, it might be having a long conversation with a person suffering from multiple personality disorder, or pausing to give a little money to a homeless person, or volunteering, or fasting. There is real horror in the world, and I believe that by keeping myself distant from it, I would be keeping myself distant from a vast segment of reality, as well as from an awareness of the suffering that maybe, someday I will be able to alleviate.

That last consideration raises what could be an interesting question: I wonder if anybody has every analyzed the political leanings of movie-going audiences. It seems like there could be some basis for believing that people who are more interested in observing horror, or reading about it, might also be more inclined to be politically liberal. A basic difference between liberalism and conservatism, as I see it, is that liberalism focuses on the improvements that are still needed in the world, while conservatism sees only the improvements that are already behind us, and disregards the possibility of negative consequences or ongoing mistakes. Put more simply, liberalism is acutely aware of the horror in the world, and conservatism denies it. It would make sense if people who have a psychological impulse to observe or imagine personal horrors also have a social interest in collective horrors.

Although, that would make more sense if it weren’t for the fact that so much of the horror that I consider to be the best has such decidedly conservative themes. And I think that may make a good topic for my next post on the general subject of horror.

Child-Haters Versus Women-Haters

I spent entirely too much time yesterday afternoon following and participating in a debate about abortion, infanticide, and Canadian law at the Ethics Alarms blog. Though I might better have spent that time doing something more significant to my survival, it was a highly stimulating bit of discussion. I took on the task of trying to convince the blog’s author, Jack Marshall, that in the case of a 19 year-old Canadian girl who gave birth to her child in secret and then strangled it, the judge probably didn’t let her off with a three year suspended sentence because she simply considers infants to be a lower form of life.

Beyond the intellectual challenge of trying to dismantle the flawed logic and straw men involved in Marshall’s slander of Judge Joanne Veit, I found the dialogue to be worthwhile because it truly helped me to see the disparate sides of the abortion debate with greater clarity. I have often found that there is a certain middle ground in that debate, which is almost never explored. Broadly speaking, I am a pro-choice individual. But there appears to be a segment of the pro-choice crowd which believes that abortions are okay, full stop. That is not my perspective at all. Rather, I feel that abortions are sometimes the least of several evils. That is a perspective that anti-abortion individuals don’t seem to understand, and it is apparently one that is not widely represented. That makes it easy for people like Jack Marshall to characterize abortion-defenders as baby-killers who attach no value to the lives of innocents.

What I learned from today’s debate is that Marshall really, honestly believes in that characterization. He is truly of the opinion that Canadian society in general, and increasingly America as well, judges fetuses and infants as being less important than the mere convenience and whim of adult women. And it’s actually kind of comforting to know that. You see, I was afraid that the subject of abortion was peopled with activists who maintain wholly inconsistent worldviews. And while that still may be true to a certain extent, the fervor and ill-will surrounding so much of the discussion is probably derived from a tendency of virtually every party involved to mischaracterize one another’s views.

What I also learned about Marshall is that he genuinely believes he is defending the unborn against the onslaught of a society that is succumbing to the sort of utter degradation that leads it to consider newborns to be disposable, valueless, and devoid of rights. He allows for no nuance in the views of his opponents. That deepens my confidence that he is wrong, but it also aids in my understanding of why he’s wrong. It’s not, as some might suppose, that he simply thinks his moral outrage trumps a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. Rather, he thinks he is defending children against women and social trends who have no moral compass whatsoever and are content to enter into abortion lightly, without reflection. I know that there are some women of whom that is true, but it is far from the norm, and what I recognize is that it is wrong to assume the authority to pronounce on what is right or wrong without having any awareness of the context surrounding specific decisions.

Ascribing highly extreme points of view to one’s political opponents makes one appear more extreme by contrast. I presume that this is happening on both sides of the debate. Pro-lifers think of pro-choice people as advocating abortion wherever there is the slightest motive for it, and that makes resistance to abortion not a personal point of view, but a moral imperative. It’s probably easy for anti-abortion activists to convince themselves that they’re fighting a group of people who, if not for the resistance, would go door to door performing abortions, even on women who aren’t sure they want them. Their own positions are probably ramped up in response. After all, if your opponent’s position has no nuance, why would yours? Meanwhile, pro-choice people think of their opponents as tyrants jockeying for control over all women’s reproductive systems. If that’s their goal, then evidently it’s not enough to defend abortion; activists believe they have to insist upon it.

I’m tired of seeing this debate framed as a contest between people who hate children and people who hate women. It’s portrayed that way because each side insists on the most evocative, rhetorical descriptions of the other. Not content to portray rivals as rivals, we feel the need to portray them as villains. We need more nuance in our understanding of the political motivations of others, but in order to achieve it, we first need more nuance in our approach to debate and political engagement. As it is, we only go on sustaining the possibly illusory perception that the two camps in any contest have wildly inconsistent views, that the definitions of “good” and “evil” are reversed on the other side.

Call me naïve, but despite all the partisanship and political rancor I’ve witnessed in my young life, I think we generally share a basic concept of right and wrong. Where we differ is in the application of it. It’s a matter of degree. By and large, conservatives don’t hate women any more than liberals hate children. We just put greater emphasis on one or the other depending upon our perception of the challenges at hand, the tendencies of the dominant society, the social position of our opponents’ views. Conservatives are categorically wrong when they paint abortion as an instance of the devaluing of nascent life, but liberals are similarly in error if they do not acknowledge the sincere good intentions of their reasonable conservative opponents.

We must take care to point out that sympathy for the emotional strain and desperation of mothers who lack support does not come at the expense of an overall respect for life. There’s room for defense of both children and child-bearers. The existing dialogue doesn’t give much hope for this, but when it comes right down to it, isn’t that what we all want? Despite how differently we rank our priorities, don’t most of us ultimately want to do right by every kind of person? We must. That's simply got to be the way it is.

The Obama Jobs Plan: Last Stop for Compromise

I must say that I was intrigued by the strategy behind the jobs plan that the President unveiled in his speech last night. I can’t exactly say that I was inspired or impressed, though. I don’t think it’s the strategy that I’d have liked to see, but it is a strategy, and a proactive one, and that’s saying something. I listened to the speech on NPR, and the broadcasters who covered it seemed to have a fair sense of what was coming before the President took the podium. There was some alternative speculation about how the bill would be structured, but the dominant theory seemed to be that it would consist entirely of initiatives that had been supported by both Democrats and Republicans in the past. That turned out to be exactly the case, the strategy being to present something that could not possibly meet with partisan opposition unless the Republican Party was prepared to explain why it had changed its view on a series of positions it had formerly supported.

It’s a clever approach, and it may succeed in its goal, but there are two serious questions in my mind: is that goal ambitious enough, and what if it doesn’t succeed? I admire the effort and sacrifice that must have gone into identifying and advancing all of the points of demonstrated overlap between Republican and Democratic policies on jobs and the economy. But as far as I’m concerned, the main reason why there is so little progress in American politics today is that the Republican Party has an uncompromising political will while the Democrats have an obsession with compromise at the expense of any will whatsoever.

I value compromise myself. I’m not so naïve and egotistical that I think I think government policy and the future of America can be built according to my own narrow vision. I am a firm believer in incremental change, and I know that the very process of positive change sometimes requires a great deal of patience and a lot of frustration. Yet, in a situation where the most regressive elements of public policy provide an unmovable defense against even the most modest applications of liberal ideas, I don’t want more compromise. I want a stronger offense. I want a reason to believe that liberal ideas aren’t dying because all political resources are being directed to efforts at obtaining cooperation with people who see any Congressional action whatsoever as an unacceptable political defeat.

It seems to me that that is what the president and much of the Democratic Party have been doing. I fear that they are losing sight of the dividing line between compromise and capitulation. In fact, I think both parties lost sight of that line a long time ago. The clearest ideological difference between the two is that Republicans believe that giving up anything is capitulation, while Democrats think that giving up everything is compromise.

And what if the Republican Congress doesn’t pass a plan consisting entirely of initiatives formerly supported by both parties? What will be the new strategy, the next step towards gaining their cooperation? Introducing a jobs bill comprised entirely of initiatives supported only by Republicans? The current strategy absolutely has to be successful. But if it is, I hope that Democrats understand that there is nowhere left to go in the interest of establishing a common vision. They have already gone well past the center of the aisle, and it would make no sense to reach any farther without simply joining the Republican Party. Instead of that, if this strategy of asking the wall to move fails yet again, perhaps it will finally come time for the Democratic Party to regroup and begin assembling the machinery to tear through that wall. Perhaps then they will at least try to stand up for underrepresented liberal ideals. That may bear with it the risk of making little progress, but the Republican strategy has already guaranteed that, and no one seems to worry about the political consequences of that. If it’s impossible for anyone to take the right action, I’d at least like the right ideas to be in the public record.

"Stop Helping, Son"

I was having a meal this afternoon at a diner (okay, it was a Denny’s – I live in Buffalo, NY and travel solely by bicycle), when a couple of people at a nearby table caught my attention. A middle-aged woman and someone I assume was her son of about fifteen years old had finished their meal and we’re about to get up to leave. The young man had his back to me, while I could see the woman in profile. The kid’s hands moved on the table in front of him as he wiped crumbs from the surface or stacked the plates, or something along those lines. I know this from his mother’s reaction, which was to reach across the table, snatch something from the young man’s hands and command him to stop cleaning up after himself. From what I could see, she appeared to actually be taking things that he had gathered together neatly and scattering them back into their prior positions.

“It’s called waitressing, or busing,” I heard her hiss with genuine derision. “They get paid to do that.”

The young man protested delicately: “I’m just cleaning up my own mess.”

The mother began to get up from the table, aggressively pitching a used napkin into its center and gesturing for her son to follow her out. “Don’t do their jobs for them,” she insisted, repeating that “people get paid for that.”

So focused was she on willfully leaving a mess behind that she didn’t ever seem to notice me, off at her side, glaring at her openly, with fury in my eyes. Her son got up as she began moving past him, still being scolded and thus compelled to defend himself against what I think was the single most irrational verbal attack I have ever heard a parent levy against her child. “I like to clean up after myself,” he reiterated.

Here was this adolescent child taking it upon himself to demonstrate a bit of personal responsibility, and his parent was actively chastising him for it, endeavoring to instruct him that it’s wrong to make something easy for another person if they’re getting paid for it and you’re not. Never mind that in this case they’re presumably getting paid less than minimum wage and relying on tips that, given the neighborhood, the establishment, and the arrogant disregard on display among certain customers, probably just aren’t there. And never mind that all that you need to do to improve their shift working at such a shitty job is run a napkin over a table and move a few pieces of dinnerware six inches or so. They’re getting paid to do that shit that takes absolutely no effort on the part of the customer, but quite a bit when you’ve been doing it every ten minutes for ten fucking hours.

I have encountered this sort of attitude many times throughout my life, in numerous circumstances. I still vividly recall arguing with a good friend in high school who routinely tossed his trash onto the floors of the hallways after school, insisting that it was okay because there were janitors that got paid to clean it up for him. As a matter of fact, he argued that he was providing them with job security by being lazy and filthy. He was a smart kid otherwise, so I give him the benefit of the doubt by figuring that that was probably just an ironic way of justifying his own self-centeredness. Then again, he also self-identified as a Marxist, which added a whole further level of necessarily unintentional irony. Being the principal’s son, the kid was from a decidedly upper-middle class background, and his adolescence created in him an identity that thoroughly grasped the theoretical concepts of equality and social justice, but failed at the task of connecting that to the very simple idea of people actively helping one another.

To this day, there is a special loathing in my heart reserved for these kinds of people – people who applaud themselves when it comes to the vague pursuit of social and political causes, and can speak loudly about them, and build their self-perception around them, but are perfectly willing to leave all the work to others when it suits them, or blame the victim when confronted with individual instances of disenfranchisement and inequality, or drive past a person who’s being attacked on the street.

Of course, in the case of the woman at Denny’s, I have no idea what her social views are. She might just plain not like poor people. She may just think that whatever pittance they’re making to clean up her shit, it’s too much, so fuck them and make sure their job is as hard as it can be. She may be that lovely kind of conservative who thinks that “personal responsibility” is just a phrase that’s used to criticize people at the bottom of society. In that case, here’s hoping that her son’s act of teenage rebellion in embracing liberalism and actually behaving with personal responsibility is not just a phase.

Not Always Black, but Always White

The front page of the Sunday edition of the Buffalo News prominently read “Minorities – the New Majority.” Now make no mistake, I don’t make a habit of reading that terrible little newspaper; I just happened across it on this occasion. I don’t read it precisely because it doesn’t take much more than one of their headlines to launch me into a diatribe about their thoughtless reporting, bias, or simple bad journalism. Speaking of which…

It’s not at all unusual for the Buffalo News to run a headline like the above, apparently without anyone on staff raising an objection about the obvious contradiction they’d placed top-center on the first page. But what’s altogether more frustrating than that is that exactly that same oxymoronic reference to “minorities” seems commonplace in the media in general, and in much of public discourse.

How powerfully consumed with our culture biases do we have to be that we never pause and think, “Wait, if they constitute a majority of the population, why are we calling them by a term that means exactly the opposite?”? It seems to me that that’s a natural question, but I’d emphasize that even if more people had the common sense to ask it, they still wouldn’t be asking the right question. A better question would be something along the lines of, “Wait a minute: why are we only calling non-white people minorities, if white people are now in the minority?”

If you think about it for a second, you realize that identifying minorities as a collective majority requires separating all of society into exactly two distinct groups: white people, and everybody else. The fact that the hasty editors of news outlets like the Buffalo News don’t bat an eye at such a move goes to show that much of media, and much of the public dialogue throughout white America identifies the default human being as white, and sets everything else in contrast to that.

There is no statistically valid reason for deciding that blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans constitute one group, termed “minorities,” while Caucasians make up a second group, which is not labeled as being in the minority even if its share of the population is substantially under fifty percent. The only reason there is for such a move is an ingrained cultural bias. It’s the sort of well-intentioned, socially liberal racism and shortsightedness that leads people who are reflective, but not self-reflective, to champion causes of social justice and equality, without ever addressing the most crucial racial and cultural problem of all – the social tendency to actually look at one kind of people differently than one looks at absolutely everybody else.

Common Thoughts

I don’t think people give enough respect to the thin, weak boundaries of their ideological convictions. I actually take notice of, and am alarmed by, the ideas that I entertain, which have the potential to push me in either of two directions – towards a more extreme, less rational extension of the political views I already hold, or towards an eventual reversal of my closely held beliefs. If we don’t live our lives in a self-imposed vacuum, our ideas certainly are capable of dramatic, almost inconceivable change. Just look at Arianna Huffington for a prime example. It just happens that most of us don’t notice the turnaround until it’s already happened. As romantic as the notion of epiphany is, it’s not the way things usually go. Most of the things we come to believe are grounded in a gradual accumulation of evidence and, hopefully, logical analysis.

I remember being twenty years old, working in a gas station over my summer break from college, and finding myself deep in thought while stocking the walk-in cooler one night, actually praying to God to not let me become an anarchist. My own political engagement, my own earnest considerations of where I stood seemed to be pushing me that way, even though I knew that anarchism, however well-intentioned, is stupid. My genuine concern was therefore grounded in the threat that if I didn’t go on reminding myself of the glaring flaws of that view, of its neglect for the numerous salutary effects of living in a civilized society, the appeal that stood beside that foolishness could overtake my mind.

On quite the other hand, I’ve worried about the potential for getting conservative as I get old ever since I heard the famous, now clichéd, Winston Churchill quote about a young man who isn’t liberal having no heart and an old man who isn’t conservative having no head. But the threat of late-onset conservativism really took on a dimension of terror after I read Rabbit Redux, and saw that John Updike’s character, in whom I had seen so much of myself, for good or ill, had become belligerently conservative as he emerged from his twenties.

The effect of fiction is bad enough, but would not resonate at length if I did not observe warning signs portending wrong thinking in my own mind, as well. Sometimes I’ll entertain what I think is a typically conservative thought, and then I’ll consider that really what is in my mind is not an ideological statement, it’s an observation. But it’s the sort of observation that it is easy to imagine dominates the senses of a right-wing person. It is the groundwork of an objectionable ideology, but the presence of that actual ideology depends on building an interpretation onto that foundation of observation.

Rational assessment of observable facts and arguable solutions is the thing that has held extremist liberal mindsets at bay, and if I retain an active mind, that will be what keeps me from conservativism, as well. Thinking about this has led me to a very interesting thought: Liberals and conservatives may very often have the very same idea about a particular subject. The thing that differentiates the two is the way each interprets his own observational thought, or even his own emotion. From my liberal standpoint, I would venture to guess that it’s often a matter of degree, with the liberal giving a greater amount of consideration to the topic, as opposed to, say, stopping short with an easy answer.

It worries me when I find myself thinking, “I can’t stand seeing all these recent immigrants in all these same positions of employment.” The thought passes through me as if it was not my own, and then my mind reels, and the first thought to follow upon it is, “holy shit, I’m betraying everything that I respect in myself.” And then I have to wonder why that is, when it seemed to me for a moment that I was just observing an obviously true state of affairs. Then I realize that I had imposed emotional content onto that observation, and that it reflected badly on me. But in the next second, I start to relax as I reassure myself that I hadn’t directed my despisal at the working class immigrants themselves, but at the circumstances surrounding them and me in kind. My comment hadn’t dislodged any of the beliefs that I hold and consider laudable – such as that everyone, regardless of race or national origin, deserves an opportunity to work.

But the fact remains that I think it’s terrible that I sometimes see white-owned, corporate chain establishments staffed entirely by very recent Indian immigrants. I don’t like that virtually all of my produce is picked and packaged by Mexican migrant workers. I know that conservatives object to these things, too. But they take the easy route of blaming the individuals who had the audacity to try to better their lives. They acknowledge what’s happening, and they acknowledge their own frustrations that things are bad, and that perhaps they themselves are out of work, but they stop there, and don’t give a deeper consideration of what’s wrong.

Every time I buy a cup of coffee from an Asian immigrant laboring for a Western company, I think about the fact that there had no doubt been dozens of applicants for that persons job from white, native Buffalonians, and that the job went to the immigrant. In several places, the job went to the immigrant in every god damn case. And it’s not because they’re coming here to take our jobs. It’s not because they’re invading us in droves and robbing the white man of what should be his. It’s because of the white men who set the hiring policy at these places, knowing that they can comfortably pay a substantially lower wage to a recent immigrant. I look at these things and I experience what I think must be a conservative’s anger. But thank God that I have a liberal’s mind, because I have no right to be angry at another person who is as lowly as I. My anger is for the system that disregards one group in order to thoroughly exploit another.

I don’t think we partisans recognize often enough that we’re living in the same world. We’re facing the same problems. And if my experiences are not anomalous, we are even having some of the same thoughts. We just need to do a better job of understanding what we’re all thinking, what we’re all feeling. And if we focus on that common ground, those of us who have thought through the facts, observations, and theoretical solutions can better explain that the issue is deeper than you realize – deeper than the conservative notion at which it’s easier to arrive.

Bias in Favor of Bias

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship have an article at Salon today, in which they claim that when conservatives deride NPR as liberal, they mean something much different from the idea that NPR is equal and opposite to Fox News and conservative talk radio.

They mean it's not accountable to their worldview as conservatives and partisans. They mean it reflects too great a regard for evidence and is too open to reporting different points of views of the same event or idea or issue. Reporting that by its very fact-driven nature often fails to confirm their ideological underpinnings, their way of seeing things (which is why some liberals and Democrats also become irate with NPR).

My own opinion is that NPR is the most reliable source of good reporting left to the American public. And it's certainly far from perfect, but evidently not as far from it as most media consumers want it to be. I deeply appreciate that Moyers and Winship parenthetically note that liberal partisans as well as conservatives are given to criticism of the outlet when it doesn't serve their ends. I encounter entirely too many liberals who take their stand on each piece of news not because they arrived at the liberal view based on an internal coherence of their ideals, but because tribalism picks their side for them.

The best of us are concerned with truth over and above all else, and it is my firm belief that the truth upholds a more characteristically liberal viewpoint. But the best liberals will reevaluate their own views when that is not the case.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of contributors to the public discourse, representing all social and ideological camps, do not hold themselves to that standard. They look for the news that supports their presumptions, and surround themselves with the people who cheer lead the same, not the people who provide them with the most information.

At its best, NPR is of the latter class, but it is disregarded by most conservatives and by some liberals as not upholding their ideas about how the news should be filtered, focused, and distorted.

Moyers and Winship say further:

If "liberal" were the counterpoint to "conservative," NPR would be the mirror of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and James O’Keefe, including the use of their techniques as well as content. Clearly it isn’t. To charge otherwise is a phony gambit aimed at nothing less than quashing the public’s access to non-ideological journalism, narrowing viewpoints to all but one.

That's exactly right. But worse than the fact that that's what is happening is the fact that that seems to be exactly what we want. Or at the least, the ubiquity of ideological journalism has made overwhelming segments of the population blind to the fact that there even is an alternative. It is apparently reflexive for people, conservatives and liberals alike, to class every media outlet, story, and personality as being politically on one side or the other. The notion of unbiased journalism seems to be viewed as some sort of mythological creature that has no purpose for the reality in which we presently live. The powerful irony of that is that unbiased journalism is the only thing that can keep us living in reality.

Unbiased, or at least only lightly biased journalism is not a myth, but it does seem to be facing extinction, and practically every one of us is guilty of encroaching on its habitat and destroying the food source that comes, oddly enough, of us consuming it. We've slowly built to the broad acceptance as normal of media that takes a clear side. I see no reason to believe that the omnipresence of bias will fade by the same mechanism. We've got to realize collectively that we've been going down the wrong road, and indeed, we have to actively remind ourselves of the fact that there even is another road. It's going to take a breaking point in the collective action of media consumers to snap us back to the reality in which reality is still something worth reporting on.

Please help us get there. Turn off talk radio, and give your support only to the news reporters that give you more facts than opinions. Remind everyone you know that we don't have to be pointing at one side of the fence or the other in order to be pointing at something worthwhile.

Legitimation as Bias

I cleaned the bar my brother works at this morning, and the television there provided me a small amount of exposure to the cable news. I gathered that the tea bagger march in Washington has been garnering a lot of media attention. This would not so much piss me off in and of itself – I’m pleased to see anyone’s political engagement having an effect on the public discourse, even if that engagement is based on irrational fear and unjustifiable anger – but I’m viewing it from the perspective of having previously engaged in leftist political protests. That being the case, I believe the first words out of my mouth when I saw the live footage on CNN were “Why are they covering this shit?” My annoyance was compounded by some of the dialogue I heard in the background as I went about my business.

“It doesn’t look like there’s THAT many people behind you just yet.”

“No, not YET.”

On the plus side, this has reminded me of, and given me a decent context for, exposition of a new theory about the myth of the liberal media, which had occurred to me earlier in the course of this health care fiasco.

The notion that the media is liberally biased is, to be frank, insane horseshit. Anybody with genuinely liberal ideologies and an impulse to express those publicly knows that it is horseshit. If I had had any doubts that it was horseshit, they were dispelled in March of 2006. On the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I took a bus to Washington D.C. to participate in a widely and elaborately organized demonstration against the war. Now, I am not good at estimating numbers of people even when they’re in small groups of dozens or hundreds, let alone when they are clustered on and around the national mall, stretching seemingly endlessly in every direction, and appearing as one expanse of solid texture in photographs from the top of the Washington Monument. But in identifying the numbers of people at the anti-war protest that I attended (one of several, in fact) I believe it is sufficient to use the vague, but still impressive phrase “hundreds of thousands.” Hundreds of thousands of left-leaning, politically active individuals came together from around the country, organized on political advocacy websites, and without promotion on CNN, MSNBC, or any other major outlet so frequently accused of being champions of liberal propaganda.

Now, I don’t remember all the details of this protest, or its itinerary. But I recall that we marched past the White House. We marched past Congress. We marched past the Supreme Court. We marched for miles and for hours, filling the streets where most of federal power resides. We chanted, we demonstrated, we danced. We expressed our anger, and we expressed our hope, and we expressed our conviction. We clashed with a handful of opponents on a couple of occasions. Along the course of the march, there was part of a particular block where a group of respectably committed, though to my mind misguided, counter-protesters chose to set themselves up to express their opposition to us, and perhaps give us something to contend with. They shouted at us as we walked past, and we walked past, shouting at them, save for a few who felt some pull towards loudly discussing the issue point-by-point. Physically, the counter-protest was barely a blip on one’s radar during the course of the route and the day. I did, however, consider it to be of particular interest, because it was at the meeting point of the two groups, however numerically imbalanced that they were, that the polarizing nature of the issues came to light. I enjoyed encountering them as a part of the larger experience of our demonstration. They provided an outlet for our anger, but the innumerable masses of people demonstrating against war were a focal point for my sense of hope and purpose.

Feeling proud of myself and my generation, I kept an eye on the news the next day, understanding that it was the attention we had brought to our cause that would show the value in our actions. I didn’t see it on the front page of any of the newspapers that I encountered in New York that day. I don’t remember what the typical front-page story was – but it must have been important. So I figured the coverage would begin on page two, or page three. No. Page four? No. Okay, it wasn’t in there. Newspapers were already starting to die at that time, anyway. The internet – that’s the place to look for the real news! Well, it wasn’t on Yahoo, or AOL, or any of the other first-look sources of news people generally encounter when they log on. Well, that was kind of weird, but I know: how about the bastions of liberalism that are the news networks, like CNN, which I’ve heard doggedly referred to as the “Communist News Network”? Or MSNBC, home of the rabid ideologue, Keith Olbermann? Nothing. There was no coverage whatsoever in any source, or any medium, of any demonstrations in Washington D.C. the prior day.

Actually, that’s not true. I did manage to find one article that fit that description. The headline read: “Hundreds come out in D.C. to rally in support of the troops.” Beneath that, a closely framed photograph of the conservative counter-demonstrators, conveniently angled away from our protest route. Whoever the jackass reporter that stumbled through D.C. that afternoon was, he turned his back on a hundred thousand people to focus his camera on the bearers of a voice that was, by comparison, insignificant. And he took it to his liberally biased editors, and they printed it without a word of context indicating that they were there specifically counter to the movement of which I was a part.

That is how the liberal movement was treated in the media, to greater and lesser extent, throughout the Bush presidency. And yet even then I heard people describing the media as being dominated by liberalism. I honestly do not grasp what that was based on, if not that that media had the audacity to eventually and occasionally point out mistakes and errors of fact coming out of the Bush White House. You hear this refrain about bias even more loudly now that conservatives are the ones who have prominent policies to protest. And the rationalization of this claim, often transparently suggestive of a martyrdom complex, has come to be very much curved around a frustrated expectation of equivalence. About the health care town halls I have noticed several conservative commentators excusing irresponsibly hyperbolic, aggressive, and stupid behavior by saying that there were plenty of people acting similarly during the Bush administration. I saw Fox News air a photo montage of posters that applied imagery as provocative and Hitler mustaches and Nazi arm bands to President Bush when he was the object of the ire of liberals. This they set against similar depictions of President Obama in recent months, toward the end of pointing out that Conservatives seem to be taking flak for the overreaching imagery of their protest, whereas the news hardly showed such things coming from the other side of the aisle during the last administration.

I heartily agree with that superficial assessment. It is interesting, however, that I derive a conclusion from that observation that is diametrically opposed to the conclusion Fox expects its viewers to take for granted. They believe that any failure to criticize equivalent activities coming from distinct groups is automatically indicative of a strong bias in favor of the group not being criticized. But that ignores very pertinent information about why stupid participants weren’t highlights of coverage of liberal protests. There was no coverage of liberal protests. On the other hand, there was no delay in not only covering conservative protests against attempts to increase health care, but also making it the focal point of the discussion.

I think the media is biased in favor of conservativism. I fervently believe that I base this on an assessment of the available evidence, and not on a commitment to a martyrdom complex. I also think that when stretched beyond one sentence, my claim of conservative media bias is rather restrained, and non-dogmatic. I don’t think the media is conservative because I think that most members of it are conservative. That may well not be the case. Put simply, because it is not the topic of this entry, I think that corporate interests tend more often to be in line with conservative policy issues, and that the media serves corporate interests, and consequently favors conservativism as a matter of course. I would also put forth, though, as something that is more in line with the topic I am seeking to discuss, that it may simply be the case that the media, whether conceived as an amorphous entity or a collection of individuals, sees the United States on the whole as more conservative than liberal. That seems plausible, and it also seems like it could be an important claim because it doesn’t require dogmatic conviction that the media is slanted in one direction or another. It allows the media to be effectively neutral, while believing that coverage of political issues needs to be geared towards one side of the spectrum in order to gain the attention of the largest portion of the viewing audience.

That is essentially, if simplistically, what I think the last several years of news coverage has suggested. With a bit of analysis, it also demonstrates a potential reason why conservatives believe that the media is biased against them, when in actuality it is more likely biased in favor of them. The nature of that bias is not a statement of agreement or disagreement on matters of opinion. The news should not and, to its credit, rarely does make such uncompromising pronouncements. What it does do is legitimate one set of views over another. In their minds, liberals don’t deserve news coverage, because no matter how many people turn out to demonstrate against the war, they are in the minority. The conservatives who were cheerleading the war, even though not many of them came out to do so visibly – they are the ones who represent the more mainstream American viewpoints.

Now, under a Democratic president, and in the midst of the health care debate, there is a different modus operandi when it comes to addressing protests. That is, they are addressed. And not only that, every protesting view is considered legitimate, no matter how outlandish and vitriolic. Sarah Palin claimed that Obama would create death panels to judge whether people should live or die, and it remains a topic of discussion even to this day. Some conservative politicians are still trying to exploit it for their ends, and everybody else feels as though they have to keep bringing it up and then saying “But it’s not really true.” Then why do we have to keep talking about it? Why was attention being given so long to the “birther movement”? And for the sake of equivalence, why don’t the liberals who follow Alex Jones get the same kind of attention? I suppose that it’s because left-wing conspiracy theories are considered to be absurdly far outside of the mainstream, whereas right-wing conspiracy theories are just fringe movements that raise real concerns relevant to the mainstream political discourse.

But it’s quite easy to understand how this perception leads to the belief that the media hates conservatives. If you have wildly nutty ideas, people with access to the facts will seem to be making fun of you when they undercut your political prejudices with genuine information. But take it as a compliment that you’re not being ignored. There is, apparently, value in your nuttiness. On the other hand, if nobody’s talking about you, nobody’s making fun of you. But don’t lose sight of the fact that nobody’s talking about you – it probably means they don’t consider you important. That, I believe, is the important distinction to make when it comes to assessing the bias of the media. If a news outlet fails to cover the craziness on one side of the aisle, and that coincides with ignoring the moderate views standing beside it, that does not mean the outlet agrees with that camp, and indeed, it may mean the opposite.