I thought this bit from Jonathan Schell pretty provocative:
All over the world, autocratic-minded rulers, from Italy's former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to Russia's President Vladimir Putin, have learned that de facto control of the political content of television is perhaps the most important lever of power in our day. They have learned that it does not matter politically if 15 or even 25 percent of the public is well informed as long the majority remains in the dark. The problem has not been censorship but something very nearly censorship's opposite: the deafening noise of the official megaphone and its echoes--not the suppression of truth, still spoken and heard in a narrow circle, but a profusion of lies and half lies; not too little speech but too much. If you whisper something to your friend in the front row of a rock concert, you have not been censored, but neither will you be heard.
That, I think, is a reality that many of us intuitively grasp, but haven't quite been able to articulate. The problem isn't a lack of information, or the obvious censorship of a police state, but the projection and absorption of misinformation and spin. I always come back to, as example, the polls showing that Americans knew more about Clinton's health care plan directly after his first speech than after nine months of round-the-clock media coverage. By tuning into the press coverage, they felt informed on the plans outlines. They were not. But it's infinitely harder to convince someone that what they "know" is wrong rather than that what they don't know is important.
If you've got some time, the rest of the essay is interesting. Schell goes through the superpower paradox -- the weird repetition in American life that, if only this country possessed the will, we could remake the world in our image. From McCarthy to Nixon to Albright to Krauthammer, there's a desire to do ever more, and a belief that what stands in our way is domestic paralysis and flaccidity. Problem is, Schell argues, America came of age after the empire era had ended:
Of far greater importance was what happened to two kinds of war that had historically been the most important--wars of imperial conquest and general, great-power wars, such as the First and Second World Wars. During the twentieth century the first kind had become hopeless "quagmires," owing to the aroused will of local peoples everywhere who, collectively, had put an end to the age of imperialism. The second were made unfightable and unwinnable by the nuclear revolution. It was these two limitations on the usefulness of military force, one acting at the base of the international system, the other at its apex, that delimited the superiority of the superpower. (The paradox of impotent omnipotence was even more pronounced for the other superpower, the Soviet Union, which actually disappeared.)
Very possibly, the United States, with all its resources, would have been the sort of globe-straddling empire that Joseph McCarthy wanted it to be had it risen to pre-eminence in an earlier age. It was the peculiar trajectory of the United States, born in opposition to empire, to wind up making its own bid for empire only after the age of imperialism was over. Though it's hard to shed a tear, you might say that there was a certain unfairness in America's timing. All the ingredients of past empires were there--the wealth, the weapons, the power, hard and soft. Only the century was wrong. The United States was not, could not be and cannot now be a new Rome, much less greater than Rome, because it cannot do what Rome did. It cannot, in a postimperial age, conquer other countries and lastingly absorb them into a great empire; it cannot, in the nuclear age, not even today, fight and win wars against its chief global rivals, who still, after all, possess nuclear arsenals. Even tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North Korea, more a cult than a country, can deter the United States with its puny putative arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era.
That strikes me as largely accurate. It's particularly illuminating to use this lens on the right, where Victor Davis Hanson and his near-pornographic veneration of ancient empires is charged with defining what a great society looked like, where the constant refrain is to avoid Chamberlain's pre-nuclear era mistake of appeasement, where the fury attaches to all of us who would counsel that America keeps the extent of its power uncertain rather than leaping forward to clearly define its limits. The right, certain that we can do what Rome or the British did, cannot blame the ragtag insurgencies of the Middle East for our losses, so they turn on the lack of will and domestic opposition they see all around them. America is not great because Americans are not great. Admitting that the mold and opportunities for greatness have changed would be too wrenching for a movement that places its mythology so firmly in the empires and World Wars of yesteryear.
