To put it nonmetaphorically: If we want a durably decent society, we have to improve the quality of political discussion. Yes, we will always need to address people's hearts and imaginations. But in the long run, their ability to think, to see through right-wing (and left-wing) bullshit, is even more important. After all, Rush Limbaugh is most dangerous not because he's a right-wing moron but because he's a moron. Karl Rove is most dangerous not because he's a right-wing liar but because he's a liar. Jerry Falwell is most dangerous not because he's a right-wing demagogue but because he's a demagogue. If voters had even a slightly enhanced tolerance for position papers and policy proposals, the influence of Limbaugh, Rove, Falwell et al. would evaporate, or at least be vastly diminished. Isn't that a worthwhile goal?Almost sentence by sentence, this seems very wrong. First, the names listed are pernicious figures precisely because of the actual consequences of their outlooks and actions rather than because of whatever particular metatextual role they fill in our debased political discourse.
Second, and more importantly, the modern liberal emphasis on making the public somehow smarter and better informed about politics as the central means of bringing about progressive change has amounted to a catastrophic misallocation of energy. I'm not sure what empirical basis anyone has in mind for such a notion: Do people really think that, say, New Deal reforms, or those brought by the Civil Rights Movement or during the Great Society came about because Americans of those periods happened to be better informed than today -- because, that is, the political discourse was more elevated and sophisticated, and demagogues and morons had a harder time finding an audience? Isn't it a bit more likely -- and, indeed, something of a constant of human societies -- that the "quality" of mass political discussion and the political sophistication of the average citizen have always been pretty tawdry, and that effecting beneficial political change has a good deal more to do with manning and strengthening particular institutions and engaging directly in raw political struggle than it does with sprinkling enlightenment across the land?
I sometimes get accused of unsavory cynicism for harboring such an outlook, particularly since I'm a professional journalist and presumably in the business of seeking to get sound views and information out to people. But I swear, it's an uncynical interest in improving things that makes me hope liberals of all stripes can finally shake off the vestiges of the kind of thinking Scialabba typifies in that passage.
--Sam Rosenfeld
