Last month's inaugural protesters, said by my sources to outnumbercelebrants, were mostly ignored by the mainstream press. The WeeklyStandard, however, did find time to make fun of them, noting that at one event--a teach-in on police brutality--the deceased victims of police were "represented in unflattering prom pictures." You can imagine the outrage that editors at the Standard would direct toward a snide, elitist liberal magazine that mocked the low-rent fashion sense of murder victims or their families. Yet as the confirmation of John Ashcroft made clear, virtuecrats on the right do not feel bound to practice what they preach.
Ashcroft's confirmation is old news, and his sins have been widelychronicled. But I'm still shaking my head at the chutzpah ofRepublicans. They were outraged when Democrats tried to hold Ashcroft to the confirmation standards that he applied to Clinton's nominees--andcavalier about Ashcroft's lies to the Senate regarding his opposition toLuxembourg Ambassador James Hormel, Judge Ronnie White, and schooldesegregation in Missouri. (The Weekly Standard said of Ashcroft's dishonest attack on White what ardent Bill Clinton supporters might have said of the Monica Lewinsky affair: "This wasn't [his] finest hour.") Republicans once cared so much about character and truthful testimony. Now they seem to define integrity as a willingness to abandon deeply held beliefs (like abhorrence of abortion) in order to acquire power. Ashcroft signaled his fitness to serve as AG by promising not to act on his convictions. Of course, no one on either side believed him.
Political nihilism is nothing new, but to see it flourish among moralabsolutists is disorienting. We're used to the spectacle of preachersfalling prey to deadly sins; but from Jim Bakker to Jesse Jackson, theyusually profess repentance once they're caught. When moralists like JohnAshcroft or Antonin Scalia devolve into political hacks, they hold tightto their exquisite sanctimony.
Conservatives may say the same of Hillary Clinton, in light of hersuspected role in the pardons of Marc Rich and four members of a keyOrthodox Jewish constituency in New York, not to mention the reported$8-million book contract and the Embassy Row manse. And it's true thatlike a born-again Republican relativist who suddenly decides that lyingunder oath can serve a greater good, the former first lady reinventsherself with postmodern élan. Soon she'll be acting less likeLady Hillary and more like Senator Clinton.
It's as if they're all suffering (or benefiting) from multiplepersonality disorder, a fashionable ailment of the early 1990s. Or maybethey're multitasking. In any case, I'm confused. Combine the spectacleof these political chameleons with the stridently oppositionalworldviews of idealists left and right, and you spark an explosion ofcognitive dissonance. It started, of course, with the disputed election.Did Republicans steal it, or did they thwart an attempted larceny byDemocrats? The answer depended on whether you read The New Yorker or National Review. The polarization was stunning: Each side viewed the other as flat-earthers.
I'm not suggesting that we haven't been ideologically divided before.Consider the abortion debate or the Clinton impeachment debacle. Butdifferences over abortion rights are primarily anchored in values andideals, as were differences over impeachment. There was little disputeabout what actually happened: Virtually everyone knew that Clinton hadengaged in extramarital sex and lied about it (except for his daughter,perhaps, and a few deluded aides). We argued about the justification andappropriate consequences for his lies, as well as the reasonableness ofKenneth Starr's investigation. The fight over Ashcroft's confirmation,however, was a fight about the basic facts: Did he slander White or showcontempt for the courts in litigation over school desegregation? Did heoppose Hormel simply because he was gay or for some unspecifiedcharacter failing?
What shapes these unsettling factual divides? In part they reflectbiased or inadequate reporting. (Why weren't the inaugural protestsfully covered?) And in part, they reflect the ubiquitousCrossfire model of debate, which offers us two simplistic, highly polarized, propagandistic versions of truth and no nuanced attempt at mediation. I don't believe that everyone involved in these "debates" is consciously and cynically distorting the facts (although many are). But almost everyone is encouraged to put ideology first; the quest for objectivity, or some degree of it, is just an afterthought. Want to drive yourself nuts? Read The Weekly Standard and TheNation; read fundraising letters from the Republican National Committee as well as solicitations from the Alliance for Justice; read the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times,and The Boston Globe. One side describes the elephant's trunk; the other describes a frog.
I don't believe, I won't believe, that everyone who fiercelydisagrees with me is acting in bad faith. And they can't all bedelusional. Still, one of us is wrong: The earth is round, not flat.(All right, it's sort of oval.) I enjoy ideological debates but notfights over fundamental empirical realities. Everyone has his or herreality, postmodernists and denizens of the therapeutic culture say.Yes, but--I've always thought--some versions of reality are grounded inthe facts much more than others. The pope and Galileo had conflictingvisions of the universe, and only one of them was true.
