"a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began"

CONTINUING ON WITH the dissection of the article from the Atlantic that I started tearing up yesterday, there is some of this I think is correct though hardly all of it and hardly in the way that Rauch and Wehner consider it brilliant, much of it is so obviously true as to be obvious and the unremarkable spin put on it by them diminishes its usefulness as analysis.    And all over this is the studied refusal to address the role of racial discrimination and worse, racial genocide, racial enslavement, and disenfranchisement while raising up Madison who not only practiced all of those, the Constitution he and his fellow founders set up is still saturated with it, something which is becoming obvious under the mainstream of Republican politics and Republican domination of the Supreme Court.  And that is not something that started with Trump but has been a feature of Republican politics since 1964 when Goldwater used racism and racists to dominate the Republican convention.  Other than the double-speaking, two-faced efforts of the likes of Jack Kemp and George W. Bush, there has been little to use in denial of that.   Remember that as these two conservatives talk about a pluralism that leads them to ignore that mastodon in the room.  That use of racism, that harnessing of racism that was Goldwater and Nixon's Southern strategy preceded Trump and it will survive him, dominating the Republican power in states where they dominate, in their congressional caucus, in Republican presidencies and on the Roberts' court and as long as there are Republican-fascists on that court. 

Jonathan Rauch: What Trump has done to America

Wehner: Pluralism provides a context for how citizens can live together and even flourish amidst differences over priorities and values. So how does a nation like America cohere, when citizens are divided along the lines of truth and falsity, reality and unreality, and are living in different epistemic universes? How can a shared sense of reality be recovered?

See what I pointed out about their discussion of the Civil War and its causes yesterday for a sense of the "reality" they would like "recovered."  It is a "reality" that I have a feeling looks like the on-screen make-up of 1950s TV or, on its most "pluralistic" end, like the lily-white casting of Woody Allen's filmography. 

Rauch: At the theoretical level, James Madison had the answer to that problem, and he had the answer both in politics and in the epistemic realm, the realm of knowledge. The answer is that when you’ve got a large, diverse society, you have to harness that diversity by putting people into managed conflict with each other so that they’re forced to come to some kind of understanding in order to get anything done and no one group can dominate in the long term.

The U.S. Constitution is basically a mechanism that forces compromise and disperses power in order to make that happen, and it forces people to follow rules. That’s the only way you can run a large society with a lot of political diversity. It requires that individuals and institutions commit themselves to those rules and those values. If they don’t commit themselves to those rules and values, no paper constitution will defend them.

This "constitution of knowledge" business is his shtick, what I assume he hopes to ride into his career as a "public intellectual."  It is about as remarkable in its originality as a card catalog is and about as significant and useful as the hagiographic high school civics of the 50s and early 60s, one which didn't mention the civil rights movement or the labor movement and considered such things as the abolition of slavery and women's' equality as battles won with the passage of laws and the 19th amendment.   

For establishment Republicans, for never-Trump conservatives, I will admit that it's rather remarkable for one of them to admit that the Constitution isn't self-acting, self-governing and entirely reliant in itself.   But considering the stunning obviousness of the point, it's not any kind of compliment to say that.  He goes on self-evidently in that way for a while, stating the obvious as if it's an original insight.

The same is true of the constitution of knowledge, which is not written down but is very similar to the U.S. Constitution. It’s a way of creating managed conflict about opinions, ideas, facts—forcing them into contention and making people persuade each other in order to make knowledge—and do that in a systematic, structured way. It’s a very, very similar kind of thing. To make it work, first, you need a lot of diversity, because we never see our own biases. We have to have people with different biases, however wrong-headed they might seem to me or to you. Then you need people who are committed to making knowledge by putting those into managed conflict and living with the outcome, even if it’s not always favorable and even if they think it’s wrong. So those are the values and structures you need, and they work fantastically well.

I claim that the constitution of knowledge is the greatest social technology ever invented by human kind. It’s transformed us as a species. It makes possible the global network of knowledge seekers and error checkers who put the COVID vaccine in my arm a couple months ago. It makes possible the organization of millions of expert minds in hundreds of countries, thousands of institutions who can pivot and decode a genome in two days. It’s astonishing. So the big-picture answer to your question is the constitution of knowledge and sticking with those values and defending those values and understanding them. 

It's a lot less astonishing if you consider that the sciences behind epidemiology, virology, immunology have been under constant, world-wide development and learning for a long while, now.  And that that effort was not without resistance from, mostly, conservative Republicans who attacked it and thwart it, today.  Not only Republicans here but Conservatives in Britain and elsewhere.  These conservatives don't seem to notice that it is their ideological side which has done that in many countries.  As an aside, considering what is said about gay issues later in the conversation, you might want to go back and look at the state of conservative governance during the previous health emergency of HIV-AIDS during the Reagan and Bush I administrations and the irresponsibility of Andrew Sullivan in that regard. 

Unfortunately, it worked so well for so long that we forgot it was there. We decided, Well, free speech is enough. You have free speech; you’ll have a marketplace of ideas; truth will emerge from that. That’s how the internet was supposed to work. No structure, just peer-to-peer conversations. Well, that’s a disaster. Madison knew that. So we need to recommit to these rules; we need to understand what they are; we need to defend them in an active way.

Here I think he reaches the apogee of his daring,  which is, again, rather stunning merely in its self-evidence.  Though he, again, uses it to blame the internet while totally ignoring the earlier venues of media which proved to be no less culpable in lying and deceiving and creating the myths and racist common received POV which Trump and his puppet master, Putin, merely exploited.  There was nothing they used which was not already long in place, the internet and the technology of targeted propaganda - something which, as I recently pointed out, Richard Vigurie was doing for Republicans with targeted mail before the internet became a force in society, culture and commerce.   The evidence of the use of such propaganda methods are as old as human literature and certainly far older than that.   The Mosaic prohibition on bearing false witness is a response to that. 

The next question and its answer is a mix of self-promotion, promotion of the kinds of  oligarchy financed "institutions" both of these clowns live on and in and more self-evident generality and non-specificity in what is to be done.  

Wehner: And what, specifically, can be done?

Rauch: In terms of responding to disinformation, this is the hardest part of my book to talk about because you want to be able to say, “Here are the three things you need to do and you solve it.” And it’s not like that. Major epistemic disruptions, like the development of the printing press or, in the 19th century, offset printing, require all-of-society responses, mostly nongovernmental but including many, many actors and institutions figuring out how to change the rules, revise the rules so that you can adapt to these new technologies and tactics.

So what are we talking about? Social media and digital media need systemic redesign. The press needs to get savvier about the use of disinformation and not fall for it hook, line, and sinker by repeating every conspiracy theory in order to debunk it. The public needs to be made aware of what’s going on; that’s why I wrote this book. A population that understands it’s being manipulated and understands the tactics can still be manipulated because they’re very powerful tactics, but we’ll have more resistance if they understand what’s going on.

Civic activism on matters like depolarization can make a difference. That’s where groups like Braver Angels come in. It turns out that when people actually know that the real level of disagreement is lower than they’ve been led to believe, that itself can reduce polarization. Direct civic action can help. Setting up watchdogs, monitors, and academic centers that understand this information, and penetrate the networks where the campaigns are hatched in order to disrupt them, alert social-media companies, intelligence agencies, and so on. I can go on in this vein, but you get the idea. We’ve got a long way to go, but all of those things are already starting to happen.

You can always tell that one of these guys has nothing to say when it comes to how to really address the problems, leaving things to the same set of designated "responsible people" who have gotten us here to start wit.   What it really comes down to is that they don't really want it to change.  "Nothing more can be done," is the inevitable stage that elite talk about such public problems.  It's the stage of elite public grief which doesn't even have the theoretical benefits of that less than helpful road map of how one is to cope.  Marilynne Robinson in her great analysis of elite British social thought in her book Mother  Country exactly describes what these two creatures of American foundations, institutions, "public intellectualism" are engaged in here in a sort of sub-committee of two.   It might help see that if you consider how Madison keeps being brought back into it.

British social thought can well be imagined as occurring this way.  It takes place in a country house built and furnished to accord with conventions polished by use, a house filled with guests, great and minor luminaries, ornaments of literature, the sciences, the church and of philosophy and politics.   Most of them, not coincidentally, are cousins at some remove.  They are charmed to find in one another just that streak of intuitive brilliance they had always admired in themselves and to be confirmed in their sense that they are true members of a group in which there are no impostors by a very great similarity of taste, of interest  of sympathy.  It is a leisurely visit, some centuries in length, and in due course everyone has confessed his weakness for Hesiod, and admired the garden, and regretted the weather.  The evenings would perhaps have begun to weigh, if someone had not suggested a game called Philanthropy.  The rules of the game are very simple.  One must justify things as they are by attacking things as they are.  It is a philosophic game, perfectly suited to showing off a fine wit.  It has even the thrill of risk, since it invites subversive ideas.  But the point is always, of course, to achieve a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began.

Among the things that really need to be done, apart from things like licensing FOX and the other cable networks THE REAL POWER BEHIND TRUMPISM and re-instituting things like the Fairness Doctrine, public service requirements, ownership diversity YEAH, HOW ABOUT THAT, WHITE BOYS, OWNERSHIP DIVERSITY, is letting people like Al Gore and Hillary Clinton sue those in the media who carry lies about them into the flames of hell.  But you'll find those have gone out before the likes of these two consider anything that will really change things.