I Used To Call Think Tanks "Guess Pools"

IN AN INTERVIEW published on Atlantic Monthly the day before last,  Peter Wehner , "a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump,"  who I was unaware of before I read it starts nicely enough.

America is in the grips of an epistemic crisis—an assault on reality, a rising inability to distinguish fact from fiction, an effort to shut down free inquiry—that poses an existential threat to liberal democracy. Which is why Jonathan Rauch’s new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, is so timely and so essential. It helps us understand this moment better than anything else I’ve read and offers insights into what can be done to strengthen what Rauch calls a “reality-based community.” Rauch’s “constitution of knowledge” is a structured system of institutions and rules that we depend on to settle disagreements and discover truth. As Rauch puts it, “Free speech is not enough; you have to get a lot of the settings right.”

To which I thought, isn't that pretty much what I've been telling people for the last 20 years and more?   Alas, the interview ended up being as much what it claims to have identified as the problem as anything else.  In fact, the problems with what both of them say are so extensive and so much an example of the kind of thing they're identifying as "the problem" that I wonder how what was once considered a major venue of intellectual activity could have not noticed that.  The problems start in paragraph 3, see how many false equivalents and outright lies told in the interest of getting everything your own way it contains and where those lies start in the both-siderism.

I called him recently to talk about his book, and about polarization, epistemic disruption, and the blast radius of Donald Trump, whom Rauch describes as “a genius-level propaganda operative.” The Republican Party has become “an institutionalized propaganda outlet,” he argues. But we also talk about the dangers of so-called “cancel culture” and the left’s “totalistic ideology,” what cognitive psychology can teach us about politics, the writers who have shaped his political sensibilities and philosophy, his pivotal role in the gay-rights debate and his concerns about where it’s heading, his thoughts on atheism and Christianity, and his aspirations as a writer and a public intellectual.

As if there is ANYTHING on the left, the real political left in American politics that begins to compare with the Republican-fascists, the billionaires who finance such projects as the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a right-wing project started by Ernest Warren Lefever who, I have absolutely no doubt would have been part of the Trump regime if he were in the prime he was in when Reagan nominated him to a position at the State Department and had his record as thickly involved with Latin American fascist regimes exposed, including the Argentinian fascist regime that murdered so many - one of its victims, the tortured Jacobo Timmerman opposed his nomination as well as two of Lefever's own brothers.  I don't think his "Ethics" and Policy Center has put that legacy behind it.  I am prepared to believe that if Trump had not been so bizarre and so extreme in his cartoonishness, they'd have had no problems with many if not most of the crimes against people he committed.   

But this is about the interview so I'll let you read and research the source of it.  As there are things I partly agree with and things I think are everything from partially false to totally false I will interject from time to time.

Peter Wehner: What’s different and more dangerous about American politics today than before, and why is this epistemic disruption so much worse now than ever before? Or is it worse now than ever before?

Jonathan Rauch: It probably tracks polarization, to which it’s closely related. And indications are that polarization is at its worst since approximately the time of the Civil War. That’s not a sentence anyone enjoys saying or thinking about. And I think the same is true of the epistemic crisis.

There was a big one in the 1850s. The South engaged in a campaign to create an alternative reality in which the North was the aggressor and it was coming down to destroy the South and its lifestyle. And that was very effective in ginning up war fever, which was the intention. I don’t think we’ve seen anything remotely like that since that time in terms of magnitude and danger. And the present crisis, of course, is of a very different nature.

So why now? It’s been building for a long time. Polarization per se is not new, but the more polarized a society gets, the easier it is to manipulate people by hating on the other side. Polarization opens the door for propaganda campaigns. And then propaganda exploits polarization, because it seeks to further divide the society. That’s what Putin was doing in 2016 when he used the Internet Research Agency to stimulate protests, even opposite protests across the street from each other. Divide the society. That in turn weakens your opponents; weakens the society; lays the groundwork for cultism, demagoguery, and so on. So first, polarization creates a substrate that’s favorable to propaganda.

The first thing that jumps out at me about that is this is obviously one white male of privilege talking to another white male of privilege so they can get through paragraphs like that without mentioning People Of Color, especially Black People and their treatment by White People as the background to all of American history.   It would seem that the central issue to all of that SLAVERY AND THE FACT THAT IT WAS THE ENTIRE BASIS OF THE WEALTH OF THE SOUTHERN ARISTOCRACY(said by some to, actually be the wealthiest class of people in the world, at the time, their billionaire class) AND A LARGE PART OF NORTHERN FINANCIAL ARISTOCRACY SUCH AS WHO WROTE THE CONSTITUTION FOR THEIR OWN SELF-INTEREST, granting a few piddling rights to propertied white men and a few left overs to others.  Doing so in such a way that the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision, more than a bit to do with the actual start of the Civil War, could claim that the Constitution excluded Black People from all of the rights of citizenship and many of the rights of non-citizen humans.  And the corruption baked into the Constitution allowed that abomination to stand as the law of the land until the Civil War amendments overturned it.  If those hadn't passed in the wake of the Civil War, I'm not prepared to say they would not still be the law of the land and that our politics would not have more closely resembled hose of apartheid South Africa which maintained such a system against a far larger percentage of Black People into recent history.  AND IN FACT OURS DID UNTIL THE VOTING RIGHTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS LAWS WERE PASSED.  That is all allowed under our Constitution AS IT REALLY IS AND WILL NOW BE AGAIN UNDER THE ROBERTS' RULINGS.   I don't recall the conservative think-tank, public intellectual class testifying against the nomination of Samuel Alito the author of the death warrant for the Voting Rights Act.   I do remember a memorable testimony by a Black Yale law school member against him as well as the establishment "liberals" Alito went to law school and worked with. including "liberal judges"  testifying that he'd be just swell on the court.

And what you can say about Black People and slavery you can say about Native Americans and genocide, the other great source of American wealth in our history.   To think those are not so much more than ghosts that haunt our governmental system, our laws, the tradition of that abomination, Supreme Court written law but are still vital forces in that is THE GREAT LIE of American culture and life.

The second one is technology. We had a major information revolution in the form of internet, digital media, social media. And those turned out to be designed much better for propaganda and disinformation and “canceling” than they were for truth. They did not evaluate truth in transmitting information. They simply evaluated addictiveness, which means they prioritized outrage and enticing the false conspiracy theories over truth. 

This pretends that all of this started with online media, online social media when the grounds laid for Trump are older than that.  The attack on the truth is as old as our national myths and they were accelerated with the arrival of the movies, radio, most of all television and the rise of the networks and, before that newspaper syndicates and media corporations.  William Randoph Hurst, of course, springs to mind as a print source the Rupert Murdoch of his time, credited with having the power to start a terrible war based on a lie told about a boat blowing up.   Donald Trump as a public figure first depended not on the internet but on NBC putting him on as a dictatorial CEO in what, tellingly in regard to peddling lies as "the truth" is called "reality television".   Before him Hollywood created Ronald Reagan, the real predecessor of Trumpism being Reaganism.  All of which had the skids greased for them by the Supreme Court allowing the mass media to lie with impunity and libertarians of the kind who opposed such measures as kept things from going completely to hell for a while, things like the Fairness Doctrine and public service requirements.   Things which, BY THE WAY, were not gotten rid of by "the left" but by the conservative Reagan administration.  I will grant that the Warren Court gave them the Sullivan Decision, which started in the permission of the media to lie about politicians with impunity, something they started doing immediately and put the previous standard of presidential criminality,  Richard Nixon in the White House in 1968.

And then a third thing that happened, and I argue it must not be underestimated, and that’s the arrival of Donald Trump and conservative media, which he co-opts and exploits.

Donald Trump is a genius-level propaganda operative. He had the audacity and skill to look at Russian-style disinformation and adapt it to American politics. He used all the power of his campaign, then his presidency, then his entire political party, plus conservative media, to push disinformation and conspiracy theories and trolling through every possible channel on a scale that was never dreamed of in America before. So this is the first time America has ever been exposed to Russian-style disinformation on a massive scale from a domestic actor. And when you take that, which is just an enormous change, and you add it to the technology and the polarization, you get what we’ve got

He certainly had lessons in how to do that from the NYC and other media which he played well before there was an internet,  especially the lightly to never really fact-checked features sections of newspapers and interview programs who knew they could turn to him for audience interesting outrageousness and bombast.   The style of media he practiced owed as much to the broadcast-cabloid form of the TV commercial, made to gull, persuade and cheat, something much closer in proximity to the idiot Trump whose mastery is more that of an idiot savant appealing to the others so propagandized, the natural audience for FOX - another omission from this very curious interview.  Considering the rise of Trump in terms of intellectualism is a lie because that's not what created him, though many such as float in the think tanks and their patrons used him once he was so created.

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?

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 is NPR-PBS-Ken Burns DC think tank nonsense.  It is not the way the Constitution has worked, certainly not as James Madison intended, he was hardly a modern egalitarian democrat.  His alleged paternity of the Bill of Rights is, as the fine historian Paul Finkleman has noted, it was a "reluctant paternity" and the results have been the source of much of what has led to Trump.  The absurdity of the cultural deification of the "balance of powers" which have never been much balanced and with the Supreme Court assuming powers never granted to it in the Constitution to act as a super-veto over laws duly adopted by the Congress, even those signed into law by the Executive, have, throughout our history, exercised a pernicious and unbalanced role in preserving the interests of the oligarchs.  Not to mention such things as "corporate person-hood and the stream of innovations that are coming in under the Roberts Court as under Rehnquist when the court blatantly overturned an election, putting Bush II in power with the blessings of the "free press".   Madison and the other "founders" were primarily amateurs who were trying to set up a government without a governing monarch and their results are something that literally everything good in American history has had to struggle with or against.   That's a lie I swore I'd stop letting get by without challenging it well before Trump was raised up by entertainment TV as a force in American politics. 

I could go on and on with the problems of this interview which I see as mostly a lab test for what's wrong with the conventional line of "public intellectualism" (how anyone can use that term for themselves or others as in this interview without getting laughed in the face is, perhaps, another such lab test for just what's wrong with our intellectuals, these days).  I'd dearly love to go into the advocacy about a group I'd never heard of before "Braver Angels" and its origins and issues positions as what happens among those who live inside the daisy-chain of "public intellectualism" and the think tanks and billionaire-millionaire funded "institutes" and foundations such as appear in such magazines as The Atlantic.   But there are other piles of outrageous crap in this I want to address and I think this is as much as I can ask someone to digest in one post.   So I'll deal with more of the huge loads of crap that are contained in this effluent from these "public intellectuals" over the coming days.  It is amazing as a document of two-faced crap that comes out of the well-funded alleged intellectual establishment such as who gets in such magazines and who show up on PBS and NPR and other such venues.