George Rebane
‘This Impeachment Is Different – and More Dangerous’ writes Lawrence Lessig in Politico. He is currently the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, and according to my lights tilts a bit to the left. But he has penned an insightful piece that more or less flies in formation and abets Rebane Doctrine on the Great Divide (you know, confirmation bias and all that).
Lessig correctly argues that the current impeachment imbroglio is not a rehash of America’s past impeachments. Today, the plethora of politically polarizing media have so divided the country that both sides are totally sustained in their beliefs without even considering whether there is any middle ground remaining, and, if so, should we seek it out. He points out that past impeachments were carried out by elite cadres operating, more or less, out of the public glare. The impeachers were not pored over by the public, whose changing attitudes were not constantly apparent to the impeachers. Today, Americans have a choice on how to view the impeachment process, and their attitudinal temperature is taken multiple times a day by countless polls.
Well, actually the Nixon Watergate scandal was followed through the big three and NPR outlets, but then everyone had pretty much the same picture of what was going on. There was one basic ground truth which was broadly accepted. Today “as information channels have multiplied, real “broadcast democracy”—the shared and broad engagement with a common set of facts —has disappeared. An abundance of choice means fewer focus on the news, and those who do are more engaged politically, and more partisan. No doubt, there is more published today about impeachment across a wide range of media than before, but it lives within different and smaller niches.”
And due to this “abundance of choice” with less “focus on the news”, the strongly divided attitudes “will have a profound effect on how this impeachment will matter to Americans.” Neither side will be sharing any common ground over which to view the proceedings, understand the facts, and distinguish between allegations, perceptions, presumptions, inferences, …, and then what used to be known as evidence.
Holman Jenkins at the WSJ makes a strong case (here) for there being no chance for common ground when he goes through an analysis of Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry report wherein its author paints the progressives’ picture of what went down with lavish and profound lies. Schiff is a politician profiting from the polarization that needs to be maintained. Take as an example the Mick Mulvaney news conference that is now totally misrepresented in the lamestream – “A media transcript plainly shows that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was not referring to a Ukraine quid pro quo when he said politics will influence foreign policy and that critics should “get over it.” Ambassador Gordon Sondland merely “presumed” that Mr. Trump sought a quid pro quo from Ukraine. Why falsely characterize these men’s statements, as the Schiff report does, when doing so is unnecessary to convince anyone that Mr. Trump nevertheless envisioned a quid pro quo?”
And even more astounding in Schiff’s dim assessment of the intellect of his true believing constituents, we have – “Mr. Schiff claims Mr. Trump delayed “critical military aid” to Ukraine, but offers no evidence that the aid was critical. (The missiles discussed in Mr. Trump’s supposedly incriminating call with Ukraine’s president were not even part of the holdup.) He insists Mr. Trump’s dealings undermined U.S. national interests, but a president is perfectly entitled to differ with Mr. Schiff over what constitutes the national interest. With a casualness you expect only from the media, he relies on the fallacy that wishing to examine Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election is tantamount to denying Russian meddling.”
Lessig concurs that “the Civil War may well have been the last time we suffered a media environment like this. Then, it was censorship laws that kept the truths of the North separated from the truths of the South. And though there was no polling, the ultimate support for the war, at least as manifested initially, demonstrated to each of those separated publics a depth of tribal commitment that was as profound, and tragic, as any in our history. That commitment, driven by those different realities, led America into the bloodiest war in its history.”
He believes that “we’re not going to war today”, because “we are not separated by geography, and we’re not going to take machetes to our neighbors. But the environment of our culture today leaves us less able to work through fundamental differences than at any time in our past. Indeed, as difference drives hate, hate pays — at least the media companies, and too many politicians.”
Finally, Lessig makes an appeal to the media companies to quit selling hate, and instead seek and establish a common ground whereon both sides could at least share some of the same views; and perhaps that would start a productive national dialogue. A part of this process would be for companies like Facebook and Twitter to self-censor divisive and false political advertising.
In the end Lessig believes that we have “a fractured America because of siloed information”. And his strong presumption is that the overwhelming share of citizens of both persuasions restrict their input to outlets of their preferred ideological flavors. But that is patently an one-sided argument, as even these pages confirm. Yes, when we monitor CNN, MSNBC, NYT, …, we see a narrow-casting of ideas both in their ‘news’ and commentary. But that clearly is not the case when we look at the news segments, and even some commentary programs, of outlets like Fox News and Fox Business that with intense regularity feature strong proponents of the Left who launch dialogues totally absent from the other side. Talking to a liberal these days quickly reveals that the person has not even been updated by his leftwing media on the basic factual happenings of the day. And here I’m not talking only in the aggregate of such populations; of course, exceptions exist, but they are relatively infrequent (most certainly not any of RR’s leftwing commenters).
To conclude, what concerns me about today’s sincere academics and analysts of our national drama, is that almost all of them turn a blind eye to the distinct, and (to me) very evident, possibility that we are now ideologically beyond the tipping point. That America is divided by a chasm of no shared ideas into two distinct ideological cohorts. One working feverishly to fundamentally transform the republic into a pure socialist democracy on the road to globalism, and the other seeking to avoid such a revolution, and go on evolving as a liberty-loving, risk-tolerant nation of entrepreneurs and workers, people who continue to enjoy the blessings of minimally regulated markets overseen by a limited and constitutional government intent on preserving America as free and sovereign nation-state.
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