I think Sam is mostly right on the money in his post below (read it if you haven't yet), and I completely agree with his assessment of Bloomberg and the media environment. But I want to question one point that I think it's important for us all to understand -- that is, our understanding of objective truth and how it relates to governance. Sam writes:

Post-modernism made some sense when applied to literary conceits like Justice, Virtue, Love, and all the rest, but it is a terrible paradigm under which to build a functioning government, composed of bureaucrats and cops. It's nonsense to say that truth is unknowable in the context of governance. The government must operate under the premise that truth is knowable, or government policy is governed by nothing but competition to see which narrative is the most compelling.

This is not quite consistent with a liberal worldview. Fundamentally we are relativists; we have always emphatically rejected the idea that human cognition can settle on an absolute truth, and we understand the innate biases present in everyone's psychological structures. (Insert the mandatory Lakoff reference here.) This informs our respect for free thought & free speech, our resistance to blame & demonization, our emphasis on context in interpreting laws (the Constitution included), and our tendency to focus on a pragmatic problem-solving approach rather than a purely ideological one.

And claiming absolute truth, after all, is the purview of our enemies. It's the phlegmatic centrists and media drones who (as Sam points out) seem to think they can find truth purely by triangulating between extremes; it's the radical conservatives who think their ideology (Christian or free-market) is Divine Revelation; and it's the psychopath Randian libertarian freaks who think decision-making is rational and human reason and logic are infallible. (For most normal people, it takes about ten minutes of interaction with the public at large to realize "human reason and logic" is a crock of shit. I can only assume that libertarians live in some kind of parallel universe where everyone performs cost-benefit analysis before they buy lunch. But I digress.)

This is a highly postmodern view, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's a more serious and intellectually honest way to look at the world than any that has come before; we should not be advocating for a return to Enlightenment naïveté.

Now, Sam is right to ask how we can run a government under such conditions; after all, it's awful difficult to dispatch troops into war zones when you have nagging concerns about the fabric of reality. But we should not be so quick to retreat into artificial moral certainty -- consider the alternative that Sam dismisses, "competition to see which narrative is the most compelling". Why is this a bad thing?

After all, isn't competition between narratives just empiricism at its finest? Various theories are posed about how something operates, they are compared with evidence, and the theory that most closely approximates the evidence is assumed to be correct -- with the understanding that a better theory may come along at any time. This is how we have come to agree on things like evolution, the existence of global warming, and heliocentric orbit, among others; not because of some arbitrary sense of "right" or "wrong" but because the evidence is conclusive.

There is no reason this attitude cannot also inform a government, especially a Democratic government. Economic policy is the perfect example -- rather than starting from strict adherence to abstract economic laws, like our conservative frends, we instead pragmatically observe how we can best influence the economy and go from there. If this means stepping on Greg Mankiw's doctrines sometimes, that is not a problem (nor does it make us traitors to capitalism). It simply means we are following the evidence.

Nowhere in that process is it necessary to claim that our understanding is "more right" or "more true" than anyone else's. Nowhere in that process do we need to claim that we have perfect understanding, or for that matter any understanding, of the world. All we need is a results-focused hardscrabble pragmatism and we have satisfied the conditions of both our worldview and our governmental duties.

So yes, we in fact can say that "all viewpoints are created equal"; but some are more equal than others. The liberal/progressive/Democratic viewpoint is better not because it is more in touch with objective reality, but because it understands that it's not and is capable of working with that. In that sense we can and should have a post-modern government.