Re: "Post-Modern Presidency"

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.

Bloomberg, and Bush's Post-Modern Presidency

I really don't see how anyone can look at the overwhelming blizzard of abuses, crimes, and foolhardy errors that have constituted the Bush years and then decide that what they're really sick of is partisanship:

... The forty per cent of the American electorate who regard themselves as Independents would also benefit. Their number has been growing in recent years, and they are increasingly joined in political sympathy by Republicans and Democrats who find their parties captive to a base, fringe, or interest group with which they have little in common. We are living through one of those recurring moments—1912, 1980, and 1992 were others—when disgust with the two big parties stirs a longing for an outsider of upright character, untainted by dirty money or political dealmaking.

Maybe I'm wrong in thinking that voters are sick of what I'm sick of, which is the actions of the current executive, and the actions of Republicans in the House and Senate (and now apparently the Supreme Court). If pressed, I could draw up a specific, and fairly inclusive, list of grievances against BushCo and against the GOP and other enablers. But maybe that's just because I'm on the high side of the news-awareness bell curve.

I can see how, in someone who doesn't spend a fairly significant portion of their waking life reading and digesting news information (this is a class issue as well, by the way; a good portion of the population doesn't have the leisure time or spare energy), my fairly specific dissatisfaction could manifest in a general 'screw the government' sort of feeling.

That it's so difficult for a casual news observer to distinguish between radicals and anti-radicals is also a damning comment on our broken media discourse. After all, most politicians sound the same as one another, they all yell and point when they get angry, and mostly they only are seen on television disagreeing with one another.

Too often, our politicians are quoted side by side making mutually contradictory claims, and too often the media fails to point out factual falsehoods (because to point out a negative about a candidate or official without pointing out a symmetrical negative for the other side would be 'biased' and 'partisan,' perhaps).

I recall a commentator on CNN who, after the Bush/Kerry debates said that it would take a team of Kennedy School of Government fact checkers a week to verify or refute all the truth claims made in the debate. And in terms of substantive discussion, that was apparently it for CNN. All that CNN was prepared to do was identify truly glaring factual inaccuracies. The rest was about who was more effective in their message delivery, the little tics, the gaffes. Coverage shifted over to 'Spin Alley,' a name suggesting fluctuation between two poles, existing simultaneously without cancelling each other out, matter and anti-matter.

It's understandable for people to get sick of it. The lack of attention to substantive policy difference makes mainstream political discourse a cross between a beauty contest and a shouting match. The media itself isn't the least bit interested in changing the dynamic; it makes for good television (Crossfire! Liberal, conservative--debate!). It took Jon Stewart making his own good television to get the show off the air.

There's ambivalence to objective truth; theirs a post-modern feeling that the truth is unknowable and that things can be two mutually exclusive ways at once. Maybe it's best just to call it doublethink. And Bush and his supporters have been disconcertingly open about their post-modern thinking:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That's a post-modern stance (in the sense where post-modern can mean "counter-enlighment". There are so many senses of post-modern that it's best to specify). When Bush and Cheney say, as they often do, that only History will be able to judge their Administration, they are really concurring with the above. The un-named aide quoted is just, you know, articulater.

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.

There are a few issues where one side or the other is objectively correct, and they can prove it. There are a great many other issues where an objective observer would say that the preponderance of the evidence tilts one way or the other.

I don't know that anyone (except maybe that Bush aide) would disagree with that assertion, and yet our media often seems to operate on the premise that all viewpoints are created equal. That stance, more than anything, creates the conditions that I think will consistently allow a sufficiently visible third-party candidate who can "bridge the divide" to claim ten to twenty percent of the vote.

The main way to be 'visible' without joining a party is to have tons of your own dough to pour into television ads. That's what Ross Perot did in '92, and that's what Bloomberg will do if he ultimately decides to make a run. Hell, he may get more than 20%. Perot got 18, and he sure wasn't a popular and effective city administrator with a record of effective compromise.

The question, if Bloomberg runs, is who he will pull more votes from, the Republican or the Dem. To me, it looks likely to be a negative for the Democrats. So what Bloomberg needs to consider, if he's conscientious, is whether he wants to help someone like Giuliani or Thompson ascend the throne of George the Second. I hope he doesn't run. If it looked like he would help the Democrats, I would be pulling for him all the way. I say this because I am not a political post-modernist--I think the Democrats have superior ideas and positions, and as a result, I want them to win.