“Everything in moderation” (or EIM, for short) is a hegemonic commonplace in 21st century American culture. That means, it is a belief that is so commonly accepted as to be nearly unquestionable. And it’s a serious problem for supporters of democracy in the 21st century.
The reasons for the phrase’s popularity are easy to see. We need salt and fat in our diets, for instance, but too much salt or fat is unhealthy. A little liquor can be a nice way to celebrate a holiday with friends, but too much can lead to bad behavior, addiction, and death. Solitude is restorative; isolation is destructive. Illustrative examples of things that are good in moderation but bad in excess are countless, but I’ll stop here in a nod to moderation. “Everything in moderation” is so obviously a virtue that it hardly bears a second thought.
But one major problem with EIM being a hegemonic commonplace—that is, a belief we tend to take as a given—is that it is not always applicable. “Everything in moderation” can start to fall apart, for example, when we apply it to political philosophies. “We need a little totalitarian dictatorship, but you know, in moderation.” I’d wager that most people who live in democratic societies would find such a comment curious (I’d hope enraging, but I’d bet actual money on “curious”).
For that matter, “Democracy in moderation” is not a phrase I’d seriously expect to encounter in the wild, even on the internet where anything ridiculous can be found if one looks hard enough. I’m not talking about moderate democracy, I’m talking about democracy in moderation.
The reasons people don’t talk about “democracy in moderation” are pretty straightforward. We can talk about pragmatic limits on democracy—the need for representatives, for example, or the maintenance of non-public, and therefore non-democratic, decision making—but the idea that we just need a little democracy, not too much, just a smidge, is nonsensical. How do you have just a little democracy? “Democracy in moderation” begs the question of what other systems we’re going to also adopt in moderation. Some democracy in the spring, a light communism in the summer, maybe a nice monarchy in the fall, and a hearty totalitarian dictatorship in the winter, when it’s most likely to thrive?
My point here is that “everything in moderation,” reasonable though it may initially seem, is often not very good advice for making decisions. Sometimes, frankly, it just doesn’t belong in the conversation. But, because it is a hegemonic commonplace, like any hegemonic commonplace, the taken-for-grantedness of “everything in moderation” can show up in places it doesn’t belong, and it can short-circuit thinking even in areas where it doesn’t make very good sense. As a result, EIM can appear to be virtuous even when it’s actually really dangerous. Such is the case of politics and media in the current moment in America (and really, for at least the last decades, but probably longer).
In late December, as just one example, Chuck Todd gave an interview to Rolling Stone to promote an upcoming MSNBC special about political misinformation and disinformation, which he is suddenly all worried about.
Todd is the Political Director for NBC News and the current moderator of NBC’s wildly popular political show, Meet the Press. Despite being one of the most influential (and presumably most knowledgeable) political commentators in the country, Todd admitted that he was “just so absurdly naive in hindsight” about American politicians’ willingness to spread conspiracy theories and misinformation to accomplish their political goals. Todd was specifically talking about Republicans since Trump’s election in 2016, but the party affiliation is actually beside the point here.
As Jay Rosen helpfully points out at PressThink, a key premise of Meet the Press is that there is a basic symmetry between the two major political parties. Todd is just now realizing that symmetry doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. Rosen is not the only person to observe this premise, nor is it the first time he’s found good reason to comment on it. Nevertheless, the assumption of symmetry that Rosen notices really is grounded in the “everything in moderation” commonplace. EIM is the backbone of “both-sides” political press. If you have a Democrat on, it only makes sense to have a Republican for balance. Give everyone a voice and the plurality will naturally moderate the conversation.
As Todd (finally) figured out more than 2000 years into the common era, and probably at least 3000 years too late, the assumption that moderation will magically materialize if you include a little bit of “everything” is plainly not true. Never has been. There is no state of equilibrium to which political discussion naturally resolves. Apparently no one bothered to tell him, and he wasn’t smart or curious enough to figure it out on his own until, like, yesterday.
I’m picking on Todd here, but he is not uniquely blinkered. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, three supposedly liberal news organizations, are constantly playing the both-sides game, often to what seem like painfully ridiculous ends.
(The supposition that there are two sides is another major problem. In short, there aren’t two sides to every issue—there are an endless number of sides, but they’re collapsed into two because it’s more marketable. But that’s another problem for another day, or hey, read this post, which includes a fine explanation of the problem.)
But it’s not ridiculous if your guiding belief is “everything in moderation.” When EIM is your basis for decision making, even if it’s unconscious, then a little racist science—as long as it’s just a little—isn’t so bad (for an example, you can check out Bret Stephens’s recent NYT op-ed about the superiority of Ashkenazi Jews, but I’m not linking to it). Or short-circuiting discussions about whether or not a Supreme Court justice nominee sexually assaulted a woman (or several women) and lied about it is fair game—after all everything in moderation. So maybe just a little good-hearted reflection on his carpooling prowess. Don’t get carried away though! Anti-deliberative, rape-obscuring deflection should be done in moderation!
CNN, for its part, has repeatedly hosted and/or hired people pushing racist conspiracy theories (Lou Dobbs famously engaged in birtherism for months before he was taken off-air), people advocating discrimination and violence against LGBT people (at least until 2013, CNN regularly hosted guests from the Family Research Council, an organization deemed a hate-group by the SPLC), and people accused of physically assaulting members of the press (dude, they hired Corey Lewandowski). Because “everything in moderation”—taken to a logical extreme really can mean “EVERYTHING.” Not too much, of course. Just a little.
For CNN, the NYT, and WaPo, and frankly for the vast majority of politics and news organizations, EIM short-circuits their ability to think carefully about what they’re actually doing to public discourse. As a result, someone like Chuck Todd can sincerely claim in 2019 that he didn’t notice that some people weren’t playing by the moderate rules. It’s like they were taking advantage or something.
Put another way, even when “everything in moderation” starts to break down as an value for some people, it can remain an unquestioned value for others because it’s hegemonic. It’s just taken for granted. In those asymmetrical circumstances, people who are willing to act immoderately can wreak profound changes on the culture almost without challenge.
In and of themselves, profound cultural changes are not necessarily bad. But when powerful people like Chuck Todd, CNN executives, and decision makers at the NYT and WaPo ignore those changes and carry along as if everything is the same as it always was, it’s a recipe for bad things. Because they’ve been including “fascism in moderation” and “Nazism in moderation” and “white supremacy in moderation” in their “moderate” coverage for decades without stopping for two minutes think if that’s good standard to work by. And they’ve blithely ignored everyone yelling at them to pull their heads out of their moderation.
Of course, the appropriate reaction to “everything in moderation” is not “everything to the extreme.” The appropriate next step, which Todd is hopefully sincerely beginning to take, is to begin to notice how EIM and false balance shape our thinking and how they allow coverage, commentary, and conversation to progress in ways that we don’t want them to. And when you have the chance, to act and advocate differently.
Not everyone is Chuck Todd, however, and not everyone has the opportunity to reshape the political landscape. But “everything in moderation” also has serious, and potentially damaging effects on how voters look at the candidates. In the moment, this is Democratic voters. There is a pretty common assumption—in the political press and also among individual voters—that there is a sort of moderate equilibrium on the table in the 2020 election. But moderation is a chimera. It’s a moving target in politics and always has been.
Or rather, moderation as a value can appear to stay constant even when the grounds for moderation have moved radically to one extreme or another, but it ain't.
Aiming at moderation does not absolve us of the responsibility of looking carefully at our candidates, at their records, at their policies and actions. It is not a substitute for making careful, thoughtful decisions. Moderation will not save our politics any more than it’s saved Chuck “Absurdly Naive in Hindsight” Todd from looking like a novice.
Showing posts with label rhetoric. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rhetoric. Show all posts
Monday, December 30, 2019
Thursday, October 4, 2012
On Debates and Disappointments
Every season on American Idol, one of the heavy favorites goes home way too early. Chris Daughtry, for example, was sent packing even though he was apparently far more popular than the three contestants who survived him (including the winner, and subsequent flop, Taylor Hicks). So shocking have the departures been that the show instituted a “judges save” to allow the judges to overrule the numb idiots in the electorate (nobody says outright that they’re numb idiots, but the message is palpable). Additionally, the Idol judges regularly repeat the obvious message that “you have to get out and vote for your favorites if you don’t want them to go home.” The Idol example, silly though it may seem, is instructive for thinking about last night’s presidential debate.
For anyone listening to the debate analysis, Romney wiped the floor with President Obama. I’ve heard commentators announce that Romney “destroyed,” “obliterated,” and “dominated” Obama. On the Diane Rehm Show, the three guests, ostensibly representing the entire spectrum of American political belief, agree that “this format isn’t really Obama’s strong suit.” On MSNBC, Obama’s liberal supporters are like howler monkeys, shrieking about the President’s failure to “show up” and “get the job done.” As on the teevee, there is widespread disbelief and dismay across the liberal social media landscape. And as if that all wasn’t enough, Obama and his team are apparently so demoralized that his handlers barely showed up to spin the debate last night (one Twitter commenter noted 17 Romney surrogates to only 5 Obamanites talking to the press after the debate), and the Obama campaign has been all but silent this morning. Surely, it seems, last night’s debate was a catastrophic blow to the Obama campaign. But, I think we forget too quickly the American Idol lesson.
For the past several weeks, Obama has looked insurmountable following a series of devastating gaffes on Romney’s part. The most prominent one, of course, is the secretly recorded video of Romney calling 47% of the country leeches and victims that has been making the rounds for the past few weeks. The election forecasters InTrade and FiveThirtyEight blog have had Obama at a huge advantage to win both the electoral and popular votes (not much has changed since last night as that’s concerned, by the way—FiveThirtyEight still gives Obama better than an 80% chance of winning the election.). While this seems like a good thing for the President’s chance at a second term, Chris Daughtry can tell you that there’s nothing worse for turning out voters than a sure thing. In fact, the more certain the President’s chances are, the more he has to worry that voters will lose their motivation to turn out on November 6th.
This put(s) the President in a tough position as a debater. Does he, as Chris Matthews and Ed Shultz suggested, crush his opponent on stage to show that he’s the big man on campus? Or does he soft-pedal into the debate, hoping to convince his supporters that the race is still a tight one and he needs their energy, their fervor, or at least their begrudging support come election day? I think we got a pretty good idea of which path Obama decided was the smarter one. It was no surprise, then, when Senior Advisor to the Obama campaign, David Plouffe, said in an interview on MSNBC that Obama thinks that “in the long run” voters will recognize who the best leader is. Anyone who watched Al Gore’s dominating performance against George W. Bush in 2000, and then watched the electorate revolt against the incumbent because mean old Mr. Gore hurt poor Bushie Wushie’s feelings might recognize the genius of this strategy. I assume it was strategic, for what it’s worth, because, while debates might not be Obama’s greatest platform, there is no evidence that I can see that he or his advisors have ever been anything but masterful at campaigning (whether or not you agree that he’s been great at actually governing). The absence of “messaging” or “spin” following the debates reinforced my sense that Obama’s team made a strategic choice that was far removed from winning last night’s debacle.
As I’ve watched the debate analysis over the past 12 hours or so, it appears the strategy is working. Liberals and Democrats (which are not, by the way, always the same thing) have spent lots of hours and energy rehashing and reasserting Obama’s accomplishments as Commander-in-Chief. Obama’s weakness last night has provided an impetus for renewed energy and commitment on the part of his voting base, in no small part because they’re being reminded (ad nauseum) of his accomplishments over the past four years. On the other hand, conservatives and Republicans (again, not necessarily coterminous) have spent much of the same time lauding Romney’s debate bona fides. For Romney, I can’t help but wonder about whether his push to the middle on things like tax cuts, Medicare, and even Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act (“I’ll get rid of Obamacare and replace it with Romney Care on a state-by-state basis?) will re-energize his voting base or de-energize them. I doubt they’ll be rushing to change teams, but there wasn’t a lot of what the pundits call “red meat” for his supporters to get them excited about casting a ballot in his favor. For people whose minds were made up prior to the debates, nothing that happened last night is likely to change their minds, but much happened that might have changed their motivation. For those who have yet to make up their minds, I imagine this event (and all the energy surrounding it) will inform their eventual decision, but only mildly given the inevitable intensity of the next 5 weeks of campaigning.
Which brings me to my final thought, only tangentially related to what I’ve already said. As I surfed Fizzborg, the Twitter, and other haunts of the political commentariat last night and this morning, a theme kept surfacing: these debates were nothing but political theater, and therefore a waste of time. I find this assertion somewhat distressing for a number of reasons, but I will restrain my observation to just two of them here. First, a large number of people claiming the irrelevance of last night’s debates are also, in other circumstances, wont to claim that they’re troubled by Americans’ widespread disconnection from politics and aversion to democratic civic engagement. This is especially the case among academics, and yet, the sort of abdication I saw repeatedly in regards to the debate made me wonder: If we, the people who are supposed to be professionally critically engaged in this type of civic event, can’t get invested, how can be surprised when our fellow Americans don’t engage either? In tuning out, it seems to me, we risk performing the failure of our own beliefs.
Which leads to my second point. The fact is, a lot happened last night, and the baying of the pundit class was as much a part of what happened as were the lunge-and-parry onstage. The debaters said little and meant even less, but to dismiss it as meaningless theater is a tremendous mistake. This is the political environment in which we live—strategy, messaging, and manipulation are (and have always been) fundamental parts of the process. We act surprised and dismayed, but that’s because we’re playing at being willfully naïve, not because there’s anything so surprising. In fact, there was nothing, and I mean nothing that was truly surprising last night. In the absence of some astonishing revelation, it is easy to dismiss the debates as meaningless. But it is exactly the absence of revelation that invites us, and every potential voter along with us, to consider more deeply the “meaning” of a series of debates that seem absent of any meaning. A tremendous amount of time, energy, and emotion was invested in last night’s event, and to pretend that it was wasted because (1) the debaters weren’t honest or forthcoming enough or (2) the exchange didn’t provide enough revelatory fireworks, is to become the numb, mindless sheep that each party is fond of accusing the other party of catering to.
For anyone listening to the debate analysis, Romney wiped the floor with President Obama. I’ve heard commentators announce that Romney “destroyed,” “obliterated,” and “dominated” Obama. On the Diane Rehm Show, the three guests, ostensibly representing the entire spectrum of American political belief, agree that “this format isn’t really Obama’s strong suit.” On MSNBC, Obama’s liberal supporters are like howler monkeys, shrieking about the President’s failure to “show up” and “get the job done.” As on the teevee, there is widespread disbelief and dismay across the liberal social media landscape. And as if that all wasn’t enough, Obama and his team are apparently so demoralized that his handlers barely showed up to spin the debate last night (one Twitter commenter noted 17 Romney surrogates to only 5 Obamanites talking to the press after the debate), and the Obama campaign has been all but silent this morning. Surely, it seems, last night’s debate was a catastrophic blow to the Obama campaign. But, I think we forget too quickly the American Idol lesson.
For the past several weeks, Obama has looked insurmountable following a series of devastating gaffes on Romney’s part. The most prominent one, of course, is the secretly recorded video of Romney calling 47% of the country leeches and victims that has been making the rounds for the past few weeks. The election forecasters InTrade and FiveThirtyEight blog have had Obama at a huge advantage to win both the electoral and popular votes (not much has changed since last night as that’s concerned, by the way—FiveThirtyEight still gives Obama better than an 80% chance of winning the election.). While this seems like a good thing for the President’s chance at a second term, Chris Daughtry can tell you that there’s nothing worse for turning out voters than a sure thing. In fact, the more certain the President’s chances are, the more he has to worry that voters will lose their motivation to turn out on November 6th.
This put(s) the President in a tough position as a debater. Does he, as Chris Matthews and Ed Shultz suggested, crush his opponent on stage to show that he’s the big man on campus? Or does he soft-pedal into the debate, hoping to convince his supporters that the race is still a tight one and he needs their energy, their fervor, or at least their begrudging support come election day? I think we got a pretty good idea of which path Obama decided was the smarter one. It was no surprise, then, when Senior Advisor to the Obama campaign, David Plouffe, said in an interview on MSNBC that Obama thinks that “in the long run” voters will recognize who the best leader is. Anyone who watched Al Gore’s dominating performance against George W. Bush in 2000, and then watched the electorate revolt against the incumbent because mean old Mr. Gore hurt poor Bushie Wushie’s feelings might recognize the genius of this strategy. I assume it was strategic, for what it’s worth, because, while debates might not be Obama’s greatest platform, there is no evidence that I can see that he or his advisors have ever been anything but masterful at campaigning (whether or not you agree that he’s been great at actually governing). The absence of “messaging” or “spin” following the debates reinforced my sense that Obama’s team made a strategic choice that was far removed from winning last night’s debacle.
As I’ve watched the debate analysis over the past 12 hours or so, it appears the strategy is working. Liberals and Democrats (which are not, by the way, always the same thing) have spent lots of hours and energy rehashing and reasserting Obama’s accomplishments as Commander-in-Chief. Obama’s weakness last night has provided an impetus for renewed energy and commitment on the part of his voting base, in no small part because they’re being reminded (ad nauseum) of his accomplishments over the past four years. On the other hand, conservatives and Republicans (again, not necessarily coterminous) have spent much of the same time lauding Romney’s debate bona fides. For Romney, I can’t help but wonder about whether his push to the middle on things like tax cuts, Medicare, and even Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act (“I’ll get rid of Obamacare and replace it with Romney Care on a state-by-state basis?) will re-energize his voting base or de-energize them. I doubt they’ll be rushing to change teams, but there wasn’t a lot of what the pundits call “red meat” for his supporters to get them excited about casting a ballot in his favor. For people whose minds were made up prior to the debates, nothing that happened last night is likely to change their minds, but much happened that might have changed their motivation. For those who have yet to make up their minds, I imagine this event (and all the energy surrounding it) will inform their eventual decision, but only mildly given the inevitable intensity of the next 5 weeks of campaigning.
Which brings me to my final thought, only tangentially related to what I’ve already said. As I surfed Fizzborg, the Twitter, and other haunts of the political commentariat last night and this morning, a theme kept surfacing: these debates were nothing but political theater, and therefore a waste of time. I find this assertion somewhat distressing for a number of reasons, but I will restrain my observation to just two of them here. First, a large number of people claiming the irrelevance of last night’s debates are also, in other circumstances, wont to claim that they’re troubled by Americans’ widespread disconnection from politics and aversion to democratic civic engagement. This is especially the case among academics, and yet, the sort of abdication I saw repeatedly in regards to the debate made me wonder: If we, the people who are supposed to be professionally critically engaged in this type of civic event, can’t get invested, how can be surprised when our fellow Americans don’t engage either? In tuning out, it seems to me, we risk performing the failure of our own beliefs.
Which leads to my second point. The fact is, a lot happened last night, and the baying of the pundit class was as much a part of what happened as were the lunge-and-parry onstage. The debaters said little and meant even less, but to dismiss it as meaningless theater is a tremendous mistake. This is the political environment in which we live—strategy, messaging, and manipulation are (and have always been) fundamental parts of the process. We act surprised and dismayed, but that’s because we’re playing at being willfully naïve, not because there’s anything so surprising. In fact, there was nothing, and I mean nothing that was truly surprising last night. In the absence of some astonishing revelation, it is easy to dismiss the debates as meaningless. But it is exactly the absence of revelation that invites us, and every potential voter along with us, to consider more deeply the “meaning” of a series of debates that seem absent of any meaning. A tremendous amount of time, energy, and emotion was invested in last night’s event, and to pretend that it was wasted because (1) the debaters weren’t honest or forthcoming enough or (2) the exchange didn’t provide enough revelatory fireworks, is to become the numb, mindless sheep that each party is fond of accusing the other party of catering to.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Notes on a Name: Dissoi Topoi
Dear Readers,
A note on the title of this blog:
Dissoi logoi is an ancient Greek concept traditionally translated as "different words." It is generally understood as the practice of arguing both sides of an issue in order to better understand your opponent's point of view on a given topic. A related definition is "making the worse case the better" with the same goal--to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of an argument. Other people, however, have argued that dissoi logoi can be better understood as taking a contrary position. That is, a practitioner of dissoi logoi does not take a stand on an issue and then attempt to understand their opponent's position. Rather, dissoi logoi is the practice of opposing any position as a way of sparking deeper thought, multiple reconsiderations, and different ways of thinking about a given issue. In the first sense, dissoi logoi is an argumentative tool; in the second, it includes an inventive aspect somewhat lacking in the traditional conception.
Topoi, on the other hand, are inventive categories. Ancient orators relied on topoi, literally "places to find things," (though some people disagree with this translation) to help them discover the available arguments to make about any given issue. Aristotle treated the topoi at length, dividing them into categories for students to memorize and access when they needed to consider the available means of a given argument.
So, dissoi topoi is a phrase I coined (I think) to play on these two ancient concepts. This is a blog of opposition meant to generate (my own) deeper thinking, to help (me) invent new ways to think about old issues, and to build a place (for me) to go for arguments. Hopefully it will help readers with some of the same things.
(Oh, and let's be realistic--I thought it made me sound smart. I mean, c'mon.)
A note on the title of this blog:
Dissoi logoi is an ancient Greek concept traditionally translated as "different words." It is generally understood as the practice of arguing both sides of an issue in order to better understand your opponent's point of view on a given topic. A related definition is "making the worse case the better" with the same goal--to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of an argument. Other people, however, have argued that dissoi logoi can be better understood as taking a contrary position. That is, a practitioner of dissoi logoi does not take a stand on an issue and then attempt to understand their opponent's position. Rather, dissoi logoi is the practice of opposing any position as a way of sparking deeper thought, multiple reconsiderations, and different ways of thinking about a given issue. In the first sense, dissoi logoi is an argumentative tool; in the second, it includes an inventive aspect somewhat lacking in the traditional conception.
Topoi, on the other hand, are inventive categories. Ancient orators relied on topoi, literally "places to find things," (though some people disagree with this translation) to help them discover the available arguments to make about any given issue. Aristotle treated the topoi at length, dividing them into categories for students to memorize and access when they needed to consider the available means of a given argument.
So, dissoi topoi is a phrase I coined (I think) to play on these two ancient concepts. This is a blog of opposition meant to generate (my own) deeper thinking, to help (me) invent new ways to think about old issues, and to build a place (for me) to go for arguments. Hopefully it will help readers with some of the same things.
(Oh, and let's be realistic--I thought it made me sound smart. I mean, c'mon.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)