The Relativism of the Right

For a real surreal experience, take a look at the NY Times' endorsement of Kerry. It's actually pretty righteous, systematically taking the Bush presidency apart, blow by blow, error by error:

• The hard right agenda: "Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right. "
• The inept war on terror: "The Justice Department cannot claim one major successful terrorism prosecution, and has squandered much of the trust and patience the American people freely gave in 2001."
• The Saddam-has-nukes language, even after officials learned the evidence was bogus: "Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway. None of the president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war that followed."
• The utter failure of our foreign policy: "The international outrage over the American invasion is now joined by a sense of disdain for the incompetence of the effort. Moderate Arab leaders who have attempted to introduce a modicum of democracy are tainted by their connection to an administration that is now radioactive in the Muslim world. Heads of rogue states, including Iran and North Korea, have been taught decisively that the best protection against a pre-emptive American strike is to acquire nuclear weapons themselves."
• Radical judge appointments: "Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis."
• Fiscal irresponsibility and incompetence: "The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management. "
• And the uppercut: "We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. "

All in all, quite gratifying reading. And most surprisingly, clearly focussed -- for the most part -- on the kind of hard reality issues that the newspaper of record should truly be focussing on: the real failure of Homeland Security and Justice departments to make the country safer; the real deception that took place in the runup to the Iraq war; the real idiocy of bogging our troops down in Iraq while Iran and North Korea go nuclear.

So why surreal? First, because the actual news part of the paper is so afraid to talk about any of these points. The editors seem to believe that any facet of reality that reflects badly on Bush is, by nature, a partisan attack, and must either be countered by some kind of stab at Kerry, or relegated to the opinion page. Under a normal presidency you might not even notice, but with so much going wrong for Bush, this policy has created a situation where a great deal of reality simply cannot be thoroughly discussed.

Where did the Times get the crazy idea that reporting fact is somehow an act of liberal bias?

Could it be, say, from the rabid, venomous right?

"To readers [of the Times], it means that President Bush is wrong, not only because the editorial page of The Times says he's wrong, but because the president's views fly in the face of what are being presented as objective facts. No technique of bias is more powerful - more useful as a means of influence - than presenting a candidate's unadulterated views through a prism of advocacy passed off as hard news."

That would be Bob Kohn, charming author of Journalistic Fraud: How The New York Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted, writing in -- guess where -- the Times! Please sir, may I have another?

The piece, pit against an uninspiring Todd Gitlin effort arguing that the Times lets Bush off too easy, is a fascinating study in how the right works. Worth a full read. It takes advantage of a lamentable column Okrent wrote in July declaring that yes, the Times is a liberal paper, because more people write telling him that the paper is too liberal than too conservative. He also points out that there are stories about cross-dressers in the metro section, and that creationists are not represented in the Science Times. (Once again, the right stakes out a position out beyond the ether, tells the left that they are out of the mainstream, then waits for the center to shift over to them.)

So, back to Kohn. He can't come up with any actual evidence that the Times was biased in its campaign coverage, but he latches onto this admission of social bias, saying that social issues are part of the campaign, ergo the paper is inherently biased against Bush. That is, reporting that gay couples who have married are happy, or that minorities have been helped by affirmative action, is in and of itself an attack on Bush.

Then he argues that the paper does the same on hard news. For example, by simply stating that the Dalfour report shows that Saddam didn't have WMDs, as opposed to accepting the administration's "See!-Saddam-was-this-close-to-using-oil-for-food-to-rebuild-his-WMD-program-so-we-HAD-to-invade" spin hook line and sinker, the Times was being biased.

I'm going to lengths here because this really captures how the right works. The key is conflating real issues of objective fact with murky social issues. Social issues are good for conservatives, because they come down to values and liberals' instinct is to respect everyone's values, be equanimous, etc. Then, once the pick is set, you switch to matters like the economy or Iraq, but you maintain the assumption that there is no objective truth. You make up your own version of reality, insist vehemently on it, and argue that the other side is making stuff up. You present the choice between real objective reality and your fantasy version as just another undecidable clash of values, like abortion or prayer in school. You reduce everything to a question of ideology. And often enough, the press buys it, running your spin alongside the cold hard facts and "letting the reader decide".

Epistemologically, we are in Stalin and Lenin country here, where there is no truth, only party lines.