The Death of Political Discourse

In his column Friday, Paul Krugman put his finger on the fundamental problem with our political discourse today. He wrote:

"What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest
of us, is that we're not living in the America of the
past, where even partisans sometimes
changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're
living in a country in which there is no longer such
a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are
now few, if any, limits to what conservative
politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists
and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would
have pleased the Comintern."

Because he is not a journalist by training, Krugman is a much more objective observer of our current media culture; this is perhaps his biggest asset. Unlike most of his colleagues, including those who consider themselves "liberals," Krugman lacks the reflexive instinct to defend how the mainstream media operates. Krugman's observations about Rove and the demise of non-political truth are right on the money. Rove has been so successful as a political operative because he was among the first to realize how the media revolution of the 1990s fundamentally altered the calculus of political discourse. Rove, like many media observers before him, understood that something false can develop an aura of truth if it is repeated enough times by enough people. He realized that journalists are often lazy fact-checkers and have a tendency to repeat conventional wisdom, i.e., things they assume are true because they've heard them so many times before. This is particularly true in cases where a "fact" fits nicely within a pre-established media narrative. For example, the idea that Dan Quale was "dumb" became an established narrative soon after his arrival on the national stage. Thereafter, any story that involved Dan Quale doing or saying anything remotely "dumb," even if totally inaccurate, was quickly picked up and repeated by the mainstream media to the point where the original truth or falsity of the story was irrelevant. Rove, like many before him, realized that if this seemingly random and unpredictable phenomenon could be controlled or guided, it could be used to great political effect.

In the past, however, attempts to steer this process always encountered two major obstacles. First, establishing a narrative requires getting a lot of people in the media to consistently repeat a set of talking points. In the past, the major players in the mainstream media had very little incentive to simply regurgitate talking points. Second, while reporters have always been lazy fact-checkers, until the last decade or so, they had no qualms about debunking claims they knew to be false. Sly political operatives could often play on the ignorance of the media, but they knew that if they went too far, the press would eventually call them on it.

The key to Karl Rove's success was his realization that the media revolution of the '90s fundamentally changed the rules of the game. The old obstacles were gone, or at least severely weakened. The advent of talk radio, cable news, and the internet provided Republican operatives with an army of partisan talking heads who were willing to parrot any talking point, no matter how ludicrous. Conservatives realized that if they said the same thing loud enough and repeatedly enough, it would eventually gain traction within the mainstream media, that it would gain an aura of legitimacy. Indeed, through this very process conservatives introduced their most powerful idea: that the mainstream media has a liberal bias. Liberal bias became the rallying cry of the new conservative media, and it quickly gained traction among the American public. Reacting to this pressure, the mainstream media fundamentally changed the way it reported political issues. Reporters were suddenly hesistent to discredit even the most bogus of conservative claims for fear of being accused of bias. All issues became relative; all headlines became "Republicans say X, Democrats say Y".

Karl Rove realized that in this sort of environment, there is no objective truth, just differing narratives. In the 2004 presidential campaign, Rovian relativism was on full display. President Bush's campaign ads and stump speech were chalked full of demonstrably untrue statements. At every campaign stop, Bush would tell crowds that John Kerry's wanted to give the United Nations veto power over U.S. national security; he would tell them that Kerry's health care plan would do away with private insurance, and that Kerry wanted to raise taxes on all Americans. Rove knew, of course, that these lies would be repeated ad nauseum within the right-wing echo chamber. He also knew that the mainstream press would dutifully and uncritically report the President's statements, leaving the job of rebutting them to the Kerry camp.

This week, as the Plame scandal resurfaced, we've seen just how low our discourse has sunk. Contrary to the White House's previous categorical denials that Rove was involved in the Plame leak, we now learn that Karl Rove played a central role in the affair. On the day the press corps finally confronted Scott McClellan about this glaring inconsistency, Steven Colbert, in a mock report on the The Daily Show, observed that for a blunder of this proportion, the White House must be wondering what sort of medal they want to bestow on Karl Rove. The very next day, as if to establish beyond all doubt that our political discourse has become a joke, John Gibson of FoxNews authored an editorial entitled "Karl Rove Should Get a Medal." Gibson's article, which praised Rove for having the "cajones" to out Plame, would have made even Colbert blush. In this brave new world of political relativism, there is simply no talking point too ludicrous for the partisan right-wing media to repeat. Republicans are confident that they can weather any storm, that any situation can be spun into relative harmlessness. There is no better evidence of this than the fact that no national Republican politician has broken ranks and asked the White House to explain itself. Indeed a great many ran quickly to Rove's defense. Krugman is absolutely right, "there are now few, if any, limits to what a conservative politician can get away with."