People, Personas, and Politics 27 – Recent American Politics
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/15
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Rick Rosner: At least in recent American politics, Republicans have been more willing to biased and unfair and come up with clever ways to circumvent democracy. They developed an apparatus long before the democrats developed one in response to the Republican apparatus to get hyper-conservative justices onto the Supreme Court. And Republicans were the ones who in 2010 came up with effective ways to gerrymander a huge percentage of the states.
Republicans are less hesitant to engage in non-democratic tactics. And that extends to what facts they choose to pull out of the confusing ball of all facts pertaining to a particular issue. They cherry pick. They build conspiracies.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One thing in response to all of that. That you have facts. You have political positions in theory along a spectrum – in reality dotted along that spectrum on various topics for individual citizens. But an important thing is, the discussions people have with, for instance, a democrat vs. republican or a liberal vs. conservative. These discussions they rely on a premise, which I don’t think necessarily holds up too much validity.
In that, you have people debating, essentially, political talking points, and that’s not a real discussion. I do not mean to say that you and Lance did that because I saw a little bit of one video, not in full. But my sense is a lot of the time people have discussions on political talking points rather than on issues and trying to come to the most factual basis of it because people cherry pick as has happened – more on the Republican side at this point in time.
RR: I like what you’re saying that political talking points not being discussions. They aren’t really discussions. They are entertainment. CNN is super guilty of this.
SDJ: You can tell! The ‘discussions’ are dull.
RR: It is a bit like a sports match. You cheer for your side. CNN puts knuckleheads on like Jeffrey Lord.
SDJ: [Laughing].
RR: People do not get better informed from this type of discourse. It is more who can out argue the other or who can get in there and say the most—I don’t know. It is not news.
SDJ: That has its own comedy. The solution to that is hard because you have to make a genuine position of ignorance, which is in itself an experience of not knowing which is uncomfortable. It is like coming to a new kind of math when you’re younger as most people have experienced. You don’t know it. There’s a moment of fear and anxiety about not knowing what’s there and feeling like you want to give up.
But listening to someone genuinely makes conversation and, therefore, life less dull because you do not know what’s coming, but you come to a negotiated and more complicated view of the world. Which is better because, because as we talked about on ideologies (Left, Center, and Right), those are simplified views of the world, which lead you to some modicums of truth, but, in general, wrongness about the world.
But the complicated views you come to from negotiation can help suss out what is really the case and then actually provide grounds for real discussion for solutions.
RR: People naturally – at least people for the last 100 years – have a progressive-rationalist view of life in America at least. That is, that things will keep getting better in the fullness of time and that people will keep getting more enlightened and rational, but since the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the coming of angry conservative white radio guys like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Alex Jones and Fox News.
A lot of discourse in America includes people who are belligerently wrong about—have been fed bullshit and have been made confident in it. So even when there’s a clear set of facts based on evidence and often on the most sensible interpretation of what’s going on, you have like a quarter of the country backing points of view that are deceptively manipulated, cynically manipulated.
And don’t represent well-informed or very rational points of view. Tens of millions of people have been cultivated, have had their brains softened by a steady stream of propaganda. Decades of propaganda now, and so, rational discourse is often tainted by people who believe or endorse bullshit. Of course, there have been many periods in history in which that has been the case, but it is not the way that Americans thought that their country would—It is not a direction Americans thought that their country would go, but we are in the thick of it right now.
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