Disengagement

by tristero

There are many interesting ideas in this post by Julian Sanchez, and it’s generated a good deal of discussion. If you want a good general response to Sanchez, you should read the great Billmon’s riff. I’m going to turn a few of Sanchez’s ideas on their head, especially the notion of “engagement.”

What got me interested in Sanchez’s post was this excerpt:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.

Really? I have a great deal of interest in understanding – and exploiting – the fragilities of the “conservative media ecosystem” and the last thing I’ve found it to be is especially fragile.

Sanchez immediately, and tellingly, veers off-topic to discuss China’s media ecosystem but Billmon gives some examples:

… in a free society, those two conditions [the active participation of the victims of rightwing propaganda and “reality must not push bag too vigorously”] cannot be maintained perpetually and indefinitely (knock on wood), which may explain why the conservative movement in the US has shown a tendency to crash and burn whenever it runs into realities (the 1991 recession, the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial meltdown, etc.) that can neither be assimilated by the false conservative reality nor fully denied by its inhabitants — thus puncturing the doublethink bubble.

If these are examples of fragility, then the window of time during which we can exploit its weakness is extremely limited. The 1991 recession is a long time ago, the ongoing tragedy Bush created in Iraq was rapidly disappeared and is now all but invisible, except for the ritual, and usually deliberately false, announcement that an Al Qaeda leader has been killed; Katrina is no longer important (despite the fact that it is: NOLA has hardly recovered from the double whammy of a natural disaster catastrophic engineering disaster and the Bush administration’s criminal negligence); and the 2008 financial meltdown (aided and abetted by movement conservatives) is now owned lock, stock, and rotted-fish barrel by the Obama administration.

While it’s useful to know that there is very little time to take advantage of the rightwing media’s fragility, this is neither a particularly new, or powerful, insight. More interesting to me is Sanchez’s description of engagement. I am aware that I read it very differently than Sanchez intended. That is because he is interested in understanding infighting among movement conservatives while I am only interested in fomenting it. Also, Sanchez wishes to increase the intellectual heft of modern conservatism while I think that it is impossible and want simply to marginalize it.

When it comes to engagement, I view it – within the context of our current public discourse – in purely operational, of if you prefer, in thoroughly cynical, terms. In short, engagement, and disengagement, are tactics for gaining power. Engagement with the conservative movement’s ideas is not possible because the conservative movement has no genuinely serious ideas (something Sanchez, at least in the present post, all but admits). In 21st Century America, engagement is a tactic, it is simply a discourse with two objectives, neither of them having anything remotely to do with a search for truth or good solutions: the attainment and retention of power.

Privileging the power aspects of engagement – as opposed to privileging the concept that it is an unfettered exchange of honest minds – is a notion so illiberal that many smart liberals – eg, Bob Somerby – react with howls of fury when other liberals – eg, Maddow, one of Bob’s pet peeves – mock, denounce, and otherwise refuse to engage the rightwing by respecting either rightwing political operatives or their victims/participants – that is, the people they are so successfully duping. What Maddow gets that Somerby doesn’t is that there is nothing serious about what the right says, except their will to power. You can engage until you’re blue in the face, and all you will do is lower yourself to their level and raise them to yours.*

In the following passage, Sanchez is interested, among other things, in prodding the likes of AEI and Fox News to strengthen conservatism by acting more intellectually secure; rather than exiling David Frum, or merely dismissing the NY Times as too liberal to consider seriously, he is urging movement conservatives to engage them by welcoming their disagreement and arguing honestly and openly with them.

Good luck with that, Julian. But if we look at what Sanchez has written in a more general way, as simply a critique of the tactics of engagement and disengagement, and then apply what he says to the problem of how liberals should engage (or not), we find that he is both very insightful but also, at least in one important detail, quite mistaken:

The more successfully external sources of information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It’s not just that any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a fellow conservative. Rather, it’s that anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between “critic of conservatives and “wicked liberal smear artist” undermines the effectiveness of the entire information filter. If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely—maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation. A more intellectually secure conservatism would welcome this, because it wouldn’t need to define itself primarily in terms of its rejection of an alien enemy.

To repeat, I am reading what Sanchez writes here in the most general way possible, as observations about how engagement and disengagement work as tactics. Further, I reject his moral judgements because I see engagement not as a moral imperative but, when dealing with the rightwing, simply as a tool, with as much moral valence as a screwdriver.** As engagement is not necessarily a moral good if it provides status to a movement or person who doesn’t deserve it, disengagement is not necessarily bad if it clears the intellectual space so that a real conversation can take place. In other words, just as you don’t waste your time arguing whether there was a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet, you don’t squander the time discussing healthcare reform arguing about death panels.

What Sanchez gets right is that engagement elevates the status of the engaged idea (and the people engaged). That is why movement conservatives keep on demanding that liberals “engage” with them and, then when we do, they use the opportunity to laugh, mock, denounce, and revile. That is also why I began publicly insisting, since 2002, that rather than “engage” advocates of the Bush/Iraq insanity, we laugh at them, ie, refuse to take them seriously. We didn’t – or rather, the media approved pseudo-liberal voices didn’t, and the rest is not history so much as an ongoing tragedy that our grandchildren will still be trying to cope with.

What Sanchez gets wrong, at least as far as I’m concerned – ie, as someone who neither seeks to, nor will engage neo-fascist movement conservatives beyond mockery and the expression of contempt – is the issue of insecurity. I, for one, am quite secure about the quality of my ideas. I am, however, quite terrified at the political insecurity not merely of liberal ideas, and not only of liberal politicians, but of liberal democracy itself. I mean that in the broadest sense of the term: what is sometimes called a democratic government, or more pretentiously, “the Enlightenment project,” ie, a society that privileges reason over adherence to any specific religious creed, a society that governs itself rather than one that is constructed as the personal property of a single member of an aristocratic class.

I’m quite certain about the high intellectual quality of liberalism and the notion of a democratic republic. I am extremely uncertain, to paraphrase Franklin, about whether or not we can keep it.

As long as we continue to engage modern conservatives and take their ideas seriously, we continue to provide them intellectual and political status they neither deserve nor should have. Again: you don’t argue theology with a Bible thumper who tells you the world was literally created in 6 days. Not even William Jennings Bryan was so ignorant and stupid. You laugh at him. And you most certainly make sure he gets nowhere close to obtaining a seat on a local school board, let alone hold national power. And, as Howard Dean so intelligently understood, you challenge the rightwing and Republicans everywhere.

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*Whether Maddow is good at “disengaging” conservatives is a separate question. While some of Somberby’s criticisms are well-taken, on the whole, I think she does a very good job. But I agree with Bob about this: liberals need to get a lot better about understanding how to describe our ideas and confront the right. There are many ways to disengage them. As great as it is, the approach Stewart, Colbert, and Maddow uses is hardly the only one. Nor is it sufficient.

** Someone is bound to maliciously misread this as implying that I am not interested in intellectual engagement. So let’s say this very slowly and clearly: Nothing could be further from the truth. I crave intellectual engagement with people and ideas I disagree with. But the modern conservative movement does not have any ideas it takes seriously other than the will to power. Therefore they cannot be engaged. However, with enough effort, the conservative movement can be returned to the margins of American public discourse. Until that happens, genuine engagement with real ideas is impossible on a national level, a lesson Obama is learning the hard way.