Anti-Speech Situations

John Stuart Mill would say that the best cure for bad speech--for misinformation generated by ignorance or malevolence--is more speech. With a thick enough market for ideas, John Stuart Mill would think, we would be able to weigh and assess ideas much as we weigh and assess pieces of fruit in the marketplace, and pick the ones that offer the best value. An agora of opinions and information would work as well as a market for commodities. Indeed, the week before last, Bruce Bartlett praised the internet and weblogs for providing the potential for a quantum leap in the power of the public sphere of discourse--the arenas in which people who disagree but respect each other's intelligence and goodwill can exchange and consider each other's arguments.

But Kevin Drum fears for the sanity of those of us who try to put Mill's advice to the test:

The Washington Monthly: THE LORD'S WORK?....You know, I sort of admire the way Matt Yglesias continues to take on Charles Krauthammer and Brad DeLong continues to take on Donald Luskin--though I think Brad may have cried uncle on the Luskin thing a while back--but at some point you have to wonder if we're endangering our national resources by allowing this to go on. Surely every moment spent reacting to the increasingly feverish drivel from people like this reduces your IQ by some fraction of a point? And fractions add up. How long before Matt and Brad, Flowers for Algernon-like, end up behind the business end of a mop in an industrial bakery?...

I find myself much more depressed than John Stuart Mill. I look at how the Clinton and Bush administrations have been covered over the past fifteen years. And it leads to the conclusion that more speech--by professional journalists and opinionists, at least--is not the cure for but rather an amplification of bad speech. Many of my friends see this as a right-wing bias: that corrupt liars who pollute the stream of discourse receive financial rewards from the rich and powerful. But I think the problems are deeper and more destructive than that--the examples below should be at least as upsetting to reality-based conservatives as to reality-based liberals, and are focused on Republican misdeeds because Republicans are in power.

(1) We have Duncan Black noting how the corrupt and ignorant National Review receives an undeserved and dangerous legitimacy from having its propaganda acts treated as genuine arguments:

Eschaton: Matt Yglesias notes that Jonah Goldberg is complaining of "Goldberg Derangement Syndrome." This is a similar complaint to that of his fellow NROer [i.e., National Review contributor] Cliff May, who recently wrote:

I enjoy a good debate as much as the next guy but, increasingly, the next guy doesn’t want to argue — he wants to demonize me. He doesn’t want to win the debate; he wants to shut it down. Whether the topic is global warming or Saddam Hussein’s links to terrorists, daring to contradict the “consensus” brings hoots and hollers and worse.

If the question is, "how come the left blogosphere is so reflexively derisive whenever they encounter an argument from people like Goldberg and May," I think that May actually puts his finger on exactly why this is so: It's because so many conservatives want to argue things like global warming is fake and that there were significant ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. These aren't arguments: they're conspiracy theories (as is another foundational conservative myth, that the media has a partisan liberal bias). They have the same basis in fact as the notion that "9/11 was an inside job." And so, consequently, such "arguments" are treated as conspiracy theories deserve to be treated: with derision and scorn. Taking them seriously only gives them and those who make them an undeserved and in fact dangerous legitimacy...

(2) The Wall Street Journal editorial page says that Paul Wolfowitz's corrupt direction that his girlfriend get a $50,000 a year raise demonstrates that Paul Wolfowitz is the right person to fight corruption:

He's a Corrupt Bastard, But He's OUR Corrupt Bastard (Shakesville): The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial that "the forces of the World Bank’s status quo," angered by Wolfowitz's efforts to fight "corruption-as-usual" and institute more accountability in the institution's lending practices, had seized on a trivial issue to bring him down. One former bank staffer said that "some of the countries who failed to block his election are trying to set him up, and he walked into that trap really well"...

(3) Charles Krauthammer. Here is the Carpetbagger Report:

The Carpetbagger Report: but Krauthammer’s latest was so entertaining, I can’t myself.

[D]ebate at home about Iraq becomes increasingly disconnected from the realities.... The Democrats in Congress are so consumed with negotiating... [how] to legislatively ensure [America's] failure [in Iraq]... that they speak almost not at all about the first visible results of [Bush's] strategy. And preliminary results are visible. The landscape is shifting in the two fronts of the current troop surge: Anbar province and Baghdad...

As it turns out, “preliminary results are visible,” but Krauthammer apparently can’t see them....[A] suicide bomber destroying Baghdad’s Sarafiya bridge and another suicide bomber detonating a device inside Iraq’s parliament... [as] Krauthammer bragged about progress towards peace in the city.... [M]ore “visible results” this morning: bombings in Karbala and the Baghdad area killed at least 56 people.... [Y]et, Krauthammer believes Democrats are “increasingly disconnected from the realities of the war on the ground.”...

[B]efore his column went to print, Krauthammer managed to sneak in a “to be sure” line: “The situation in Baghdad is more mixed. Yesterday’s bridge and Green Zone attacks show the insurgents’ ability to bomb sensitive sites. On the other hand, pacification is proceeding.” If multiple bombings are indicative of “pacification,” I’d hate to see what he considers escalating violence...

I think what I miss the most is the absence of reality-based conservatives. Real conservatives should recognize that they lose their honor by going all the way with the global-warming-isn't-real crowd, the Saddam-Hussein-and-Al-Qaeda-are-friends crowd, the we-are-making-rapid-progress-in-Iraq crowd, the Mussolini-and-Hillary-Rodham-Clinton-are-friends crowd, the Paul-Wolfowitz-is-THE-MAN-for-fighting-corruption crowd, and the George-W-Bush-is-our-fearless-leader crowd. And they should be smart enough to realize that they weaken their cause in the long run as well. But--with a few honorable exceptions, of whom Bruce Bartlett and (gulp) Andrew Sullivan come first to mind--the public voices of the reality-based conservatives are few and weak (although their private loathing for their corporate and political masters is in many cases loud and shrill).

And I find nothing in my volumes of Juergen Habermas to tell me how to deal with this problem.

Comments

[Charles]

The liars need to be told they are liars; it is part of our national cure.

At heart, they know that they are engaged in something shameful and disreputable. They cannot find the energy to research a topic to the point that they can put together a genuinely plausible argument, and so they put out easily-detected lies.

But if there are not good people to tirelessly smack down the lies, then the nation begins to believe that there is no such thing as truth. It is when ordinary people cease believing in truth that a nation is destroyed. It is when ordinary people revere the truth that golden ages begin.

[Robert Waldmann]

Off topic but I think the invisible hand gets palsy when the public reward journalists for being pals with the powerful. The idea is that even if editors just want to sell papers and journalists just want to be rich and famous, they will find and report the truth because that is what we want to read. This fails if we want to know what our betters are saying in private. Then we reward journalists who have access. There is no social benefit of journalists seaking access, the powerful will get their message out some way or other. However, so long as we reward journalists with access, they will sacrifice the quest for truth.

I don't blame the star struck journalists, I blame their star struck audiences.

Another conservative who doesn't follow the party line is Francis Fukayama (the guy who came up with the argument so dumb that he became famous). Another (who no one would accuse of being a grown up) is Patrick Buchanan.

Something to think about when you call for an end to right wing message discipline. Do we want to hear what they really think ?

[Matt]

Luskin? Good grief. Anyway back to main points.

The lies we receive from the Bush Bubble Republicans have to do with maintaining inflated assets in their bubble economy.

Our economy has been spit by the conservative Bush boondogle into an attempted molecule, to use the atomic analogy. The effect of the Cheney,Bush team has been to create a second economy, a bubble on the right.

They need to get the economy on the left to assume the liability for the inflated assets of their right side bubble. Effectively, they have tried to create an economy of their own to the right of the federal legislature, not possible. They did this by price fixing taxes, minimum wage and social security, creating a constriction between the middle class and the conservative growing bubble.

The minimum wage hike is a first pass at market equilibrium, the left offering to cover at least half of the 3 trillion dollar bubble.

Aside:
The minimum wage is one of those economic institutions which need updating yearly by small amounts, like income taxes and social security. Both institutions need some semi-monopoly independence from the legislature, so they can act more like the federal reserve.

The Bush conservatives are still rejectionist, so to cover the costs of minimum wage they need to increasingly borrow short term cash to continue to fund the negative assets they hold dear. Hence the short term volatility we see.

The Republicans will fail to convert these inflated assets into a real liability to the middle class because they are falling further away from a market equilibrium. This will continue until the wealthy in the right side bubble are just passing increasingly deflated money around at higher speeds. They will either have to launch an indpendent atom, or bite the bullet.

Hence the lies. The lies are all about trying to convince the middle class that there is value in this 3 trillion adventure. The longer the Bush bubblers hold this line, the farther they will fall.

After the crash, legislatures need to think seriously about giving some independence to federal economic institutions. Giving the federal government institutions independence reduces correlation and instability.

[vdk]

please please please please....never give up the good fight on our friend Don Luskin.....an occasional vetting of poor Don's drivel is certainly worth a couple of point increase in ones "emotional" IQ....and fractions do add up....

[Barry]

Brad: "But I think the problems are deeper and more destructive than that--the examples below should be at least as upsetting to reality-based conservatives as to reality-based liberals, and are focused on Republican misdeeds because Republicans are in power."

IIRC, you've pointed out before the the reality-based conservatives are not the people running the show. As for focusing on Republican misdeeds, please recall the Clinton years. Journalists had no problem taking dictation from GOP partisans in 'think tanks', whose whole job was to spread every lie that'd stick. And by 2000, the Bush vs Gore presidential coverage was incredibly bad. In 2004, Kerry was made to look like sh*t even as it was clear that Bush was happily leading us into disaster.

What we've seen is something that you should recognize - large scale journalism responds to incentives, the incentives of those who make the decisions. Corporate higher management likes a corrupt GOP government, unless or until the corruption and incompetancy gets so bad that corporate management is affected.

Truth, as a value in itself, isn't of much value.

[Roger Albin]

Habermas is too much of a relativist to be useful. Try Karl Popper. Popper's colleague Imre Lakatos on Popper: Intellectual honesty consists rather in specifying precisely the conditions under which one is willing to give up one's position... Belief may be a regrettably unavoidable biological weakness to be kept under the control of criticism; but commitment is for Popper an outright crime.
Translation: you don't want the Public Sphere, you want a scientific invisible college dedicated to falsification.

[Mike]

If you're smart, it doesn't take too many 'examples' (Robert Parry, Gary Webb and Robert Scheer come immediately to mind) to figure out that 'pimpin' for da man' is the only sure way to keep your (corporate) media job. If you're not that sharp, it never occurs to you that that's what you're doing. Eventually, almost everybody remaining in the 'serious' end of a 'game' like that is bound to fall into one or the other of those two general catergories.

Then there's the whole 'infotainment' phenomenon--Falwell, Stern, Limbaugh, Imus, O'Reilly, retchcetera, retchcetera.

Is it really surprising to anyone here that no one 'out there' pays much attention to any of it any more?

[Rich C]

So, part of the solution must be the change the incentives faced by the media. I think this may be simpler than Brad supposes, considering that other countires, inclduing Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, which share our basic legal traditions do not have this problem. I believe that when the Supreme Court made it much more difficult for public figures to secure damages for libel (with the Sullivan decision), they eliminated a key incentive that induced editors and publishers to be careful that they only published true things. The elimination of this incentive has gone hand with the erosion of standards in journalism.

[sm]

I have often said in comments in this very blog that the time spent swatting down lies and exposing delusion might at some point (the problem in my proposal: when is that point?) be better used featuring smart people saying smart things that don't get their due attention. Every blog post by a smart person who has figured out the liars and their misleading constructions does not be a primer for readers who have not figured them out, or an exercise in solidarity with other frustrated people who have also figured these things out. It feels good for the writer perhaps, to point out that Jonah Goldberg has said something dishonest or stupid for the 10000th time, and isn't it a shame that he gets paid real money to do so?

But every time a smart person invests a paragraph in pointing at JG's stupidity, or makes a detailed analysis of the corruption of the big-money US media, while one of the smart person's friends is doing the same on her/his blog, good ideas and important facts are being crowded out.

Identify the good ideas and the smart people and the honest critics (I like the Popperian test) and beat the drums for them. Make it possible for the less informed and inexperienced to find the useful ideas that the NYT or WP will never feature.

[Matt Austern]

You may be more pessimistic than Mill, but, you know, I'm afraid you are still too optimistic.

You end this post by pointing out that reality-based conservatives lose their honor by going along with this crowd, and by saying that in the long run they weaken their cause. You're certainly right about the first point, but about the second? I'd like to see the evidence. I really would.

The trouble is, as you point out elsewhere in the post, that these techniques of distraction and deception work. Bad speech gets amplified, and power begets power. Some of our negative feedback mechanisms still work, but others are demonstrably broken.

It's true that the Republican party lost the most recent national election, but it was the first national election they lost in ten years. We're still a closely divided electorate, and the right still has important institutional advantages. There's still no reason to think that the right's tactics, unsavory alliances and flight from reality included, have hurt the right's long-term prospects.

[The Fool]

Charles said, "The liars need to be told they are liars; it is part of our national cure."

Bingo. It's The Lying, Stupid.

As long as the Republicans can lie with impunity, they will never be stopped.
The Democrats have got to turn the lying itself into an issue. When a Republican lies about issue x, it is not enough just to refute their claim by saying not-x. We have to also take the further steps of calling the lie a "lie" and characterizing the liar as a "liar".

In the political realm, outside of academia, I don't think there really is any substantial number of reality-based conservatives. The lying over the last 6 years (really the last 27 years) has turned from a steady stream into a raging flood. Anyone with any respect for truth or reality would have ditched the lying sack of shit conservatives a long, long time ago.

[baileyman]

Perhaps the reason that one shouldn't expect resurgent Dems to lie less than the Reps is that while the Reps are at heart all Federalists, most of the Dems are also. And the Federalists are anti-democratic. They are the party of the few, and they have to lie to stay in business.

[Mike]

"...while the Reps are at heart all Federalists, most of the Dems are also....they have to lie to stay in business."

Smile when you 'commercial[ly] speech' like that, baileyman <]:^)

[Ken Muldrew]

"when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality judiciously, as you will, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too"

Of course the speaker was intentionally misusing the word "reality" to taunt those who respect empirical validity, but still, he understands that this cycle of make-believe can go on for a very long time as long as the realists choose rhetoric over violence. In fact, the more obvious the lies, the more likely it is that the reality-based community will fall back on reason and logical argument to demonstrate the essential dishonesty behind the assertions. Meanwhile, the Rovians have moved on to another set of lies. The whole game seems to be predicated on finding out just how long the U.S. nation can resist collapse on the momentum of the federal bureaucracy alone. It's reminiscent of the final experiment carried out at the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

Brad once wrote, "This school [libertarian economic fundamentalist] is such as to make refutation difficult: their universe of values and assumptions is "crazy" in that it has so little in common with the one that the rest of us take for granted that it is hard to determine what arguments will have purchase." The problem is similar with the Rovians, but much, much harder to understand. If they truly believe that "reality" is a construction of those with political and economic power, then there is no hope for understanding; their brains are simply not properly connected. Alternatively, if they are as malicious and genuinely evil as they must be if they are simply playing a game that leads to certain ruin, then they similarly cannot be understood by people with a conscience and some hope for the future of humanity.

[C. L. Ball]

But people discount information's accuracy based on perceived source bias -- the general public does it and blog reader do too. If DeLong says that Bush's immigration policies are good, then I know they really are good because DeLong does not think much of Bush. If Luksin says Clinton's fiscal policy is good, I know it is good .

Who takes NR, WSJ, or Krauthammer to be unbiased sources? Their info. is discounted by its audience because their slant is known. Obviously, readers of this blog figured it out, so why assume that everyone else has not? We are not privy to super-secret info. that others lack; we sorted good from bad speech.

[John Emerson]

The ownership of centralized media is where I see the problem. I also believe that a lot of junk media is driven by finance, and finance is motivated by tax and regulation reductions. We're not dealing with ideological rightists, we're dealing with people (the owners) for whom no political issue is more important than their financial bottom line -- for which deregulation and tax reductions is a very good thing.

When truth and knowledge become entirely commoditized (you get what you pay for), democracy will be completely dead, and rational government might be too.

I suspect that there's lots of stuff out there about the truth market, but after reading Nobelist Becker's execrable book about the marriage factory and its child-commodity products producing child-utility, I think that I'll take a break.

[Barry]

CL Ball, the 'efficient market information' hypothesis is a rather strong assumption. Easily disproven by asking any Faux News watcher about the bias of Faux News. Krauthammer, for one, wouldn't be on any mainstream publication if he were discounted for bias.

[Mills Skeptic]

Andrew Sullivan?! I gave up on him when, during the Gore-Bush campaign, his comment on Krugman's exposure of Bush's lies was that if lies were the only way to get small government conservatives into office lies were justified. Since I haven't read him since, I am open to correction on this.

But how can someone who has publically said that he doesn't care about truth, but only political effectiveness, ever again be believed about anything?

The only way the effectiveness of the media makes any sense to me is to assume that the bulk of the intended audience doesn't do any consistancy checking (suggested long ago in a paper called "The Structure of Belief Systems in Mass Publics"). In such a context I'm afraid the market model breaks down; volume and repetition are all that matter. At least for a disturbingly long time.

[sm]

Two things about Andrew Sullivan worth knowing.

He talks more about the importance of the issue of torture than any major blogger I know.

Also he has an eye for material. Every day he directs me to something good.

See my earlier comments.

[Kenneth Almquist]

Re: Ball's point that "people discount information's accuracy based on perceived source bias."

This strikes me as a poor heuristic, in part because I think the overwhelming problem in today's world is not filtering out bias but dealing with outright dishonesty.

Example: "If DeLong says that Bush's immigration policies are good, then I know they really are good because DeLong does not think much of Bush."

You really think it's likely that Brad would oppose an immigration policy just because Bush supports it? From what I've seen, Brad is a more serious thinker than that.

On the flip side, it strikes me as silly to take Brad's opinion as gospel just because Brad happens to agree with Bush on something.

Second example: "If Luksin says Clinton's fiscal policy is good, I know it is good ."

I gagged when read this. Apparently you believe that whether Luskin praises or criticizes Clinton's fiscal policy depends, at least in part, on whether Clinton's fiscal policy is good or bad. Why? Brad has collected plenty of evidence that Luskin's opinions are worthless. You have, at least in this comment, presented no evidence that Luskin's opinions have any relationship to reality. So I get the impression that "Luskin's opinions are not completely worthless" is an article of faith with you, which you persist in holding regardless of the evidence.

[johne]

Ken:
"[T]he momentum of the federal bureaucracy alone" may be more reminiscent of the USSR in general than of just Chernobyl. Not long after the abortive Prague Spring was crushed, a Czechoslovakian told me, speaking of both the Soviet and the new Czech masters, "They know it's not going to last much longer, but they figure that it will last long enough that they will be fine."

[banana]

Brad: John Stuart Mill would say that the best cure for bad speech--for misinformation generated by ignorance or malevolence--is more speech.

Assumption that people are rational consumers of information could have been new and useful in 18th century. By 21st we just might have moved forward in our understanding, no?

[C. L. Ball]

Almquist is right that in my prior comment I have "presented no evidence that Luskin's opinions have any relationship to reality" but that is not the signaling point. If X is critical of Y in general and then X supports Y's policy(A), I have a signal, not proof, that policy(A) is different. If Z is supportive of Y in general, and Z supports Y's policy(A), I have neither a signal nor proof that policy(A) is good.

Public opinion research shows that people discount information from potentially biased sources when they do not understand the technical side of it. This is why Bush Social Security plans lost public support. The public did not, in general, understand the technical analysis, but when normally pro-Bush politicians, activists, and commentators criticized the Bush plan, they took the signal and Bush propaganda did not good.