Shutting the conversation down

I always shake my head at the irony of a Fox News pundit claiming that President Obama has politicized the death of Michael Brown. This comes from the folks who - along with other rightwing media outlets - have made it their goal to politicize EVERYTHING.

I was reminded of how that happens when I read this article in PowerLine about the politicization of history. But we have plenty of evidence about how the right has politicized everything from science (evolution and climate change) to math (unscewing polls). The success of these attempts can be seen by the fact that where we shop is political, how we acknowledge holidays is political, and cultural icons are political.

Fox News and other right wing media play on all this to set up one side as righteous and the other as out to destroy America as we know it. So if you are a truly patriotic American, you agree with our side and any other position is to be excluded as the enemy. It is this attempt to politicize everything that Julian Sanchez calls epistemic closure.

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...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.

In order to halt any real conversation, one of the tools often used by right wing media is to cast every issue as an either/or. Media Matters has been doing a pretty good job lately of showing how Fox News edited the remarks of President Obama and AG Eric Holder about the situation in Ferguson by eliminating the balance in their statements. They aired only the side of these remarks that was sure to inflame their audience and eliminated the side conservatives might have agreed with.

There are two reasons why its important to understand this pattern. One is so that we can recognize what the right wing media is doing. But perhaps even more important - so that we can check ourselves and make sure we're not doing the same damn thing.

An astute commenter here pointed out how Michael Eric Dyson did the exact same thing (in reverse) to statements made my President Obama about the situation in Ferguson. Dyson basically wrote a script for what he thinks the President should have said:

And I'm saying to you that if he could inform American society that, look, yes, we must keep them law, yes we must keep the peace, people must calm their passion, but let me explain to you why people might be hurt, why they might be angry and why they might be upset. That is his responsibility to tell that truth regardless of what those political fallouts will be.

Now here's what President Obama actually said:

As Americans, we've got to use this moment to seek out our shared humanity that's been laid bare by this moment -- the potential of a young man and the sorrows of parents, the frustrations of a community, the ideals that we hold as one united American family.

...I’ve said this before -- in too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement. In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear.

To give Dyson the benefit of the doubt, I'm going to suggest that he heard what the President said that made him angry...and not much else. Brittany Cooper did exactly the same thing when she critiqued Rev. Al Sharpton's remarks at the Michael Brown Memorial.

So while our walls of epistemic closure might not be as high or as impenetrable as those on the right, we fool ourselves if we don't admit that they exist. Because anger is such a strong trigger, we go there and shut the conversation down - never getting to the possibilities of where we might agree.

I actually think that Rev. Sharpton spoke eloquently to exactly what is going on - and sounded an awful lot like Bernice Johnson Reagon in the process.

Sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves won't solve our problems. Sitting around having ghetto pity parties rather than organizing and strategizing and putting our differences aside. Yes, we got young and old. Yes, we got things that we don't like about each other, but it's bigger than our egos. It's bigger than everybody. We need everybody because I'm gonna tell you, I don't care how much money you got, I don't care what position you hold. I don't care how much education you got. If we can't protect a child walking down the street in Ferguson, and protect him, and bring justice, all you got don't matter to nobody but you!

Can we talk? High-fiving Coates and Chait (updated x4)

No one is going to accuse me of breaking any news when I say that our politics has become polarized. When we're not retreating into information bubbles that confirm what we already think (ie, epistemic closure) we're yelling ad hominems at each other and then storming off in outrage. Years ago then-Senator Barack Obama warned us that this played completely into a conservative agenda.

A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

That's exactly why I want to notice and applaud the conversation that is currently underway between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait. Yes, they are disagreeing with each other. And not only that - we're watching a black man and a white man have a conversation about race in America. The odds that this happens in a way that informs rather than inflames are minimal at best. And yet that's exactly what we're seeing.

In case you haven't been following along, it all started when Ta-Nehisi Coates reacted to Rep. Paul Ryan's statements about a culture in our inner cities that doesn't value the importance of work. Here are the links for how it has progressed from there (so far):

Jonathan Chait

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Jonathan Chait 

I promise that if you read all four articles, you are going to learn some things about race in America. But I also have this warning: if you go in thinking its time to dig in your heels and take one person's side over the other one - you're going to miss out on a lot. As Nezua wrote a while ago, I encourage you to let go of your surety and exist for just a moment on the "purpling beaches of dusk."

...life is not like a series of books in a course on …anything. It fluctuates. We fluctuate. We are not a being, but a becoming, as Friedrich once said. And sometimes ideas are hammered out and we draw lines and walls and are told we fall on one side or the other and so do our thoughts and so does all that follows from them…and so it goes. We buy into these illusory borders, too...

I am far more comfortable navigating the in-between than I am in any Place. I like no thing as much as the coming and going from one to another. It is on the purpling beaches of dusk and the roseing gauze of dawn that my true eye shines lidless and I see so much more than in broad daylight. In the falling away of my tired husk I remember my shape can only be held temporarily. And to cling too tightly to it is to rot.

Being sure is but the borderwall we place around a heart to ward off the skinstripping wind of the next living moment.

I really hope that Coates responds and that this conversation continues. That's only partly because in his latest response Chait brought up the article I wanted to ask Coates about. But WAY more important than that is the fact that this back-and-forth is exactly what a conversation over disagreements should look like. We see far to little of that these days.

Update 3/30/14: Coates has written his next response. I'm going to keep updating this post so that I can compile the entire conversation here.

Update 3/31/14: Chait responds.

Update 4/3/14: A little something from me on all this

Update 4/4/14: The latest from Coates

When conversation becomes a threat

We are witnessing a fascinating psychological phenomenon these days from those on the right of the political spectrum. As polling suggests that Mitt Romney is going to loose the election (perhaps badly), conservatives are experiencing the cognitive dissonance of the world not behaving as they've come to believe it would/should.

What it comes down to is that their anger/fear of President Obama is so extreme that they couldn't countenance that the rest of the country might not feel the same way. The reality of the polls is challenging their assumptions. And so what do they do? Dismiss the polls. Contrary to what we might think, that behavior is not all that uncommon amongst human beings...we tend to dismiss information that conflicts with how we've come to see the world. Its just that conservatives (and a few liberals I might add) have been able to take this kind of thing to a whole new level.

No one described this phenomenon better than Julian Sanchez a couple of years ago. He even gave it a name - epistemic closure. The definition of epistemic is: "of or relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation." And so here's how Sanchez talks about the right's tendency these days to close themselves off from knowledge:

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... 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.

(Emphasis mine)

Note that he refers to the conservative media ecosystem as fragile. This is inherently true of any set of ideas that has to wall itself off from criticism.  If your ideas cannot tolerate engagement, they are inherently fragile. And that is precisely why conversation becomes a threat.

I don't for one minute think that when Sanchez is referring to conversation, he means the kind of ideological battle we often see in the comment threads of blogs. Very often that is an attempt to dismiss conversation rather than engage in it.

Thinking about that takes me back to something Michael Lewis said about how President Obama constructs meetings when he has to make the tough calls.

He likes to make decisions by having his mind occupying the various positions. He likes to imagine holding the view.

That's what someone does when they want to enter a real conversation not beholden to ideology or dogmatism - but to decide on the very best course of action (pragmatic problem-solving at its best).

It also reminds me of an article I wrote about two years ago by James Kloppenberg.

Throughout his career, Obama has refused to demonize his opponents. Instead, he has sought them out and listened to them. He has tried to understand how they think and why they see the world as they do. His mother encouraged this sense of empathy, and it’s a lesson Obama learned well. Since January 2009, Obama has watched his efforts at reconciliation, experimentation, and -consensus--building bounce off the hard surfaces of political self-interest and entrenched partisanship, but there is no reason to think he will abandon that strategy now. He knows that disagreement is a vital part of the American fabric, and that our differences are neither shallow nor trivial.

Although Obama’s reform agenda echoes aspects of those advanced by many Democrats over the last century, he has admitted—and this is the decisive point in understanding his outlook—that his opponents hold principles rooted as deeply in American history as his own. “I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush’s eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him,” he wrote in Audacity. “That’s what empathy does—it calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal … We are all shaken out of our complacency.” Obama rejects dogma, embraces uncertainty, and dismisses the fables that often pass for history among partisans on both sides who need heroes and villains, and who resist more-nuanced understandings of the past and the present...

After almost two years as president, Obama has failed to satisfy the left for the same reason that he has antagonized the right. He does not share their self-righteous certainty.

That's what it means to have an actual conversation.

From all this we can see why that kind of engagement is something Republicans fear the most and President Obama thinks is our greatest tool. He has confidence in our ability to sort things out, whereas all they have is fear and fragility. He is inviting us to share that confidence and engage the conversation.

Our goal should be to stick to our guns on those core values that make this country great, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention that can achieve those goals, and try to create the sort of serious, adult, consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will. This is more than just a matter of "framing," although clarity of language, thought, and heart are required. It's a matter of actually having faith in the American people's ability to hear a real and authentic debate about the issues that matter.