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Tuesday, August 15, 2023

The Great Endumbening

A More Nuanced Past

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, President George W. Bush gave his historic Axis of Evil speech. In addition to the titular triumvirate, the other line from that speech that made a lasting impact was the proposition to other countries that "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

In the immediate reaction, the country so pro-America and standing behind the commander-in-chief, there was little consternation at this dichotomy, but as the months waned on, and a presidential election loomed, and President Bush used that line, among other things, to push for a war many thought was unrelated and a huge mistake, and to expand the security state at the expense of civil rights, people began to criticize that line.

The biggest criticism was over how it over-simplified the situation. That it's wrong, even if it's rhetorically effective, to paint the world as black and white. John Kerry, Bush's Democratic challenger, came to represent the opposite of Bush's simplistic world. Kerry was the candidate of thoughtfulness and nuance.

"During the last presidential campaign we were endlessly reminded that John Kerry was the standard bearer of the Nuance People, whereas President Bush was the intellectually incurious, black-and-whit, simplistic non-thinker who didn't appreciate life's shades of gray."

Etta Hulme 9/8/04. Fort Worth Star-Telegram

"Nuance is not a word Americans associate with strong leadership. But Kerry called it the essence of his presidency." --NBC News

In fact, it got to a point where George W. Bush was made into Darth Vader in the third and then-final Star Wars prequel.

The Endumbening

Sometime since then and now, however, nuance was thrown out the window, as even something to aspire to. Politicians have often resorted to the black and white-ification of public policy. Climate change policy is a battle between people who want to wreck the economy and those who want to eviscerate the environment. Journalists, though, and the Democratic media complex had promoted it, as an aspect of their push for technocratic rule. Experts, you see, understand policies have benefits and costs, and once they identify all of them, they would be able to govern perfectly.

If I had to pinpoint an exact moment when the zeitgeist changed, it would be when Donald Trump won the 2016 election. From then on, it seems like we are in an entirely different media environment. There is much less tendency to grant that the other side might have strong arguments or that their own arguments are weak, and much more tendency to vilify opponents.

How often does President Biden call every Republican that disagrees with him MAGA? Not to mention Kamala Harris claiming that Florida wanted to "replace history with lies", even though the instigating action by Florida was one that the AP had approved and Democrats (including Harris!) defended six months previously.

In the research for this story, this Slate article came up. In it, the authors gleefully observe that Bush painted himself into a corner with his over-simplistic, un-nuanced rhetoric. He then was in a position where he needed to make a more complicated argument but couldn't because he was trapped by his own one-dimensional world. Humorous in its supreme irony, advertised on this criticism of Bush for being unnuanced was a story about how DeSantis wanted to erase people.

Even in Supreme Court cases, the media consistently dumbs down the esoteric arguments to the point that they're more dissembling than informing. In a decision about whether or not business owners have the power to control their products (not their customers), the media calls that "legalizing discrimination."

Reaching another level is Matt Yglesias. He had the audacity to say that Richard Hanania, even if he was overall a bad person, had some interesting ideas that merited consideration. The left honed in on him.

It's fascinating that lefty Twitter has decided its archenemy is @mattyglesias. Just goes to show that @Atrios still has his mojo.

— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) August 8, 2023

Matt, here, is demonstrating a level of nuance that many on the left have heretofore abandoned. As a result, Matt must be destroyed. It's a particularly interesting episode, because Matt can be open-minded and inclusive but also impressively unforgiving of others who disagree with him, calling Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen and Elon Musk "immoral."

What to make of all this? Previously, I argued that competition among media is bad for the country, and this is a manifestation of that. It is much easier to attract audience with simple themes of good and evil because people are primed for it. We observe that in fiction, history, and politics. People gravitate toward simple messages. Politicians ave been using it for as long as they needed to persuade people to vote for them. Fiction even longer. Media, though, have lately become more enthralled to it as a result of the increased competition for Americans' attention.