Matt Taibbi is one of the good guys, so it's distressing to see him writing this bit of both-sides-do-it-ism in his New York Times review of Seth Rosenfeld's Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power:
... the current culture war being played out between watchers of Fox News and readers of The Huffington Post is really the same old '60s argument, pitting social conservatives' unshakable faith in American exceptionalism against the progressive insistence that there's something dark and violent at the core of American hegemony. These two sides have painstakingly constructed competing versions of recent American history, leaving us without even a common set of historical facts to debate....Why does Taibbi have to give us this pox-on-both-your-houses nonsense? He goes on to praise the book, which makes clear that the FBI was absolutely guilty of excesses and tunnel vision in its overwrought war on the left. If "liberal cable shows" covered the book, wouldn't they cover precisely that, and praise the book in pretty much the terms Taibbi uses? And in praising the book, isn't Taibbi saying that if Michael Savage attacked it by railing against "red-diaper doper babies," it would be a sign not just of his intemperance, but of the fact that he's flat-out wrong about what the book tells us? And even if lefty talkers did focus on anti-Reagan gossip, wouldn't they at least be angry at one of the book's actual villains -- while Savage would have the heroes and villains reversed? Doesn't that mean the two reactions wouldn't be equally regrettable?
If forced through the typical blue/red "Crossfire"-style propaganda shredder, the sensational material [in the book] would be debased, both sides using the book's iconic characters to score quick and easy on-air points. Right-wing screamers like Michael Savage would rail against the book as 700 pages of whining by "red-diaper doper babies" whose idea of changing the world was singing "Yellow Submarine"' and hanging Ronald Reagan in effigy. Liberal cable shows, meanwhile, would make great hay over the sordid revelations about Reagan (whom the F.B.I. records reveal to have been petty and cowardly, snitching on a young actress to the F.B.I. just because she embarrassed him at a cocktail party).
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It upset me that, just as the mainstream press is finally starting to drop its reflexive both-sides-do-it-ism and is vaguely beginning to recognize that the right is nuts, folks like Taibbi and Conor Friedersdorf are seizing the Broderite both-your-houses cudgel, albeit in a libertarian or left-of-liberal form.
I understand why you'd attack Democratic as well Republican politicians if you don't like drones or the drug war or the coddling of banker-criminals. But why attack the left-wing media and its audience, which have shown a willingness to go after both parties from the left on these issues?
This plays all too perfectly into the annoyingly wrong idea that we could break partisan gridlock if it weren't for equally angry partisanship in which both sides have their own facts -- in fact, the right has shown far more willingness to believe conspiracy nonsense than the left, and Fox News spreads craziness much more effectively than any left-wing media outlet does.
Both sides aren't equal in this. C'mon, Matt -- you're smarter than that.
Matt either sold out himself in some fashion and/or is conflating liberals and the right wing as equally homogenous forces balanced inequally in the media, but counter-balanced in other ways, ie "both are equally corrupted and culpable in Wall Street fraud and usury, therefore nothing matters and Dems=Repubs."
ReplyDeleteA problem with being in media as a journalist or an analyst or observer is that you are inevitably taken in by the same language, idioms, and jargon that corrupts you into a style that forces you to take a side, be it right, left or center. You attribute more power to perception and illusion than facts and reality and tend to believe you are the special snowflake that is incorruptible and pure. You cease to be a player in the game and become an unwitting pawn. I call it, "The scales fall off my eyes so I put new ones on" syndrome.
Humans usually only deal in rough binaries. When something upsets that binary, such as "Dems=good, Reps=bad," based on their behavior towards Wall St, Matt Taibbai has no choice but to revise his heuristic to "Dems and Reps=Bad, Independent Outsiders=good, OR "truth telling journalists who pox the entire system without calling for revolution=good, everyone else=partisan=bad."
Matt Taibbi is far more interested in being seen as "independent" and "pure" and "journalistic" than he is for helping promote any political agenda that will inevitably become corrupted and impure, and thus disappoint him. Thus the true enemy of good is always the perfect ideal that is unachievable, and therefore unworthy of effort, when such a successful life and career can be built by saying, "Both sides do it." and "HOOCOODANODE?" and "AMIRITE?" in 3,000 word form.
Also see entry, GREENWALD, GLENN for more information on this phenomenon.
What do you think?
ReplyDeleteDid the FBI back then have less legitimate reason to worry about radicals than the FBI now has to worry about radical Muslims?
From the latter we fear another 9/11.
Nobody in the 60s or 70s even came close to that.
Railing from the right, and railing for the center are lucrative.
ReplyDeleteRailing from the left, and at the center, much less so.
Period.
"... the current culture war being played out between watchers of Fox News and readers of The Huffington Post is really the same old '60s argument, pitting social conservatives' unshakable faith in American exceptionalism against the progressive insistence that there's something dark and violent at the core of American hegemony."
ReplyDeleteI don't get it.
Does that mean he likes American "hegemony"?
Well, I guess maybe it does.
Lord knows there are plenty of "internationalist" liberals who think non-interventionists (aka isolationists) are crackpots.