WHAT'S IN A NAME?

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

So I am now being told that we are in the era of "post-truth politics."

According to the pundits, this is an era where facts do not matter.  Instead, media reporting takes the form of "he said, she said" dueling quotations.  Every claim, however preposterous, is framed as the neutral report of an asserted proposition by the would be proponent, followed in turn by an equally anodyne denial of the proposition by the would be opponent.

It is not clear to me when, precisely, this new era began.

In my lifetime, the modern starting point for overt media bashing was Spiro Agnew, circa November 1969.  He was Richard Nixon's Vice President and, like Nixon, was also "a crook."  Unlike Nixon, however, he never really denied it.  Instead, he resigned the Vice-Presidency in 1973 and plead "nolo contendere" to charges of having accepted bribes while serving as Governor of Maryland.  "Nolo contendere" is lawyer-Latin speak for no contest and really just constitutes a sort of linguistic way around having to actually utter the word "guilty" in a courtroom; the two more or less amount to the same thing.  In any case, before he nolo-ed his way to retirement, Agnew toured the land eviscerating the networks and the New York Times and Washington Post for their alleged liberal bias.  Over time, these claims became a settled part of the conservative political canon, ultimately spawning in their wake both Fox News, the post-truth era's example of "fair and balanced," and the snarky anti-media jibes prevalent at any GOP convention.

So, I am thinking, maybe  this "post-truth" period started back then, with media big feet ultimately inhibited into the neutral alley of claim and counterclaim just to avoid the charge of left wing bias.  Woodward and Bernstein, of course, would have none of this, nor would their editor, Ben Bradlee.  They followed the Watergate story wherever it lead, set out the facts, and ignored denials coming from the Nixon White House. 

But ever after, it really has not been the same.  

Reagan skated on Iran-Contra, as did Bush II on no WMD in Iraq.  And now, Romney and Ryan want to do the same on the economy, hoping to assert their way to the White House notwithstanding the plain factual inaccuracy of their claims.  

And it may work.

Here's why.

We are not any dumber than our confreres (and soeurs) from the pre-"post truth" era.  And that era was not one in which facts were always presented with pristine clarity, unalloyed or without varnish.  In fact, the opposite was often the case.  

In the 19th century, before Ochs and Sulzberger began to professionalize journalism, truth was not remotely evident in the broadsheets of the day.  Indeed, when historians tried to reconstruct the famous 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, they relied on the pro-Lincoln newspapers to reconstruct Lincoln's remarks and on the pro-Douglas papers to do the same for Douglas's.  Had they done otherwise, there would be no accurate record for the simple reason that Lincoln papers made Douglas look like a fool while Douglas papers did the same to Lincoln.  Forty years later, things were not much better.  In 1898,  William Randolph Hearst's scandal sheets  more or less started the Spanish-American war all by their lonesome, inundating the public with the dubious claim that the Spanish had attacked an American ship -- the Maine -- in Cuba.  And a half century later, truth still went wanting in the red-baiting and black listing of Joe McCarthy.  

The difference between then and now is that we seemed to be improving.  Regardless of the overt bias of mid-19th century news sheets, or the egomania of Hearst, or the manipulative work of Joe McCarthy, Ochs and Sulzberger and Edward R. Murrow were still manning the barricades on the side of truth.  They weren't ducking the truth; they were searching for it.  And when they missed the mark, they called it a mistake, or an error, or a lie.

That's the problem now.  

We've labelled lies as something else.  They are no longer lies, not even mistakes or errors or just plain wrong.  They are now post-truths, data points in the dawn of an ostensibly new era.

So Chris Christie gets to say Republicans will save Medicare, when the voucher plans they endorse will simply turn this successful government run program over to insurance companies that for fifty years have had us spend more but get less than any other advanced democracy on the planet; or Rick Santorum gets to say Obama ended work requirements for welfare by acceding to waiver requests from GOP Governors, when he did no such thing; or Paul Ryan gets to say Obama "did nothing" with the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction recommendations, when Ryan himself killed them; or everyone at the GOP Convention in Tampa gets to claim Obama told small businessman and woman they did not "build" their enterprises, when the President never said that; or the GOP ticket gets to pretend that spending cuts in a world of near zero interest rates will create economic growth, when they will do the precise opposite.

These aren't "post-truths."  

They are lies.

And calling them post truths . . .

Is just another lie.

AUGUST 1912

AUGUST 1912

About a hundred years ago, all was supposedly right in the world.

Well settled in the predictable conventions of the 19th century, no one, it seemed, even contemplated the possibility that the century long post-Napoleonic order could or would be rent asunder.  European stability, coupled with attendant increases in trade and economic largess triggered by the greatest surge in labor saving gadgetry the world had ever known, seemed to have ushered in an unending era of relative peace and prosperity.  The railroads, telegraphs and oceanic steamers that made the world a smaller place existed in an easy camaraderie with the elevators, refrigerators and now-available-on-a-large-scale "horseless carriages" that made it an easier one as well. 

Sure, there were pockets of despair -- from the Irish nationalists demanding freedom from an imperial order that had unnecessarily killed millions of their countrymen in an if not created then certainly abetted famine, to the widespread poverty of an industrial order that produced a set of discordant notes running from Marx's manifesto to the Paris Commune to the nascent labor movement -- but things on the whole seemed always to be improving.

And then, two years later, a Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian prince and the world blew up.

For well over ninety years now, historians have sliced and diced the causes of World War I from almost every possible angle.  They have lamented the failure of statesmanship that unnecessarily turned a crime into a cause.  They have unmasked the fragility inherent in inter-related monarchies, where Kaiser, Czar and King all had the same grandmother and, perhaps, the same psychoses.  They have plumbed the documentary record to expose the flaws in inter-locking treaty commitments that turned the heirs of Bismarck, Metternich, Gladstone and Disraeli into dominoes that mindlessly fell into their pre-assigned positions, as one after another erstwhile great nation mistook action for strength while dismissing thought as the province of the weak.  They have condemned the leaders who ignored America's Civil War, a stark and recent example of how total war would become in the new industrial age. 

But perhaps the most accurate assessment is this --

World War I happened because no one in any position of responsible authority really thought it could . . . or would.

And in that, there is a lesson for us in August 2012.

We are running around in circles today, and our arguments are often pointless, especially when it comes to the economy.   Neither the temerity of the European Monetary Union nor the austerity plans embraced by various conservative and/or creditor friendly  political parties or governments make any sense in the current economic environment.  When interest rates are near zero, demand has imploded, and growth become anemic, deficits are irrelevant and fiscal stimulus on a massive scale is really the only  solution.  To pretend this is not the case, or to ignore the transparently obvious realities that make it so, is the rough equivalent of assuming in 1912 that a world war lasting four plus years -- and costing tens of millions of lives -- can never happen.  To further assume that austerity will  somehow create a recovery under these circumstances is equivalent to assuming in 1912 that the cavalry will be be relevant in the coming mechanized war. 

Whether fiscal stimulus has to be administered through existing governments, as is the case here in the US and in Britain, both of whom still control their currencies, or must first traduce the barriers of a monetary union that needs to somehow get itself to the point where its supposed central bank is allowed to represent everyone and not just creditors, as is the unfortunate case in most of Europe,  is at this stage almost beside the point.  If it is not done -- both here and there -- there will be no recovery in any significant sense of that word.

What if the opposite is done?  What if Romney becomes president here and implements some version of Rep. Ryan's and the right-wing House of Representatives' budget? What if the European Central Bank continues to dawdle on having member states underwrite continent-wide bonds so that Germany can inflate as Spain, Italy, Greece and Ireland devalue  (growing their economies by making their products cheaper and improving their comparative competitive position)?  What if, in other words, everyone takes their assumed positions and, lemming-like, marches down the road to economic perdition?  What if this all occurs and, as is likely, the consequence is Depression?

The answer is, unfortunately, simple.

One hundred years from now, a new crop of historians will have spent their careers puzzling over the mindlessness of a governing class that ignored reality and assumed the worst could never happen. 

They will ask how it was that science -- in this case, economic science -- could have been so thoroughly discarded. 

They will lament the lives needlessly ruined, the assumptions mindlessly made, the history casually ignored.

And some may even recur to an earlier time and a different world -- the world of August 1912. 

Where a different hell was ultimately produced . . .

For the same reasons.