Thursday, September 14, 2017

"Malleable To The Point of Innocence" is NYT-Speak for "Reprogrammable Meatheads"*

UNITY


After reading Thomas Edsall's column today, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage reportedly got knee-walking drunk, downed a whole bottle of prescription Oxford commas and then threw itself off of a precipitously high dangling participle.

Because like pretty much every other Nerf Ball column about partisanship and politics the Beltway generates these days, Mr. Edsall's contribution to the genre is an exercise in attempting to write about why the GOP is a reeking shitpile of bigots and imbeciles without actually, y'know, talking about why the GOP is a reeking shitpile of bigots and imbeciles.

Right off the bat he tries to clear the very first hurdle from the wrong foot.
In the Trump era, Republicans have been revising their views on right and wrong.
No, Mr. Edsall, this is not some exotic new plague that arrived on our shores with the advent of Stupid Administration.

In fact, for decades the Republican party has depended entirely on it's reprogrammable, bigoted, brain-dead base to win elections -- a base that has eagerly and radically revised their views on right and wrong over and over again depending on whether or not their party occupies the White House. And they have gotten away with it so often thanks to the invaluable assistance of the Conservative media and the Beltway media that by now they have been conditioned to believe that it is their inalienable right to just doublethink all contradictions out of existence -- to wish, wish, wish away their own, inconvenient past as though it had simply never happened.

And it is this corrupt bargain between the media and the Republican Party to never, ever hold the bigoted, brain-dead Republican voters responsible for the disastrous policies and cartoonishly incompetent demagogues and con men they vote for that resulted in the election of President Stupid.

But please, do go on.
...“In a head-spinning reversal,” Robert P. Jones, the C.E.O. of P.R.R.I., wrote in the July 2017 issue of The Atlantic,
white evangelicals went from being the least likely to the most likely group to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality has no bearing on his performance in public office.
What happened in the interim? The answer is obvious: the advent of Donald Trump.
No, no and no again.  The depravity of the Republican base, especially its white conservative evangelicals, is a long-standing pre-existing condition that has manifested itself in many, horrifying ways, the latest and ugliest of which the Trump/Pence administration.

Jesus Syllogism Christ, am I the only who watched the West Wing does the fucking homework?


But please, by all means proceed, Mr. Edsall.
There is more to this phenomenon than evangelical hypocrisy. Many Republican voters, including self-identified strong conservatives, are ready and willing to shift to the left if they’re told that that’s the direction Trump is moving.

Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope, political scientists at Brigham Young University, reported in their recent paper “Does Party Trump Ideology? Disentangling Party and Ideology in America,” that many Republican voters are:
malleable to the point of innocence, and self-reported expressions of ideological fealty are quickly abandoned for policies that — once endorsed by a well-known party leader — run contrary to that expressed ideology.
Those most willing to adjust their positions on ten issues ranging from abortion to guns to taxes are firm Republicans, Trump loyalists, self-identified conservatives and low information Republicans.
This is straight-up, cask-strength, Orwell stuff.  The nightmare scenario about which the dirty hippies have been warning for 30 years (and for which we have been slandered, mocked and roundly ignored by the Very Serious men and women of the mainstream media.)

I have nothing to dispute here.  I just wanted to give you a moment to pause before plunging again to our next stop:  watching as the authors of the cited study -- Messers Barber and Pope -- avoid having their academic funding pulled for being too partisan by abusing the word "may" way past the point of decency (emphasis added.)
Many partisans are, in effect, more aligned with the leader of their party than with the principles of the party. (Although Barber and Pope confined their study to Republicans, they note that Democrats may “react in similar ways given the right set of circumstances.”)
Most of the rest of the column is (as I mentioned at the start) an extended exercise in attempting to write about why the GOP is a reeking shitpile without actually talking about why the GOP is a reeking shitpile.  Most glaringly, there is no whisper to be found anywhere about how the modern Republican Party spent decades methodically reorganizing itself on a foundation of racism.

There is no mention of the Southern Strategy.  No talk of the GOP's 40 year project to create a safe space for bigots and imbeciles.  No discussion of the Fox News.  No mention of the decisive and fatal role played by the rise Hate Radio and of Newt Gingrich's GOPAC a quarter of a century ago.  And above all, no judgement exercised about things like facts or the truth or falsity of the positions of the two parties.  For example. the word "science" does not appear anywhere in this report.  Nor does the word "climate".  Health care?  Nope.  Obama?  Nope.  

Birth certificate?  Benghazi?  emails?  

Nope, nope and nope.

Apparently this Great Sorting all just...sorta...happened.

Because Trump!

And even though apparently no one know how any of this came to be,  golly, it sure is a damn shame that it did.
...
Third, and most significant, if the Barber-Pope, Broockman-Daniels and Achen-Bartels conclusions are right, American politics is less a competition of ideas and more a struggle between two teams.

In other words, insofar as elections have become primal struggles, and political competition has devolved into an atavistic spectacle, the prospect for a return to a politics of compromise and consensus approaches zero, no matter what temporary accommodations professional politicians make.
Oh no, Mr. Edsall, American politics is definitely a competition of ideas.

They're just ideas that you would rather not talk about in the good, gray pages of The New York Times.  

 * (Title of this post shamelessly stolen from @WattleOfBits from the Twitter machine.)



Behold, a Tip Jar!



8 comments:

bowtiejack said...

Wait, wait, wait! I get what Edsall's talking about:

". . . American politics is less a competition of ideas and more a struggle between two teams".

"two teams"! Get it? It's Both Sides!
There is no such thing as right and wrong, truth and lies, it's just a sports competition and journamalism's job is color commentary, not calling fouls.

jim said...

The worm - as is its nature - doth tend to turn.

When you've lost New Hampshire & Oklahoma, you've lost {PUNCHLINE REDACTED DUE TO LEGAL ACTION BY THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY} !

trgahan said...

"...American politics is less a competition of ideas and more a struggle between two teams.”

Bullshit.

The media demands Democratic candidates have ideas and policy. The candidate then gets pilloried by the media over details and their ideas and policy get dismissed by media "intellectuals" as naïve, budget busting, freedom killing, neo-Marxist tripe.

From my experience, Progressive voters also tend to not show up for candidates who don't have tangible ideas.

Republicans can run on talking points proposing to do shit their own voters don't even want (but won't admit in when "liberal" media pollsters come by). Media "intellectuals" call these shallow talking points "compelling" or "outsider thinking."

Republicans are assured to get 40+ percent of the vote because their governors make damn well sure EVERY FUCKING REPUBLCIAN can cast a vote with minimal effort.

Lawrence said...

Malleable to the point of innocence? Malleability has nothing to do with innocence. Do they know of what they do, or do they not? Perhaps further, have they been given the opportunity to gain such knowledge beyond a reasonable doubt, or have they not? Malleable to the point of innocence obliterates the person and assumes a machine. What do I owe a defective and destructive machine? Failing to grasp the gravity of their citizen franchise despite all efforts to impart the knowledge, should that judgement be rendered, obliterates the citizen. A person, perhaps, remains. But not a citizen. But, of course it is far from known that failure to obtain the knowledge occurred despite all reasonable efforts to impart it. Perhaps such efforts were made and others labored to interfere. To distract. To hide the truth. Then those parties would be most responsible. Because someone is always responsible. In this world, and in this time, someone is always responsible.

dinthebeast said...

"...the prospect for a return to a politics of compromise and consensus approaches zero, no matter what temporary accommodations professional politicians make."

Nope. When the Democrats win, compromise (read that capitulation) is demanded, when the Republicans win compromise is equated with treason. By assholes writing shit in the paper just like you.

-Doug in Oakland

Robt said...

The sothern Strategy was not the beginning. A feller named Paul Wyrick had to have exclusive white churches to speak the words of the great ascending.
There were loud clergy of spreading the white supremacist gospel. They too, required cheeks in the pews.

GW Bush was so close to the conservative movements dream. So close was he to being Grover Norquist's president with five working digits to sign his legislation. So very close.
So they built more hate and anger via their wealthy owners as Mercer owns and funds Breitbart, (internet). Rush on radio (sinclair broadcasting propaganda socialism), FOX TV (your rich foreigner Murdock swaping propaganda for media power).
Trump's arrival and rise is merely a reflection of the party who voted and supported him. This included the elusive republican who" says he did not vote for Trump but did not vote against him. (or), vote "for some one that is not a fascist..! Yes, Trump moves in fascist directions.

Trump also benefited from 8 years of racial intolerance shown by too many elected officials of Obama being black. They could not see the whiter side of his life. And all the resentment of the black president and how he humiliated the white fold. Taking their guns. Raping their daughters. Trump Birtherism is vital to the apex of all this generated hatred.

Trump's rise by stealing their nincompoops armies of blind loyal dumshits and selfish tax cuts for me, (if you have to take away a prosthetic leg of a veteran), crowd. The GOP's synagogue Gorgons decided he (Trump) could be their "5 presidential working digits. to sign what they tell him to.
Only to find out, the GOP is not unified and the KKK don't like the NAZIS. The Nazis don't like the anti Semites and the mystical moderate is only a myth. Boy can the rile and campaign and spread hate. Govern once they achieve majority? You cannot govern something you been indoctrinated to hate. They will steal what they can while they can. They aren't there for Americans or constitution beliefs.

While there are many republicans that always rationalize down the complicated to a simplicity with No construct or substance. Like denying climate change by repeating the magic words of, "nothing conclusive".

This reduce it to a sports game is the "Dumbing down" Rush accused the left of doing.

Try reducing it to the game of Monopoly. Bankers, Buying the Americans dream, competition. Dice?
And you can have more than two sides. To begin and play the game.
But you know what? No matter how hard you work at playing the game. No matter who you know. No matter how much you rub the prosperity gospel dice.
The game ends up with one person with everything and everyone else with Nothing. Not even their freedom.


Unknown said...

And make sure that African Americans, Hispanics and other Dem voters can't. This should be front page story about 2016 election. Telling that media never cover GOP voter suppression. GOP doesn't even try to hide it. What it tells me is that media malfeasance has much more to do with promoting fascist agenda than just trollong for clicks and viewers. Mainslime Media, with a few exceptions, is pure evil.

Tom Shefchik said...

"Democrats may “react in similar ways...."" Well, that's definitive proof.

GOPers are malleable because they are too proud and too stupid to admit the have no ideas that would actually help the country. They're called, "flip-floppers".