The Times Editorial Page Shows Its Ass

Today's New York Times editorial lambasting Barack Obama for his supposed "shift" to the center is a sad example of the all-too-common ignorance, laziness, and stupidity of the 4th estate. In short, the Times is showing its ass. I love the Times, and I read it every single day. But through a combination of misunderstanding of the policy issues in question, a lack of scrutiny of Republican spin, and tacit participation in the collective media effort over the last few weeks to "take the shine off" Obama in a very hands-on fashion (for the sake of "the narrative" and horse-racemanship) they have blundered terribly. Post-Hillary stress disorder may be playing a role as well.

The fact of the matter is that Obama has "shifted" exactly nowhere - not center, not right, not left, not anywhere. What's more, if you take each of the issues on which the Times criticized Obama (Iraq, FISA, death penalty, campaign finance, gun control) and do the smallest amount of due diligence, you will realize just how much his decisions have reflected A) the consistent pursuit of progressive, not centrist, interests and B) intelligence rather than pandering to surface impressions, precisely when pandering would have been the far easier route.

Take FISA, for example. The Times has not been the only leftish outlet to criticize Obama on his decision to support the new FISA bill. But if you listen to Jonathan Alter, you will quickly realize that Obama's decision was simply the intelligent choice of someone who understands better than most what's at stake legally and how things will play out politically. We should be grateful to have a legal mind as practiced as Obama's when it comes time to make such decisions.

Obama did indeed trade the restoration of the FISA courts - a dire necessity - for telecom immunity. The latter is what some leftists don't like. But they should know, as Obama does, that there is absolutely nothing to stop the new congress, working in tandem with Obama's administration, from revisiting the immunity clause and completely changing it in six months time. That new congress will likely have both a Senate and a House that is majority Democrat. So what Obama really traded was short term immunity for the telecoms. What's more, even that immunity, so traded, does not apply in the case when someone has been harmed by a telecom's participation in wire-tapping. In other words, the immunity has strict and important limits. In exchange, what Obama got was a restoration of the constitution, which the Bush administration had flagrantly demolished in violation of American civil liberties. In part because of Barack's support of this compromise, FISA is back in business, and the Bush administration, for the next few months, cannot run roughshod over the constitution. In other words, Barack got the constitution's heart started by ignoring an infected flesh wound that he knows he can treat later with antibiotics. But all the American left can do is cry "Amputation is inevitable! Save the leg before the heart or you're a leg-sacrificer forever!"

Now Obama knows that not everyone will agree with his compromise (because some people are morons, though he's far too generous and smart to even imply it). And in contrast to the way the McCain camp does business, Obama issued a refreshingly open and grown-up defence of his decision, acknowledging that he will sometimes make decisions that not everyone will agree with.

For anyone without a tin ear, it's clear that far from reflecting a strategy to pander to the center and get votes in the November election, Obama's FISA decision is a risky one that Obama well knows is risky. Yet he made it anyway because it reflects what he actually believes is best for the country. (A country full of idiots, by the way, who don't deserve such a president.) Obama will get exactly zero love from swing voters for his FISA decisions. It's just not the kind of issue that resonates with swing voters. It does, however, resonate with the left, so Obama had nothing to gain by voting the way he did and everything to lose. Thus, the pandering accusation on the part of the Times could not be more egregiously false, bordering on perverse. If the New York Times were correct in their assertion that the last few weeks of decisions reflect a strategic choice on Obama's part to move toward the center, they would be right in also stating that it is a failed strategy. But what could not be clearer is that the last few weeks do not reflect such a strategic move. Rather, they marked a random collection of decisions, combined with a set of non-decisions (like the non-change in Barack's Iraq war policy) that Republicans have spun as changes, and that the New York Times has swallowed and regurgitated as a strategic change in the Obama camp. If Obama were a run-of-the-mill political talent, the Times' gulled surmise about what's happening might have had a pretty good chance of being accurate. Such is way the politicians we are accustomed to operate; their decisions reflect short term political necessity and not a consistent, intelligent approach to the issues at hand.

But as it is, the Times is simply supporting the Republican narrative that Obama is a new slick willie, a huckster "willing to do anything to win". Appropriately, it was a column by Times columnist David Brooks that announced this to be the new Republican way of framing Barack's decisions, soon after Barack chose to opt out of the public financing system. A few weeks later, Paul Krugman was claiming that Barack is the new Bill Clinton. Here are two men, supposedly writing from opposite sides of the political spectrum, who have decided that Barack is a huckster in the same week. Now, supposedly in the name of progressivism, the Times editorial page is helping to flesh out that frame. Coincidence? I think not. I think the Times editors are either dupes or they are crafting a narrative designed to make the Obama-McCain contest closer - that's what I think.

What's even more ironic about this is that Obama's decision on FISA is, for anyone who has the remotest understanding of the legislation, the clear winner from a progressive standpoint. There will be other legislation for which Obama's moderate stance will be far less in lockstep with the progressive point of view. But the FISA bill is not one of them. If progressives did less shrieking and more thinking they would understand better what their interests are. Of course, by the time Obama makes a decision that genuinely departs from leftist orthodoxy, "the narrative" will have changed, and the Times editorial page probably won't even notice. Because, as this week's editorial page reveals, they are prone to the same kind of numbskull myopia and attention deficit disorder as their more mickey mouse colleagues at CNN and FOXNews. Come on Times; act like the journalists we know you are capable of being on a good day.

Call me a Obamaniac if you wish, but posterity will show just what the real story is here, and that story is this: this is one of the most sophisticated, intelligent, and courageous politicians we will see in our lifetimes. You do not need to be in "thrall" to the Obama charisma to understand this. All you need is half a brain and not be under pressure to sell papers.

Obama's Shocking Centrism

Today Paul Krugman has a column claiming that Barack Obama is the new Bill Clinton. That's strange, since everyone else in the Democratic party thought Hillary was the new Bill Clinton, including Hillary. Krugman is either framing Obama's candidacy in a way that defames the intelligence of progressive voters to flatter his own (he's always supported Hillary), or he simply fails to understand Obama's candidacy.

I think it's both.

According to Krugman, Obama presents a "facade" of transformational politics when he really won't change things much at all. "At heart", Krugman hopes we will be scandalized to hear, Obama is a centrist (this idea of where Obama's "heart" is is important). Thus, progressives have been swindled, duped, and manipulated.

The column reveals a great deal about the Baby Boomer mentality that currently dominates the pundit classes. Contrary to Krugman's understanding, progressives got exactly what they wanted. Yet like so many of his peers, only some of whom were Hillary supporters, he wants to chalk up Obama's victory to something other than the American people's overwhelming dissatisfaction with Washington culture, and not just the Bush administration. Crediting Obama's victory to a cult of personality or a technicality or even the Clinton campaign's miscues obscures the fact that his nomination is in some measure a judgment rendered on the pundit class itself. In fact, it's a judgment on a whole generation's approach to politics. After all, Bill Clinton was arguably the first boomer politician, and Obama's nomination means that we have likely seen the last. Already.

Lest we forget, Obama and Clinton had almost identical policy positions. The choice between them came down to the fact that Obama offered to do more than be the anti-Bush. He offered to be the anti-Bush and the anti-Clinton. Hillary offered the continuation of a dynasty, a prospect so distasteful that Democrats jumped at the chance to nominate an articulate, but relatively inexperienced alternative with a fresh vision.

Krugman's is a column that could only have been written by someone who fails to take into account that there is a new politics, driven by young people for whom the ideological wars of the 20th century are of diminishing import. Names like Lukács and Althusser and Marcuse are indeed obscure for them. Lenin and Stalin are simply less memorable Hitlers, part of a large ensemble cast of vile men from long ago in a galaxy far far away. This lack of memory is perhaps justly decried in some quarters, but a bad memory may not harm the new progressivism much. Progressives may have been swindled, but on the other hand, it might be time to redefine what progressivism means. If so, then forgetfulness will not only be helpful, but necessary.

Krugman's outlook also fails to take into account the emergence of the two most important political parties: the insiders and the outsiders. It's odd that a member of the generation that once vowed to "never trust anyone over 30" now fails to see the degree to which Americans of all ages resent establishment Washington and feel powerless to change it. The inside-outside dynamic is the defining fact of American politics today.

Outside of Washington, people do not think it normal that politics should proceed without actual legislating. Call them members of the vast and radical "do-something" party. Krugman is part of the small but powerful "do-nothings", people who assume that normal politics has always been and must always be as bellicose as it is now, who thought that Obama's lack of experience with politics so-conceived was a great mark against him, and who believe that the ideological poles of the last century will define the 21st. But they won't. And the reason they won't is that the systemic rot has become so acute as to open huge fissures in the traditional voting coalitions on the left and the right. No one is getting what they want out of the current system, and so experimentation is in the air. This, I am betting, will make traditional liberals like Krugman and traditional conservatives like Rove, O'Reilly, and Limbaugh irrelevant in very short order.

If these folks' political sensibilities and their careers had not been forged in the crucible of confrontationalist politics, they would realize just how radical a candidate Barack Obama really is. He's radical because, while committed to traditional liberal causes like civil rights and helping the working poor, his is a liberalism that is more committed to getting things done than to being thought correct or authentic. That doesn't mean he hesitates to disagree with his opponent, but it does mean he refuses to demonize him. But we should realize that Obama's skill is about more than not doing things; it has been so long since we had a civil political climate that we've forgotten how one works. That means Obama is blazing new territory, trying to figure just how to do manage a media cycle that would seem to demand rancor, micro-scandals, and constant crises.

In Obama's world, so-called revolutionary credibility is a pretentious luxury. That's something a person like Krugman, whose idea of liberalism was crafted (by others on his behalf) at meetings of Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s, cannot understand. In that milieux, being a liberal was about demonstrating, with wild-eyed vows, that you were working for violent revolution, even if you were a mainstream politician with no intention of being violent. You had to be a confrontationalist to prove your mettle, and indeed, it was this very revolutionary one-up-manship that began tearing apart SDS and large chunks of the American left before COINTELPRO agents ever walked into their meetings.

Even moderate leftists like Bill and Hillary Clinton became sensible that in order to be considered sincere leftists, they had to hate the "fascists" that were running the country. "In their hearts", it needed to be made clear, they were revolutionaries. During primaries, they would be required to communicate the same zeal to the base, while pandering to the oh-so-bourgeois expectation of calm rationality. Hence the particularly taboo sin of Obama's "heartfelt" centrism. Democratic political meat is supposed to be pinker the closer you get to the heart. Obama, by contrast, appears to be medium rare all the way through.

During 80s and 90s battles over issues like abortion and school prayer, the Republicans forged their own version of this kind of acid confrontationalism using religion. The result has been almost total legislative stalement in Washington for the last two decades. But it was the religion of American Marxism that started the arms race of confrontationalist politics in America. Had we all lived through the 50s, with its hypocrisies, its easy sense of white, male entitlement, and its systemized oppression, confrontationalism would no doubt still make sense to many of us the way it does to the aging liberal pundit class.

How quickly things change, however, especially in the age of the internet. If this were a different era, the boomers could have expected to sit on the presidency for at least another decade. But that's not going to happen. And the reason it's not going to happen is that the 21st century cannot afford the do-nothing agenda any longer, and thus it cannot afford confrontationalism either. It's simply not good enough to name-call and filibuster and go home.

We have a country to save from its reliance on oil. We have a physical and educational infrastructure to rebuild in order to compete economically with China and India, on a sustainable basis. And we have an international reputation to redeem. That means compromise. And yet, compared to the bald neglect and vast waste that uncompromising and "authentic" politics has wrought, Obama's "get 'er done" attitude, reflected not only in his brief legislative career, but in his every word, whether in a speech or on the bus, is absolutely the medicine the country needs. It's medicine that at least one 60s icon would have approved of, the one who sang "Come together, right now" and "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow."

Make no mistake, Barack is no Billary. Billary would have been a polarizing figure that would have fed the Republican attack machine, while only Barack has the skill to defuse the Republican attack machine and the will to genuinely change the culture in Washington. That's not to say it's guaranteed that he will do so. After all, there are far too many people with a stake in perpetuating the culture of massive retaliation.

Also don't expect to read about it in the newspapers for a while - because just about everyone writing columns will resist Barack's truly transformational politics. It's probably time the nation's newspaper editorial pages reflected younger attitudes. Unfortunately, it's more likely the nation's newspapers will dig themselves deeper into irrelevance and unintentionally raise the profile of bloggers that much more quickly by failing to understand the obsolescence of the likes of Paul Krugman. This will only underscore the differences between what's old and what's new. Eventually, you will be able to know where you stand just by token of what media you use.

The souls of aging American confrontationalists are twisted things. They've sacrificed so much ethically to try to make something happen in Washington in the vain effort to avoid compromising legislatively. They now take the lobbyist culture and 1000-dollar-a-plate fundraisers for granted. They have contempt for the very "people" they once sought to help, and they are convinced now more than ever of how irredeemably evil and ruthless their opponents across the aisle are.

And here comes sauntering in some (uppity) young black man with barely any hair on his manifesto to declare that the lobbying culture is toxic, the fundraisers obsolete; that regular people, because of the internet, have a newly powerful role to play in the process; and that the people across the aisle deserve our, yes, heartfelt, respect. Blech!

If you're Paul Krugman or Hillary Clinton, your shrivelled Grinch's heart cries out for succor. Naif! Charlatan! Demagogue! It's an act! He's not really a uniter; he can't be, because compromise can't ever really happen! We know this to be true. There aren't any ratings in it. No, wait! Even worse. He is a uniter. He's serious! And nobody wants a sincere uniter, do they? He fooled everyone when he ... said ... he was ... what ... he ... is. Yes fooled us all with the appearance of revolutionary zeal, despite saying clearly that he was moderate. Remember when he refused to wear the flag pin? We knew what that meant as well as anyone at Fox News! Communist! And we loved him for it! Who listens to what people say anymore anyway? Surely progressives are smart enough not to fall for that old trick. Are people really buying this? Doh! Curse Obama and every Hoo who caucused for him down in Hooville!

Santayana created one of the great cliches of the latter half of the 20th century when he butchered Nietzsche and said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. It was a portentous nostrum for an elegiac, modern mood. But there is a corollary that future generations should make their guiding light: the ever-blooming necessity of effective action is the only thing that makes the past worth remembering.

Uncle Steve vs Dark Matter

[http://objective.jesussave.us/creationsciencefair.html]

For your amusement and, um, consternation, I present the Baptist Creation Science Fair, in which an elementary school girl presents positive proof (!) of the evolution conspiracy by attempting to feed her Uncle Steve a banana. Steve's refusal of said banana clearly demonstrates his non-simian genome, or something.

And as counterpoint, to dilute the grody hubris of the scientific community, I present the New Scientists' "13 Things that Do Not Make Sense". Which of these 13 "mysteries" will scientists resolve first? Which will never be resolved?
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600

The thing that, for me, ties all of this together and makes it all interesting is the way in which people develop personal criteria for continuing belief in a worldview/methodology/dogma despite clear evidence of that system's inability to explain/resolve/account for the totality of phenomena. I often find lay people (and sometimes scientists - see my last post) marvelling at the way in which cancer patients believe in quack cures or primitive peoples accept the wisdom of the shaman, as if demonstrations of the inadequacy of those "charlatans" were ubiquitous and self-evident. What these people seem to fail to grasp is that skepticism and belief are completely intertwined, and that all belief systems require sustained
psychological resistance against the arguments/proofs/rationales/examples of the inadequacy of that system.

Most of us who believe in Science do not do so because of firsthand experience! Few of us have assembled even one rigorous experiment! So, people who accept scientific proof as valid are not sufficiently distinguished from those who accept creationism by the existence of "evidence" or evidentiary criteria. What's more, discourse exists because no system has a "complete" or totalizing set of evidentiary criteria that make all other kinds of belief impossible or unreasonable. The spectrum of phenomena and experience is simply too varied.

(In this vein, I also recommend reading this amazing tract against democracy called "Democracy is Kufr" http://www.1924.org/books/pdfs/Democracy.pdf from a site called 1924.org, which seeks to support Muslims in their effort to stop western ideas from infiltrating their homes and countries and minds. It is a fascinating site, and the tract in question had me nodding my head when it flatly pointed out that our country is run not by a majority but rather by wealthy business interests, duh, or when it notes repeatedly how much spiritual havoc the separation of church and state wreaks on the individual - a matter which, if you really think about it, is far from settled, as we post-enlightenment secular westerners like to assume.)

Scientists hold many contradictory beliefs and yet many of us continue to believe Science to be a valid and valuable enterprise. Why is this so? It is not so simple a question as we would like it to be, and I frankly tire of the common response to the creationist agenda, which is usually incredulity, mocking, or dismissal. As I recall, these were the same kinds of attitudes that lost the democrats the election. The longer scientists continue to believe that "the evidence speaks for itself" and refuse to acknowledge belief as a cultural process, the more jeopardy they put themselves in. Science, in other words, MUST compete in the marketplace of ideas. It MUST assert itself, not as a replacement for religion or spiritual convinction, but as a set of methods, values, and cultural practices that help us understand our existence and the universe, and which human beings have come to value for their explanatory power, consistency, and breadth. Only through this kind of dialogue can we help more Americans to see the ways in which scientific endeavor truly does and does not present a challenge to the religious believer.

Also, the philosophy of science has advanced far beyond the positvism of the late 19th century, though some scientists have not! And what's perhaps most important is that the public face of the philosophy of science is especially bound up in outdated and invalid assumptions, from a naive belief in the existence of "pure facts" (without any awareness of hermeneutics/theory of interpretation) to a phenomenology that is basically "atomist" in character, where the world is composed of chunklets (since quantum mechanics is mystifying, it is more or less ignored) to a notion of human "uniqueness" that is pre-1920s (human beings have language, animals don't; human beings use tools, animals don't; human beings feel pain, animals don't). This has the effect of making, say, the ethics of Peter Singer, seem unusually cold and alien to average people. And it certainly impoverishes the stem cell and abortion debates. Science can't afford this kind of popular ignorance!

Feynman and the Cult of Science

[http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html]

Here is a link to an object lesson in so very very many things. In fact, it summarizes so much about our modern culture and the culture of science that exists alongside and inside and outside of it, that I would have had a hard time crafting a parody more brilliant and articulate. What we have here is Richard Feynman, noted public scientist (and, dare we say it, celebrity intellectual?) speaking about what science is and what it does and all the crazy things that people who are not doing science, in fact, do. The anchoring metaphor of the piece is the example of the Cargo Cult people of the south pacific, who build runways and make nonfunctional communications gear out of bamboo in hopes that planes will land and bring them the kind of cool stuff they brought during World War II.

The difference between Mr. Feynman and myself is that I believe that, gratefully, we are all Cargo Cultists, including scientists - ever imitating the form of things in hopes of stumbling upon a solution. This is the dirty part of science that Mr. Feynman would like to pretend does not exist - the process of hypothesis formation. Hypothesis formation is an essentially creative (if also analytical) activity that draws on the whole range of the experiences of the scientist, most definitely including imitation of form. We see this process at work in Da Vinci, who built wings of wood and feathers that looked like the bird's, and whose work influenced every subsequent aeronaut, both would-be and successful. Such imitation may not always be sufficiently rigorous to provide real solutions to problems, but in many cases, it is quite sufficient. Witness the imitation in nature - where an oppossum's sham death is quite sufficient, in many cases, to avoid predation, or in genomic science, where by having one gene imitate another great progress is made. In fact, the line between form and function is often drawn at precisely the point where imitation begins to fail to lead to a desired result. Had the Cargo Cult people managed to build exact replicas of 50s radio equipment, only to find no one to speak to but passing fisherman, they could be congratulated for their rigor and attention to detail, but not for their success in bringing airplanes to the island. Their new magical equipment would have failed to function as desired.

I only wish that scientists were as willing to hold up messy creativity as essential to their work as cherished observation. I have encountered many a cynical lab technician and post-doc employed by the "cancer industry", one of thousands of researchers who do work every day that has little bearing on any kind of cure. They follow up obscure leads, rule out scenarios that were already terribly unlikely. In other words, they imitate the form of the scientific method, day in and day out, because the grant money is there and because hopefully, amongst all the admittedly useless activity, a handful of experiments are done that actually have some chance of bringing real progress to the search for a cure. In other words, even science must pay the bills, and it often does so with research that is "merely formal". Is this a great moral failing or necessary realism?

One of the many things that Feynman reveals about science, I think, is how at pains its practitioners are to separate themselves by dint of method, from other kinds of thinkers. Is this passion derived from a serious belief that one day, if we can distill "scientific integrity" into its pure principles, we might jettison any other kind of human effort, creative or intellectual, to be honest and thorough and rigorous? I'm sorry, but no institution will ever accomplish that. Principles alone will never uniquely and thoroughly identify charlatans and separate them from trusted helpers. Ask anyone whose loved one has ever died of cancer after long and tortorous years of chemotherapy whether our modern witch doctors have solutions that "work". I guarantee you'll find someone waiting to be converted to another kind of religion than the one that you and your labcoated fellows preach. Ask any south american tribesman whether the shaman's aloe poultices soothe chafed skin, and you'll find someone loathe to abandon his healer's sacred wisdom.

Whatever you might think you mean by "scientific integrity", I would remind you that intellectual integrity transcends a slavish devotion to empiricist positivism, and that if "does it work consistently and observably without any room for interpretation or disupte?" were the only criteria for success in experimentation, 99% of "science" would never get done.

Moyers Discovers Right-Wing Relativism

In this last NOW, Bill Moyers, an intelligent left-wing journalist at PBS, demonstrates all that is wrong with traditional progressivism's conception of the media and of journalism. His expose on the right-wing media is well-encapsulated by this supposedly damning quote by Richard Viguerie, right-wing propagandist: "That’s what journalism is, Bill. It’s all just opinion. Just opinion."

We are given a pregnant pause with which to absorb the statement, as if Moyers and his editors believe it speaks for itself, that it testifies to the moral bankruptcy of the American right, and that it finally draws a big dark line between journalism that has integrity and journalism that does not. We are meant, I suppose, to yearn for Huntley and Brinkley, for Cronkite, for an illusory era of fair and informative journalism which never existed and never will. What did exist was a time when leftists felt they could legitimately "believe" in such a system, and it made them feel warm and fuzzy. But as with most religious faiths, this particular belief system concealed basic contradictions and was preserved primarily because it had its own kind of utility to the power structure. There is a class of people who are motivated by the ego that comes from feeling they are "good and right". And those people were motivated and still are motivated by the idea that journalism is or can be "fair and balanced".

But it isn't and it cannot be. And so Viguerie is absolutely 100 percent correct. What's really very ironic is that Viguerie, either because of simple ethical convenience or because he reads theory or because it filtered down to him through the culture, has picked up a core tenet of post-structuralist critical thought. He is, in effect, a practicing relativist - someone who has come to accept that there is no truth, that evidence is always the result of some human being's very biased process of hypothesis-formation and observation, that statistics are always intrinsically unreliable, and that even if facts could be "purified" of their non-objectivity (many statistical "controls" are meant to remove bias), they must always be selected for presentation. And this selection itself is always fraught with bias. What's more, human cognitive processes determine how and when and why a person or a group of people will be receptive to arguments and facts - and so the same argument made with the same facts can be constructed so that different people perceive and draw distinct conclusions. Viguerie also understands that this does not make "facts" unimportant. Quite the contrary, it means that a good news producer will "seize the means of fact production", so to speak, and make sure the facts that get manufactured and filtered are the "right" facts.

In other words, leftist theorists preach relativism. Right-wing propagandist/newsmen practice it. Yet another irony in this ever-twisting debate over journalistic integrity is that the christian right claims to be so appalled by the notion of "relativism". Perhaps this is a revealing bit of false consciousness, however. Murdoch, Ailes, Rove, and yes, Jerry Falwell, well know (or it is beginning to dawn on them) that the real reason for the objectivity meme is that in a system where reporters and information consumers both believe in objectivity - that is, take it as an article of faith - a journal can more easily sell its "truth" to people and be perceived as credible. Hence FOX News' mocking slogan "Fair and Balanced". Yes, in this particular moment, the right has the most to gain by undermining the "objectivity" meme - so as to destroy the credibility of lazy, complacent, milque-toast liberal papers like the New York Times.

But what liberals need to realize is that the Times and the Post and their brethren and all their "objectivity" and all their "fairness" - do not and cannot help progressivism in an era in which the power of the objectivity meme has been eroded. What's more, we should not mourn it's passing, as we are better off without it anyway. Leaving "objectivity" behind will ultimately make us more ethical and more flexible. Like any dogma, devoted adherents cling to it as the only guarrantor of their moral superiority. Objectivity has been a journalist's anchor for a very long time, so it is to be expected that many will not let it go. But in reality, the ideal of objectivity has never guarranteed anything, and even as it inspires some, it gives others a false sense of their own ethical position.

A new era has dawned, and here are the facts, so to speak, of this new era:

1. It is one in which we must accept diversity. We cannot deliver the same progressivism to all peoples and expect them to all go along. We must know our information consumers and market a different progressivism to each of them, not different fundamentally, but different in style and in tone and in some cases, the kind of content filtered or emphasized. The conservative "news" machine has failed to recognize this, and they still speak primarily to their admittedly powerful and influential angry white male demographic. But how does their message come off to new hispanic immigrants, to gays, to soccer moms? O'Reilly's shouting and Hannity's snarky self-satisfaction alienates these groups. What if there were radio hosts who were delivering a tweaked message in a different style for each demographic profile? Well, I'll tell you what would happen: the democrats would REALLY be in trouble. The right wing is on the cusp of understanding these techniques, thanks to their study of marketing, but they have yet to really embrace them.

2. We must leverage the insights of semiotics, cognitive science, and psychology to learn about how people receive and dissect messages, in visual media, in text, in audio. We must know intimately how people "hear" us, and therefore how we may better "speak" to them. The new era in communication will be an era of "usable information". If consumers can't "use" the information to make meanings, we are wasting our time delivering it to them. By "use", I should be clear what I intend: people "use" information to construct a coherent and positive picture of an often incoherent and negative world. They "use" information to affirm themselves, their identities, their life choices, and their relationships. This is the sense in which all progressive information must be "usable" in the future. It must fit like a comfortable glove on the hand that is the psyche of the information consumer.

3. You can sell anyone on any platform, so long as you understand the way to hook them, to use the right memes and the right slant on your message, and to filter out noise. We must not let our own understanding of what our policies actually are discourage us from expending the resources required to deliver our message to particular groups. Why would a gun-owning neo-nazi vote for Kerry? In the future, with the right techniques, this will seem highly plausible. Remember, every election cycle Republicans get poor people to vote against their own self-interest by producing a cultural stageplay whose heroes and villains are fictive. The play features "limousine liberals" and "political correctness cops" and lots of other people who want to cramp the style of the poor and ignorant person. The stageplay appeals by painting its viewer as basically correct and painting those who would educate and elevate that person's situation, socially, intellectually, financially - as elitist snobs. It is easy to look down upon the ignorant for how easily they are manipulated. It is easy to say "shame" on the Republicans who play on their ignorance and vanity in such a calculating manner. But the truth is that far smarter, far wealthier people are just as vain and ignorant. And though it may seem counter-intuitive, we must begin to imagine a role in the progressive cause of the beneficent manipulator, someone whose job is to create imaginative spaces in which it is possible again for all the ignorant people - from Nascar dads to bourgeois bohemians, from proles to professors to executives - to believe again in values that are actually in their economic and psycho-social interests.

4. Delivering a message that is as nuanced and difficult as the real issues in the real world is not possible, even assuming your consumer is educated, with a sky-high IQ. Most people can't even begin to digest the daily paper - which itself is an unfocused and clumsy instrument of expression. Even academics and other highly educated people are specialists, with knowledge limited to particular subject areas. Nobody knows it all. Most of us know very little about the realities that underly the legislative and regulatory process. We are little qualified to render opinions on such complex issues; if we were working in the organizations that are actually on the frontlines of international politics, education, or social welfare, our ignorance would quickly be made clear to each of us. No matter how articulate or expressive a journalist's approach, no matter which medium used, when one tries to deliver nuanced and detailed information, one message is clearer to the reader than any other: "you, the info-consumer, are too busy and too ignorant to understand this issue". That message is basically alienating and troubling for all classes of people. Of course, this, doesn't mean it is a bad idea to deliver different messages to relatively informed readers and relatively uninformed ones. But both messages must, of course, affirm the consumers' tight grasp of the issues, confirm to them that they are good, effective, and insightful consumers of the data. By aligning themselves with the cause of progressivism, they must feel they are demonstrating this fact. (Of course, most left-targeted journals already do this subconsciously. Just go read Harper's and you'll see how much winking ego-stroking they do for their self-satisfied leftist readership. And yet, this message is often mixed with a healthy dose of disdain and condescension, sporadically targeted, and therefore likely to offend some of their readers.) But in the new era, we must do this in a more rigorous and discplined manner for a greater variety of types of info-consumers.

5. We must limit message inteference or noise as much as possible. In other words, we want to drive information consumers to the right progressive media. This means driving them away from FOXNews, but it also means keeping them away from progressive channels that aren't right for their profile. We want our soccer moms to receive the soccer mom message, and we want our homosexual constituents to receive their message, and we want to limit the interference as much as possible, while simultaneously limiting the damage it does. In a media era defined primarily by networked systems and large databases of profile information on media consumers, this model will be extremely possible. The good news is that most people already do a great deal of self-selection in terms of the media they choose - picking outlets that affirm their pre-conceived notions over those that don't. However, we must know more about how and why this occurs, and increase the positive feedback effects of the phenomenon.

In short, we must remake the news-scape, the simu-reality, the ficto-actual mediated world of all information consumers, in a way that does not judge them and in a way that does not shy away from manipulating them. The wisest among us know that we must manipulate ourselves for our own good - because none of us is omniscient or free from susceptibility to the sophisticated techniques of psychological manipulation. Quite the contrary - we are all too predictably susceptible - every last one of us. And we cannot fight it; call it propaganda if you wish. Imagine Huxley's or Orwell's dystopias if you wish. Be naive and draw a snobbish line between the educated and the uneducated. Imagine yourself impervious to "control". Imagine yourself as infinitely authentic and strong. They've already created a category for you, and you are already being manipulated.

But every second people like Moyers spend moralizing, every second we spend thinking of ourselves as heroes of mental resistance, the marketers and their right wing clients are refining their techniques and gaining the upper hand in this information war. I would rather be winning it . . . for all our sakes.

Machiavellian Memes

In the last week or so, I have been flattered to see that there has been discussion of my post on Applied Memetics. Thanks to everyone who responded by email and on discussion boards. There have been two kinds of responses especially that deserve a reply. One is that my post seemed somewhat Machiavellian. That, of course, is my paraphrase, but people have variously been concerned about the ethical implications of using memetics to achieve progressive goals. The second kind of response has been basically, "Call these things 'memes' if you like, but you're basically describing traditional rhetoric or marketing techniques."

First, the Machiavellian complaint. My initial impulse is to agree that memetics is manipulation and insist that that's okay because it is necessary. The reason it's necessary is not because the right is already doing it and we need to "match" them. (In fact, the left is already doing it too, however ineffectively.) Rather, the reason memetics is necessary is built right into the structure of our democracy. In order to elaborate this point, I have to go on to say openly what my former post only implied or assumed: large democracies must always necessarily have in place a system which motivates and channels representational activity; such a system is required, sadly, because of basic human foibles: ignorance, fear, and apathy. Voting must be made to answer the question "What's in it for me?" While many of us assume the answer is obvious, for most people it is far from obvious. And the system or systems that answer this question are terribly important pieces of our government, though examining them is a bit like watching the proverbial sausage being made.

We forget that before the mass media such a system was already in place, one which was forged and modernized only after the Civil War, and which was as reviled in its day as the mass media is now. That system was known by various names: "The Spoils System", "Organized Labor", what have you. Boss Tweed was probably its most famous public face. But it basically consisted of a network of party bosses and local officials who worked street corners, butcher shops, churches, and factories. These people "manufactured consent" by organizing voter turnout for the parties. Traditionally people voted for whom the local bosses told them to vote. It's as simple as that. The system was tribal, primitive, and highly susceptible to corruption. Social and financial ties determined the vast majority of America's votes throughout most of the country's history.

It's sacrilege in some circles to say so - but no one can begin to parse the data and perform the analysis necessary to make an informed vote. (And even if we could, we would likely learn that the specific policy initiatives that mattered to us were likely to be drastically compromised by the legislative process, even if our candidate won.) What's more, the idea of voting is too abstract and daunting to make it an attractive activity. Most intellectuals assume that once given the privilege of voting, people will naturally value it and want to use it. But voting has to be made safe and intelligible before it becomes attractive; it must be put in a more intimate context than that offered by the national scene. To an intellectual, perhaps the most non-intuitive fact about voting is that people must be made to value it for reasons other than its value as a representational activity. The major effort that is put into "get out the vote" initiatives every election cycle testifies to real worthlessness of our individual right to vote. So at pains are we to convince each other that voting matters that it seems far more likely that the opposite is true. Voting may just be truly worthless, at least to the individual. What really matters is that there be a process by which non-violent contestation of government can be carried out - a process which mitigates against abuse of power and the trampling of the rights of the minority.

The sheer size of our democracy guarantees the worthlessness of an individual vote. Size absracts. Lots of people have theories as to why the electoral college exists. Some people think it was put in place to prevent demagogery. However, one way of thinking of the electoral college is as a way of making people's votes more valuable to them. If you are just one of a hundred million people in a nation-wide popular election, it is hard to value your vote. The more granular the regional scale of the voting block you associate yourself with, however, the more important your vote begins to seem. Think of how important Ohio voters must feel, for example. The electoral college may have been the very first major American system designed to drive voter turnout, the first major bit of "voting PR" in America.

In the age of mass media, of course, the traditional system has been replaced. Now voting patterns are no longer tied so rigidly to one's place in the local community, job, etc. Instead, like many products that Americans buy and use, party affiliation is largely a matter of consumer identity or "lifestyle affiliation". Just as people who drive Fords or drink Coke learn to think of themselves in certain ways as a result of the products they purchase, voting offers most Americans not an intellectual decision, but a thoroughly aestheticized lifestyle decision. Elections ask people to answer the questions "How do you think of America?", "What candidate reflects your values and lifestyle outlook?" and "How do the candidates make you feel about yourself?" As America's local cultures have degraded, large media cultures have evolved to fill the gaps, mostly organized by television and the images it presents. And as we all know, television "dumbs down" all discourse it touches.

The problem with most progressive approaches to "manufacturing consent" in the age of television is that they refuse to accept television as a reality that is not going away. What's more, instead of seeing television as just the latest discursive tool for organizing an electorate which is basically ignorant, disengaged, and manipulable, they see it as a kind of temporary technological horror. They think "the medium is the message" instead of "the culture is the medium". To defy McLuhan for a moment, televisual information is as much or more a reflection of the messy American psyche as it is of some inherent "televisioness". And so we progressives lament TV's effects on public discourse and hope it will go away, or we hope that television can be turned into an instrument of rational argument and dense information delivery. This, in some people's estimation, is the ethical thing to do. I personally think it is the self-deluded thing to do.

What I want progressives to acknowledge is not simply that our approach to communication in the age of mass media is flawed, but rather that our basic belief in the informed and rational American voter is flawed. Even highly intelligent people think largely in the form of cliches, tropes, and symbols that are easily identifiable and easily controlled. We must not only see that American voters are easily manipulable and largely ignorant; we must go further and acknowledge that WE ARE THOSE VOTERS. Every PhD is ignorant of those areas of knowledge in which they do not specialize, and very few of us are policy analysts. Every one of us is ignorant, anxious, emotional, insecure, and every one of us thinks in ways that memes can be used to manipulate.

So this is not a screed designed to upbraid the American voter in particular, to conjure images of beer-swilling Nascar dads and hypocrite born-agains. Instead, I would encourage us to see these people as just like ourselves with one major difference: they have absorbed different messages than we have as a result of their chosen communities and media outlets. Of course, thinking of people in this way is indeed a drastic simplification, not to mention that it eliminates free will as an input into the process. Our better angels would have us appealing to these people's ethics, their intelligence, their desire to do the world a good turn. But the truth is that while we might reach some in this way, we will not reach most; not by a long shot. This sad fact is guaranteed not by the nature of our media, but rather by the sheer size of our democracy and the diversity of our electorate. Our country is too big and it contains too many different kinds of people for rational discourse or traditional rhetorical techniques to be effective tools in "manufacturing consent". The failure of the populist movement in the late 19th century was the first great demonstration of this, and we have seen nothing to prove otherwise since the 1880s. And so, the "red staters just blue staters with different memes" model is an essential one that we must reference again and again.

We have no choice but to resort to memetic communications as our primary discursive tool, else we give up on the whole possibility of having a national conversation about politics. This is not to say that reason and rhetoric are to be discarded whole hog. On the contrary, these are still the tools of choice among communities smaller than 100,000, and communities that share discursive frameworks or specializations. But to assume we can still have nation-wide public conversations with these tools is tantamount to shouting at the deaf. It is simply doomed to be ineffective. We need a fundamental change in approach.

More on the second kind of response to my post later...

Applied Memetics for Disillusioned Dems

EMBRACE MEMES NOW

As I contemplated the depressing outcome of last night's election, one thought kept bugging me. How incompetent can the Democrats be when it comes to the cutting edge of political manipulation? Throughout the Clinton presidency I always felt that the sharpest operators were on the left's side. We controlled cultural discourse. We understood the media. We knew how best to talk to the people about what mattered to them. And frankly, we were better at manipulating our opponents.

But I no longer feel that way. Today it's clear that the Republicans understand the media better than we do, and it's time we admitted it to ourselves. Among other things, the biggest difference in the last two years has been, to my mind, the way Republicans have come to understand marketing and ways to use language to control people's thinking.

Of any president, Bush speaks with the most densely coded language we have ever witnessed. You may think his ideas are moronic, but you might be the moron for thinking it matters that he articulate ideas. Leftists would like to think that in the marketplace of ideas, good ones don't need salesmen - but it's time we realized how wrong we are. We need to give up on reason and embrace memetics; if we don't, the elephants are going to whip us every time. Bush realizes that what matters most is that he communicate to the constituencies that matter: those who already support him and those who might be alienated from doing so. In terms of his ability to speak to these two groups in highly coded language, President Bush's communications people - are masters. Clearly they've read their Dawkins, their Lakoff, and their Levi-Strauss (or at least Karl Rove and Paul Weyrich have). When I mention the phrases "culture of life", "senator from Massachussets", "flip flop", "liberal elite", "hard work", or just the word "prayer", I am using the simple terms that won President Bush this election. They represent just a handful of the litany of linguistic viruses his administration used to shape an electorate that ultimately rated "moral values" as more important than Iraq or the economy as an issue in this election.

How can such simple words be so powerful? They are what zoologist Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 Book "The Selfish Gene" called a "meme". A meme is a linguistic, conceptual, visual, or other social structure that has the properties of a virus. The power of memes is the same as the virus: a well-constructed one gets people to accept ideas they would normally reject and then has them re-propagating the new ideas without realizing it. Memes can be complex or very simple, but Republican memes are usually very simple in construction and usually built on simple language, though their aggregate effect is complex and powerful. In fact, they are so powerful and insidious that they turn otherwise neutral commentators and even leftists into servants of the Bush message. Every time a Dem says the words "gay marriage" or "terrorism", in fact, they are speaking against their own interests. Let's see how a classic Bush meme works.

A BUSH MEME AT WORK

It is a rare Bush speech in which the word "prayer" does not get used. Usually, it is enough for the president to say someone is "in his prayers" or that he is praying for something. In his acceptance speech, President Bush invoked "the simplest prayer I know, 'God Bless America'." Why talk so much about prayer? A naive listener might speculate that prayer is simply important to Bush. It's on his mind. But rarely does something make its way so consistently into a President's speeches just because it is important to him. Presidential speeches are too valuable for that. No, "prayer" is a powerful code word for Bush's base. It says that Bush is on the side of conservative Christians, that he is watching out for their interests. It says that despite the (supposed) anti-religious agenda of the left, despite the fact that political correctness dictates that Bush can't openly profess his profound devotion to God and "God's agenda", his base knows that he knows that his base knows that Bush is on the case. That simple word makes Bush and his base a part of a secret society of persecuted true-believers. It binds him to them like a secret handshake or gang colors. And yet that word promises nothing and accomplishes nothing. Without ever requiring Bush to deliver on any legislative goals, the use of that word shores up Bush's base.

But "prayer" has other important properties. It makes Bush's opponents look bad and drives a wedge between them and his base. It tempts the left to point out that such frequent invocation of the word "prayer" is traditionally considered unseemly - at least in the elite confines of Washington DC. It is considered unseemly because of America's long-standing belief in the separation of church and state and because in times past, it was politically dangerous to indicate anything close to a fervent belief in God. What the left fails to realize is that most of Bush's base is unaware of the tradtional disapproval of fervent religious belief, and that they do not believe so strongly as Washington insiders in the separation of church and state. So every time a commentator or a reporter or a political operative scoffs at Bush's prayer talk, or even points it out, he is painting himself as a condescending Washington insider who hates God. And futhermore, he is confirming to the conservative Christian base that the left has an agenda to disempower religious people. Thus the "prayer" meme uses Bush's enemy's personal habits, knowledge, experiences, and agendas as tools to help get the Bush message out. That message: I, Bush, will protect you, while "they" reject you.

Finally, "prayer" is powerful because it offends no one. The vast majority of the electorate, and even the far left, might be perturbed by Bush's use of "prayer", or at least the frequency. But the "prayer" meme is tied to a powerful truth - no one in America can deny the traditional cultural influence of Judeo-Christian religiosity, nor can they censure Bush much for simply exercising his constitutional right to express his faith, not without being hypocritical and offending large chunks of the electorate. So not only does "prayer" unite Bush with his base; just as the hidden video messages Bin Laden uses to order a an attack, Bush actually communicates with his followers via the "prayer" meme. He communicates, "I am pro-life." He communicates, "I am pursuing Christian interests in Israel." And he does this without coming close to risking the political alienation that would result from actually articulating these ideas directly and repeatedly.

So, Republican memes are effective because they:

1. Bind Bush to his base psychologically without requiring him to deliver legislatively.
2. Tempt Bush's opponents to respond in a way that confirms his base's preconceived ideas about them.
3. Suggest Bush's ties to particular stances and agendas rather than stating them explicitly.
4. Avoid provoking a strong response from those moderates or even leftists who might disagree with his specific policies or principles, thereby allowing the memes to be repeated and re-repeated.

The final attribute of the "prayer" meme is one it shares with all the other Bush memes: it is related to a small number of core "metamemes" or umbrella memes, that Bush's handlers use to define him and his party to the American people. Individuals might disagree on Bush's metamemes, but here are a few that might apply: "Resolve", "Values", "Independence", and "Humility". The last of these might provoke cries of outrage from the left, since leftists often think of Bush as arrogant. But the truth is that the Bush "beer-buddy" quality is a core piece of his political persona; it is affirmed by his verbal miscues and frequent appearance in jeans and boots. All these visual memes tie back into the core "humility" meme, as does "prayer". After all, a person who puts himself in God's hands has traditionally been thought humble. A prayerful person is a pious person, a moral person with "values". And a person who prays for God's advice makes decisions without regret; thus they are "resolved". So "prayer" ties back to and reinforces the core Bush memes, bringing into sharper relief a persona that Americans feel makes sense to them, especially conservative Americans, but really a wide cross-section of Americans. Even if they disaapprove of aspects of Bush's persona, it makes sense to them, so well have Bush's handlers constructed and applied the memes that define it.

Compare this with the approach many Democratic politicians (with the notable exception of Clinton) use. Leftists usually begin by wanting their ideas and their policies to be heard first and let their personas recede. Most still naively believe that they can be direct, honest (if reductive), and open with the electorate. Once they are compelled to define a persona, they usually don't do a thorough job of tying their ideas and policies to that persona in the clear, distinct, and reflexively memetic manner that George W. Bush does. If leftists want to win presidential elections, they need to seize on some core metamemes and then find ways of relating all of their policy goals to memes that relate back to the core memes. Then they must beat those memes into the heads of the electorate by sticking to talking points that propagate the memes, avoiding all discourse that does not reinforce and exalt them. When voters say they don't "trust" Kerry, many of them are really articulating the fact that his persona is incomplete or incoherent to them. The "trust" issue really testifies to Kerry's inability to quickly and efficiently construct a persona and tie it to a memetic agenda. People will always vote for a well-understood candidate persona of which they only partially approve over a persona that is poorly defined by self-reflexive memes.

A FEW GOOD METAMEMES

So how should Democrats counter the powerful memetics of the Republicans? The first thing to do is create the metamemes. These memes should be values that any American can and does admire, but which emphasize particular Democratic strengths. These memes should reflect the particular strengths of a given candidate, though I will suggest generic ones. I think the Democrat's best metameme candidates are probably "Rights", "Choice", "Unity", and "America First". Other possibilities are "Hope" and "Struggle". However, I think these are both dying and retrograde memes for the Democrats. They are memes for harder times when people feel more desperate. Whatever you think about Bush's economic policies, they haven't yet rendered America desperate (though they might yet!). Besides, Democrats have sadly allowed the Republicans to poison the "hope" meme by partially claiming it as their own. President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" act is an meme-poisoning meme masquerading as a policy. That's why he's never funded it. NCLB exists solely to make Bush seem to be someone who cares about education, but more importantly to make people think he cares about caring, that he provides "hope". The name of the legislation matters more than what it ever attempted to do or failed to do (though most leftists and educators will idiotically try to argue the substance of the bill in the national media.)

So why these four core metamemes? Let's start with "Rights". This meme reflects the long-standing association of Democrats with civil liberties, labor, and defending the oppressed from intimidation and exploitation. But it is an expansive enough notion to include a vast array of other American "entitlements". Democrats can, and do, talk about the "right to quality health care". That is an excellent impulse, but it is one that could be far more universally applied. All Americans like their entitlements, from the richest, most ornery CEO to the lowliest street criminal (and all the crooks in between), so the appeal of "rights" is universal. When applying this meme, Democrats should remember that almost all legislative or policy initiatives can be couched in the language of "rights". Americans have a right to alternative energy sources and quality public schools. We have a right to be respected in the world. Our troops have a right to come home after their tours end. Etc, etc. An additional benefit is that it dilutes the current power and pride of the "religious right" and "right wing". We may think of these as negative terms or doubt the power of this linguistic association. But by having leftists repeat the word "right" over and over again, we create a classic bit of Orewllian confusion. Who represents the true interests of the "right", the Democrats or the Republicans? Such confusion creates a space, a gap, in a person's knee-jerk thoughtstream, which facilitates the reception of new memes. Democrats have a real opportunity right now to take over the financial stewardship meme - one the Republicans have long monopolized - and take a number of libertarians into the Democratic party. The "right"/"right" confusion is exactly the kind of memetic effect that might make this happen.


"Rights" also feed into people's notions of "right and wrong". Democrats who talk about frequently and passionately about "rights" will simply be thought "right", as in "correct" and "moral". This may seem silly or trivial. "People don't think this way," you might say. But the truth is that linguistic association is powerful. At a low level, average and even non-average people intuit that linguistic association is meaningful, and their habits of thinking will lead them to make these assocations stick, even if they suggest false or tendentious ideas. One key to being a great meme designer is forgetting what you've been told words mean and realizing that human beings have the power to make words mean whatever they want them to. It's the boldness of this very notion that makes most people incapable of recognizing when they are being effected by a memetic assault.

"Choice". This meme is powerful because it can suggest a number of core Democratic issues without directly mentioning them, such as abortion, health care, etc. People who are pro-life can't argue that "choice" is a bad thing, at least in the abstract, while the pro-choice set will "get it" when you invoke "choice" as a key American value. What's more, much like "rights", Americans love more choices, and choices are everywhere to be emphasized in Democratic policy initiatives. Democrats want people to have a choice in their medical insurance, they want people to be able to choose whether to buy their drugs from Canada, and when they become sick they want to offer people the choices that come from stem cell research. Finally, "choice" can be used as a new angle on the "opportunity" meme, the "diversity" meme, and the "class struggle" meme, all of which are hackneyed. Democrats fight to give the children of the urban poor more choices than their parents, just as they fight to give the middle class new choices about where to send their children to college. This meme is also a key anti-meme or meme-stealer. Just as Republicans have eroded the power of the "hope" meme with the "No Child Left Behind" act, Democrats seem to me to be well positioned to erode the momentum of the school prayer issue, the Republican effort to enact school voucher programs, a variety of corporate entitlements, and most importantly, the recent medicare bill, all of which Republicans have tried to sell with the "choice" meme at some point. It's time for Democrats to reclaim this important metameme.

"Unity" is first and foremost a replacement for the "diversity" meme, as Barack Obama and others have realized. What's more, it's suggestive of other key Democratic values. America is divided from the world over Iraq. America is increasingly divided between rich and poor. Etc. Finally, there is the "America First" meme. This is an effective replacement for all that unfocused talk about jobs and outsourcing. It can suggest that American companies think of America First when it comes to jobs, and it can also suggest making America an example for other Democracies to emulate again. People sens that America has fallen in stature in the world, and the America First meme capitalizes on this. When it comes to environmental stewardship, health care, education, the quality of our elections process, and the corruption level in our campaign financing system, America should lead the world, not follow it. America should be first. People who oppose campaign finance reform, quality elections, universal healthcare, job outsourcing, and the closing of business tax loopholes. These people, it should be made clear, are keeping America back.

NEW MEMES FOR A NEW ERA

So, what are some specific memes that could be leveraged under these metamemes?


"Gay Marriage" + Universal Medical Coverage for All Families +
"Partial Birth Abortion", "Abortion", "Pro-life/Pro-choice" = "Family Rights"

One thing that irks me greatly is to see Democratic pundits talk about the "gay marriage" issue. What a bunch of fools. Just saying those words kills Democrats, regardless of the opinion expressed. Putting what amounts to a derogatory term right next to a word expressive of sanctity creates a hook in people's minds that makes them hostile to the issue. It's like talking about "fag baptism" - just hearing it makes me uncomfortable. If you really want to help the cause of committed homosexual couples, then you should never mention "gay marriage" again, or even "equal rights for homosexuals". Instead, Democrats need to talk about the bigger issue of "family rights". The same goes for "abortion". It's a dirty word. Stop using it. Don't even mention it. The word itself is a foregone conclusion. We have the right to reproductive control - Roe guarantees it. If someone tries to take it away, ask why they are trying to destroy the rights of American families, and why they want to take away the choices faced by rape victims. This blends our metameme "rights" with the swing-voter keyword "family".

As in: "Today Hillary Clinton introduced new family rights legislation to help guarrantee America's working parents and sick children access to health care and the ability to visit hospitalized loved ones on an unrestricted basis."

Or: "Bush threatened to veto Senator Obama's new family rights bill. 'Why does George Bush want to deny the rights of American families?' asked Obama."



"Terrorists/Enemies of Freedom/Islamic Fundamentalists" --> "Conservative Muslim Groups"

Every time a leftist talks of terror, it hurts the left. Stop doing it. Remember, there's no war on terror, no fighting for freedom. Instead, talk about conservative Muslim groups or conservative Muslim criminals. Remember, this effort is an international law enforcement issue. Don't say it explicitly at first, but as time goes on, the military flags, and Bush's "war" stales in the American mind, people will be begging to think of this as a police matter. At that point, remember, the enemy is "conservative" Muslims. This is just the beginning of a campaign the Democrats should launch to destroy the word "conservative" the way the word "liberal" has been destroyed. The end result should be that both words fall out of use or that both return to inspiring normative levels of skepticism and resentment. Remember, Bin Laden and Bush share many more values than they don't share. The American people, in subtle memetic ways, need to be shown this truth.

As in: "Today it has been reported that Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and members of other conservative Muslim groups bombed a train station. This pattern of violence and anger is not uncommon among these kinds of conservative groups."

Or: "Bin Laden and Zarqawi, two Muslim conservatives..."



"Stem Cell Research", "Environmental Regulation", "Teaching of Evolution", Money for Schools --> The Future of America agenda, the Good Science Agenda, and America First.

This is a key meme and if handled properly it could inspire a huge shift in American thinking. Basically we live in a country where people resent intellectualism and learning. They mistrust it and feel judged by it. We need to recall the 50s when Americans were proud of our NASA engineers and our physicists, leverage people's positive disposition toward doctors, and turn this anti-intellectualism upside down. Americans need to remember that it is good to have people in charge who are smarter than they are. When they think of PhDs, they need to feel proud, not diminished. All this is part of the America First meme. America needs to lead in science, lead the world in fighting global warming, in medical research, and in the teaching of our children. We need to demonstrate that if America is going to be first in the world again, it will require us to think about the future, the problems we are creating for our children, and it will require very smart people to help us solve these problems.
Once we've refocused people's attentions on good science, we can use the naturally positive associations people have with good science and the doctors who use it on intellectualism as a whole. We should be as proud of our political scientists and our anthropologists as we are of our doctors. The words "science" and "America First" can make this country safe for intelligent people again.

As in: "Today George Bush pitted himself against 30 nobel prize winners when he vetoed new 'Good Science' legislation introduced by Senator Salazar."

Or: "I don't see why George Bush insists on keeping America behind the vanguard of advanced Democracies by refusing to provide adequate health care for America's children. The Democrats want to put America First again, first at home and first in the world."



"Internationalism, Diplomacy, Non-proliferation" --> Good Neighbor Doctrine

Americans need to understand that effective international law enforcement depends on our status in the world. So this is also an America First issue. But we need to take every opportunity to remind Americans that the same things they expect of their neighbors in their neighborhood are the things the world expects of us. Our politicians should drop lots of folksy analogies that show the relationship between signing international environmental accords and keeping the neighborhood clean, etc. It's just neighborly.

"Wiretapping, International ID Card, Civil Liberties Violations" --> Surveillance Society, Citizen Spying

We need to drop "big brother", drop "civil liberties", etc. It all sounds too cliched, too abstract. Instead we need to remind people that America is beginning to look like that classic US enemy of the past, the Soviet Union. We need to invoke our best dystopian writers without resorting to the big brother cliche. And to do this I think we need to talk about the "surveillance society" that is around the corner. We need to also talk about "citizen spying", because it suggests citizens spying on one another. And when police get a wiretap, that's exactly what's happening. But the effect of "citizen spying" is to suggest the sinister cultures of the Nazis and of Stalin.

As in: "Hillary Clinton today spoke out against John Ashcroft's request for a loosening of wiretapping rules, saying that Ashcroft's attempts to create a "surveillance society" is scaring America. 'We don't need any more citizen spying', she went on to say.



"Corporate Deregulation, Corporate Outsourcing" --> America Last policies

Just as good science, education, and environmental leadership are what will put America First in the future, people who want to outsource jobs, set up shop offshore to avoid American taxes, or pressure American politicians from a position of multi-national leverage -- well, we need to make it clear that these people are trying to put "America Last". Democrats have been slow to realize that they are alienating small business owners by talking about "corporate greed", "corporate evil", etc. The fact is, corporations are a legal structure, not a demographic. We need to embrace responsible businessmen and women and tout models of responsible business stewardship while focusing the people's anger on that minority of business owners who take everything America has given them for granted. These selfish individuals don't care about America, because they operate on the multi-national stage. They think of themselves first, and America Last. And that's unpatriotic. These people need to be reminded that America is a unique and wonderful place to do business, and as such, they owe their country a responsible attitude toward workers, investors, and business partners. Remember, corporate America is not evil. It's us vs them, where US is people who put America First, and them is people who don't care about America. Those traitors who put America last are giving the responsible businesspeople a bad name.



For more info on memetics and how to use them to achieve Democratic political goals, check out these books:

• Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives by George Lakoff, et al (Paperback - September 2004)
  


• Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics As a Science
  by Robert Aunger