Annals of Ahistorical Bedwetting: Simon Jenkins Edition

Amidst the usual stiff competition this week’s palm for Most Abject Commentary goes to Sir Simon Jenkins for this truly miserable column on the aftermath and implications of the shootings in Tucson.

It’s not entirely clear what Jenkins is trying to say but since he writes that “Freedom can only flourish in a climate of discipline” and concludes with “If American politics is now going the way of wounding, not healing, it needs the tonic of order. It is the great paradox of democracy. Free speech cannot exist without chains” it seems reasonable to conclude he thinks some kind of Jenkins-friendly authoritarianism would be preferable to the vulgar, boorish, messy stuff that pollutes his internet connection every day.

Needless to say American political discourse, no matter how ghastly one thinks Rush Limbaugh (or Michael Moore) may be, is hardly as “wounding” as it was in the 1950s or 60s. Consult the histories of Alabama or Mississippi if you doubt this. True, the rise of talk radio and the rest of it has given great license to crackpottery but this is scarcely new either. Recall if you will, the pre-internet theories that Bill and Hillary Clinton had arranged for Vince Foster to be murdered. Go still further back and you’ll find that the New Deal occasioned no small measure of controversy and that FDR wanted to pack the Supreme Court with cronies to protect his political agenda – a wounding constitutional obscenity rather more serious than whatever Sarah Palin has to say about anything. That proved quite controversial too and too much for even FDR’s brass-neck.

For that matter, in Jenkins’ youth the United States was governed by a trio of reprehensible characters – Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon – each of whom make all their successors seem like paragons of moderation and virtue. For fully fiteen years American public life was riven by discord and hatred on a scale – in terms of its severity and consequence – vastly greater than anything we’ve seen these past 30 years. To pretend that the froth and stupidity that passes for much of present-day politics is somehow unusual or threatens the safety of the Republic is ahistorical bed-wetting and nonsense in equal measure.

Sure, there’s distemper in the air but this too may be related to the economic uncertainty of the times. The crabby state of the American economy feeds the fever swamps and helps persuade people to take the “virus” more seriously than they would, or do, in sunnier times. But let’s not exaggerate things more than must be demanded by the niceties and time-honoured conventions of a newspaper column.

I mean, this is simply silly:

Foreigners are always surprised by the US’s capacity to speak right but somehow not do it. Washington must contain more wisdom and talent than anywhere on earth, yet it contrives the disaster zone that is American foreign policy. This is normally put down to such impediments as the US constitution, the silent majority, sheer bigness and freedom of speech.

If foreigners really are so surprised then more fool them. More to the point, no element of American policy is more insulated from the “silent majority” than foreign policy. Elites and the holy bipartisan consensus may not be what they once were but they retain an iron grip upon foreign policy. This is not an area of Washington life ruled by a mob that, anyway, has relatively little interest* in such affairs. (The exceptions to this general rule may be Cuba and Israel but in both cases there is a cross-party consensus in favour of the status quo.) To that extent the problem with American foreign policy is not too much “freedom of speech” but a near-total lack of speech and a shortage of alternative perspectives that are acceptable within polite, Washington society. If you doubt this, ask Ron Paul.

Then there’s this:

I was asked some time ago by a university-educated Texan, in the nicest possible way, what it was like to live in a country of “baby-killers” about to be “overrun by Muslim bad guys”. I inquired where he had gained this bizarre impression of Europe, which he had never visited. It turned out his sole information about the world beyond America’s shore came from Fox News. He was not stupid. But he and millions of people like him considered this source of news a sufficient window on the world. He genuinely thought American troops would soon have to save Europe from “the Arabs”.

Well! Just as well this chap is Texan. The anecdote – if it rises to that – wouldn’t work so well if he were from Vermont or Oregon would it? But two things: first, even in its more popular moments barely one in 100 Americans is watching Fox News and secondly if Jenkins thinks such views are hard to come by in the United Kingdom then he is surely and sorely mistaken.

And there’s this too:

Free speech is a Hobbesian jungle. It requires a marketplace where the trade in information, ideas and opinion has a framework of rules, including rules that maintain fair and open competition. Most will be voluntary, but others need enforcement. The US supreme court last year freed from control all political campaign gifts from corporations, on the grounds that this would be a breach of free speech. Ronald Dworkin’s rebuttal of this “devastating decision for democracy” in the New York Review of Books pointed out that freedom of speech was hopeless if vulnerable to the bullying of wealth. Obama warned that it would “open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections”.

But where is the evidence for this tragedy of the free speech commons? The noble knight declines to tell us. For that matter, if Jenkins thinks money is a recent political pollutant then he is, once again, utterly mistaken. There may always be shenanigans at the ballot box but, in general, the payroll vote is perhaps not as powerful as once it was. And if it isn’t then that’s at least in part a consequence of the raucous marketplace of ideas and the messy proliferation of voices in the public square.

For that matter, I’d be interested in knowing why Jenkins thinks it right that some corporations be permitted to advise people on how to vote but that others be prohibited from expressing their opinions. If the Washington Post company may make such recommendations why can’t Exxon-Mobil? This, you might say, is an unfortunate consequence of a written constitution – and I might sympathise with that view! – but that’s a different argument altogether.

Jenkins continues:

Yet Obama himself declined to champion the “fairness doctrine” that once governed broadcasting licences awarded by America’s Federal Communications Commission, and governs them throughout Europe. The doctrine was rescinded in 1987 under pressure from the right, stimulating the growth of one-sided broadcasting outlets such as shock-jock radio stations and Fox News. While Jon Stewart and others have counter-punched from the left, it strains credulity to maintain that this polarisation has had no impact on the virulence – and immobility – of American public life.

But American public life has always been virulent! Ask the descendants of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. It’s a cultural thing and, one might add, a pretty important component in the great American success story. Limbaugh and Beck and so on may well help popularise loopy opinions (or, if you must, common sense!) but given American history and the, shall we say, vibrancy of American political discourse it “strains credulity” to suppose Limbaugh et al have created these views. 

And anyway, Jenkins’ complaint makes no sense even on its own terms. On the one hand there’s the terrible “virulence” of polarised discourse and on the other American public life is plagued by “immobility”. Well, which is it? Either Fox and friends are tilting the United States towards disaster or American politics is strangled by “immobility”. I struggle to see how both these things can be true at the same time.

Party identification is, for those that hold it, stronger than in the past but this is, in many ways, a logical consequence of the long post-Civil Rights realignment. But it has been accompanied by the rise of the non-aligned movement. True, many independents are only really quasi-independent since they tend to favour one party 80% of the time but the great middle-ground of American politics is not really terribly impressed with either party. They are reluctant partisans and weary pragmatists who, in the end, would actually like politics to go away. Man may be a political animal but most people are not. (This is true in Britain too.)

Perhaps I am being unfair on Jenkins. Perhaps he is simply trying to say that freedom of speech is difficult and can sometimes have unfortunate consequences. But if that’s what he were trying to say perhaps he could have put it that clearly. As it is, his column drips with disdain and snobbery and exemplifies the fatal flaw common to so many columns – namely that of thinking that if the world were rearranged to encourage my own prejudices it would be a better place and you would like it better too.

But it doesn’t work like that. Freedom of speech is a lump it or leave it issue and while Sir Simon Jenkins might prefer to leave it I would rather lump it.

*The corollary – that is, Column B ready and waiting to be trotted out when the time is right – to this is to worry that the United States is gripped by neo-isolationism. This too is always considered a Bad Thing. Even though it is almost never actually true.

[Thanks to KC for the heads-up.]