] The dumbing down of the public discourse follows as the
] day the night, and so it comes as no surprise that both
] candidates in this year's presidential election present
] themselves as embodiments of what they call "values"
] rather than as the proponents of an idea.

If only the "alternative weeklies" could write like this, they might be worth reading.

To a small group of activists meeting in New York City in the early 1970s, Rob Stein had brought thirty-eight charts diagramming the organizational structure of the Republican "Message Machine," an octopus-like network of open and hidden microphones that he described as "perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system."

In July 1968, the Republicans knew they were in trouble, but they didn't know why. Ideas apparently mattered, and words were maybe more important than they had guessed; unfortunately, they didn't have any.

Having exchanged intellectual curiosity for ideological certainty, they had forfeited their powers of observation as well as their senses of humor.

But if a set of coherent ideas was hard to find in all the sermons from the mount, what was not hard to find was the common tendency to believe in some form of transcendent truth. A religious as opposed to a secular way of thinking. Good versus Evil, right or wrong, saved or damned, with us or against us, and no light-minded trifling with doubt or ambiguity.

In place of intelligence, which might tempt them to consort with wicked or insulting questions for which they don't already possess the answers, the parties of the right substitute ideology, which, although sometimes archaic and bizarre, is always virtuous.

The dumbing down of the public discourse follows as the day the night, and so it comes as no surprise that both candidates in this year's presidential election present themselves as embodiments of what they call "values" rather than as the proponents of an idea.

] Having exchanged intellectual curiosity for ideological
] certainty, they had forfeited their powers of observation
] as well as their senses of humor; no longer courageous
] enough to concede the possibility of error or enjoy the
] play of the imagination, they took an interest only in
] those ideas that could be made to bear the weight of
] solemn doctrine, and they cried up the horrors of the
] culture war because their employers needed an alibi for
] the disappearances of the country's civil liberties and a
] screen behind which to hide the privatization (a.k.a. the
] theft) of its common property%u2014the broadcast spectrum
] as well as the timber, the water, and the air, the
] reserves of knowledge together with the mineral deposits
] and the laws. Sell the suckers on the notion that their
] "values" are at risk (abortionists escaping the nets of
] the Massachusetts state police, pornographers and
] cosmetic surgeons busily at work in Los Angeles, farm
] families everywhere in the Middle West becoming chattels
] of the welfare state) and maybe they won't notice that
] their pockets have been picked.

[ A good article. It's obviously from a left perspective, but removing the few potshots, there's a cogent analysis of the way in which the right has conciously, deliberately and effectively controlled the entire tone of american political and cultural debate for the past 30 years.

You wonder why the left seems to be on the defensive all the time... it's because it *is* on the defensive all the time. The intrinsic liberal philosophy of ideological tolerance and equanimity is the very weakness which demolishes cohesion and precludes the kind of lockstep certainty and consistency available to the right. Logic and truth have trouble keeping up with constant, disciplined distortion. -k]