All the President's Mental Lapses- The Biden Summary (2/2)
From
John Smyth@21:1/5 to
All on Sun Jan 5 09:54:54 2025
[continued from previous message]
Hitler, but actually worse than Hitler; and b) that five days after it
appears, people will have forgotten it.
With no apparent way to change the thinking of people who don’t already
share its worldview, mainstream media can do little more than flatter
and increase the insularity of its core audience, the NPR-tote bag
demographic. One popular lawn sign in the 2024 campaign season read, “Harris-Walz: Obviously.” In other words, if you would even consider casting a vote for Donald Trump, you’re worth disdaining but also so
dense and/or bigoted that efforts to persuade you would be a waste of
time. By providing mood music in an echo chamber, legacy media is not
just ineffectual but actively harmful for the Democratic Party,
encouraging the dubious but perilously comforting belief that the appeal
of its politicians, policies, and rhetoric is quite broad. Thus misled, Democrats come up with ploys like Tim Walz or White Dudes for Harris,
which squander opportunities or succeed in insulting a target audience.
Even though the legacy media’s forfeiture of political significance is self-inflicted, one can view its decline as both justified and
lamentable. It remains the case that Americans who love Trump, Americans
who loathe Trump, and Americans at various points in the middle must
find a way to share a country. And because that country is a republic,
the sharing requires not just forbearance and restraint but also some
basis on which collective deliberation can be coherent. We’re entitled
to our own opinions, Daniel Patrick Moynihan often said, but not to our
own facts.
But if every institution that pronounces on which facts are real and
which are bogus turns out to indulge its partisan or ideological bias,
we end up on a slippery slope where skepticism leads to cynicism and
culminates in solipsism. Since I’m just as good as you, my facts are
just as good as your facts. This attitude, seemingly proud and defiant,
turns out to jeopardize republicanism. The lack of trust, and the lack
of institutions that are trustworthy, reinforce each other. This
downward spiral renders a republic more susceptible to shrewd
manipulations of public opinion, as people are disposed to believe what confirms their worldview rather than what is true—or, rather, to believe
that the only test of whether a statement is true is that it confirms
their worldview. A self-governing nation that travels this road will
eventually vindicate Thomas Hobbes’s contemptuous opinion that democracy always turns out to be “no more than an aristocracy of orators.”'
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