Beware those speaking with the voice of God
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Alex Wise is the host of Sea Change Radio, a weekly syndicated broadcast on climate change and environmental sustainability. He occasionally invites me to talk about politics. He asked me to come back after reading my piece on the elections in Wisconsin. It was titled "Francesca Hong's defeat was 'stunning' only if you believe the press corps' 'political fictions': Beware those speaking with the voice of God." Here's the part that piqued Alex's interest:
Does voting for [Governor] Ned [Lamont in the Connecticut Democratic primary] make me a moderate? Hardly. Does his victory mean the establishment "struck back against a surging populist left"? Yeah, maybe. You can interpret the details that way if you choose to, and that's my point. The Times and others, but especially the Times, behave as if they speak with the voice of God when in fact they are making human choices in the service of a "narrative" that they want to tell, for their own reasons, often in conspicuous contradiction to the very facts they report, with the added consequence being that they cannot be held responsible for those choices, as they were not choices, but acts of God.
Listen to our conversation and lemme know what you think.
Here's a snippet of our chat
Alex Wise: Let's go back to the voice of God framing for a moment. I don't know if we gave enough examples for our listeners. You quote Jonathan Martin from Politico in your piece where he writes, it was a “crisis averted moment for mainline Democrats." ... This is the kind of framing you’re talking about where the reporter is speaking in this omniscient voice that makes something true.
Me: It makes something that’s not true into something true, and then there are political consequences as a result. I don’t give enough time in that piece to the late Joan Didion. She wrote a book called Political Fictions a while back. That’s the word that we’re looking for. These political fictions that arise from these narratives, which themselves attempt to speak with the voice of God. You have a fictions with this godly authority, and people tend to receive them as true. ...
The reason Martin says things like that is because there really is a consensus within the rarified circles of a political journalism in Washington and in New York among political reporters where they actually agree that the Democrats can’t go too far, can’t be too extreme. They just agree and the reason they agree is because they all say the same thing to each other, all the time. It’s not a hypothesis that they test. They just all agree and because they all agree, you get stories like this.
Alex: And what do they agree on? They agree that America is a center-right nation.
Me: Yeah that’s what they agree on. I mean what are really agreeing on, and they won’t say this, is that the true center of power in America is whiteness, and the true consensus is white supremacy. That’s what they’re really saying, but they’re not gonna say that, because that would be a gauche. That would be impolite or some other word that a snob might use. But that’s what they’re really saying, though. And by the way, that's why the press looks at the Democrats as slightly illegitimate, because the Democrats are a multiracial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious party, whereas the Republicans are white, white and white, all the way through. They therefore represent to the media, politically, historically and culturally, an automatic natural legitimacy. That I wish more people would really understand. That is the double standard that animates all of political journalism.
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