Elizabeth Bruenig, Kavanaugh is one more step in America’s cycle of self-destruction, Washington Post, October 4, 2018:
The Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation Affair is almost over, and there’s no outcome that isn’t nightmarish. I don’t just mean for the left. I am a leftist, but I’ve long since given up on the idea that much can be done for the left — or for any constituency — until the massive dysfunction in the U.S. political system is resolved. The dysfunction is multifarious. But one of its main sources is that everyone thinks that everyone else involved in politics is constantly, openly lying, and they’re right. [...]H/t Chad Wellmon.
The reason for all the lying is, at least in part, nonpartisan, and it has to do with the limitations of classical liberalism, meaning the philosophy that underlies our entire system of government. Because liberal democracies aim to be tolerant and inclusive of multiple conflicting versions of the good, they have to find a way for people with vast philosophical differences to talk to each other intelligibly about politics. So we have a language of public reason, as political theorist John Rawls called it, which is a rhetorical universe in which we supply reasons for our political desires that don’t really have anything to do with what we believe or want — or at least, they’re not the primary reasons for what we want. Instead, we supply reasons that we think will be persuasive to people who don’t necessarily have anything in common with us philosophically. [...]
Politicians are bought and suborned in ways they won’t admit, and ideologically committed in ways they find it difficult or inadvisable to talk about in public. The result is that we all know we’re constantly navigating a web of lies and misrepresentations that possibly have a relationship with the truth and possibly don’t. Our entire democracy functions under a noxious haze of justified mistrust. What does anyone really believe? Do they even know? Is it even possible to determine?
Something to be said for distance. Sales Blurb for a book written before this moment. The Secret History in Literature 1660-1820
ReplyDelete"Secret history, with its claim to expose secrets of state and the sexual intrigues of monarchs and ministers, alarmed and thrilled readers across Europe and America from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century..... it offers a case study for approaching questions of genre at moments when political and cultural shifts put strain on traditional generic categories."