Selective Skepticism and the Nihilism of Bullshit Politics
Understanding the new conservatism.
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1. Eyes on the Right
My friend Damon Linker has started a newsletter which is absolutely crucial: An ongoing, deep set of observations on what is happening to conservatism. Iāve already subscribed. You should, too.
The first two entries are about Glenn Greenwald and Steve Bannon and what makes this project stand out is that Damon isnāt just scoring points. Heās unpacking and making sense of what is going on beneath the surface with these people.
For instance, in the Greenwald piece the moment Damon said āselective skepticism,ā a lightbulb went off in my head and everything about Greenwald made sense:
Greenwald is a vivid case study in the deleterious intellectual and moral consequences of selective skepticism. . . .
Appalled by the way the Bush administration waged the War on Terror, Greenwald adopted a position of intense skepticism about its policies and the way it justified them. And about everyone who served in the administration. And everyone in the media who acted as a cheerleader for those policies, or who even publicized administration claims with insufficient skepticism.
That has served Greenwald well as a journalist. Itās good to be skeptical of government policies and official justifications of them. Itās good to criticize media outlets that get too cozy with power. Itās good to hold authorities to account when things go badly or embarrassing mistakes get covered up. Greenwald has done all of thatāwith Bush-era Republicans, and with center-left Democrats who supported the Iraq War and signed off on the administrationās national security policies (as well as with Bolsonaroās government and the politicized prosecution of Lula in Brazil).
The problem is that Greenwaldās skepticism is applied selectively. Anyone who had anything to do with the Bush administration, anyone who was once insufficiently skeptical of it (including many Democrats), and any media company that has hired or given a megaphone to administration staffers or one-time defenders now works under a cloud of absolute and permanent suspicion in Greenwaldās mindāwhile anyone who shares that suspicion of Bush-era Republicans, center-left Democrats, and mainstream media outlets gets treated as a trusted ally in pursuit of the truth.
I donāt see any other way to account for the fact that Greenwald spent almost the entirety of the Trump administration eviscerating center-left Democrats and journalists for pushing the story of Russian collusion in the 2016 election, about which he was thoroughly (and sometimes justifiedly) skeptical, and yet had very little critical to say about the rampant corruption, incompetence, and insurrectionary lies of the 45th president and his political and media enablers.
Or why Greenwald now mixes intense and sometimes reasonable skepticism of Biden administration statements about Russiaās invasion of Ukraine and the Ukrainian governmentās own propaganda with credulous takes about the war that tend to align with what Vladimir Putin and Russian apologists say about the origins of the conflict.
Or why he would continually apply severe (and occasionally well-earned) skepticism to Rachel Maddow and MSNBC over their news coverage and analysis while the right-wing fear-mongering, demagoguery, and agitprop of Tucker Carlson and Fox News are allowed to slide.
Again and again, Greenwald applies intense skepticism to a finite list of political and journalistic enemies while applying none at all to those with whom he shares antipathies. The enemies of his enemies are his friends, and friends apparently get an automatic pass.
If this were just a personal peccadillo, it might not be worth noting (even in a subscription newsletter). But itās actually an especially vivid example of a much broader and quite pernicious trend.
Yes! All of this makes absolute sense! And Damon goes on to examine how this disease of selective skepticism is spreading.
You should read the whole thing.
In his piece on Steve Bannon, Damon gets to the heart of what drives the man:
Non-radical, āordinaryā politics can be a pretty prosaic affair, as different parties compete for the chance to make incremental changes hemmed in by public opinion, which acts as a fixed limitation on the possible.
But radical politics is different. Itās a form of idealism, in the sense that it imagines a very different future and motivates people to bring it into existence by telling a compelling story about the possibility of remaking the world of the given. Communism was born through this kind of process, and to this day the most ambitious and self-aware people on the left are keenly aware that itās sometimes possible to conjure a new public thatās eager to bring forth a whole new reality and future order of things.
Bannon grasps this, too, which is why he once half-trollingly referred to himself as a Leninist. He understands the possibility of remaking the world. But to what ends? There things become obscure.
Bannon knows what he hates. Liberals. Progressives. The left. China. But whatās the alternative? It canāt be anything that resembles the Republican Party of the past, because he hates that, too. What then? He canāt really say. In place of a vision of a better world, he offers only negation. His āidealā future is one of leveling destructionālike the skyscrapers collapsing, one after another, in the final scene of the movie Fight Club. What comes after the skyline has been reduced to rubble, Bannon hasnāt a clue. All he knows is that he wants to be the one to place and detonate the TNT. . . .
Those of us who devoted ourselves to making sense of the Trump administration frequently struggled to nail down precisely what was so unnerving about his presidency. Was it the policies he pursued that were unusual for a Republican president? Or his furious combativeness? Or the corruption that swirled around him and his family? All of those things were troubling, and some were terrible.
But far worse and more dangerous was the bullshit.
It began before Trump launched his presidential campaign, with the ābirtherā conspiracy about Barack Obama. It leapt to prominence early in his presidency, when, a day after his inauguration, Trump insisted before a throng of employees and reporters at CIA headquarters that the crowd gathered the previous day on the Washington Mall was the largest ever for such an event, despite photographic evidence definitively proving otherwise. . . .
The ultimate consequence of spreading BS far and wide is a gradually rising tide of chaosāepistemic, moral, and political. Hannah Arendt rightly saw it as preparing the way for totalitarianism in general and fascism in particular.
Iām not calling Bannon an outright fascist. His positive vision is too indeterminate to be pinned down with any precise ideological label. Yet itās also undeniable that one potential outcome of the politics of bullshit could be a revolution or coup in which a strongman (perhaps along with a cadre of needy, self-deluded morons) seize power amidst intentionally cultivated confusion about just what the hell is going on.
Again: Read the whole thing. Because once you do the connection between nihilism and bullshitāand why those two modes of operation are a threat to democracyābecomes clear.
I hope youāll subscribe to Damonās project. Itās a valuable contribution to understanding the world.
2. Uncertain Futures
To be honest, I know nothing about this newsletter by Anton Stjepan Cebalo except that this essay which introduces the term āquantum politicsā:
[W]e have come to expect some chaos or, at least, more unpredictability than usual. Our bias to normalcy, that we enjoyed since the 1990s, has been shaken. Todayās historicity can maybe best be summed up as a mixture of shock, surrealism and bewilderment. . . .
Someone who has taken the futureās erratic prospects as particularly worrisome is former Armenian President Armen Sarkissian. He spoke about it candidly at the 2020 Munich Security Conference: it was becoming increasingly difficult to predict social outcomes with any certainty. Social systems are so complexly entangled today, it is making them more chaotic. A trained physicist specializing in computer modeling, Sarkissian is no stranger to randomness within systems. It is from this vantage point that he calls todayās social sphere āquantum-like.ā
The quantum-like element that Sarkissian was describing is the public, made up of individuals who are bouncing around multi-directionally within a convoluted system of interrelations and nested groups. Politics, in our digital century, has thus been transformed. Its unpredictability, buttressed by technology and the infosphere, is one of the main drivers of history today.
Obviously, this idea is hitting all of my erogenous zones.
Quantum theory deals with the āworld of the very small.ā One of the most main takeaways of this world is that, on the subatomic level, one cannot ascertain where the quantum entity is and where it is going at the same time. If you try to apply deterministic and continuous frameworks, you will not grasp it. Obviously, quantum mechanics do not influence historical forces directly. Still, as a metaphor, it can be a useful means of understanding our current social environment.
In social processes, the āworld of the very smallā is individuals who are connected by a networked web of relations. The complex chain of interactions is unknowable, but nonetheless produce large-scale effects. These individuals seldom know what their end point is. Their main drive seems to be motivated by dissatisfaction in most cases. It is the āenergyā that jolts everything when it reaches critical mass. . . .
Quantum-like politics is about sudden swarms, made possible by the infosphere.
There follows a long historical digression, which isnāt terribly compelling, before Cebalo gets to the nub:
[W]e still live in a world of geopolitics. The difference today, however, is that this realm is also being augmented from below, by the āworld of the very small.ā The emergence of this quantum-like realm forms an entirely new terrain, which exists both inside and outside traditional geopolitical concerns.
I donāt know what I think about his thesisāyou can discuss it in the comments. But itās interesting and worth examining.
3. Bald Faced Truth
John Canzano writes about the Oregon State baseball team. As always with baseball, it isnāt really about baseball:
Mitch Canhamās Oregon State baseball team woke Monday, running on fumes. His Beavers faced elimination, stared down a sobering end to the season and punched it straight in the nose.
Three OSU home runs.
Ace pitcher Cooper Hjerpe summoned to pitch two innings as a closer.
The Beavers won 7-6, beating Vanderbilt. The No. 3-seed advanced to the Super Regional, where it will host Auburn. But all I could think about was Canham in the dugout and the strength it took all those years ago when he was just a kid.
Canhamās father served in the Navy. His younger brother, Dustin, was a Marine and his older brother, John, was in the Army. He even had an uncle who was a paratrooper nicknamed āSkull.ā The former Beaversā catcher talked about his family in 2007 when I covered him as a then-college kid in Omaha.
He spoke then about his mother, Kim, too.
She began using drugs when he was in elementary school. His parents divorced. Life got hard. Canham was just a freshman in college when his mother was discovered dead in her apartment in Spokane.
āHeroin and methamphetamine,ā the autopsy read.
She was 40.
It was difficult for Oregon State to lose on Sunday to Vanderbilt and have to come back for a do-or-die Monday game. The Beavers pitching staff was worn out. The end of the season crept closer. The Commodores had a deep and dangerous lineup and good pitching. The television coverage in the last couple of days kept cutting to the now 37-year old Canham in the OSU dugout.
He looked unfazed.
The Beavers arenāt the most gifted team in college baseball. But theyāre opportunistic, resilient and tough ā a lot like Canham. Theyāre Jake Dukart, who grew up rooting for OSU as a kid and scored two runs on Monday. Theyāre Matthew Gretler, who hit the go-ahead home run in the seventh inning. And theyāre Hjerpe, a dominant starter summoned like Randy Johnson to get the final six outs in a must-win game. . . .
In 2007 in Omaha, Pat Casey said of Canham, his star catcher and leader: āIf the enemyās coming over the hill, I want him pretty close.ā
The Beavers beat North Carolina in that College World Series final and dogpiled on the field. I was there to write about it. Canham was smack in the middle of every important scene that weekend ā the hugs, the heroics, and a wonderful pile of OSU exuberance after the final out.
Canham emerged as the go-to interview for media members that unforgettable week in Omaha. He spoke candidly about the death of his mother. The catcher confessed that he felt lost and blamed himself after her death. To cope, he wrote songs, played baseball and leaned on his teammates.
Canham is such an easy guy to pull for.
After college, Canham spent the next eight seasons riding buses in the minor leagues. He played for 12 different teams, in places such as San Antonio, Memphis and Harrisburg, Pa. He never made the big leagues, but never lost the joy either.
When Canham was named head coach at Oregon State in 2019 he told me, āI love this game.ā
It loved him back on Monday.
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I see selective skepticism in the persistent efforts to find some little hidden factoid about 1/6 -- "Someone opened a door from inside!!" ... "What was Ray Epps doing and who sent him??" -- while dismissing a Himalayan range of evidence that Trump and his allies were trying to halt the peaceful, constitutional transfer of power.
Behind it, there's an element of "You've sometimes got to violate the Constitution in order to save the constitutional republic."
It goes along with selective patriotism: People who claim to love America more deeply than their domestic opponents also believe that U.S. institutions are so corrupt that they need to be blown up and replaced by new ones, run by people who agree with them.
And selective moral concern: People who lament the moral decay of America decided that the indispensable champion of their values was a sociopathic narcissist who defines right and wrong around ego and self-interest, and whose example encouraged the idea that moral judgment is something to be wielded against enemies, not something to apply to one's own side.
While it's a mystery as to what kind of world Bannon really wants, I do remember reacting to one of his "lectures" with a thought on that subject. He basically doesn't like most of how the world works and feels that if he blows it all up, the pieces may fall into a configuration that he'll like better. At a minimum, he thinks it will be fun to watch. He's one of those guys who would shoot up a school if he were younger and dumber. Instead, he's decided blowing up the political status quo is much more satisfying intellectually and they don't throw you in prison for it, at least not initially.