Punditry As Religion

I stopped watching the Sunday morning talking head shows a long time ago, mostly because they made me want to throw things at the teevee. And I don’t want to hurt the teevee.

But, except for guest appearances by Paul Krugman, I take it the establishment pundit shows have, if anything, grown more insipidly stupid over the years. Watching them may destroy brain cells. See Alex Pareene, “Watching the Sunday Shows So You Don’t Have To,” and Jason Linkins, “TV Soundoff: Sunday Talking Heads.” You can find more intelligence on the Puppy Bowl.

Speaking of insipidly stupid, last week David Brooks got roundly called out by several leftie-leaning media people for writing that President Obama has no plan to avoid the sequester. Jonathan Chait, Ezra Klein, and others let Brooks know this was unvarnished bullshit.

But, as Chait also points out, Brooks isn’t the only one saying that Obama doesn’t have a plan and that it’s his fault if Republicans won’t compromise. It seems to be the consensus of the Washington pundit class.

This is all by way of introducing what Steve M wrote about Brooks and his peers:

I didn’t join the pile-on because Brooks wasn’t engaging in journalism. He wasn’t even engaged in fact-based punditry. What Brooks was writing was theology.

Brooks was writing a commentary rooted in the Beltway’s political religion. In a religious faith, stories are told that are frameworks for belief, even if they’re not believed literally. Thus, when I was a Catholic, I was told that the Bible is the revealed word of God — and yet my faith also accepted the theory of evolution, which tells an origin story for life on Earth that contradicts the one in the Bible. The Church was saying, in effect, that the Genesis narrative of creation is theologically true, even if it’s not literally true.

You could say the same thing about the Brooks narrative. It doesn’t matter whether President Obama has acted in good faith, despite Republican intransigence, to deal with issues of taxes, spending, debts, and deficits in a responsible way — there are two strains of the Beltway faith, one of which tells us that, on economic issues, Democrats are always wrong and Republicans are always right, the other of which (the one of which Brooks claims to be an adherent) tells us that both parties are to blame, but it’s the responsibility of Democrats to move the discussion to a point midway between where the two parties are, which is, by definition, the responsible center. Republicans, according to this faith tradition, will inevitably meet Democrats halfway — though if they don’t, that’s also the Democrats’ fault.

See also Mark Twain, “My First Lie and How I Got Out of It.” “Obama has no plan” seems to be a variation of the “silent assertion lie,” which are “gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams.” It’s a lie that becomes an unquestioned orthodoxy because the truth is too terrible to contemplate.