Atlantic

Magazine

Straw Man Argument

How America Lost Its Mind

The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history.

I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart … Face it, folks, we are a divided nation … divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart … Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.”

DYI:

Classic straw man argument; ridiculous example as to when the Panama Canal was built to highlight the author’s – Kurt Anderson – premise of Americans losing touch with reality. 

We believe that the government and its co-conspirators are hiding all sorts of monstrous and shocking truths from us, concerning assassinations, extraterrestrials, the genesis of aids, the 9/11 attacks, the dangers of vaccines, and so much more.

 DYI:

After many paragraphs of rambling with glittering generalities how Americans have become so unhinged we are finally blessed with a few specifics.  Old Kurt just can’t help himself to another helping of strawman by adding in the space alien crowd in with the 911 Truther’s.  The 911 Commission Report is a gargantuan gas bag of fiction.  If it were not for the dead and injured it would make for great comedy.

 The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites. Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.

The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative. 

The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them. Before the internet, crackpots were mostly isolated, and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the web, just like actual news. Now all of the fantasies look real.

 DYI:

The main stream press IS bias to the point of absurdity.  CNN (and the rest of the main stream press) has been caught so many times fabricating and manufacturing outright propaganda their ratings are dropping like a rock.  Main stream Americans have a basic intelligence whose BS detector is working just fine now that they have alternative news sources due to talk radio and the internet.

What really is going on is that the legacy main stream press no longer is the arbiter of truth which is a polite way of saying propaganda.  Talk radio and especially the internet are tearing apart legacy media.  Their advertising revenues are constantly dropping along with Americans cutting the cable and satellite TV moving to the internet.

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say. Our marketplace of ideas became exponentially bigger and freer than ever, it’s true. Thomas Jefferson said that he’d “rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it”—because in the new United States, “reason is left free to combat” every sort of “error of opinion.” 

However, I think if he and our other Enlightenment forefathers returned, they would see the present state of affairs as too much of a good thing. 

Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.

 DYI:

Too much of a good thing?  What total BS only an excuse to bring in censorship there is no other way to corral in his perception of “too much of a good thing?”  Our founding fathers realized there would be yellow journalism but as long as we have vibrant highly competitive and broad based news the American public over a reasonable amount of time will be able to discern fact from fiction.  Our government has not enforced the Sherman Anti-Trust Act as 85% of the media is controlled by six global corporations.  The internet is doing the job the Justice Department should have done decades ago.

I doubt the GOP elite deliberately engineered the synergies between the economic and religious sides of their contemporary coalition. But as the incomes of middle- and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity. Economic insecurity correlates with greater religiosity, and among white Americans, greater religiosity correlates with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, that’s a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.

 DYI:

Who’s calling the kettle black?  Good Lord entrenched Democrats and Republicans court rich donors successfully all the time.  The majority of this extremely long article has been a hit piece for anyone who is Libertarian, conservative, or constitutionally driven.

Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades. As the pioneer vehicle, the John Birch Society zoomed along and then sputtered out, but its fantastical paradigm and belligerent temperament has endured in other forms and under other brand names. When Barry Goldwater was the right-wing Republican presidential nominee in 1964, he had to play down any streaks of Bircher madness, but by 1979, in his memoir  

With No Apologies, he felt free to rave on about the globalist conspiracy and its “pursuit of a new world order” and impending “period of slavery”; the Council on Foreign Relations’ secret agenda for “one-world rule”; and the Trilateral Commission’s plan for “seizing control of the political government of the United States.” 

The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.

 DYI:

Barry Goldwater was absolutely correct for the U.N. from its very inception designed for the purpose of a one world government.  Today the main stream press has finally come around to acknowledging the existence of the deep state something only a few years ago would have been regarded as the tin foil hat club!

Why do potential Prime Ministers and possible Presidential candidates all make the trip to the Bilderberg conference are they trading cooking recipes?

The article is an excerpt from Kurt Anderson’s book Fantasyland:  How America went haywire – a 500 year history.  What a total load of crap.

DYI