From Life After Lapham:
The Atlantic has lost money for all of living memory, and The New Yorker was unprofitable for most of the last two decades. So are all the little weeklies. Call it cultural philanthropy or call it vanity publishing, but without rich guys willing to take financial baths, magazines of literary and political journalism and belles lettres would scarcely exist in America.
I wonder how true this is?
I find this interesting:
I ask if he’s heartened by the lifting of the post-9/11 chill on debate and dissent. “It’s heartening to me,” he says, “when I see Frank Rich or [Paul] Krugman write about this gang. The question is, will it lead to political change? We still have Time putting Ann Coulter on the cover.”
We are talking past each other. As much as he decries oligarchies, Lapham seems nostalgic for the old media oligarchy. Back when liberals were definitely in charge of the press, Lapham could abide publishing conservatives because they were safely powerless—and because they were horrified by the twilight of the American idea.
How does LL's response amount to talking past each other? Have we paradoxically got to the point where to be taken seriously you have to appear convictionless? If he had said it's a good thing Ann Coulter is in Time magazine again, would that have shown him to be a magnanimous free thinker not chained to his liberal ideology? If I rewrote that sentence with "right wing" replacing liberal, would it seem out of place?
Posted by: Alan Hogue at December 9, 2005 01:08 PMWell, it follows on this earlier exchange:
Public discourse now takes place in echo chambers, each side preaching to its own choir. And that’s bad, isn’t it?“Yeah, that is bad,” he says. “Most obviously so in the success of Fox News.” His answer suggests that he doesn’t really regret ideological balkanization as much as the associated rise of the right-wing media.
I'm sure we've all had conversations before in which you're discussing some sort of general problem and your conversational partner keeps introducing the same narrow examples that don't quite fit. The sort of person who only brings up Muslims when you're talking about sexism, or keeps rambling about Israel when you're talking about racism. Eventually you get suspicious that their complaint is with something else, and are only acknoledging the general problem as a way of drawing you into agreeing with them.
I obviously have no idea if this is what's happening in the Lapham interview — it seems a bit like it in the brief quotation, but who knows?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at December 9, 2005 01:30 PMI suppose I could see it that way if the "chill on debate and dissent" affected both sides, but it doesn't seem to me that it did.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at December 9, 2005 01:41 PMI think you're reading the article backwards. It's pretty clear that we Americans inhabit a bunch of tiny echo chambers nowadays — everything from the history of the Dean campaign to the advertisement in my Inbox for powder-horn making kits just in time for Christmas points to it. Lamenting Fox News seems like an odd response to that observation.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at December 9, 2005 02:00 PMIt's pretty clear that we Americans inhabit a bunch of tiny echo chambers nowadays.
Now I think we're talking past each other. So how is it that Fox News is not related to this?
Posted by: Alan Hogue at December 9, 2005 02:46 PMWell it is, of course, but the author of the article portrays Lapham as (likely) only seeing echo-chambers on the Right. You need not "appear convictionless" to recognize the same phenomenon on the left. I'd argue that the Dean campaign is an excellent example of an echo-chamber phenomon leading to an electoral defeat as lamentable to any Dean supporter as the existence of Fox News is.
The author is (perhaps unfairly -- something about the wording makes suspect his editing) portraying Lapham as either only recognizing echo chambers on the Right, recognizing them across the spectrum and only lamenting the phenomenon's side-effect of giving the Right a greater voice, or simply equating "echo-chamber" with "right-wing media".
Lapham's response to the author comments about the "chill on debate and dissent" is also a bit distressing. Odious as she might be, certainly Ann Coulter has a better claim to have suffered for her speech post-9/11 than most, having actually lost a job because of what she wrote. I'm not sure if his response expresses regret she's still employed or regret at her popularity.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at December 9, 2005 04:42 PMBen, you're implying that the best position is a kind of false evenhandedness in which "the liberals" and "the right" are presumed to each have intimidated the other similarly, with similar weight and effect. Do you genuinely believe that to be true?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at December 9, 2005 09:16 PMI'm implying no such thing at all, and am a bit mystified that you and Alan read that in what I wrote. I'm saying that
1) Anderson thinks that ideological balkanization is spread across the political (and cultural) spectrum, and that
2) fairly or not, Anderson is portraying Lapham to either be blind to this or lament only that the fragmentation of the media gave voice to the Right.
That's how I read the article. It just so happens that
3) I agree with #1, and am surprised it would even be controversial, and that
4) if I were to put myself in the shoes of almost anyone on (or near) the Left, I would see plenty to lament in the echo-chamber's effect within the Left,
5) as exemplified by the swift rise and collapse of the Dean campaign.
As I hope you can see, this has nothing at all to do with a "false evenhandedness" or "appearing convictionless", unless you disagree with #1/#3.
Addressing your specific question, though,
"the liberals" and "the right" are presumed to each have intimidated the other similarly, with similar weight and effect. Do you genuinely believe that to be true?
My perception of public discourse over the last four years is that a only tiny handful of people have lost jobs, been disciplined, or had columns suppressed based on their political speech and thus can actually claim to have been censored. This half-dozen or so (until last week's Howard University incident) is probably almost evenly divided between leftish opponents of the administration and frothing-at-the-mouth nutjobs who want to nuke Mecca or strip-search anybody they see in hijab. Probably each of these actions was a tragedy for public liberty, even though I'm not at all affected by Coulter's dismissal, and I recognize that Howard University probably has a reasonable legal argument.
Aside from actual censorship and intimidation, there has been a great deal of criticism of members of the left by the right (and, I think, broad middle), and a scandalous amount of whining that such criticism amounts to censorship. I sometimes get the impression that for a lot of the Left, "debate" involves hectoring a gagged opponent, and any ability for that opponent to answer back is "stifling discourse".
Regarding my own personal experience, I know exactly what sorts of political and cultural statements would be welcome or unwelcome in my workplace and social group here in Austin — someone might put a "W" sticker on his car within the relative anonymity of the parking garage, but would never admit voting for the guy (or supporting the invasion of Iraq, or attending church) in the breakroom. Of course I'm aware that things might be reversed if I were to travel a hundred miles in any direction, but that environment does tend to color how I perceive political reality in this country, and it makes me suspect that there's a lot of "wolf" being cried.
Let me respond with a few questions of my own — I'll try to use specific examples so that we're not talking past each other. Do you think it unfortunate that counter-protest movements like Protest Warrior have arisen to parody the anti-war movement? Is it a bad thing that radicals within academia (like Ward Churchill) are having their work scrutinized by the press? Does the publication of extreme statements within the Left (see zombietime for an example) by the Left's critics amount to censorship, intimidation, or stifling dissent?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at December 10, 2005 07:05 AMAs I hope you can see, this has nothing at all to do with a "false evenhandedness" or "appearing convictionless", unless you disagree with #1/#3.
No, what I found interesting was the author's apparent assumption that Lapham was somehow unreasonable because the first example of "balkanization" that came to Lapham's mind was Fox News. Well, he's a liberal, why wouldn't he think of Fox News?
Should people think more about their own back yards? Sure, there's a good argument for that. But it's getting to the point where it feels somehow gauche to express a point of view, where saying, in essence, "I don't like Fox News" is roughly equivalent to saying "I am a close minded fool."
Of course your opponents will always pull stuff like that, and I'm sure everyone gets a little of it. What bothers me is that it's done under the guise of evenhandedness or maybe some kind of objectivity.
All the stuff about censorship...I don't know where you're getting that. Maybe you should ask your coworkers.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at December 12, 2005 09:51 AMOh, and just to be clear, I agree with 1 and 3. That is not the controversy as far as I'm concerned.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at December 12, 2005 09:54 AMFair enough.
But it's getting to the point where it feels somehow gauche to express a point of view, where saying, in essence, "I don't like Fox News" is roughly equivalent to saying "I am a close minded fool." . . . .
What bothers me is that it's done under the guise of evenhandedness or maybe some kind of objectivity.
I'm not sure that I see that. I've seen the same reaction to my own statements about not liking Michael Moore (in one case) and Rush Limbaugh (in a different conversation). In neither case was the reaction "you're closeminded", but something more like "you're afraid of the truth."
All the stuff about censorship...I don't know where you're getting that.
I was trying to respond to Martha's question about whether I believed that Left and Right had been intimidating each other's speech to a similar extent — which seemed to imply that she believed A) that a good deal of such intimidation had occurred, and that B) it was predominantly the Right intimidating the Left. Essentially, this is a question of how I perceive the climate.
It's very hard to answer such a question briefly, as it exposes some pretty fundamental differences in how we view American politics and culture. I've noticed before that Martha and I seem to differ less on specifics than on generalities, and that she seems to express a profound pessimism about American society which I do not share. It's impossible to discuss such differences of outlook with citations and examples, since you're always arguing about whether an event is an aberration or part of a general trend. So I tried to give a more general explanation of how (and perhaps why) I see things. Which is a rambling way of explaining my earlier rambling.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at December 12, 2005 10:47 AM