The Stuff of Politics

Paul Krugman dissects what passes for dialog in American politics. Here's the key bit from a posting on his NY Times blog:

Person A says “Black is white” — perhaps out of ignorance, although more often out of a deliberate effort to obfuscate. Person B says, “No, black isn’t white — here are the facts.”

And Person B is considered to have lost the exchange — you see, he came across as arrogant and condescending.

I had, I have to admit, hoped that the nation’s experience with George W. Bush — who got within hanging-chad distance of the White House precisely because Al Gore was punished for actually knowing stuff — would have cured our discourse of this malady. But no. Why not?

Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)

He has more to say. Go read the whole posting.

Watching the American political scene helps me understand how Hitler rose to power in Germany. You have a public that fails to connect the dots, that fails to see the logic of the politics, that fails to be curious about where the politics is leading. The German people paid a very heavy price for their unwillingness to understand what passed for politics in the early 1930s.