A Wise Man Has the Power to Reason Away

Left Blogistan is in a terrible state today. They got some good news and some bad news and some Agnews.

It seems they discovered Fox News.

Billmon and the Anonymous Liberal both point to the same nasty poll number – 50% now believe Saddam Hussein had WMDs — after Sen. Rick Santorum made the claim (easily refuted) which was then endlessly repeated throughout the Vast Right Wing Noise Machine.

This, they claim, is proof that people are fools and that a central tenet of Totalitarian Thought — control of all media so they can’t learn the truth — has been successfully amended in our time. Throw all sorts of stuff out there and people won’t be able to find the truth, they’ll just believe what you tell them is the truth. What a fool believes, that’s Billmon’s headline.

Well, nonsense.

It is central to the Nixon Political Thesis under which we live that
the media is leftist, that it’s against our interests. Thus, as an integral part of
this thesis, an alternative media has been created (of which Fox News
is a part) which parrots the right-wing line, calls this
truth, and calls any alternative (whether true or not) left-wing propaganda.

I get that.

But at a time of political crisis, like the one we’re going through
right now, every political thesis breaks down. It breaks down without
those inside the thesis even knowing about it. It breaks down while those in the Anti-Thesis (like Billmon) continue to rail against it. A new political world is created,
with a different set of rules, and those who are living inside the old
rules are simply left behind by that new order. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss only because he’s the boss. Agnew and Humphrey, however, are not the same at all.

This has happened repeatedly.  It happens inevitably. The legacy of
FDR, the assumptions of the New Deal and World War II, had no answers
for what was happening in the 1960s. The young went off one way, their
public drifted to the right, and when we all woke up in 1972 we were
living in the Nixon Thesis — 61% voted for Nixon despite all that
Washington Post reporting on Watergate and its links to the White
House. (Watch the movie.)

Why was that? It was because hatred (or at least mistrust) of the "liberal media" was, by
1972, already accepted by most Americans as part of their political
DNA. People were transformed by the events of the 1960s, but not in the
way those who engaged in protest or covered the protest imagined.

Well, sparky, the same thing is in the process of happening to the
Nixon Thesis right now. But it doesn’t happen all at once. Millions of people
will continue to believe in the Nixon Thesis even after this crisis,
just as millions continued to believe in the New Deal after 1968
(thinking that Humphrey’s loss that year was narrow). Most of those who voted for McGovern still believed that thesis.

Rather than arguing against what a fool believes, wise men will seize
the power to reason a way out, a new political thesis that answers the
concerns of our time — energy, the environment, science — based on
the values of this medium.

That’s what we’re about here. And that’s what all liberals —
especially in Left Blogistan — should be about. Stop worrying about
what they’re going to do to you — make them worry about what you’re
going to do to them.

Namely, leave them in history’s dustbin and bring forth a new political thesis.