I believe that the victory of truth over truthiness is the most important result of the elections last week. The victory is beautifully documented in Frank Rich’s latest piece in New York Magazine. In my judgment, the defeat of truthiness is even more important than the victory of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney and the victory of the Democratic Party over the Republicans, important though these are. A sound relationship between truth and politics will provide for the possibility of American governability and progress, informed by both progressive and conservative insights.

To be sure, on the issues, foreign and domestic, and on various public policies, the differences between the two presidential candidates and their two parties were stark, clearly apparent now as the parties position themselves for the fiscal cliff. Yet, these differences pail in comparison to the importance of basing our political life on factual truths, (as I analyzed here) instead of convenient fictions (fictoids), and on careful principled (of the left and the right) judgments and not the magical ideological thinking offered by market and religious fundamentalists (as I also previously examined) and by various xenophobes and racists (who promise to take their country back).

Stephen Colbert, the great political philosopher and public intellectual, the leading expert on truthiness, disguised as a late night comic, has most clearly illuminated the truth challenge in his regular reports. His tour de force, in this regard, was his address to the White House press corps in George W. Bush’s presence. But now it no longer takes a brave comic genius to highlight the problem. Republican and conservative responses to election polling and results provide the evidence, both negative and positive.

Though the polls clearly predicted an Obama victory, it is noteworthy that the Republican leaders and their advisers really didn’t see the defeat coming. They operated in an ideological bubble, which facts did not penetrate. Now they must (more on their alternative courses in our next post by Aron Hsiao on Monday).

After all objective reports on election night indicated a decisive Obama victory, Romney wouldn’t concede. Karl Rove on Fox News comically refused to acknowledge what Fox News (Fox News!) projected. Before the election, Republican pollsters systematically distorted their election predictions to confirm their desired results. A fact denying normality had become the order of things. The right-wing politicians, and their media enablers, were not simply lying to the public. They were blinded by their own fabrications. There were the fortunate (from my point of view) miscalculations of the campaign, but when it came to science, to climate change, to biology and much more, fact denying had become deadly. Thankfully, there is now sensible resistance, by the population at large and also by conservatives themselves.

As reported by Jonathan Martin at Politico notable young conservatives are now presenting important criticism. Ross Douthat: “What Republicans did so successfully, starting with critiquing the media and then creating our own outlets, became a bubble onto itself.” Ben Domenech: “The right is suffering from an era of on-demand reality.” Such self-criticism is heartening. Perhaps, it will be possible for serious conservative intellectuals and public figures to present positions without the craziness.

Severely conservative Romney continued his ideologically driven, fact-denying, forty-seven percent ways, blaming his defeat on “free gifts” to Obama’s core constituencies, free birth control to single women in college, health care to African-Americans and Latinos, and a special gift to Latinos — the promise of amnesty to children of illegal aliens, “the so-called Dream Act kids.” In the conservative cocoon at Fox, Bill O’Reilly strongly agreed, but it is very interesting to observe many Republicans running away from the remark. Surely political calculation is involved, but it is also a healthy matter that key conservative figures, such as Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie, are distancing themselves from the ideological fiction of the society made up of takers and makers, as Paul Ryan has put it.

I wonder, thinking ahead to 2014 and 2016, perhaps there will be a Republican civil war, between the ideologues and the conservatives. I have my hopes, but also my concerns. But at least in this election, those who used facts to mobilize their campaign won over the prisoners of fictoids.

I identify with Barack Obama’s political position, as a centrist wanting to move the center left. I identify with the democratic left because of its long and developing progressive tradition, addressing the problems of inequalities based on class, race, religion, gender, nation and sexual orientation, and because of its critique of the injustices of untrammeled capitalism and its conviction that the present order of things can and should be subjected to critique, its conviction that the way things are is not necessarily the way they must be. For these and other substantive reasons, I am very happy with the election results.

But further and in a less partisan way, I understand that alternative political traditions, broadly understood as conservative, are worthy of respect, especially as they illuminate the importance of learning from experience and highlight the limits of reason. I respect this tradition and have learned from it. I think a healthy modern republic should be informed by it. And, for these reasons, I even have sought to find conservative intellectuals worthy of respect at Deliberately Considered, see here and here. It is a terrible loss that fact-denying, right-wing ideology has prevailed in the Republican Party in recent years, amplified by racist currents during the Obama presidency. But perhaps the tide will now change among conservatives.

Conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, and radical icon, Karl Marx, are important thinkers for me as I try to make sense of the political world, but it is the ambiguous and ambivalent commitments and insights of Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt that make them my primary political teachers. Tocqueville, the ambivalent democrat, highlighted the dangers of mass society as the underside of democracy. (I should post my thoughts on this one of these days.) Arendt more crucially observed the dangers of ideology and emphasized that a common factual base is the ground upon which democracy is built. I sense that the most significant result of this election is that we are moving back to this ground. I hope Fox News craziness, the right-wing entertainment industry, as David Frum is now describing it, is “so yesterday,” or at least no more intimately connected to the Republicans than the Democrats are tied to MSNBC. I can’t tolerate either as a source of news. It worries me that some think of them as such.

This is how I understand my centrist orientation. My primary political commitment is to a free public life, where people with different identities and principles meet between left and right, i.e. in the center. I don’t’ believe in watered down progressive and conservative positions, but a position where there is informed debate. For me, this is the meaning of “the vital center.” I think this election, as truth prevailed over truthiness, and as a principled leader prevailed over one that pretended to be a true-believer, who had a very problematic relationship with factual truth, provides hope for a centrist with leftist commitments.

I am quite ambivalent about the Tea Party.  While I am appalled by some of the slogans and signs that have appeared in Tea Party rallies, I am convinced that this is a genuine social movement, a politically significant instance of the politics of small things, a political movement concerned with fundamental principles, engaged in a great debate about both the pressing issues of the day and the enduring problems of American political life.  As a registered Democrat and as a strong supporter of President Obama and his program, I am pleased that the actions of the movement may have made the Republican landslide in the upcoming elections less momentous, as the talking heads are now speculating, although I am still concerned that the movement may have given wind to the rightward shift of public opinion.  The emotional, irrational and often purposely ignorant political expression in Tea Party demonstrations is of deep concern, but I think the strong expression of fundamental political principles can and should be seriously considered and confronted.  I am unsure about what the Tea Party Movement’s impact on American public life in the very near term, i.e. the midterm elections, and in the long term, i.e. in the reinvention of American political culture will be.  As I have been trying to sort this all out, I am reminded of the insights of an old friend, Alberto Melucci, an Italian sociologist who presciently understood the meaning of social movements in the age of internet and mobile communications, before these new media were common.

The Theoretical Perspective of a Friend

Alberto Melucci

In series of important books, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, and Playing the Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society, Alberto explored what it means to become involved in a social movement in our times.  He understood that the means of social movements may be even more important than their ends, and that they make possible a new sense of self and self purpose for their participants to emerge.  Further and most significant politically, they can change the basic social codes.  Alberto was mostly thinking about progressive new social movements, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights and the like.  But I think his approach illuminates the new conservatism of the Tea Party quite well.  He died prematurely on September 12, 2001, not observing the strange turn in global politics since that very day.  But he would have understood the Tea Party, as a social movement concerned with primary values, unconcerned with electoral priorities, forging new, in this case, reactionary, identities and values, a movement that is very much a product and a challenge of our times.

Challenging Codes

The Tea Party Movement makes its participants feel good about themselves and gives them a sense of purpose, as the participants frequently report on movement blogs and to reporters.  The Movement seeks to “take our country back,” supporting and attacking politicians of both parties.  They have specific ends against bail outs and the government handouts to the undeserving, from the poor to the mighty banks and corporations of Wall Street and Detroit.  They are for limited government and the constitution, as they understand it.  They imagine together a new future based on an idealized past and in their movement they enact their future.

The movement activists and candidates sometime seem to hurt Republicans more than Democrats, an outcome that seems to be irrational given their own voting records, but this is not as significant to them as one would expect.  They are concerned about a vision of America between its past and its future and their place in this America, and worry that this vision to which they are deeply committed is being lost, taken away politically by politicians they revile, and overlooked by too many of their fellow citizens.  When the fundamental concern with the American code is kept in mind, the Tea Party Activists are not as irrational as most outside commentators, of the left and the right, think.

September versus November

Karl Rove got caught up in this Primary Night last Tuesday.   In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, they agreed on fundamental conservative issues.  Nothing in their discussion suggested a questioning of the principles and practices of the Tea Party.  But Rove dared to frankly criticize the candidate who won her primary in Delaware due to Tea Party activism and support, Christine O’Donnell.  She was the candidate of true conviction against a moderate, but her odd behavior despite her stated purity would lead to electoral defeat.  “It does conservatives little good to support candidates who at the end of the day while they may be conservative in their public statements do not [evince] the characteristics of rectitude, truthfulness and sincerity and character that the voters are looking for.”  Rove maintained, frankly concluding that “This is not a race we’re going to be able to win.” (link)   For this assessment he was severely attacked by Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the full staff of Fox News, forcing him to retreat from his initial assessment. (link)

Rove was caught between the calculation of a political analyst and of a political partisan.  Since he cares most about the politics of the day, he could not be content with pronounced conservative purity.   He, on the right, along with most objective and Democratic partisan observers, noted that the Tea Party victory in the Delaware primary greatly increased the Democrats chances of maintaining their Senate majority.

But those who seek to take their country back, those more interested in the long march of changing the political culture, changing the code of politics as Alberto Melucci would put it, would prefer resolute cultural battle (most prominently Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, link).    Their movement is their message. For them the victory in September is more important than the increased chances of a defeat in November.