Uncommon Sense: Triumph of the shrill

Written by Jeff Morris
Thursday, 18 February 2010 01:00

The problem is evident right off the bat: I’m not angry.

When I told you, regarding last week’s special election in the 89th Assembly District, that it would make me angry if “a smear campaign financed outside the district was successful in getting more people to vote than a campaign based on actual accomplishments” I already expected that to be the likely outcome. It’s hard to be truly angry about human nature. Clearly, more people vote based on emotion than on reason. With fear and anger among the strongest of emotions, they are going to win over logic and rationality every time. (And that includes the last presidential election, in which “hope” was victorious.)

I can already hear all the outraged voices out there: “How dare you assume I voted irrationally! My vote was based on a very rational idea: We have to Shake Things Up in Albany, and the only way to do that is to bring in somebody new, not some political insider who’s going to be under the political leadership’s thumb!” And that, of course, merely confirms my point. It was well documented that Pete Harckham was not under anybody’s thumb; had in fact fought to reduce county spending and favored a cap on property taxes; and was more likely to be able to effect change as part of a reformist movement within the majority than would any Republican in the heavily Democratic state Assembly. That made no difference in the face of a massive Republican ad campaign that continued to capitalize on voter anger about the state of the economy, by blaming economic woes on high taxes and blaming taxes on Democrats. In other words, a campaign appealing to emotions.

Republicans simply “do” emotion much better than Democrats. (Why do you think Glenn Beck is always crying?) This was again evident at this past Saturday’s “Congress on Your Corner” forum with Rep. John Hall at the Lewisboro Library. A man and a woman in attendance were ready with “questions” in full Tea Party mode. Essentially, this means that you yell your questions much louder than everybody else, and do so in a way that is not so much asking anything as making angry accusations — including blanket statements about health care reform being “unconstitutional” and Congress pursuing a “radical” agenda. Once those allegations are on the table, any rational answer is ignored. Thus, Mr. Hall’s very calm, reasonable, and relevant responses — which included the facts that the great majority of Americans favor the most important individual elements of the health care reform bill that he will now attempt to implement separately, and that he has no jurisdiction over New York state taxes but had nonetheless been putting pressure on the state to use stimulus funds he had helped procure to eliminate the MTA payroll tax — were shrugged off by these folks in favor of repeating their talking points.

On a recent visit to my ophthalmologist (obviously not the same ophthalmologist currently campaigning against Mr. Hall), he lamented that so many people seem to be in the clutches of the Church of Fox News. He calls it that because once so enthralled, these people just keep repeating the dogma and refuse to consider any other point of view. And he has found that he is better off not attempting to engage them in any kind of discussion, because it is useless.

Democrats don’t have a Fox News (though Fox News adherents cling to the mythology that the rest of the media do nothing but propagandize for the left). Democrats don’t have a single set of talking points. Democrats don’t even have a solid base among Democrats, which is why the Republicans manage to put up a unified blockade against any and all Democratic ideas, while Democratic legislators constantly have to be herded into line. It is why they are at a disadvantage so long as the economy remains the number one challenge: People are fearful, people are angry, and it is far easier to repeat simplistic Fox News/Republican/Tea Party slogans than to engage in any nuanced discussion of enlightened self-interest or long-term economic policy.

When Mr. Hall described on Saturday how, while he was attempting to chair simultaneous committee hearings on veterans benefits, he had to keep running back across the street to the House chamber every 15 minutes to vote against Republican legislators’ calls to adjourn, it couldn’t have been more evident that the Republicans are doing everything they can to bring government to a halt. Yet such stories are remarkably absent from the “liberal” media. And when Lewisboro’s new Republican administration makes absolutely false claims about the reality of the town’s finances having been “hidden” from them, it is yet another example of the triumph of simplistic sound bites.