What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we’re not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we’re living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. Paul Krugman, July 2005
***
The [Bush] aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. Ron Suskind, NYT Magazine, 10/17/04.
If it were not Karl Rove, it would have been someone else. It’s not that he’s the cause of it all; he’s more a symptom of a larger historical cultural trend. Rove is just more precocious among Americans in understanding it and leveraging what he understands into political power.
Nevertheless give credit where it is due. He is the first truly postmodern American politician (maybe you could make a case for Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich). He’s created a political culture in which the aide could talk to Suskind the way he did and expect to be taken seriously. Rove understands that objective reality is irrelevant and that the Liberals’ greatest weakness is their continued quaint belief in facts and argumentation. Rove understands that truth is a social construction and that the people who have the most power are the ones in the strongest position to construct their version of reality. Those who have the power are fools not to use it to construct a version of reality that promotes and consolidates their power.
It’s been really something to watch. I often find myself in slackjawed amazement as I observe the audacity with which he exploits his advantages. He is a chess master who finds a way to take his opponent’s queen off the board early in the game. He shrewdly identifies the key strengths of his opponents and develops very effective strategies to neutralize them. He is a psychological warrior, and his favorite tactic is simply to spread lies that plant the seeds of doubt.
Q: What was John McCain’s greatest strength?
A: His heroism as a POW.
Q: How do you flip that into a weakness?
A: His experience in the camps made him mentally unstable.
Just enough of a doubt, just enough plausibility, that if you were leaning toward McCain, now you’re going to start looking somewhere else to stay on the safe side. Everything the electorate knows about candidates for national elections is indirect and fuzzy. Each has a crafted media image, and Rove understands better than anyone how to craft the counterimage. And the public doesn’t know for sure which one is the more truthful. So whichever one gets the most media repetition is the one that gets established in the public’s mind as the more true. That’s the logic of the big lie. Just say it often enough, and it’s accepted as reality–by enough people to get you elected, anyway. There is no truth; there is only image crafting and counter-crafting for political advantage, and the main crafting tool is repetition through talking points.
No one understands better than Rove that political reality is a sham reality, and nobody exploits better the public’s suspicions that all politicians are not the images they project. There is no strength that cannot be flipped into a weakness. No insignificant peccadillo that can’t be made into a major scandal. In Rove’s hands either will be crafted into a negative that in the end it becomes his opponent’s defining characteristic. He is an artiste of political thuggery.
But what I find truly awesome about Rove is his ability to inoculate his own candidates. Bush has some strengths, but his weaknesses are so obvious, so glaring. That this oafish, ignorant, weak man could be plausibly enough presented as a strong, steady leader to win (sort of) two presidential elections will be one day recognized as of the greatest accomplishments of modern political propaganda. We’re too close to it now to fully appreciate it for the remarkable achievement that it is. It’s stunning, really.
He does it primarily by playing very aggressive offense. He keeps his opponents off balance and prevents them from establishing a strong enough foothold to mount a counter attack. The main technique is just to say any absurd thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s untrue. The opponent has to spend time to refute it because we live in a carnival hall-of-mirrors world where innuendo has as much a hold on the public perception as a lifelong record of public service. But the more time he spends refuting, the less time he has to counterattack. And whatever mostly weak and ineffectual attacks he is able to mount, Rove is able to parry fairly easily.
He does it by accusing his opponents of being politically motivated. What else? In his world that’s all there is, because for him there is no reality except that which is constructed for political advantages. He will use every trick in the book and all of the power of the presidency, now that he’s obtained it, to promote his version of political reality and to delegitimate the version of his opponents.
But reality has a way of bringing people down to earth. Our delusions never last. Sooner or later reality gives us a jolt and wakes us from our dream. The reality of Iraq is finally shaking the country awake from its neocon power fantasy. And this business with Valerie Plame seems finally to be awakening the country to who Rove, Cheney, and Bush really are.
But maybe not. I could be wrong. I was wrong about the election. I’m still amazed that 51% of Americans could believe the GOP version of reality plausible enough to allow it another four years. 30% or maybe 40%, ok. But a majority of voting Americans? Still hard for me to understand. Maybe we just don’t want to see what’s right before our eyes. Maybe we’ll just yawn, roll over, and go back to sleep. Let Big Daddy do his thing. He knows best. But sooner or later we’re going to be shaken awake. If it doesn’t happen now, the jolt to do it will have to be all the stronger in the future. Better that we do it now.
Leave a Reply