A poll like this is implicitly posing a question: Do you believe the Washington Post, with its decades of hard-won credibility, its numerous sources, and its adherence to the standards of journalism? Or do you believe Moore? Few of us have the time or capability to investigate the story for ourselves, and so we have to choose. And given what Alabama’s conservatives have heard about the mainstream media for years, is it any wonder some of them choose Moore?
The problem with this argument is that I'm old enough to remember Watergate, another creature of the Washington Post (which puts them well ahead of the New York Times, home of Jeff Gerth and Judith Miller), and I remember people in Texas who dismissed the story as false even after Nixon resigned. And they hadn't been bathed in criticism of the "mainstream media" for years; they simple didn't consider the Washington Post "mainstream media." Nor did they consider a non-Texan, non-Southern, non-conservative newspaper to share the standards of evidence and accuracy that they shared.
Never doubt the power of regionalism and parochialism, and the fact that all politics is (still) local. So 29% of Alabama voters say they are more likely to support Roy Moore after the Washington Post article?
Doesn't surprise me one bit. So, is this true?
If one side rejects the epistemic authority of society’s core institutions and practices, there’s just nothing left to be done. Truth cannot speak for itself, like the voice of God from above. It can only speak through human institutions and practices. There is no longer any settling such arguments. The only way to settle any argument is for both sides to be committed, at least to some degree, to shared standards of evidence and accuracy, and to place a measure of shared trust in institutions meant to vouchsafe evidence and accuracy. Without that basic agreement, without common arbiters, there can be no end to dispute.
Well, only if you believe "basic agreement" means you must agree with me; which is, ironically, the whole basis of the critiques of standards by multiculturalism and post-modernism, which are still not the bug-bears they were ever made out to be by conservative critics. The "epistemic authority of society's core institutions and practices" have always been under attack. Consider Luther's Reformation; the Enlightenment; Descarte's skepticism; the Romantic revolution; Darwin's theory of evolution; the Declaration of Independence. Truth has never spoken for itself, the voice of God from above has always been a myth and a shibboleth (much like the "ghost in the machine" was not a description of Cartesian dualism, but a critique of it). The argument Ezra Klein quotes so approvingly is an argument for hegemony, for one side is acceptable and no others need apply. And it is an argument generally reconciled in the law and in governance where extremes may arise from time to time, but consensus eventually and finally emerges. What never emerges in the body politic is a commitment to "shared standards of evidence and accuracy," because those are always being challenged and are always in flux, even in law; nor even an agreement on what standard of measure yields the proper "measure of shared trust in institutions meant to vouchsafe evidence and accuracy" if only because, as Hume pointed out, those measures are either irrelevant, or never absolutely established.
It strikes me how much of what we assert we know is a desperate attempt to understand a situation that is too complex to understand, often too varied to understand because when the outcome is the result of a vote, we have to pretend that that "thing" which decided it is comprehensible and predictable.
ReplyDeleteThe longer I look at politics, even American politics which I've watched for more than a century, the more convinced I become that I can't know about it.
Look at Virginia's governors' race and how the condemnation of how Ralph Northam had "blown it" how Donna Brazile had muffed it, etc. were already published by people wanting to get ahead of the curve.
I have no idea what's going to happen in Alabama or who else might come out with new accusations or how much corroboration they might have or what effect that's going to have on anything. It's one thing for journalists to write about bridges crossed and burned after that but before they've even gotten to the rive bank is way too early to come to any conclusions.
I am sure the WaPo has got their defense against Roy Moore suing in order, they'd seem to have more than enough to justify them publishing what they have.