Faux Facts

Senator John Kerry was a guest this morning on Morning Joe (8/5).  There was much discussion about the debt ceiling crisis and the 513 point plunge in the Dow yesterday, but he made some very good comments also about the media.

He discussed the custom of the media of presenting both sides of an argument as though both sides have equal validity.  It should be the responsibility of the media to do a little investigating to determine if both sides are arguing from facts, or from faux facts.  My definition of faux facts derives from the famous quip attributed to Senator Patrick Moynihan:  “You are entitled to your own opinions.  You are not entitled to your own facts.”  We have a great many people in both the country and in the Republican Party with this fundamentalist mind-set of wanting their own facts.

An article in Truthout.org, August 3, 2011, Henry A. Giroux, “Breivik’s Fundamentalist War on Politics, and Ours”, is an excellent article regarding the nature of fundamentalism of all varieties, and its effect on our society.  I have some quotes from that article that I believe are pertinent to what is happening in our country at this time. 

The article begins with the fact that within a week of Breivik’s Norwegian carnage, “…the US Republican Party leadership, in an effort to rally its members in the budget battle with the Obama administration, screened a short clip from the 2010 Ben Affleck movie, The Town.”  The clip, though spoken, is violent in the extreme because it contains the following statement, “I need your help.  I can’t tell you what it is.  You can never ask me about it later.  And we’re going to hurt some people.”  No questions asked.  Just “we’re going to hurt some people.”  Like this is no big deal.  Yeah, so what!!  And this clip was used to motivate Republicans to remain firm in their position to dismantle programs that would provide services to vulnerable adults and to children. Yeah, so what!!  No big deal.

From Giroux’s article:  “The tragic slayings in Norway raise anew serious questions about domestic terrorism and its roots in right-wing ideology and fundamentalist movements. Breivik's manifesto "2083" and his murderous actions remind us of the degree to which right-wing extremism is more than a minor threat to American security - a fact we have been all too often willing to forget. The foundation of such violence, and the insistent threat it poses to democracy, is not to be found in its most excessive and brutal acts, but in the absolutist worldview that produces it. As the Swedish religion scholar Mattias Gardell insists, "The terrorist attacks in Oslo were not an outburst of irrational madness, but a calculated act of political violence. The carnage was a manifestation of a certain logic that can and should be explained, if we want to avoid a repetition."[5]

Elements of such a logic are not only on full display in American society, but are also gaining ground. The influence of extremist and fundamentalist ideologies and worldviews - whether embodied in religion, politics, militarism or the market - can be seen currently in the rhetoric at work at the highest levels of government. How else to explain that just one day after the deficit settlement in Washington, Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn of Colorado Springs, in an interview with a Denver radio station, referred to President Obama as a "tar baby."[6] It is hard to mistake the racist nature of the use of the term "tar baby," given its long association as a derogatory term for African-Americans. Soon afterward, Pat Buchanan wrote a column that began with a shockingly overt racist comment in which he writes: "Mocked by The Wall Street Journal and Sen. John McCain as the little people of the Harry Potter books, the Tea Party 'Hobbits' are indeed returning to Middle Earth - to nail the coonskin to the wall."[7] What is clear about this type of racist discourse is that it creates a climate where hatred and violence become legitimate options. It also indicates that the violence of extremist rhetoric is alive and well in American politics; yet, it is barely noticed, and produces almost no public outrage. Moreover, this type of fundamentalism and extremism is about more than just the rise of the Tea Party. It is a growing and ominous force in everyday life, politics, and in the media.

A rigid, warlike mentality has created an atmosphere in which dialogue is viewed as a weakness and compromise understood as personal failing. As Richard Hofstadter argued over 50 years ago, fundamentalist thinking is predicated on an anti-intellectualism and the refusal to engage other points of view.[8] The other is not confronted as someone worthy of respect, but as an enemy, someone who constitutes a threat, who must be utterly vanquished. Michel Foucault goes further and insists that fundamentalists do not confront the other as:

a partner in the search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat.... There is something even more serious here: in this comedy, one mimics war, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders, putting forward as much of one's killer instinct as possible.[9]

Missing from the fundamentalist toolbox is the necessity for self-reflection, thinking critically about the inevitable limitations of one's arguments, or being morally accountable to the social costs of harboring racist ideologies and pushing policies that serve to deepen racist exclusions, mobilize fear, and legitimate a growing government apparatus of punishment and imprisonment.[10] What connects the moral bankruptcy of right-wing Republicans who embrace violent imagery in order to mobilize their followers with the mindset of extremists like Breivik is that they share a deep romanticization of violence that is valorized by old and new fundamentalisms, whose endpoint is a death-dealing blow to the welfare state, young people, immigrants, Muslims, and others deemed dangerous and, so, "disposable."

And later on Page Four, “I am not suggesting that Breivik's actions can be linked directly to right-wing extremism in the Congress and broader society, but it is not altogether unjust to suggest that what they share are a number of core concerns, including a view of immigrants as a threat to American nationalism, an embrace of anti-Muslim rhetoric, a strong espousal of militarism, market fundamentalism, hyper-nationalism and support for a host of retrograde social policies that embrace weakening unions, the rolling back of women's rights, and a deep distrust of equality as a foundation of democracy itself.[11] Chris Hedges outlines the elements of such a fundamentalism when he writes:

Fundamentalists have no interest in history, culture or social or linguistic differences.... They are provincials.... They peddle a route to assured collective deliverance. And they sanction violence and the physical extermination of other human beings to get there. All fundamentalists worship the same gods - themselves. They worship the future prospect of their own empowerment. They view this empowerment as a necessity for the advancement and protection of civilization or the Christian state. They sanctify the nation. They hold up the ability the industrial state has handed to them as a group and as individuals to shape the world according to their vision as evidence of their own superiority.... The self-absorbed world view of these fundamentalists brings smiles of indulgence from the corporatists who profit, at our expense, from the obliteration of moral and intellectual inquiry.[12]

“At work here is a moral and political absolutism that more and more dehumanizes young people, immigrants, feminists, Muslims, and others relegated to the outside of the narrow parameters of a public sphere preserved for white, Christian and male citizens. Breivik acted upon his hatred of Muslims, leftists and immigrants by murdering young people whose activities at a Labor Party Camp suggested they might usher in a future at odds with his deeply racist and authoritarian views. As Scott Shane, writing in The New York Times, put it, and it bears repeating, Breivik, "was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam."[13]

Giroux’s article is rather long, and if you wish to look up his footnotes, I suggest you find the article on Truthout.org.

That being said, fundamentalism, whether religious, political, economic, or whatever, never achieves anything in the way of creative solutions, because, since the fundamentalist has all of the answers already, based on faux facts, there is no need to search for other solutions.