Pat Moynihan and the Post-Modern Presidency
For the better part of two generations, the political theory of the hard left has held that language—“discourse,” in the argot of the academy—is a matter of social construction rather than a means of describing objective realities. The slogan celebrates when the oppressed “speak truth to power,” but the theoretical grounding holds that speech regarding truth is a mere assertion of power.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed this, and was disgusted by it, in the New Left of the 1960s. He was the most recent, though he need not be the last, of the great New Deal liberals who were as comfortable speaking in defense of truth as they were of ameliorating economic hardship. The 1960s witnessed the mutation from this liberalism to the New Left, whose opposition to the Vietnam War Moynihan shared but whose “great debasement of language” and “fantasizing of politics” he could not countenance. He wrote:
Upper-class lying—that the men in jail are political prisoners, that the fatherless child is happier, that the welfare system is a conspiracy to keep the proletariat passive—is destroying standards of discourse. The language of politics grows more corrupt. We have graduated a demi-generation of students who appear lost to reality. We are beginning to encounter middle-of-the-road politicians who will seemingly say anything. We approach a fantasized condition.
In 2016, we arrived at that condition, and the Left found itself theoretically disarmed. How was a movement that had long rejected the idea of truth to accuse Donald Trump of falsehood? For him, truth was exactly what Michel Foucault had asserted it to be: a means to power. (“Hey, Bill, Bill,” Trump demanded of the host of The O’Reilly Factor after the future president-elect retweeted a racially charged chart radically overstating the rate of African-American murders of whites, “am I gonna check every statistic?”)
The institutions that should check every statistic are increasingly allergic to stating anything in
the language of truth. The academics experiencing apoplexy over Trump’s rhetoric have in fact spent decades dismantling the philosophical infrastructure of truth. They have done so in the name of a moral relativism intended to inhibit the imposition of cultural norms. Now, finding moral objectivity suddenly useful—such as insisting on truth and civility in political conversation—it is unavailable to them.
This assumes an especially ironic cast in the case of the media, whose very objectivity becomes an excuse for refusing to state objective fact. Consider The New York Times’ obituary of Fidel Castro. A caption under a photograph of the Cuban tyrant gingerly allowed that he “was seen as a ruthless despot by some and hailed as a revolutionary hero by others.”
This is a classic instance of the use of the passive voice to obscure responsibility. Castro was, in point of fact, a ruthless despot. Moynihan called dictators exactly that during his ambassadorship at the United Nations. This is a truth the Times was unwilling to state about Castro even as it became more aggressive in making judgments about truth and falsehood with regard to Trump, such as that his assertions of voter fraud were “baseless.”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/12/11/pat_moynihan_and_the_post-modern_presidency_132541.html
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