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December 18, 2006
Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop"Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that--fuzzing things up--because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004."Even realism has an obligation to be realistic. — George Packer. The only piece of political journalism ever to make me cry was Ron Suskind’s article, Without a Doubt, published in the New York Times Magazine shortly before the 2004 election. It was in that article that the famous passage appeared quoting a senior administration official on the myopia of the “reality-based community” when it came to understanding the government of George W. Bush. Lately I have been thinking a lot about that article because the “realist” school in foreign policy is thought to be back in charge. The release of the Iraq Study Group’s report on December 6th and the re-emergence of James Baker, famous for being pragmatist, a realist, and a fixer, were the triggers for this observation. The Guardian’s report was typical: “This is a return to the realist policy of Mr. Bush’s father.” Dan Froomkin said the report and reactions to it “marked a restoration of reality in Washington.” Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are quite different ideas. We shouldn’t fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that—fuzzing things up—because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004. Of course, neither did the political system. Or the Republican party, or its sensible wing— the elders, the responsible people. I think they all regret it now. But they’re happy with this month’s theme, “realists are back.” It sounds almost… normal. An intellectual scoop In Without a Doubt (subtitled “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”) Suskind was not talking about an age old conflict between realists and idealists, the sort of story line that can be re-cycled for every administration. It wasn’t the ideologues against the pragmatists, either. He was telling us that reality-based policy-making—and the mechanisms for it—had gotten dumped. A different pattern had appeared under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The normal checks and balances had been overcome, so that executive power could flow more freely. Reduced deliberation, oversight, fact-finding, and field reporting were different elements of an emerging political style. Suskind, I felt, got to the essence of it with his phrase, the “retreat from empiricism.” Which is a perfect example of what Bill Keller and others at the New York Times call an intellectual scoop. (“When you can look at all the dots everyone can look at, and be the first to connect them in a meaningful and convincing way…”) Over the last three years, and ever since the adventure in Iraq began, Americans have seen spectacular failures of intelligence, spectacular collapses in the press, spectacular breakdowns in the reality-checks built into government, including the evaporation of oversight in Congress, and the by-passing of the National Security Council, which was created to prevent exactly these events. How did realism become a submerged, almost dissident philosophy amongst American elites, and how did its opposite triumph so completely? Unless one chalks it up simply to the historical caprice of the Bush presidency combined with 9/11, one must consider the motivations of major donors and the myriad factors that determine the acceptable limits of what people in think tanks think. If powerful Americans think differently about the world than they did in the late 1940s and 1950s, an explanation should be sought. Action vs. behavior Mine would begin this way: The alternative to facts on the ground is to act, regardless of the facts on the ground. When you act you make new facts. You clear new ground. And when you roll over or roll back the people who have a duty to report the situation as it is—people in the press, the military, the bureaucracy, your own cabinet, or right down the hall—then right there you have demonstrated your might. (See my essay called Rollback.) The contrast I would draw is between the actions of Bush, a political innovator, and the behavior of previous presidents, Republican and Democrat. (The distinction between action and behavior is originally Hannah Arendt’s.) In everything bearing on national security, the Bush Government has been committed to action first, to making the world (including the map of the Middle East) anew, to a kind of audacity in the use of American power. It simply does not behave as previous governments have behaved when presented with the tools of the presidency, which includes the media, and the greatest public address system in the world: the White House podium and backdrop. “In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush,” Suskind wrote, introducing his characters. “He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.” The aide said that guys like me 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.” That passage caused a sensation when it was published, and the sensation introduced a new term, the reality-based community, into political talk. Two things happened right away. Many on the left adopted the term. “Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community,” their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left’s self-description. (They’re reality-based? Yeah, right.) Spooked Republicans Neither of those responses highlights the fact that in Suskind’s reporting it was Republicans spooked by Bush and his anti-empiricism who were beginning to speak out. After his portrait of Karen Hughes, after his book with bounced Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, after he wrote about Karl Rove’s operation, Suskind’s phone began to ring. His sources, he has said, were people who had been left out of decision-making or put off by the Bush team’s projections of certainty. Republicans, insiders. They had a disturbing pattern to report. “By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality.” “The circle around Bush was tightening.” “The president would listen without betraying any reaction.” “The president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.” “By summer’s end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their weekly lunch.” Suskind had a lot of it figured out: A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush’s White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners. That “cluster” is not idealism. In the current New York Review of Books, Mark Danner talks of a “war of imagination” that Bush and his advisers preferred to fight. The thing is, it takes a leap of imagination to realize they did it that way. As Danner puts it, anyone trying to understand how the current mess in Iraq started “has to confront the monumental fact that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, invaded Iraq with no particular and specific idea of what it was going to do there, and then must try to explain how this could have happened.” Empiricism isn’t policy And remember Sir Richard Dearlove, the British intelligence official who in July 2002 took notes on the way it happened, so as to inform his colleagues: “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Or consider Lawrence D. Freedman’s observation in Foreign Affairs (Jan./Feb. 2006): “It suited the White House to take at face value assertions from Iraqi exiles that solving postwar problems would be relatively straightforward.” There was no attempt to ascertain. Empiricism wasn’t the policy. Now here’s what Glenn Kessler and Thomas E. Ricks reported in the Dec. 7 Washington Post: “The Iraq Study Group report released yesterday might well be titled ‘The Realist Manifesto.’” And I suppose it might. But what if our problems in Iraq are due not to a lack of realism, but to the total breakdown of reality-based policy making, a deliberate withdrawal from an empirical mindset in order to conduct abroad a war of choice and expand at home executive power? Ricks and Kessler drew me up short when they wrote: “The report’s description of the violence in Iraq, which amounts to an attack on the administration’s understanding of the facts on the ground, will likely set the new baseline for how the Iraq conflict is portrayed.” How are these baselines for day-to-day description normally set? Who has the authority to do so and where do they get it? We’re deep into the reality-making machinery with that phrase. According to the Post reporters, there would be new baselines from now on. The power to set them had apparently shifted, away from Bush, toward Baker and the so-called realist wing. According to the study group, “Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes discrepancy with policy goals.” Go, realists! Note, however, that Baker’s group still assumes that “good policy” is by definition reality-based, exactly the assumption Bush the younger tried to overturn. Good policy was to Bush, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld action-based. It worked in creative friction with facts on the ground. Fogs of confusion inside the government were fine because deeper within the government a few had the clarity of action. Erasing people There’s another story almost as iconic as Suskind’s senior adviser: “we make our own reality.” When Jay Garner returns to the White House from running the American effort in Iraq, Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice and Rumsfeld are there to greet him. Not only does he know to give a falsely upbeat assessment in his written report and stick to cheerful banter during the meeting, but he finds that no one asks him a single question about the situation on the ground in Iraq. Here you have the best possible reporter, but there is no report. The scene (as described by George Packer) is highly ritualized. A message is being sent about who gets to define what’s happening on the ground, and it isn’t the people on the ground. Garner told Packer that “Bush knew only what Cheney let into his office.” The erasure of reality could get quite personal. You had to be willing to erase people. As part of a profile that Suskind wrote for Esquire about Karl Rove, John DiIulio, who served briefly as director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, sent the reporter a seven-page memo about his resignation, explaining that the White House suffered from “a complete lack of a policy apparatus.” The normal checks had been overridden. Later a strange thing happened. DiIulio apologized like an official of the Khmer Rouge following arrest. He said his own story had been false. He erased himself in public. Before the election I heard Suskind give a rousing talk to students at NYU. He talked a lot about Dilulio. When Suskind recounts the story, the detail you focus on is not what DiIulio said about White House decision-making but the extreme tactic of making him disown his own experience, the reality of his own (typed) words to Suskind. “That’s when my phone began to ring,” he said. Others saw it happening to them. Confronted with “…when we act, we create our own reality,” what could the press have done differently?
Why didn’t the press do these things? Part of it is the reluctance to appear partisan. Of course if Suskind’s reporting was correct, the people to whom this news would matter most were reality-based Republicans, members of the military who cannot afford to have any other “base” but reality, and intellectually honest conservatives who believed in Bush and wanted to see him succeed. There’s a lot of truth in what Atrios says about Washington pundits, “They’d rather be wrong than agree with the dirty fucking hippies.” Small shelf of books I once tried to ask John Harris, then the political editor of the Washington Post, about the Bush government’s various conficts with the reality-making machinery. (See my recent interview with him upon leaving the Post.) I said to Harris that “aside from the coverage of weapons of mass destruction, which is seen to have failed, my sense is that you and your colleagues think you have handled the challenge of covering this government pretty darn well.” The game hasn’t changed, you contend. We’re still in a recognizable, fourth-estate, meet-the-press, rather than beat-the-press universe. Those — like me — who accuse Bush of taking extraordinary measures to marginalize, discredit, refute (and pollute) the press are said to be exaggerating the cravenness of this Adminstration and ignoring the parallels and precedents in other White Houses, including the Democratic ones. Well, I tried. (Read about the misbegotten answer here.) Today it is extremely difficult to find language adequate to “reality gets dumped,” which is still in most respects an unbelievable and unbelieved tale, even though we know a lot about it from columnists like Dan Froomkin, Frank Rich, Hendrick Hertzberg and Eric Boehlert, from sites like Tomdispatch.com and writers like Mark Danner. We can also point to a small shelf of books that are largely about the collapse of empiricism— including two by Suskind (The Price of Loyalty and The One Percent Doctrine) George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate, Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco, and most recently Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, the title of which gestures toward the story Suskind tried to tell but shrinks a bit from it. Denial is a psychological state we are all somewhat familiar with and is therefore a more comforting description of the Bush government than the bizarre flight from empiricism that Suskind tried to alert us to. Similarly, realists vs. ideologues is a conflict we can understand without spraining our brains too much. This makes the Dana Milbanks and Joe Kleins of the world happy. When a sturdy distinction still works it’s good news for incumbent interpreters—and journalists are interpreters even when they are “just” reporting—because they don’t have to introduce an unfamiliar language to describe what they are seeing. More accurate, less credible Whereas if they tried to narrate the expansion of executive power (led by the vice president) through a revolt against empiricism (led by the chief executive) their story would be more accurate (to what happened) but less credible to more people. Because it sounds so extreme. This is in fact a way to discredit the press that the press has not fully appreciated. Take extreme action and a press that mistrusts “the extremes” will mistrust initial reports of that action— like Suskind’s. This gives you time to re-make the scene and overawe people. There are all kinds of costs to changing a master narrative that has been built up by beat reporters and career pundits. When the press can hang on to an old and proven one it will. The Bush people understood that. They knew they could change the game on the press because the press finds it hard to act in reply. Therefore it tends to behave. The idea that accuracy improves credibility is comforting. The more accurate you are, the more credible you will be, right? But in extreme situations—and invading Iraq with no particular and specific idea of what to do once there is an extreme situation—an accurate description is likely to be rejected, and the describer treated as in-credible. Reporters and editors are, I believe, intimately aware of this. Bob Woodward, as I have said elsewhere, wrote Plan of Attack because at the time it was a more credible book, even though Attack Without a Plan would have been more accurate. When I read “Without a Doubt” I felt an immediate kinship with Suskind. Because I could see what he was trying to do: warn us about something that sounded crazy but was all too real. I could see he was going to fail in that, and I sensed that he knew it too. That’s what made it so sad to read. Journalists and talking heads: if this month you wish to tell me that realism is back kindly tell me where you think it had gone to.
Posted by Jay Rosen at December 18, 2006 10:40 PM
Comments
Excellent post. I've been collecting scraps and pieces on this topic for years. I someday hope to make a Neoreality quilt. Mark Schmitt describes the ideology of information. David Brooks pooh-poohs substantiality on the occasion of the second inauguration. And no one does pseudoperspicaciousness better than the Medium Lobster: [The] administration has not only embraced ideas, it exists, in a sense, only as an idea. It has so rapidly and so readily embraced the boldest of ideas that it has transcended the need for real actions, real plans, real accomplishments, and reality itself. Posted by: Sven at December 18, 2006 2:36 PM | Permalink if this month you wish to tell me that realism is back kindly tell me where you think it went. I think that "where reality went" was 9/11. Bush's poll numbers were going down literally from the day he took over the White House. The press was doing its job, more or less -- at least well enough that people understood that the policies of the Bush administration were inconsistent with "reality". 9/11 changed the way people including the press perceived their world -- the fear and panic created by 9/11 meant they were no longer sure that their own perceptions were an accurate reflection of reality. The mainstream media pretty much lived in the "reality" described by Suskind -- the "reality" that was being created by the empire itself and was enforced by the empire by accusations of disloyalty, lack of patriotism, or "supporting the terrorists." It took the cataclysmic reality of the Katrina catastrophe to shock most reporters into consciousness.... Posted by: p.lukasiak at December 18, 2006 6:48 PM | Permalink I wish Suskind had presented better evidence to support his claims. Consider the conversation with Lantos, that is provided by Biden to Suskind: ''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.'' Bush was wrong that Sweden has no army, but he was right that it is neutral; Lantos seems to imply that Sweden is not neutral. And Lantos was wrong about Switzerland -- it does have an army, not a "national guard." And Bush admits he was wrong! At some point, someone on his staff checked up on Lantos' claim and told Bush about it. This is not a good example of how the White House ignores facts. Moreover, Suskind misses the point of the adviser critical of the "reality-based community."
It seems quite clear to me that the adviser is arguing that the US is a force for change and that Suskind and other journalists critical of the Bush administration are harping about what cannot be done while the US goes and does it. The key part is:"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality... We're history's actors." If anything this statement is remarkable as a paragon of the "arrogance of power" that Fulbright discussed back in 1966. What Suskind and his sources describe more accurately is not faith-over-fact but the amazing insularity of the Bush team. The emphasis on "loyalty" is pathological. To me, this more reflects the degree to which the Bush admin. acts and is staffed at the White House level as if it were back in Austin. Posted by: C. L. Ball at December 18, 2006 11:08 PM | Permalink re: 'we make our own reality' that would only be true if we controlled *all* the movers (which, luckily, we don't...-- if there was any doubt about this, you'd think the Iraq fiasco would have cleared it all up...) Delia Posted by: Delia at December 19, 2006 1:47 AM | Permalink The recent Whitehouse effort to kill Flynt Everett's N.Y. Times editorial for revealing "classified" information that is already in the public domain and which has been repeatedly cleared by the CIA strikes me as a gauntlet thrown down in defense of the retreat from empiricism. Where has the baseline for reality got to if public information can be reclassified by decree? How absolute is executive power that can declare already public facts to be secret? This is practically a legal declaration that, when it is convenient for the Bush administration, "up" will legally be considered to be "down." How much plainer can they make it for us? This administration has made such claims repeatedly, and they largely seem to be inspired by challenges to administration dogma of one sort or another. They tend to fall hardest on dissident, reality-based Republicans because those are the folks who witnessed the reality atrocities from within. For example, there was a grand diplomatic bargain offered by Iran a couple of years ago, but that must be disappeared from public memory because it was simply too embarassing and inconvenient. According to the Danner piece, the nut of it is that even within the administration, and even within the Pentagon, the reference points for reality construction continue to compete with one another and there is no force within the administration that requires they be adjusted to one another. The competing realities simply rage on in conflict with each other and any conceivable national interest from any conceivable ideological perspective. I think the level of Bush administration dysfunction may verge on a new definition of failed state. This affair has made Juan Cole fed up. He understandably calls for Elliot Abram's resignation over the matter (I guess accountability has to start somewhere), but, as Henry Waxman has said, with this administration the challenge is where to begin with the Boltons and the Cheneys and the Feiths and the Libbys and the Rumsfelds to choose from? This administration increasingly looks to be a cabal within a cabal wrapped up in a cabal. According to Danner, even most administration officials apparently don't know what's going on--how are we supposed to figure it out? As you suggest, Danner finds that Bush and Cheney got the lack of interagency process they demanded. He also says that the Pentagon effectively removed the president of the United States and the NSC from all discussion surrounding several of the most critical decisions on Iraq occupation policy. Along with the retreat from empiricism, doesn't this mean we've also unknowingly witnessed some sort of coup d'etat on the part of agents in the Pentagon or the vice president's office? We have not only a retreat from empiricism, but a retreat from policy-making, a retreat from accountability, and apparently, a retreat from coherence. Posted by: Mark Anderson at December 19, 2006 2:51 AM | Permalink I think Kessler and Ricks use mild language The ISG purports to be about its 79 proposed solutions, but I'm skeptical. I think its real purposes were shifting the center of the Iraq debate and emboldening the press to return to a more traditional role. The words that really counted were these: "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." Everything else was just footnote. This was completely "known," and even people outside the Beltway knew it. But it took an "independent commission" that was "bipartisan" to validate this knowledge. Which ought to give everyone pause. Back when Tony Snow was coming aboard there was good discussion here about what this meant for Rollback. I got the sense that Snow meant a more sophisticated package on the same philosophy: It wasn't enough anymore to send Scotty out to mock the press with his disregard for their questions. Rollback 2.0 was going to include some Fox News showmanship to liven up the non-responsiveness. But considering Bush's poll numbers, this "validated" ISG rebuke from the foreign policy establishment and the coming subpoenas from the Democratic Congress, does Rollback now have any future, whatsoever? I'm not saying the press coverage will get better, only that it's going to be more confident in the face of administration disapproval. It's easy to criticize someone when everyone else is already calling them names (which, ironically, is why Rollback worked in the first place). Posted by: Daniel Conover at December 19, 2006 11:33 AM | Permalink Great analysis, Jay. Suskind's piece was heartbreaking, indeed. And I think you have to parse the incidences of "we" in the money quote. Perhaps we can assume that the first "we" -- as in "we're an Empire now" -- refers to the U.S.A. But the rest of them clearly refer only to "history's actors" within the innermost sanctum of the administration. I don't get the sense that anything has changed. Though you have to wonder what the ISG would have reported had the Republicans won in November. My sense is that, rather than using the ISG as cover for "graceful retreat", they will use it as cover under which to continue business as usual. So that as the press trumpets the return of reality, the unreality of "we're history's actors and the rest of you pissants can just study our moves [haw! haw! haw!]" continues unchecked over the next two years. Posted by: Richard B. Simon at December 19, 2006 1:09 PM | Permalink Re: that famous Suskind quote. The problem I've always had with it -- and the problem I still have with it -- is that it's almost too perfect an expression of the self-entitled arrogance that people like me tend to ascribe to this administration and its bad actors. That it's anonymous is one thing. That it's long and perfectly worded is another. I've read conservatives who simply dismiss it as made up. I don't think it's made up. But I don't use it or make reference to it because ... ... Well, because it's part of the dynamic you describe. Because it's so extreme, the statement is hard to believe... so I instinctively don't want to use it in public writing, because it fits so nicely into my private assessment of how things actually work. Journalists describe that cautious instinct in positive terms, and that's OK... but an instinctive aversion to anything outside the master narrative isn't really a journalistic virtue. It's ingrained in my mainstream editor's head that if something looks too good to be true, it isn't true, so I wind up doubting Suskind's reporting because I'm biased against anything that could blow up in my face and publicly confirm that I'm an idiot. The way I rationalize this is to say that "for something that explosive and important, I need special proof." Which is generally good journalism practice... except how are you going to ever confirm something like this? How would you source a sentiment, unless the speaker said it at a podium during a publicly witnessed press conference? And what if the source said it on the record and later recanted under pressure? If I didn't have proof of my accuracy, could I withstand the heat? When the reputable people all agree on the same narrative, to disagree is to be disreputable. Nobody in mainstream journalism wants to be considered disreputable these days, and those who don't mind tend to get weeded out early. This is as true with politics as it is with reports of police misconduct toward prostitutes. It's not that one thing or another is likely or unlikely to be true -- it's that we simply have no public system of knowing. Posted by: Daniel Conover at December 19, 2006 4:54 PM | Permalink Thanks, everyone. All good points. I agree with C.L. that the Sweden story is weak. It doesn't say what Suskind thinks it says. But the real power of his "thesis," if you will, is that other accounts by other reporters (mostly in books) have confirmed and fleshed out the basic insight. Paul: I agree with you and many others that Katrina is the turning point in people waking up to this story. What happened after the hurriace is that the flight from empiricism by Bush and his team was televised live in front of the whole nation during a genuine national emergency. Nothing is the same after something like that. Dan: This was completely "known," and even people outside the Beltway knew it. But it took an "independent commission" that was "bipartisan" to validate this knowledge. Which ought to give everyone pause. Yes, it ought. What were Ricks and Kessler saying with their comment that baselines for the "portrayal" of conditions in Iraq will shift after the Study Group report. One would think that "reality," the facts on the ground, would have shifted that baseline a long time ago. ...Right? Why couldn't the press have shifted it? Maybe because "we will ignore as best we can the mainstream press and let's see if there's any penalty for doing that." So went the thinking. What penalties do you think they had in mind? How are they extracted and by whom? I continue to find it weird and puzzling that people who were disposed toward Bush, part of his coalition, on his team, under his command... weren't more concerned about the possibility that Suskind's sources were real, his reporting good, his picture accurate enough to matter. I mean it's fine to feed media bias to the base as the reason for disbelieving all critical coverage, thus keeping morale high and the flow of hostility into newsrooms heavy, and I understand all that, but... I always figured that savvy people on the Republican side knew that reporters like Suskind don't usually make things up, and therefore there was a very good chance that his sources were Republicans trying to warn other Republicans. In this sense "Without a Doubt" was in part an internal communique from one part of the Bush coalition (theunseen insiders) to another (the outsiders trying to see in.) But the culture war allowed the signal to be misread. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 19, 2006 5:21 PM | Permalink Jay -- You nailed the press's problem when you noted that "there are all kinds of costs to changing a master narrative ... " Witness coverage of both the 2000 and the 2004 presidential campaigns. It was like watching a train move down the only tracks available to it. Big trains very seldom hop the tracks. And big old trains that are getting tired and running out of fuel never do. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at December 19, 2006 5:30 PM | Permalink You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.-Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), 256-7 Posted by: Richard B. Simon at December 19, 2006 5:55 PM | Permalink Steve about 2004. "It was like watching a train move down the only tracks available to it." Yes, that's how the narrative engine works. Without risky, difficult and controversial improvisation, the story will run on the existing tracks. All pressures point that way. It's head-splitting work to replace a master narrative that's been extended over many Administrations, and proven flexible, efficient, understandable to audiences, plausible to editors, easy to transmit to newcomers on the beat, "safe" enough for everyday use... But the problem is actually one degree worse than that (and this took me several years to understand, Steve...) because if it's a choice between the chance for greater accuracy with an unproven narrative, and lesser accuracy but more immediate credibility and far fewer hassles by sticking with what you got, then most of the time the press will stick with what it has, but since, according to its own code, it can never choose "against" accuracy (even though it happens) and since a good journalist never does, journalists who want stay within their code will simply hide from themselves the terms of the terrible bargain they are striking. Now they've just become harder to talk to, or reach with criticism. (Subtext of the tension with bloggers, who can see a down-and-out narrative and make merciless fun of it.) The problems of an outworn narrative, huge enough by themselves, are compounded by a professional mythology, a self-image that has to be upheld, causing misrecognition of the choices one has actually made. If Bush loads more power onto Cheney's plate and Cheney is then made less legible, more invisible, the press has to respond aggressively and with creative measures just to keep executive branch power under normal levels of scrutiny. And if it fails to call itself into emergency session and get on the Cheney case, it has just surrendered territory to the White House. (Which is exactly what Cheney was seeking.) The press corps is "behind" where it once was in the levels of scrutiny if can offer as the public's watchdog, rep and baseline setter. In a sense it is accepting a less accurate picture. Force 'em to innovate to keep up with you. Chances are they won't. Would you take those odds if you were Dan Bartlett or Dick Cheney? If you know the press think and how it works in White House coverage, you would. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 19, 2006 6:34 PM | Permalink Ron Suskind definitely got it right, but he was not the first to make the claim that this White House was driven by something not rooted in reality. Paul Krugman discussed this in his book, The Great Unravelling, which I touched on in my interview with him.
I believe that Bill Woodward reported this in his first book on Bush, but didn't really understand what was being said. Here's what he wrote that Bush believed:
The whole idea that they've been playing out is that true confidence in setting the way will change reality. Many management books talk about how one can harness chaotic change to shape the future they want - and these guys live that. That was why I was not surprised to see Suskind's article because it was clear watching them that this was how they were governing. How about this article from March 2003 which describes Bush's management style wondering what would happen if it failed?
What Paul Krugman called Revolutionary Power, Eric Hoffer described in The True Believer. I think if you want to understand the crisis of our time, one should read that book again, because I think the world is facing two incipent mass movements -- the Islamic version with the face of bin Laden and the version with George Bush as leader of the Christian right looking to pull down the current world and replace it with their own theistic vision of the world. And as you say, Jay, too many people (our press, our elected leaders and the Republican moderates) think this is too extreme. But it is what one sees when one looks at the actions and the results of this President. That's why you see so many worried Cassandras like me.
To use a more manageable example, consider a large mutual fund that wants to buy the stock of a small company. It is extremely difficult for the fund to invest in a small or even mid-sized company without the very fact that the large fund is interested in the company driving up the price of the stock. The stock then attracts front-runners who wish to benefit from the short-term increase in demand, driving up the price of the stock still further - and the large fund manager must constantly reassess whether the price of the stock has moved so much that it is no longer a good investment. Then he has a different problem: How to sell it without the very fact that he's selling it driving the stock price DOWN. This is a very real concern for the Fidelitys, the Warren Buffetts, the large hedge fund and pension funds of the world. They deal with it every day of their lives. The same thing happens writ large - smaller actors have to surf on the waves of US policy. That's the reality of it, and the reality changes every time the US reassesses policy. It changes even when there is NO change in policy, because certain actors will have anticipated a change (in, say, interest rates, for example), and will have to alter their course in light of new events. Which itself creates a new reality, which the U.S. must discount in its own decision-making processes. Writers are experts at pissing in the wind. Today's paper is tomorrow's fishwrap. Policymakers have no such luxury. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at December 19, 2006 10:34 PM | Permalink By the way - I find your characterization of the President as leading a "revolt against empiricism" to be wholly unsubstantiated. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at December 19, 2006 10:36 PM | Permalink What Orwell teaches us is that the prevalent form of social control that has been held over from the 20th century is for government to become the sole arbiter of reality precisely by undermining the very definition of reality. The press has been heretofore unable or unwilling to unveil that part of the narrative. It is an institutional flaw -- wherein what goes on behind the scenes is left masked, so that the political narrative that the public receives is only the iceberg's tip. Nudge nudge, wink wink, senior administration official, say no more. Posted by: Richard B. Simon at December 19, 2006 11:09 PM | Permalink Mary: Thanks for those links. That piece on Bush's management style especially. "A movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system." Yeah, in a lot of ways that's true. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 19, 2006 11:26 PM | Permalink Jay, this is another very interesting article by Alan Wolfe I missed when it was first published (in 2004) which talks about how antithetical the current Republican philosophy is to our Constitutional government set up by our founding fathers and why so many Republicans truly do not accept the legitimacy of our political structure. I think it explains why we have such a huge argument these days about what it means to be an American. Bush is part of that, and but the Republican Party has a great deal to explain in their support of him. George Bush is the "leader of the Christian right?" Mary,you've been reading too many paranoid fantasies in "The Nation." The Christian right is not particularly fond of Bush, and hasn't been for some time. And are you really equivocating between Bin Ladin's theism and Bush's? I thought you wanted to be reality-based. I think Godwin's Law needs a subparagraph to cover that kind of thinking. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at December 20, 2006 8:05 AM | Permalink Jason provides a fine example of: Two things happened right away. Many on the left adopted the term. “Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community,” their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left’s self-description. (They’re reality-based? Yeah, right.) I'm sorry Jason feels the retreat from empiricism is wholly unsubstantiated. I did my best but my best wasn't good enough. He'll have to take it up with Paul O'Neill, Lawrence Wilkerson, John DiIulio (all Republicans) and the five books I mentioned above, plus Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael R. Gordon and (ex-Marine) Bernard E. Trainor. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 20, 2006 8:56 AM | Permalink Nice post. One further question: has Suskind's "we make our own reality" source - the White House aide - ever been identified? I wonder what he or she has to say now. Posted by: Andrew Buncombe at December 20, 2006 9:26 AM | Permalink Andrew: When Suskind spoke at NYU, he said that his source for that story has recently checked in with him. He said source is still a senior official in the Administration. They had a conversation along the lines of, "We're okay? Yep, we're okay," Suskind said. Which means: I want to remain unnamed and you continue to respect that, right? Right. Meanwhile, I got this rather interesting note from a reader. (Not that his suggestion would or could ever happen.) Dear Jay Rosen, Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 20, 2006 10:03 AM | Permalink re: "I think the aide who said we create our own reality was absolutely right." Jayson: We may be big but we do not dictate (control) what all others do at all times (see Iraq, if you have any doubts) -- that's why we DON'T "create our own reality" (since our reality is affected by what others do or don't do...: if we created our own reality wouldn't you say that the Iraq thing would have been gloriously done and over with a long time ago?) re: "By the way - I find your characterization of the President as leading a "revolt against empiricism" to be wholly unsubstantiated." well, that was a bit poetically put ("revolt against empiricism") -- aside from that, what kind evidence would you need to agree with Jay's assessment of the situation? Delia Posted by: Delia at December 20, 2006 10:18 AM | Permalink One further question: has Suskind's "we make our own reality" source - the White House aide - ever been identified? Only Rove could be at once that articulate and that pompous. Plus he's a plausible person to give Suskind a dressing-down after the Hughes article. Posted by: Anderson at December 20, 2006 10:30 AM | Permalink Jay's essay raises, or at least implies, a fundamental question many of us have been debating: essentially, "Did the Bush cabal really mean to do that, or are they really living in a fantasy land, as many of their statements suggest?" He appears to come down on the "fantasyland" side: that they just don't care what the reality is. Their suppression of science certainly supports that idea. But it raises another question: why would they act that way? There is the religious aspect, but it doesn't explain Cheney, who as far as I know is not a fundamentalist, nor the recently-exposed comments that they are exploiting the religious right. There is another possibility. Perhaps they haven't "failed," in Iraq or elsewhere. Put this another way: are Halliburton, the oil companies, or the big military contractors hurting? No, they're making out like bandits - literally. Perhaps that's one reason there's no real effort to stop or remove the Bush administration: their cronies haven't finished looting the country and the rest of the world. In short, maybe they aren't delusional: maybe they're just crooks. And for the prominent journalists commenting on this blog, perhaps there's a story there. Follow the money. One further question, which also deserves further reporting: where do these people plan to go when they leave office? There was mention of a huge ranch in Paraguay; is that true? It will have to be somewhere with no extradition treaty with the US, and no participation in the International Criminal Court. Do you suppose they already have their plane tickets? Or do they plan to use Air Force One? Posted by: Charles Newlin at December 20, 2006 12:40 PM | Permalink Brilliant Post. The "we create our own reality" political mentality is an extention of the subrational religious fundamentalist mindset. Believers simply condition themselves to ignore and supress all facts that conflict with their religious worldview --whether on climate change, evolution, absitinence-only or WMD. The dangerous subgroup consists of those who feel compelled to force external world compliance with their own fantasies --otherwise known as sociopaths. In Iraq, though, the Bush crowd finally hit the "Pravda point," --as when the old Soviet Daily kept publishing outlandish claims of Communist superiority and the imminent collapse of capitalisim while the Russian masses ossified in breadlines. At a certain level of cognitive dissonance, most people stopped listening to official pronouncements. Still, the US press could have (and should have) hastened this awakening by limiting airtime to sources who were clearly known to be nothing more than PNAC propagandists (e.g. Judith Miller, Ahmed Chalabi, William Kristol, Bill Bennett, etc.), and instead given more bandwidth to those who at the time were non-partisan experts (e.g. Scowcroft, Zinni, Wes Clark, Jim Webb, etc.). Why anyone sought --let alone respected-- the opinions of the Bennet's and Kristol's and Krauthammer's on serious subjects like war and WMD intelligence has yet to be explained. The fact that most of them are still welcome, active "opinion leaders" tells you just how little has changed. Posted by: Munguza at December 20, 2006 12:46 PM | Permalink The pattern displayed by Bush & Co. of acting without careful examination of the pertinant facts, is a pattern also displayed by people who for some reason are unable to absorb the facts into a meaningful body of knowledge on which to act, and so to avoid inaction (which they fear) they choose instead to act without much planning and then deal with any resulting problems on the fly. People who have suffered cognitive impairment from drug use show this sort of behavior pattern. This pattern has been observed in Bush by people who have met him. He can follow an argument but seems unable to synthesize the information into a body of knowledge on which he can act. His policies and his execution of them also show this same pattern. What's interesting is that this pattern displayed by Bush has been adopted by his administration. Perhaps this is the result of Bush picking only sycophants to work for him, rather than anybody who will stand-up to him. This is kind of like the mad prince who surrounds himself with yes men and fellow lunatics. This reminds of reading about Caligula. Posted by: bg1 at December 20, 2006 1:13 PM | Permalink I always thought the unanamed aide was Karl Rove because the tenor of the speech seemed very Rovian. Maybe someone could get Dan Foster on the case? (The one who sussed out Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors). Jay my collegues and I have been debating about your essay and my question was "let's say people like John Harris and Len Downie agree with your theory that this is what's happening but also know that when the Washington Post acts there are other actors in this game who will also act." There will be a Fox News and a Accuracy in Media around. So if one branch stops following the trend the other actors in the drama may also play into isolating that actor like a bad virus. Post is perceived as "too tough on Bush" well let's have our executives say that we think the Post is against Bush which makes our news product (The New York Times, ABC News, Fox News, etc.) seem more balanced in comparison. Posted by: catrina at December 20, 2006 1:14 PM | Permalink The United States is finished as a great power or even a potentially great power. The 6 sickeningly Kafkaesque years of Bush (soon to be 8) has seen to that. All that's left is the slide downhill, like a sleeping fat man slowly falling out of his Lazy Boy. Even if a Democrat is elected president in '08 that party's enthrallment to big money will doom any meaningful change. In the end, stupidity and long term moral corruption will usually always catch up to you. Posted by: Mordechai Shiblikov at December 20, 2006 1:22 PM | Permalink One of this team's key strategies is to keep everyone guessing. We act, you study. Is Bush really in charge or is he a front for Cheney? Is Iraq a disastrous mistake, or is the disaster all unfolding according to plan? Is team Bush ignoring global warming because they don't understand it, or because they DO understand it, and they want it to happen? If you do as Charles Newlin suggests above, and follow the money, you will see that, as he suggests, everything that has happened has been extraordinarily good for the very elements that bankrolled Bush-Cheney 2000. Including a wasted decade in which the "sole superpower" failed to act on global warming ... virtually guaranteeing the further melting of the polar icecaps. Which, of course, would open access to new oilfields -- as well as new shipping channels through what was once solid ice. I think they are keeping so many balls moving in so many fields, that it is very difficult for any press entity, let alone the American people, to get a grasp on what is happening. Make no mistake -- this is an information war that is being waged against the American people's right to know enough to make decisions. That aforementioned rejection of the fundamental principles of this Democracy is it -- these are royalists, not democrats. And this is Republicanism today -- government from the top down. This is why Bush continually stresses, even now in talking about the war, how he is going to say, rather than what he is going to do. From Abramowitz' analysis of Bush's WashPost interview: "I, of all people, would like to see the troops come home," he said during the interview. "But I don't want them to come home without achieving our objective, because I understand what happens if there's failure. And I'm going to keep repeating this over and over again, that I believe we're in an ideological struggle that is -- that our country will be dealing with for a long time." (emphasis added) The problem is not that anything is going wrong -- it's that the American people do not have the perception of reality that the Bush team desires them to have. Therefore, repeat, repeat, repeat, until they get it. Posted by: Richard B. Simon at December 20, 2006 2:25 PM | Permalink "The same thing happens writ large - smaller actors have to surf on the waves of US policy." Absolutely true, Jason. Unfortunately, in this case, the surfers in Iraq and elsewhere appear to have figured out how to handle the waves just fine. In fact, they seem to be having a field day. Which is why the voting public finally decided "This is one fucked-up wave," and responded accordingly. That in turn finally jolted a sleeping press (which is what this post is all about) awake. But, alas -- except for a few like Suskind, Jim Risen and Dana Priest -- the watchdogs waked up a little too late in the day, well after the house had been ransacked. That's the real press failure here. Most of them got suckered. Which is why they (including Woodward) are now scrambling to catch up with the story. But the real question -- Jay's question -- is why did they not have the tools to stay on top of the story in the first place ? And one answer to that question is, the tyranny of the prevailing narrative.
Posted by: Steve Lovelady at December 20, 2006 2:26 PM | Permalink Shorter me: Suskind gave them a map, and they couldn't follow it. Why? And I ask that question about: * political reporters Cheers.... Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 20, 2006 2:35 PM | Permalink 1. On the reporters side, don't forget that the Administration was regularly denying access to those who printed stories that cast the Administration in unflattering light. 2. The Administration did an expert job of framing all debate, beginning at least as early as Summer 2002, as Republican vs. Democrat. This sidelined the "realist" Republicans (both out of gov't and in Congress) by portraying dissent from the Administration line as disloyalty to party. And it blindsided journalists by framing any commentary that cast the Administration in unfavorable light as "partisan". Hence White House pressure on the Washington Post to change the name of Froomkin's column. Tony Snow's recent casting of David Gregory's question -- quoting the "realist" ISG Report -- as partisan is fairly solid evidence that this gambit is still in play. The reaction and Snow's subsequent apology may or may not indicate its failure. But the dynamic that holds that for every story there is an opposing and equally valid Republican Party version held sway across journalism -- because of the Institutional imperative to provide "both sides" of every story.
Posted by: Richard B. Simon at December 20, 2006 3:59 PM | Permalink To the question: Why did the news media miss the story that Bush & Co. was "making its own reality" rather than working with within the restraints of carefully examined reality?, I, as a non-media person ask: did the media really miss it, did the top people running the media really miss this story, were they that stupid or unable to grasp this new Bush "paradigm" of doing without regard to reality? Given the thousands of news reporters and hundreds of editors in the MSM, what is the probability that all or almost all of them actually missed this story? Was it perhaps instead collusion between the administration and the top players in the media? Perhaps the top media players (owners and pundits with a stake in this administration's policies) went along for the ride, and now that things have blown up they are all publicly "wondering why" things went so wrong. I know for a fact that the top Republicans (David Drier among them) knew all along what BushCo was up to in Iraq('it's for oil') but were willing to go with the program as long as they could benefit personally. They all jumped on the bandwagon, hoping it would carry them to the promised land (GOP dominance-rollback of public services and regulation, US oil company control over Iraq's oil), but sadly overestimated this administration's competance. Rank and file reporters who didn't go with the program, i.e. keep to the narrative, risked their careers. Posted by: bg1 at December 20, 2006 4:30 PM | Permalink "like a sleeping fat man slowly falling out of his Lazy Boy." Mordechai - what a great image !! Although I don't find it too far off the mark I think there is something to be said for not necessarily being a "great power" as being a "great hope" of what's to come.. I cannot abandon this hope for America... Jim Martin Posted by: jamatwitsend at December 20, 2006 7:08 PM | Permalink > But the real question -- Jay's question -- is why did they not have the tools to stay on top of the story in the first place ? Wouldn't this be best addressed by asking the appropriate people, directly, one-on-one, offering anonymity where wanted, and compiling their answers? Who has the clout to take this on, and get answers? (not that the answers would necessarily be accurate, but it sure would be interesting to see what the practitioners themselves honestly believe.) And also ask what could be done to make the press more accurate in future. Posted by: Anna Haynes at December 20, 2006 7:12 PM | Permalink The description of "Reteat from Empiricism" does perfectly describe the Neocon/Bush administration. Sadly, but perhaps thankfully, the laws of physics, mathematics, evolution and human nature ultimately trump any human assertion of reality. The central tenet of empiricism is itself the invisible hand that strangles the foolish who are blinded by the hubris of Will To Power. The current situation in Iraq has made me feel like a Cassandra for seeing the inevitable result now come to pass that is trivially predicted by only an modest application Lanchester equations and Game Theory. Posted by: Mantra at December 20, 2006 7:22 PM | Permalink Let's see: We have one petty ideologue posing as a press critic, fawning over the political cant of a like-minded ideologue posing as a reporter. After a highly selective consideration of the relevant facts, supported by snippets from other like-minded ideologues in the press, we arrive at the highly dubious-- or at best, completely unsubstantiated-- premise that Bush has dumped "reality-based policy-making." A gaggle of other like-minded ideologues then rapturously expresses approval. My god, the irony couldn't be more overwhelming. There is nothing remotely empirical here, and yet you indignantly decry a putative retreat from empiricism on the part of the Bush White House? This entire thread is just so very sad: the ranting of foaming-at-the-mouth partisans so consumed with rancor that they fail to comprehend their own estrangement from reality. Posted by: TD at December 20, 2006 7:58 PM | Permalink Unfortunately, as many bloggers regularly point out, much of today's journalism has dissolved into nothing but "he said, she said" with more of an emphasis on good sound bite quotes than anything else. That said, it wasn't until 2006 before more than a couple of token Democrats began forcefully speaking out about withdrawing from Iraq. And, remember, only one Democratic Senator spoke out loudly before the invasion. And the "reality-based community" quote came out just before the 2004 election when the Dems were tough and making noise, which is why it played on every channel then. But look what then happened to the Democratic Party for a number of months after Kerry lost: internecine battles online and off- about whether or not the party had become "too liberal" and much "soul searching" about faith-based voting polls (which were misreported giving us unreality-based data). It's really no wonder that unreality muckraking didn't become all the rage after November of 2004, when the magic word was bipartisanship (which hadn't worked before with Bush, I guess Dems forgot). ...oh yeah, helluva great post, as usual Posted by: Ron Brynaert at December 20, 2006 8:12 PM | Permalink I don't have much new to add to the debate (yet), but great post. Oh, and Don Foster ain't foolproof. Remember when he found a Shakespearean sonnet? That ended embarrassingly. The smaller the sample, the more fallible his method. Posted by: Mavis Beacon at December 20, 2006 8:19 PM | Permalink TD: #1. what are the relevant facts that would support your assertion that the Bush White House policies re: Iraq were in fact reality-based? #2 If those policies were based on reality how come that this late in the game we are so far off from what "we" (Bush administration) expected would happen? Delia Posted by: Delia at December 20, 2006 8:45 PM | Permalink Just a rhetorical comment: Since his days as a cheerleader at Yale, when has it been apparent that bush has ever been "based" in any type of "reality"? Posted by: Ex-Canuck at December 20, 2006 9:08 PM | Permalink For Mary and any others interested in the resonance between the GOP and Carl Schmitt, I have a post on the topic from May 12 this year. Though I don't mention it in that post, the deepest irony of all is that Schmitt was so conservative (he essentially coined the term political theology because he saw secular humanism as the ultimate enemy) that, for him, Bush's crony capitalism would itself look like part of the liberal conspiracy. It is inconceivable that Carl Schmitt would ever look a strategic crisis in the face and conclude by saying, "Please shop more." George W. Bush, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt Posted by: Mark Anderson at December 20, 2006 11:12 PM | Permalink Great piece. But the beat goes on: Today on NPR LA Times reporter is asked about his scoop concerning the early retirement of Army Gen. John P. Abizaid from his post leading the Iraq theater. NPR asked if Abizaid - who along with the Joint Chiefs is against increasing troop strength - is being forced out. The reporter says no - of course not. That is true Chainy reality. First off, the reporter should have qualified his answer. But the 'real' reason he said it is that Chany controls the levers of what is real and what will be followed up on. It is just the way it is as long as he is in power. What is going to happen is that anyone against increasing troops in Iraq will be erased. Troops will be increased. More will die and nothing will change. We now are 'Brazil.' Posted by: Ted Woerner at December 21, 2006 1:22 AM | Permalink President Bush has for years hidden behind the fairly transparently bogus claim that decisions about troop strength and deployment will be made based on the judgment of what the military brass thinks they need. That now seems to be a dead letter, though, as the Joint Chiefs are unanimously against the White House plan to 'surge' troops in Baghdad for at least the first half of next year. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 21, 2006 2:03 AM | Permalink What is with all the pseudo-intellectual handwringing about "reality-based" absurdities ? This is pure Orwell. Read "1984" again. This is not new. It was a blatant power grab and the first casualty was language. It is a tool of all tyrants from Constantine to Goebbels and if Journalists had the balls they would never have allowed this to happen. The Grand Master who still hacks his corrupted wares is Newt Gingrich......why is he being treated with any legitimacy ? He began the current asassination of language more than a decade ago. The 4th Estate bought into it because it elevated the mundane grunt work of Journalism to some exalted Ivory Tower of the Learned. Get back to covering Zoning Boards, Police Blotters, and developing credible sources. When the history of this smarmy era is written, the reponsibility for the horrid corruption and the resultant bloodshed will lie at the feet of American Journalism. Shameful. A renunciation of a Patriotic Duty of inestimable proportions. Why do you think it's the 1st Amendment ? Uncorrupted information is the oxygen of a Democracy. Posted by: Lescoeurs at December 21, 2006 4:41 AM | Permalink Mark Anderson: that was a very interesting post. Thanks for letting me know about it. It brings to mind one of Eric Hoffer's insights into the True Believer which talks about the shield the movement puts between the believer and reality.
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