https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/12/just-politics?mod=article_inline
“We have reached a period of political partisanship where people are so willing to suspend reality in order to pursue an agenda that they view real-life events almost entirely through the prism of their own bias. Like football fans watching the video replay of a penalty—one set of people are able to scream that one thing is “clearly” the case, even as the other shouts that it is “blatantly” the opposite. The same footage, the same evidence, through almost identical sets of eyes, is capable of spinning wildly contrasting views. . . . We have reached the stage where manipulation of the facts by spin doctors or government departments is no longer necessary—people take the raw evidence before them and mould it themselves in real time. But what is every bit as chilling is just how effective it is at drowning out reasoned debate on serious subjects.”
In what now seems a distant epoch of pre-history, President Bill Clinton came before a joint session of Congress in 1996 to deliver the State of the Union Address and announced that “the era of big government is over.” Even in 1996, no one thought that the era of big government was actually over, least of all Bill Clinton. But it must have seemed like the right thing to say at the time, in order to show that one was in tune with the popular mood—in fact, leading it rather than following it—by putting into a pithy sentence what people were beginning to think, or thought they were thinking, before they had quite thought it. This happened, you may remember, just after the newly elected Republican Congress, the first in forty years, was forced to knuckle under to Mr. Clinton after shutting down the government in a vain attempt to limit big government–style spending. Thus the President, as it might have seemed, was being magnanimous in victory—making a gesture in the direction of the ostensibly small-government philosophy of his opponents before adding: “But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”
Needless to say, the reference to “the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves” was as empty of real political content as the claim that the era of big government was over. No one was proposing, as no one would have dared propose, to abolish the social safety net. The President was merely juggling partisan clichés, but in an original enough fashion that the media were inclined to regard it as a political masterstroke, part of his campaign of “triangulation” in which progressive desiderata were introduced cautiously or with an alloy of conservatism (or, failing that, conservative rhetoric) in order to make them more palatable to the centrists in both parties. We disgruntled conservatives used to speak of this as “the triumph of style over substance,” but in retrospect the joke was on us. Bill Clinton saw sooner than we did that, in the post–Cold War 1990s, style was substance—or as much substance as most people wanted to bother themselves about.
Politics, in other words, had become a fashion statement rather than a serious program for governing. The real business of government was already in the process of being turned over to judges and what is now being called “the deep state,” leaving politicians free to posture and virtue-signal without consequence. With the departure of seriousness and responsibility from the political culture, what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences” took over, and the rancorousness and hatred which are now the salient features of our political life have been increasing ever since. Way back in the ’90s I tried coining the name—I’m sure I wasn’t the first to think of it—“post-modern politics” to describe this new, style-centered political culture based on moral preening, but it didn’t catch on. Of course, we had no need for the name once all politics became post-modern politics. It was just politics.
