More than a decade ago, before everyone could disappear into their own channel, their own tube, I argued that I thought personalization was dangerous. Perhaps inevitable with cable TV and the Internet providing endless channels, but a bad thing for a democracy. The beauty of the heterogeneous is that you’re exposed to other arguments than your own, and even if you’re not moved by them, you at least understand how the other half lives. For too many people in this country, that appears to no longer be true.
I mentioned last week that I thought GOP insularity was at least partly behind the government shutdown. More on the topic from New York‘s ever-excellent Jonathan Chait:
“One of the causes of the economic and Constitutional crisis unleashed by House Republicans is their utter failure to grasp how Democrats would perceive their behavior. Conservative reporter Byron York perceptively, and alarmingly, describes a discussion with an influential Republican, who explains that the GOP stumbled into the shutdown war without a plan and repeatedly expected Democrats to bail them out by capitulating, only to be shocked when they refused. The GOP’s strategic failure has grown out of its intellectual insularity (or, to reprise a once-hot term, epistemic closure) leaving them so unaware of the principles motivating the other side that they couldn’t anticipate the Democrats’ obvious response.
‘I would liken this a little bit to Gettysburg,’ York’s source explained, ‘where a Confederate unit went looking for shoes and stumbled into Union cavalry, and all of a sudden found itself embroiled in battle on a battlefield it didn’t intend to be on, and everybody just kept feeding troops into it.’ An even more apt, and more recent, analogy might be Iraq, when Republican war planners expected a suspicious Muslim culture to greet their troops with sweets and flowers.
If you reside within the conservative news bubble, you probably had no idea before this crisis what the Democratic position on the debt ceiling and the shutdown is. You still probably have no idea now.”
Tags: Byron York, Jonathan Chait