How to Understand America
The USA is a country of vast importance in
today's world but it is also misunderstood by so many. There are a great deal of
parties who are either interested in telling a distorted picture of the US or
who are utterly incapable of providing enough or the proper kind of information
to provide people with the tools to properly predict what the US will do. If the
world is surprised by Lesotho or Burundi, it will easily recover,
misunderstanding the most powerful military power, a huge political, economic,
and social influence on the world is a great deal more serious.
The US is a democratic republic based upon two
parties and five political traditions. The traditions endure far better than the
parties and move between the parties, influencing their political platforms. If
you do not understand what are the five political traditions and only take in
information from one or a few of them, the US will always surprise. For those
who are unfamiliar with them, the five traditions are Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian,
Madisonian, Wilsonian, and
Jacksonian.
The US is a revolutionary
country whose revolutionaries were essentially conservative. This fact of
history is especially important today. When challenged, the conservative strain
in any country goes back to the founding principles of the nation. For the US,
such challenges turn conservatives into a very unusual sort of radical. This
unusual political circumstance is generally a footnote in American history.
Existential challenges are rare and has happened only twice in the US' history,
in the formation of the Republican party and its ascent to power under Lincoln
and today in George W Bush's administration with it's War on Terrorism.
Mass media in the US is configured in
a very unusual way. Following a decades long period (starting in the 1930s) of
center-left dominance, traditional media was predominantly center-left. This led
to the center-right having their story told largely by hostile voices, a
situation which led the center-right to create it's own counter-institutions in
new media outlets of newsmagazines and journals of opinion as well as in dying
media backwaters such as AM radio. The international visibility of center-left
dominated media is much higher than that of the center-right media for two
reasons. First, the center-right has tended to be more concerned with reversing
center-left dominance at home than winning converts abroad. Second, the powerful
force of AM talk radio programs are technologically unsuited to reach far and
only the very few most popular programs are rebroadcast abroad, mostly on armed
forces radio and mostly without the benefit of caller feedback which is a large
part of what makes such programs so powerful.
The new media construct called the
blogosphere is also being used in different ways by the left and the right, ways
which directly influence popular opinion in the US. This influence is twofold.
First popular blogs are being read directly, influencing political opinion.
Second, larger media figures are picking up predigested news stories from the
blogs and using them as news, fact checking, and commentary arms. This sort of
use is not always attributed and some of the oddest moments in US mainstream
media these days come from journalists answering blog charges without ever
acknowledging their opposition's existence, a phenomenon that dates back to
before the blogosphere when Matt Drudge's Drudge Report website and Rush
Limbaugh's EIB radio program suffered this cordon sanitaire for years.
If you (outside the US) depend on
getting information about the US from news sources who maintain their own cordon
sanitaire and do not read, listen, or react to the alternative media structures
of the US center-right, you will be laughably misinformed, even dangerously
uninformed, though you do your part and consume your national news media
voraciously. Far too many foreigners seem dangerously uninformed about american
realities.
If you woke up and neither
you, nor anybody you knew, could explain why George W Bush was reelected, it's a
strong warning sign. If everybody was depressed over how such a bad man could
have possibly been elected, this is a dangerous warning sign that you and your
set have not gotten enough information to even come close to predicting the US.
It's not a problem of you disagreeing with the US electorate. Diversity is the
spice of life. It is that those whose opinions were different were invisible to
you and when they made their force felt at the ballot box, you were shocked by
their very existence. Your news media had an absolute duty to explain these
people to you and they failed to do so. That failure is just one data point in a
very busy graph.
Pay attention to
photographs. They are gold mines into the editorial slant of a news outlet. If
you consistently see unflattering photos of one side of a debate, be aware that
this is an attempt at subliminal manipulation to influence you into dismissing
their arguments without thought. Most of the time there are complimentary and
embarrassing photographs available for both sides of any debate.
Posted: Sat
- November 27, 2004 at 10:50 AM