Wilfred McClay on "The Passing of an Era?"

[Note: Democracy Project board member Wilfred McClay has contributed the essay below to our blog and we're most grateful for his participation. A historican of American intellectual history, he is SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanitities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Prof. McClay is also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a member of the Society of Scholars at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He's a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and First Things, among many publications.
Winfield Myers]

"The Passing of an Era?"

I’m hardly the only one to be struck by the vehement, uncontained rage of media figures like Chris Matthews and Tom Oliphant, and the sweeping, completely unearned condescension of the New York Times and Washington Post, directed at the Swift Boat Vets and their gallant campaign against John Kerry’s candidacy. Why such an angry, petulant---but also, be it noted, completely self-righteous---reaction? Why the shift in tone, the loss of control? It seems to me that, aside from the obvious partisan particulars, there are two larger and interlocking reasons for this, and taken together, they suggest why the struggles now underway may have consequences far beyond their immediate content.

First, it seems we are experiencing one of those moments when history shifts its gears, and the accredited elites cannot seem to grasp what is happening, and cling desperately to the pieces of their fraying reputation. It’s a shift that the army of talented bloggers out there, part of one of the most genuinely populist movements ever to arise in modern American politics, has been announcing for a long time---perhaps a little prematurely and self-interestedly, but what they have been predicting is now clearly upon us. The baby-boomer generation’s journalistic and academic elites sought, and gained, control over the nation’s chief organs of knowledge production, accreditation, and communication, with all the enormous power and influence that has entailed. But now the Gramscian monopoly is crumbling, and they cannot see how they are themselves largely to blame for their own discrediting. The moves by Kerry’s campaign to stifle discourse---threaten booksellers, bully publishers, file lawsuits, seek regulatory restraints---are all too indicative of a reflex to control speech, and thereby deprive a democratic society of the oxygen it needs to thrive. Those of us who live and work in universities have been all too familiar with this reflex, which has been more triumphant than not in the academy, to the enduring detriment of academic discourse. But it is much harder to control and stifle journalistic and non-traditional media of expression. The credential-flashing of Mr. Oliphant (who somehow neglected to mention that his daughter is employed by the Kerry campaign, an uncomfortable fact brought out by the bloggers) looks more and more like the flash of an empty suit.

For those who have chafed under the years of this so-called mainstream media’s arrogant domination, this really is a remarkable moment in our nation’s history, in which one feels the atmosphere becoming palpably freer, as the big organs of propaganda show themselves to be permanently weakened. It would be far too much to say that it doesn’t matter anymore what the Times says, or what Time, Newsweek, and the major TV networks do. That’s clearly not so. But they continue to discredit themselves, in ways that are almost beyond repair. If they want to know why Fox News and the blogosphere have been so successful, they need only look (to quote a prominent Democratic politician) deep into the mirror of their own souls. These large media will not go away, and the blogosphere is parasitic upon it in ways that it does not always acknowledge. But the MSM will never again be able to operate without the potent check of the alternative media, a new epicycle of checks-and-balances that reflects the genius, and continuing fertility, of American politics. This is a very, very healthy development for American democracy.

There is a second deeper reason why people like Matthews, Oliphant, et al. are reacting with such uncontained fury and condescension. It’s because the case of Kerry is a proxy for a whole set of assumptions that the boomer elites have made about the world, and managed to install as our conventional wisdom, about the arrogance of American power, the unmitigated evil of Nixon, the goodness and altruism and truthfulness of the antiwar movement (and therefore themselves), and so on. That whole complacent and self-congratulatory narrative---which is, in some sense, encapsulated in Kerry’s famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee---is being implicitly challenged now. Bush’s foreign policy challenges it, and if it can be shown that Kerry is a comprehensive liar---and in fact the Cambodia lies alone, which have been admitted to, would surely have been enough to end a Republican candidate’s entire career---it calls into question everything about the great boomer narrative. It threatens their sense of world-historical rectitude, their moral amour-propre. Hence the indignant reactions. They cannot and will not give in gracefully on this; but they don’t know how to fight back effectively. So expect to see the same sneering and dismissive gestures, and expect them to seem increasingly ineffective. It’s all very well to make the “long march” to control institutions. But what happens when those institutions have lost their commanding authority? What kind of information environment are they, and we, now entering?

That is a vast subject for another occasion, but I recommend that readers of this blog take a look at a brilliant exploration of this theme by Frederick Turner at Tech Central Station. This analysis, which deserves to be widely promulgated and discussed, suggests that, as so often happens in history, this great institution (i.e., the mainstream media) may be losing its power because of its own folly.