The press does something right

This is Joseph

We often give the media a hard time, but this coverage by the Washington Post is a nice example of being appropriately critical of the remarks of spokespeople:

Kellyanne Conway has taken “alternative facts” to a new level.

During a Thursday interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the counselor to the president defended President Trump’s travel ban related to seven majority-Muslim countries. At one point, Conway made a reference to two Iraqi refugees whom she described as the masterminds behind “the Bowling Green massacre.”

“Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered,” Conway said.

The Bowling Green massacre didn’t get covered because it didn’t happen. There has never been a terrorist attack in Bowling Green, Ky., carried out by Iraqi refugees or anyone else.

Now, there was a story underneath this one, but it rather defied the term "massacre", where one presumes at least one person would need to actually be killed (as opposed to a couple of arrests).  If we can trust Talking Points Memo, this was not a singular lapse. 

This can be more difficult with opinions, or difficult to prove facts.  For example, at Chaos Manor, prominent science fiction Jerry Pournelle claimed:

It is not universally agreed that universal health care is so easily attained or that it works so well; Canada’s is tempered by the proximity of US clinics which can relieve much of the waiting times, as an obvious example. But this is hardly the place to debate that.

This is much more tricky to debate.  The first sentence is obviously true (Mr. Pournelle claims it, making it clear that it is not universal).  The second point is overly broad, and it isn't clear to what extent it is occurring.  But it could be true, at least for some diseases or procedures (and is a real point in regards to Canada)

I generally presume socialized medicine works best for public health interventions and worst for elective surgery.  But this is the sort of tricky political opinion that already gets complicated, because real world evidence is complicated.  I get the decision to try and not take sides on these claims.  My personal opinion is that the US has a trivial effect as a safety valve on Canadian waiting times for most procedures, because the cost is so high.  But I could very well be incorrect.

However, I think that we should call out invented examples early and often.  The evidence is challenging enough as it is, without adding fictional evidence in as a complication to the whole thing.

Hopefully, this was a failure of recollection on an overburdened staffer dealing with a difficult transition, and not the beginning of a pattern.  

"Must read" is one of the internet's most overused phrases, but this time it applies

Last December, Prof. Jay Rosen wrote the best and most comprehensive piece I've seen on how the decline in American journalism enabled the election of Donald Trump. The follow-up is almost as good.

Though, to be perfectly fair, Tennessee has always been a hotbed of leftist radicals

We have all heard the statistics about how difficult it is for a Congressional representative to lose his or her job. This is partially because of things like gerrymandering and spigots of campaign cash, but it also reflects a process that does a pretty good job allowing a reasonably competent and dedicated legislator to keep the constituents fairly happy in his or her district. A big part of that process is the maintaining of good relationships and lines of communication with voters and communities. Many political career has ended when voters felt someone had "lost touch with the people back home."

In this context, stories like the following from Talking Points Memo's Allegra Kirkland take on a special significance.

Constituents requesting that Rep. Jimmy Duncan Jr. (R-TN) hold a town hall on repealing the Affordable Care Act aren't being met with a polite brushoff from staffers anymore. Instead, Duncan's office has started sending out a form letter telling them point-blank that he has no intention to hold any town hall meetings.

“I am not going to hold town hall meetings in this atmosphere, because they would very quickly turn into shouting opportunities for extremists, kooks and radicals,” the letter read, according to a copy obtained by the Maryville Daily Times. “Also, I do not intend to give more publicity to those on the far left who have so much hatred, anger and frustration in them.”

In the first weeks of the 115th Congress, elected officials dropping by their home districts were surprised to find town halls packed to the rafters with concerned constituents. Caught off guard and on camera, lawmakers were asked to defend President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and provide a timeline on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

Now, many of them are skipping out on these events entirely. Some have said large meetings are an ineffective format for addressing individual concerns. Many others have, like the President himself, dismissed those questioning their agenda as “paid protesters” or radical activists who could pose a physical threat.

Voters turning out to town halls are pushing back hard on this characterization, arguing that they represent varied ideological backgrounds and have diverse issues to raise. Constituents unable to meet with their elected officials over the weekend told TPM that they’re not attending town hall events to make trouble. Instead, they say they want accountability from the people they pay to represent them.

Kim Mattoch, a mother of three and event planner, told TPM that she tried to go to a Saturday town hall in Roseville, California with GOP Rep. Tom McClintock but couldn’t make it in. The 200-seat theater hosting the event was quickly filled to capacity, leaving hundreds waiting outside.

“I’m a constituent of McClintock and a registered Republican in a very Republican district—though I don’t really align very well these days with the Republican Party,” Mattoch said in a Monday phone call. “So I wanted to go to the town hall because I legitimately had questions for the congressman.”

Mattoch said the protesters waiting outside had a wide range of “legitimate concerns.” She personally hoped to ask her representative about how the GOP was progressing on repealing and replacing the ACA and why House Republicans last week voted to kill a ruling aimed at preventing coal mining debris from ending up in waterways.

Yet McClintock told the Los Angeles Times that he thought an “anarchist element” was present in the crowd outside his event, and said he was escorted to his car by police because he’d been told the atmosphere was “deteriorating.”

Ramon Fliek, who attended the McClintock event with his wife, told TPM on Monday that police “were kind enough to block the whole road” to make space for the overflow crowd, and that he overheard protesters thanking law enforcement for “doing their jobs.”

“If you look at the videos from the event, you can’t get any notion that it was aggressive,” he said. “There was an older woman with a poodle that ran after him and it’s like, okay, the older lady with the poodle is not going to threaten you. I understand that he might want to give that impression, but it was very pleasant.”

Admittedly, it is a long time until midterms, but possibly not long enough to repair this kind of damage.

Build it and they will come. Post it and they will provide you with examples. [updated]

Remember last week when we were talking about Strauss and the cult of the savvy ? Do you remember how we singled out Paul Ryan as a subject on which journalists continue to delude themselves?

If so, the following by political correspondent Jon Ward will seem a lot more relevant.

On issues, Trump and Ryan are on different sides of some core issues: trade, entitlement spending, and immigration. Trump demonized free trade deals during the campaign. Ryan has been a big advocate for free trade. Trump has vowed not to change Medicare or Social Security. Ryan has long described those programs as driving the national debt, and wants to overhaul them.

Trump has disparaged immigrants, instituted travel restrictions from seven predominantly Muslim countries via an executive order last week, and slammed a federal judge last summer for bias because he was of “Mexican heritage.” Ryan rebuked Trump for the latter comment, saying it was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Ryan has tried to work toward a solution to the nation’s problem with illegal immigration, unlike Trump, who has merely denounced the government for not fixing the problem. As president, Trump will find that solving problems is far more difficult than complaining about them.

The two men also have a fundamental different approaches to the role of government and guidance of the U.S. Constitution. Ryan comes from a political and deeply conservative background, and so he believes in the Constitution’s prescriptions for how the government should work. Among other things, the Constitution clearly limits the president’s authority and hems in the office. Trump comes from a nonpolitical background, is not known for reading much of anything, and it’s not clear whether he’s ever actually read the Constitution. He made many statements throughout the presidential campaign that promised unconstitutional actions, and often issued vague threats to people who criticized him. If he were to continue this kind of behavior in office, it would be more fitting for a third world dictator than for a U.S. president, and at some point, Congress would need to step in. Ryan is the leader of one half of Congress. He believes in the American system. It is far from clear that the new president does.

As people who have followed his career closely (such as Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall, and Jonathan Chait) are quick to point out, Paul Ryan's rhetoric on the deficit is completely and consistently contradicted by his voting record. Even though Ryan was compelled to distance himself from Randianism when it became a significant political liability, he continues to reliably support the tenets when it comes to progressive taxation and the social safety net (which he still sometimes describes in the language of a hammock rather than a net). This even applies to programs such as Obamacare which are better than deficit neutral.

The case for Ryan as a champion of principled government is nearly as bad. This is someone who owes his position as speaker to gerrymandering and voter suppression, someone who has, at best, turned a blind eye to the use of government offices for partisan ends. As for the rest of the deep ideological divide, here's Jonathan Chait:

It is widely known that very few Republican elites share this Trumpist vision. What’s grown clear since the election is how little this matters. Traditional Republicans would prefer to build a coalition for their small-government policies that would attract immigrant communities, but they will take any coalition that presents itself. Paul Ryan’s professions of love for tolerance and openness before the election reflected the calculations of a politician who expected his nominee to lose and was planning to repair the anticipated damage to his party’s brand. The ideas that deeply troubled Ryan when articulated by a losing presidential candidate sound far more acceptable when articulated by a sitting president who promises to sign his fiscal bills. “People close to Ryan and the White House say the Speaker shares an easy rapport with Steve Bannon,” reports Politico.

Ward's entire piece is pretty much one long attempt to alleviate cognitive dissonance. He either has to admit to himself that he has been played for a sucker or he has to embrace a scenario, no matter how implausible, that allows him to preserve his dignity. You will notice that he goes all the way back to June of last year to find an example of Ryan (briefly) pushing back against Donald Trump. If you were following the campaign closely, you will remember that as a period when establishment Republicans were very nervous about the potential political cost of associating themselves with a controversial and seemingly doomed candidate. You will also remember that Trump subsequently slapped Ryan around and the congressman immediately fell into line.

"Centrist" pundits arguing that Paul Ryan obviously didn't say what Paul Ryan obviously just said has long been a cottage industry (consider this classic example from James Stewart of the New York Times), but as with so many things, the arrival of Donald Trump has made the absurdity of the practice difficult to ignore.

Update:

TPM reports the latest in the Ryan/Trump divide.

“We respect an independent judiciary. This is a separate branch of government,” Ryan said. “He’s not the first President to get frustrated with a ruling from a court.

“I think what’s most important are the actions,” he continued. “This administration is honoring the ruling, and this administration is going through the proper procedures to deal with the ruling to try and get the ruling overturned. They’re going through the appeals process, they’re respecting the separation of powers in the process. Look, I know he’s an unconventional President. He gets frustrated with judges, we get frustrated with judges. But he’s respecting the process, and that’s what counts at the end of the day.”

Trump lobbed multiple attacks on his Twitter account at U.S. District Judge James Robart after the judge blocked Trump’s immigration order. And White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Monday that Robart had gone “rogue” in stopping the order.

A useful footnote on Medival Iceland

This is Joseph

Megan McArdle has a great footnote

Yes, anarcho-capitalists, I know about medieval Iceland. I do not think that the U.S. can be run on the same basis as a tiny, culturally homogenous island nation.

Whether or not I agree with the article, this point is actually the most important one.  The ability to make a diverse nation work depends on the rules of conduct.

I also read Icelandic sagas.  It's unclear that things are notably better when law enforcement is private (some rather spectacular massacres occur due to feuds).  International relations become a challenge -- unless we want a nation of privateers like Egil from Egil's Saga.  After all, how do you enforce agreements between nations when all law is private the parties who negotiated the law are likely far away. 

It's not that we cannot find ideas of value in medieval Icelandic culture, but that perhaps we should pay close attention to the actual problems they had as well. 

The NYT doesn't just bury the lede; they chop up the body and dissolve it in acid.

Last year we spent a lot of time complaining about the New York Times' softball coverage of Donald Trump (at least after he cinched the nomination). Well before that, we were complaining about the paper's sloppy, credulous, and deferential coverage of Silicon Valley billionaires. It was only a matter of time before the two threads converged.

Check out the following from today's edition by Mike Isaac [emphasis added]:

Uber was under attack — unfairly, many staff members believed — after people accused the company of seeking to profit from giving rides to airport customers in New York during weekend protests against President Trump’s immigration order.

But there was another matter disturbing the employees: Mr. Kalanick himself. He had joined Mr. Trump’s economic advisory council in December. After the immigration order against refugees and seven Muslim-majority countries, many staff members wondered why Mr. Kalanick was still willing to advise the president.

At least in the immediate sense, “seeking to profit” is the opposite of what CEO Travis Kalanick is accused of. The key point of contention here is the decision to suspend surge pricing.

Here are William Turton and Bryan Menegus explained it writing for Gizmodo:

#deleteuber was born Friday while demonstrators at JFK airport protested Trump’s executive order on immigration. While the New York Taxi Worker’s Alliance was striking in protest of the ban, Uber sent a tweet saying it had dropped surge pricing. This, in combination with Kalanick’s participation on the business advisory council, started a wave of deletions so huge that Uber had to build a new system to handle them all.

Or put more bluntly by Raphael Orlove at the sister site Jalopnik.

#DeleteUber is trending on Twitter after the notoriously scummy ride-hailing app broke a strike and undercut taxi drivers’ protest of President Trump’s refugee-detaining executive order.

The New York Times pretty much tells the story the way Uber would like it told, omitting or downplaying accusations of strike-breaking and undermining protests. It's the kind of reporting we've increasing come to expect from the once great paper, the kind of reporting that did a lot to get us into our current crisis.

When it comes to Straussians, everybody thinks they were the last to make the cut

 [I told you we'd be coming back to this.]


After taking a preliminary pass at this topic, I realized that setting up the rules might be a bit more complicated than I first thought. With that in mind, here's my initial attempt at an oversimplified Straussian communication matrix

Members of this system pass information to each other. This information can be true or false. Recipients will not listen to information they believe to be false. The members who generate the false information have divided the population up into two groups: everyone in the preferred group is told the truth;  everyone in the other group is fed incorrect information whenever convenient. While there are many people in the matrix who are aware of the cutoff, few believe that they fall below it. The lied-to generally assume that they just made the cut, that the lies start one or two levels below them.

Unless they are to stupid to breathe, reporters covering Paul Ryan have to know that he lies routinely, that he's not a world-class marathoner, that his tastes run less to domestic beer and more to $350 bottles of wine, that he was neither surprised nor disappointed when the camera crews show up to find him washing dishes at a soup kitchen. Journalists could still consider Ryan an honest man because they felt he was only lying to those below them on the hierarchy.

Even among the lied-to journalists, there were strata. There were those who didn't believe the humble everyman bit but swallow the rest. Then there were those who (having a rudimentary understanding of the numbers) knew that Ryan's budgets were profoundly dishonest, but they put those deceptions down as the compromises necessary to make the sausage. They too believed that he was only lying to those below them on the hierarchy, colleagues who lacked the sophistication to follow detailed budgetary discussions. Ryan was, after all, a serious policy wonk who cared deeply about issues like fiscal responsibility.

Of course, every bit of evidence we have indicates this is also a lie, that Ryan is a committed Randian who is willing to inflate the deficit like a birthday balloon if that's what's required to redistribute wealth from the takers to the makers.

Almost all of the journalists who have been lied to by Ryan knew that he was lying to other journalists. This brings us to the I'm-not-going-to-believe-anyone-who-lies standard versus the I'm-not-going-to-believe-anyone-who-lies-to-me standard.

The big problem with the second (and more widely followed) is that detecting lies directed at you is far more difficult than detecting lies directed other people. First, of course, there is simply the sheer number of total lies versus the small subset directed at you. On top of that, lies directed at you are tailored to deceive you. Lies tailored to deceive other people are generally much easier to spot. Then finally and possibly most importantly, there is cognitive dissonance. We simply don't like thinking of ourselves as easily fooled. This is doubly true for journalists, particularly those in the cult of the savvy.

If we all held to the don't trust a liar standard, bullshit in the Straussian network would have a relatively short half-life, and given the increasingly dire consequences, it would be enormously helpful if we all adopted the more demanding standard. I would even go further and propose a don't trust anyone who lies or anyone who trusts a liar standard, though these days, few news sources would make that cut..

Tyler Cowen asks an interesting question

This is Joseph

From Marginal Revolution:

By applying a dual citizenship provision, in effect we are making Iranian law American law.  It is Iran who determines who is banned, not Trump.  You even could imagine a foreign government using this to punish or blackmail people who have scant current connection to their nation.  What should I do if Yemen offers me honorary national citizenship, in return for the service of promoting their cuisine and restaurants in the fine state of Virginia?  Can I turn it down?  Prove I don’t really hold it?  What exactly is to count as such proof?

 This is a rather good point about the complexities of immigration law.  Dual citizenship is always going to be a complex things.  But it is a fair point that this puts control over border crossing with governments that are not always close friends and allies of the US government. 

Now one presumes that this sort of "targeting by citizenship" could be fixed in an actual court of law.  But it does speak to why complex regulations can make sense -- to minimize gaming and to provide clarity for complex cases. 

Media consolidation story of the day

Libby Watson writing for Gizmodo:

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Verizon is exploring a merger with Charter Communications, less than a year after Charter successfully merged with Time Warner Cable.

The talks are still reportedly in the early stages. According to The Journal, there is “no guarantee” a deal will arise, and it’s “unclear whether Charter executives, including Chief Executive Tom Rutledge, would be open to a transaction.” But there has reportedly been speculation recently about such a merger since Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said it would make “industrial sense.”
Charter is the second-largest cable provider in the US after Comcast. Last year, it merged with Time Warner Cable, giving it control of 34 percent of the US cable-broadband market, according to Business Insider. Time Warner Cable company was previously owned by Time Warner before being spun off in 2009; Time Warner itself is currently exploring a merger with AT&T, Verizon’s main rival in the wireless market. The Washington Post noted that a Verizon-Charter merger would make it competitive in size with Comcast:

Verizon serves 114 million cellphone subscribers, 4.6 million TV customers and 7 million Internet subscribers; Charter has 17 million TV customers and 21 million Internet subscribers. Together, the two companies’ high-speed Internet businesses would add up to more than Comcast’s 25 million broadband customers; at 21.6 million, their combined base of TV customers would be roughly on par with Comcast’s.

Many Americans still don’t have much choice of cable company or internet service provider, particularly at 25mbps speeds which is the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) definition of “broadband” (i.e., enough speed to stream video or use multiple devices). The latest FCC data shows 29 percent of developed census blocks (areas of the US that people actually live in) don’t have access to any provider that provides 25 mbps, and a further 47 percent only have access to one provider with that speed.

"Where the rules are made up and the points don't matter"

There is a popular comedy improv game where the performers are required to ad lib a conversation made up entirely of questions. These do not have to be particularly sensible and they can and often do veer off in radically different directions, but they need to be on topic just enough to qualify as a response.  This is harder than it looks, particularly when the performers are deliberately trying to stump each other. It is challenging enough that the game is often played with tag teams, where a new player steps in when someone can't come up with an appropriate query.

As I believe we have mentioned before, the public policy discourse has evolved into something very much like this. When asked to defend a position, one is required to give some kind of answer which is vaguely on topic, but that is pretty much the only requirement. The statement can be silly, illogical, factually inaccurate, and, by every standard, worse than no answer at all, but as long as you responded, you get to keep playing the game.

As with all things involving Donald Trump, this convention has recently been pushed to its absurd extreme.

From Deadspin:

Betsy DeVos, a galactically rich and galactically evil anti-public school, anti-gay rights donor appointed by Donald Trump to be our country’s next Education Secretary, is going through confirmation hearings tonight (sports angle: her shitty father owns the Orlando Magic). She was asked about guns in schools. She said it was worth exploring. Her reasoning? “Grizzly bears.”

Robot Origami

Sometimes, when I'm feeling pessimistic, knowing that people are out there coming up with things like this makes me feel better.

"Cult of the Savvy " – this is one you need to read

I have been meaning to write something on Jay Rosen's thesis for a while now, but I have a piece I'm working on about Straussian communication matrices that makes this particularly relevant so I decided to get on the stick.

At the risk of giving away the point of my upcoming post, one thing to keep in mind while reading the following is that the people who are easiest to fool are generally the people who think of themselves as being the most difficult.

From "Behold how badly our political journalists have lost the freakin’ plot"

This is what led to the cult of the savvy, my term for the ideology and political style that journalists like Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin spread through their work. The savvy severs any lingering solidarity between journalists as the providers of information, and voters as decision-makers in need of it. The savvy sets up — so it can speak to and cultivate — a third group between these two: close followers of the game. The most common term for them is “political junkies.” The site that Cillizza runs was created by that term. It’s called The Fix because that’s what political junkies need: their fix of inside-the-game news.

Junkies are not normal, but they accept their deformed status because it comes with compensations. They get to feel superior to ordinary voters, who are the objects of technique and of the savvy analyst’s smart read on what is likely to work in the next election. For while the junkies can hope to understand the game and how it operates, the voters are merely operated on. Not only does the savvy sever any solidarity between political journalists and the public they were once supposed to inform, it also draws a portion of the attentive public into emotional alliance with the ad makers, poll takers, claim fakers and buck rakers within the political class— the people who, as Max Weber put it in his famous essay “Politics as a Vocation,” live off politics.

But we’re not done. The savvy sets up a fifth group. (The first four: savvy journalists, political junkies, masters of the game, and an abstraction, The Voters.) These are the people who, as Weber put it, live for politics. They are involved as determined participants, not just occasional voters. Whereas the junkies can hope for admission to the secrets of the game (by taking cues from Chris Cillizza and Mark Halperin and the guys at Politico) the activists are hopelessly deluded, always placing their own ideology before the cold hard facts.

...

So this is what the savvy in the press do. Cultivate the political junkies. Dismiss and ridicule the activists, the “partisans.” Assess the tactics by which the masters of the game struggle to win. Turn the voters into an object, the behavior of which is subject to a kind of law that savvy journalists feel entitled to write. Here’s Cillizza, writing one:

    Remember that most voters — people who don’t follow this stuff as closely as me, you or, likely, most people we know — make their decisions based on 30-second TV ads.”

I’ll remember, Chris. Your assignment: Inhale that sentence, click this link and behold how badly our political journalists have lost the plot.

You should also check out Paul Krugman's follow-up post.

Beyond the hyperbole barrier

Occasionally you come across an idea so absurd that it is literally impossible to top. It defies mockery by exaggeration because you simply can't come up with a more extreme example than what is actually happening. (If I tried really hard, I could probably connect this to some event in the news, but let's save that for another day.)

You see this a lot when a previously winning formula starts getting mined out. For example, producers have had considerable luck over the past few years taking series with good name recognition that had been considered light-weight kiddie properties and reimagining them as dark and sexy adult shows.

The trouble is that the pool of potential titles is limited, and if the trend goes on long enough, inevitably something will get green-lit that is so ridiculous that any sentence beginning with "they might as well adapt ..." is doomed to anti-climax.

We've talked about this before, right?

By now, we've done literally thousands of posts, and, to be perfectly honest, it has gotten to the point where I tend to lose track, but surely we've covered the whole upsell strategy. You know, come out with some super-economy version to lure people in, then make it so godawful that customers are eager to start climbing the upgrade ladder.

I'm almost certain we talked about the practice with cable-television, where the bottom tier is often worse than what you get for free with an antenna. I think we've used airlines as an example too, but just in case here's Sidney Fussell writing for Gizmodo:

On Wednesday, American Airlines announced that it will soon offer a cheap-as-hell “basic economy” package for its flights. The catch—because there’s always a catch when it comes to flying—is that these passengers won’t be able to use the overhead bins while flying.

Outside of checked baggage, which will still incur a regular fee, “basic economy” fliers—let’s call them “basics” for short—will only be allowed to bring one personal item on board with them, and it’ll have to fit under the seat. “No overhead bin luggage may be brought on board,” the airline’s press release notes pointedly. If your bag doesn’t fit, you’re looking at a $25 checked bag fee plus another $25 for checking it at the gate. Presumably, even if there’s space for your bags, you won’t get the privilege of putting them overhead.

Pauline Kael on Hollywood Leftism

The initial impetus for digging up this passage from Kael's essay came from a recent Matt Novak post, but as soon as I started rereading the original I realized that it was far more relevant then I remembered.

For a long time, the virulence of the response to “Raising Kane” seemed rather strange, particularly the focus on "defending" Orson Welles. Not only was the essay rather affectionate (albeit irreverent) toward the director, Kael was a long time champion of the Welles' works, often more so than the people who were supposedly offended by her treatment of him. It wasn't until years later that I realized just how many sacred cows she had gone after over her career and, not coincidentally, how valued those cows were by many of her attackers. Case in point, the martyrs of McCarthyism. Like Orwell in 48, Kael in 1971 was (as you can see below) willing to say out loud things that good liberals kept to themselves, particularly when the martyrs and and the liberals in question were Hollywood-based.

If you would have asked me a couple of years ago, I would have told you that, while the American Left had much to answer for in regards to its handling of the Soviet Union (a point many others have made), that was a thing of the past. At least with Stalin, you could do cling to the belief that the eventual goal was compatible with left-wing values. It is difficult to imagine anything that either liberal or leftist can admire about the Russia of Vladimir Putin. Nonetheless, recent events have shown us that accusing politicians and journalists of being inappropriately influenced by Russia will still prompt counter-accusations of “McCarthyism.”

I don't want to get into this debate at the moment or go into the impact it may have had on the election, but this does seem like a good time for some historical perspective.

From “Raising Kane” by Pauline Kael published in The New Yorker, February 20, 1971 and February 27, 1971

        It’s common to blame the McCarthyism of the fifties and the removal of blacklisted writers for the terrible, flat writing in American movies of recent years, but the writers might have recovered from McCarthyism (they might even have stood up to it) if they hadn’t been destroyed as writers long before. The writing that had given American talkies their special flavor died in the war, killed not in battle but in the politics of Stalinist “anti-Fascism.” For the writers, Hollywood was just one big crackup, and for most of them it took a political turn. The lost-in-Hollywood generation of writers, trying to clean themselves of guilt for their wasted years and their irresponsibility as writers, became political in the worst way—became a special breed of anti-Fascists. The talented writers, the major ones as well as the lightweight yet entertaining ones, went down the same drain as the clods—drawn into it, often, by bored wives, less successful brothers. They became naïvely, hysterically pro-Soviet; they ignored Stalin’s actual policies, because they so badly needed to believe in something. They had been so smart, so gifted, and yet they hadn’t been able to beat Hollywood’s contempt for the writer. (Walter Wagner had put twenty-seven of them to work in groups in succession on the script of Vincent Sheean’s Personal History.) They lived in the city where Irving Thalberg was enshrined; Thalberg, the saint of M-G-M, had rationalized Mayer’s system of putting teams of writers to work simultaneously and in relays on the same project. It had been lunatic before, but Thalberg made it seem mature and responsible to fit writers into an assembly-line method that totally alienated them and took away their last shreds of pride. And most of the Algonquin group had been in Hollywood so long they weren’t even famous anymore.
        Talented people have rarely had the self-control to flourish in the Hollywood atmosphere of big money and conflicting pressures. The talented—especially those who weren’t using their talents to full capacity—have become desperate, impatient, unreliable, self-destructive, and also destructive, and so there has always been some validity in the businessman’s argument that he couldn’t afford to take chances on “geniuses.” Thalberg didn’t play around with a man like Mankiewicz; after throwing him off A Night at the Opera, he didn’t use him again.
        The writers who had become accustomed to being assembly-line workers were ready to believe it when, in the forties, they were told that, like factory workers, they were “part of the team on the assembly line” and needed “that strengthening of the spirit which comes from identity with the labor of others.” Like the producers, the Screen Writers Guild respected discipline and responsibility, but though the businessmen had never been able to organize people of talent—producers like Thalberg just kept discarding them—the union ideologues knew how. The talented rarely become bureaucrats, but the mediocre had put down roots in Hollywood—it doesn’t take long in Los Angeles, the only great city that is purely modern, that hasn’t even an architectural past in the nineteenth century. In the forties, the talented merged with the untalented and became almost indistinguishable from them, and the mediocre have been writing movies ever since. When the good writers tried to regain their self-respect by becoming political activists in the Stalinist style, it was calamitous to talent; the Algonquin group’s own style was lost as their voice blended into the preachy, self-righteous chorus.
        The comedy writers who had laughed at cant now learned to write it and were rehabilitated as useful citizens of the community of mediocrity. It was just what the newly political congratulated themselves on—their constructive, uplifting approach—that killed comedy. When they had written frivolously, knowing that they had no control over how their writing would be used, or buried, or rewritten, they may have failed their own gifts and the dreams of their youth, but the work they turned out had human dimensions; they were working at less than full capacity, but they were still honest entertainers. Their humor was the humor of those trapped by human weakness as well as by “the system,” and this was basic comedy—like the jokes and camaraderie of Army men. But when they became political in that mortally superior way of people who are doing something for themselves but pretending it’s for others, their self-righteousness was insufferable. They may have told lies in the themes and plots of the thirties comedies, but they didn’t take their own lies seriously, they didn’t believe their own lies, the way they did in the forties. In the forties, the Screen Writers Guild and the Hollywood Writers Mobilization (for wartime morale-building) held conferences at which “responsible” writers brought the irresponsibles into line. The irresponsibles were told they were part of an army and must “dedicate their creative abilities to the winning of the war.” And, in case they failed to understand the necessity for didactic, “positive” humor, there were panels and seminars that analyzed jokes and pointed out which ones might do harm. It was explained to the writers that “catch-as-catch-can,” “no-holds-barred” comedy was a thing of the past. “A very funny line may make black-market dealings seem innocent and attractive,” they were told, and “Respect for officers must be maintained at all times, in any scene, in any situation.”
        Show-business people are both giddy and desperately, sincerely intense. When Stalinism was fashionable, movie people became Stalinists, the way they later became witches and warlocks. Apparently, many of the Hollywood Stalinists didn’t realize they were taking any risks; they performed propaganda services for the various shifts in Russia’s foreign policy and, as long as the needs of American and Russian policy coincided, this took the form of super-patriotism. When the war was over and the Cold War began, history left them stranded, and McCarthy moved in on them. The shame of McCarthyism was not only “the shame of America” but the shame of a bunch of newly rich people who were eager to advise the world on moral and political matters and who, faced with a test, informed on their friends—and, as Orson Welles put it, not even to save their lives but to save their swimming pools. One might think that whatever they had gained emotionally from their activity they would have lost when they informed on each other, but it doesn’t seem to have always worked that way. They didn’t change their ideas when they recanted before the House Un-American Activities Committee; they merely gave in and then were restored to themselves. And they often seem to regard it not as their weakness but as their martyrdom. Show-business-Stalinism is basically not political but psychological; it’s a fashionable form of hysteria and guilt that is by now not so much pro-Soviet as just abusively anti-American. America is their image of Hell (once again, because of Vietnam, they’re in a popular position), and they go on being “political” in the same way, holding the same faith, and for the same reasons, as in the late thirties and the forties. The restoration there is fairly general. In Hollywood recently, a man who used to be “involved” told me he wanted to become more active again, and added, “But, you know, I’m scared. The people who are urging me to do more are the same ones who ratted on me last time.”
        Mankiewicz was too well informed politically to become a Communist Partyliner. Because he didn’t support this line, he was—and only in part jokingly—considered a “reactionary” by the activists of the Screen Writers Guild. Yet he went on to write the movie they point to with pride in Hollywood, the movie they all seem to feel demonstrates what can be done and what movies should be doing, and it’s their all-time favorite because they understand it—and correctly—as a leftist film. Its leftism is, however, the leftism of the twenties and early thirties, before the left became moralistic. There were other expressions of the tough spirit of the thirties that came after the thirties were over. There may be a little of it in the newspaper film of the fifties Sweet Smell of Success, but the ambivalence there is harsher, grimmer, more artistically “serious” than it was in the thirties; there’s some in the happy mocker of Hollywood in Singin’ in the Rain, which takes off from Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetime, and in the films of Preston Sturges, who alone somehow managed to stay funny and tart. The only writer of this whole group who became a director with an individual style, Sturges kept American comedy alive singlehanded through the mawkish forties. Maybe he was able to because he was a cynic and so politically baroque that he wasn’t torn by doubts and guilts. The political show in Hollywood in the forties was just one more crazy scene to him; he’d grown up rich and eccentric in Europe, the son of that expatriate lady (called Mary in The Loves of Isadora) who gave Isadora Duncan the fatal scarf.
        But Mankiewicz climaxed an era in Kane. He wrote a big movie that is untarnished by sentimentality, and it may be the only big biographical movie ever made in this country of which that can be said. Kane is unsanctimonious; it is without scenes of piety, masochism, or remorse, without “truths”—in that period when the screenwriters were becoming so politically “responsible” that they were using all the primitive devices to sell their messages, and movies once again became full of blind beggars, and omens of doom, and accidental death as punishment for moral and sexual infractions, and, of course, Maria Ouspenskaya seeing into people’s hearts—the crone as guru.