China and its Discontents

According to the Financial Times, the Global Times recently published an editorial calling for the Chinese government to revisit the sovereignty of Okinawa as part of the ongoing Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute between Japan and China. China might have good strategic reasons for wanting an independent Okinawa given that the U.S. based nuclear missiles at Okinawa during the Cold War, which were aimed at Beijing and Shanghai (before the U.S. was aware of the Sino-Soviet Split). But the nationalists referred to in the FT article neglect the strategic dimension for the historical, justifying their position instead on the fact that Okinawa was a Chinese tributary state in the 15th Century.

Of course, this is just one instance in which China has used historical artifacts to justify its claims in the many territorial clashes it has with its neighbors. Perhaps the best known instance of this tactic is China’s nine-dash line claim of sovereignty over nearly the entirety of the South China Sea. China’s justification of the nine-dash line is an exercise in studied ambiguity. The territory within the line was first claimed only in 1947 by the then Nationalist government. The PRC continued the Nationalist argument in two ways: 1) Claiming the entire South China Sea and all islands therein using terms such as “sovereign” or “historic” waters that are unsupported by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and 2) Claiming the islands themselves as a basis to claim jurisdiction over territorial waters and exclusive economic zones (EEZ) around those islands, even though EEZs cannot be claimed around islands which support no human habitation or economic activity (which includes most of the islands in question, many of which are little more than bare rocks). China’s extralegal claims not only complicate access rights to fishing and resource extraction, but could also impede the freedom of navigation for the U.S. Navy and others.

China’s claims are dubious on a number of other grounds. To begin with, China’s borders have varied wildly over the course of millennia, and its territorial claims have changed in a much shorter timeframe. As Peter Dutton at the U.S. Naval War College notes, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia have historically all shared access to the South China Sea. Furthermore, even if Beijing’s argument concerning history and tributary states were to stand, China is hardly the only country to have lost former territories over the course of time—most European countries once ruled over areas far beyond their current borders. In this context, China’s claims are no different than modern-day Great Britain laying claim to France because of the House of Plantagenet, or Spain claiming nearly all of Latin America because of its colonial past. Indeed, according to Beijing’s logic, Mongolia can claim the Chinese homeland as its own.

Returning to the Global Times op-ed (which appears to have only been published in Chinese, not English), it is clear that the editorial is mainly about the Diaoyu Islands, not Okinawa. The op-ed proclaims: “In China’s struggle over the Diaoyu Islands problem, Japan does not have any hope of winning. China has sufficient resources and means, and enough official and public will to confront Japan over the Diaoyu Islands,” continuing with a four-point bulletin on how to do so (which includes increasing China’s naval presence in the area and enlisting the help of the Taiwanese). And then at the very end, the editorial mentions “revisit[ing] Okinawan sovereignty”—but it seems like the author (Hu Xijin, perhaps?) only really means for it to be a psychological ploy to “curb Japan’s attitude over the Diaoyu Islands.

But this is all your average, every-day kind of talk among nationalists in China. What was really surprising was the final conclusion: “Of course, China does not have to actively make life difficult for Japan and squeeze China and Japan into a confrontation at the point of a bull’s horn. China doesn’t need Japan to be friendly—it only has to play out the results of its chess game with Japan, and be bold enough to use its strength to bring Japan to its senses…After a few rounds, Japan will reconsider its proper behavior.”

Chinese nationalists can’t possibly believe this. Calling for irrational and provocative military action is one thing—but expecting Japan and probably the rest of the Western Pacific to react as tributary states of yore? This is a serious misappraisal of the intentions of those countries involved with China in territorial disputes. This sort of thinking, if anyone in power actually believes it, will not only detonate what little cooperation on territorial disputes that still exists, but might actually lead to military conflict. This sort of hubris isn’t unique to China—it seems pretty similar to the Bush administration’s prediction that the Iraqis would ‘greet us as liberators’ in 2003. But it didn’t belong in any government’s rhetoric then and it doesn’t now.

The driving force behind the U.S. deficits and China’s surpluses lies not in exchange rates but in structural factors that built up over time. Three factors largely explain the emergence of China’s trade surpluses: surging U.S. consumption that fueled import demand, maturation of the East Asian production sharing network centered on China, and ratcheting up of China’s savings rates.

The story of the origins of the decline in U.S. household savings rates which was then exacerbated by growing fiscal deficits and together led to the excessive demand for imports is well known and still unresolved. This part of the story has little to do with China, but reflects the political gridlock in Washington.

Yukon Huang, of the Carnegie Endowment and former country director at the World Bank, writes at The Diplomat that the U.S. “must get over” the renminbi. While it is true that China gets the low-added value side of the production chain, and that if counted properly, our trade deficits with Japan, South Korea, et al would be much higher, I think he discounts the role of Chinese state policy in perpetuating the trade deficit. The Chinese, in effect, have subsidized our consumption: all dollars that flow into export businesses must by law be surrendered to the People’s Bank of China, which then invests it right back into U.S. treasuries because it doesn’t know how to spend its money fast enough (there are already questions about the quality of the infrastructure investments China has made). This is one of the primary reasons why the Chinese savings rate is so high–because it’s Chinese state policy. Sure, the average consumer has a high savings rate because of the volatility of the Chinese market (no social security/safety net, very few safe investments so much of those savings flows into real estate or low-interest savings accounts that don’t keep up with inflation–financial market liberalization is a topic for another day). But state-enforced savings far outweigh consumer savings. This investment in Treasury bonds, in turn, aids the U.S. in taking out more debt, and ultimately, for U.S. consumers to buy more things. It’s a vicious cycle of consumption.

Huang does give the right solution, however: increased Chinese consumption. But again, he seems to think this is mostly solved by individual consumers buying more things. He does suggest the Chinese state do one thing: relax the hukou residency permit rules, so that migrant workers can feel more secure in spending more money. This is all well and good (the Chinese hukou system is draconian; the lack of labor mobility is a huge drag on the Chinese economy), but the Chinese state can do a lot more: by spending more of the money it puts into Treasury bonds! If it’s having trouble disbursing the money in the form of infrastructure investments, fine! Use it to create a viable social safety net and universal healthcare! Pay school teachers more! Invest in the Chinese people, rather than trying to build the next big infrastructure monstrosity that will fall apart in five years anyway.

On the eve of SCOTUS potentially overturning the individual mandate portion of the ACA, Ezra Klein reacts to the sadness and resignation at the political polarization of the court coming from liberal legal scholars by saying: “Of course the Supreme Court is political!” Last fall I wrote a paper on the various civil rights cases basically saying that this is not just a modern phenomenon, but one that’s been around as long as the court has existed (or perhaps shortly after McCulloch v. Maryland), and that shifting interpretations of the Constitution are perhaps not such a bad thing given the shifting moral ground of society (EDIT: I should note that I do NOT support the overturn of the individual mandate). At the time I was very nervous about ever writing or publishing something like this, but I guess it’s become a common-place sentiment now! Read on:

Justice cannot be blind to morality; ultimately all decisions made by courts amount to moral judgments. This seems to run contrary to the most conservative notion of the law: fixed and unbreakable, to be treated only as the words exactly prescribe and in the exact intention of those who wrote it. But this belies the fact that we have progressed morally. To say that we have progressed morally is, I think, clear. One hundred and fifty years ago, it was acceptable for Justice Taney to declare: “He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics…” (6) In Dred Scott, Justice Taney’s conclusion that blacks cannot become citizens is grounded on a purely moral basis. The appeals to tradition and precedent are beside the point. If Taney had disagreed with this evaluation of all blacks, then he would have reasoned that since blacks were human after all, they deserved the rights and protections of the Constitution. Taney contorts himself trying to explain the Declaration of Independence: “The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family…But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration; for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.” (9) The founders would have been hypocritical if they simultaneously owned slaves and at the same time declared those slaves were free human beings? Why yes, they were hypocritical! There is no way Taney can come to this conclusion unless he makes a prior moral judgment that blacks are inferior. In this case, the language is unambiguous and clear, as Taney acknowledges in the first sentence.

The Court in the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson did the exact same thing, but in reverse. The Court in these cases use the 13^th and 14^th amendments to institutionalize racism and discrimination in this country, contra to the obvious intentions of those who passed those amendments. When it passed those amendments, Congress specifically gave itself “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions” of the two amendments. And it did enforce those provisions! It passed civil rights laws that guaranteed equality in the use of public accommodations; it directed the army to occupy the South, enforcing political and social equality and voting rights for blacks; it established the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide emergency assistance to former slaves, public schooling for black children, and found what we now refer to as historically black colleges and universities with the hope that the social inequality that former slaves and their descendants faced could be eradicated.

But the Court in the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson made a predetermined moral judgment, and conformed their legal reasoning to fit that judgment. In the Civil Rights Cases, Justice Bradley seems to believe that “There were thousands of free colored people in this country before the abolition of slavery, enjoying all the essential rights of life, liberty and property the same as white citizens…” (45) How can Bradley believe this in 1883, when surely he has read Justice Taney’s Dred Scott decision, written only twenty-five years prior? It certainly is not any close reading of precedent when Bradley decides to use this “fact” to support his argument that private discrimination should remain untouched by federal legislation.

Bradley later asks: “If it is supposable that the States may deprive persons of life, liberty, and property without due process of law…why should not Congress proceed at once to prescribe due process of law for the protection of every one of these fundamental rights…?” (36) And yet this alternative is exactly what happened when, in a series of decisions, the Court incorporated the Bill of Rights and applied it to the States! The Court in later decades simply made a different moral determination than Bradley did and used the Constitution to support that determination.

And the same thing happened when the Court ruled in direct opposition to the Civil Rights Cases in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. without explicitly overturning the earlier precedent. There is little difference in the facts of the two cases, and no difference in the legal issues presented! In the Civil Rights Cases, the Court denied that private discrimination constituted a badge of slavery per the 13^th amendment. In Jones v. Alfred Mayer, the Court did. The Court in every one of these cases interpreted the Constitution according to their individual ethical codes and contemporary public morality. How else can you explain the radical swings in Constitutional law, from Reconstruction, Segregation, and Civil Rights eras? Morality dictates law.

Nothing could illustrate this case further than the Court’s opinion in Plessy. I need only reference one overriding, and controlling fact to make my point. In the Civil Rights Cases, Bradley specifically stated that the 14^th amendment, “nullifies and makes void all State legislation, and State action of every kind, which impairs the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, or which injures them in life, liberty or property without due process of law, or which denies to any of them the equal protection of the laws.” (33) And yet Justice Brown in Plessy directly violates this ruling. Bradley meant that the 14^th amendment made unconstitutional exactly the same State-authorized Jim Crow segregation laws that Brown accepts as constitutional.

Any claim that the Court has always, and should always, retain a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution is a farce. We have progressed morally. Our interpretation of the Constitution has evolved dramatically over time. We haven’t maintained an Originalist interpretation according to the “Founders intent” (whatever that is), and we shouldn’t.

In Dred Scott, Taney derides: “No one, we presume, supposes that any change in public opinion or feeling, in relation to this unfortunate race, in the civilized nations of Europe or in this country, should induce the court to give to the words of the Constitutions a more liberal construction in their favor than they were intended to bear when the instrument was framed and adopted.” (24) But practically speaking, this is exactly what we have done. As we as a people have interacted with one another and discovered that we are human beings and citizens deserving of equal rights, we have changed our interpretation of the Constitution to fit the times. This is appropriate. Law is a codification of common morality. Any interpretation that insists we adhere to a puritanical eighteenth-century version of morality is wrong.

I just finished reading Yu Hua’s latest novel/memoir, “China in Ten Words.” What a book. It’s one of the best China books I’ve ever read, and it’s banned in China (which is one of the reasons why it’s so good). The book, with all of Yu’s polemics and invective, is an astonishingly effective evisceration of any legitimacy to which the CCP still desperately clings. If I were to make an analogy, Yu Hua’s latest book vs. his previous novels is like Tian Zhuangzhuang’s movie “Blue Kite,” vs. Zhang Yimou’s adaptation of another Yu Hua novel, “To Live.”

The premise of the book is self-explanatory: Yu Hua surveys modern China by looking through the lenses of ten words, from “People” and “Leader” to “Revolution,” “Grassroots,” and “Bamboozle.” But the method by which he does this is creative and emotionally resonant. Each word is mainly a jumping off point for Yu’s childhood memories of the Cultural Revolution. The beginning of the book in Chapter 1 (“People”), with his memories of the Tiananmen Massacre,  are the least distressing, most innocent parts of the book. Surprised? I was too. By the time we get to “Revolution,” present-day forced evictees are throwing Molotov cocktails at the demolition crews and burning themselves to death, and childhood Yu is admiring his older brother for making the teacher cry while other teachers backstab each other and engage in class warfare-style schadenfreude. In “Disparity,” young Yu and his buddies mob and beat a villager to crack down on the illegal sale of food-rationing coupons; the villager had been saving the coupons for his wedding. Yu explains: “We got a kick out of bullying those weaker than ourselves, believing too that we were performing a public service.” (149) Space-Time and the normal associations between youth and innocence have been overturned. Yu’s reminisces bring us into the thick of what seems like some tragic nightmare that belongs to some other reality, that “Romantic and absurd comedy/cruel and all too realistic tragedy.” (116-117)

Yu’s message gradually unfolds as we progress from word to word: that modern China and the CCP are still best explained by the Cultural Revolution; that China is still stuck in a middle-school mentality of bullying, senseless brutality, and anarchy. Furthermore, this backwards political system has birthed a deformed, inane popular culture where “copycats” and “bamboozlers” are celebrated. The implication is that China’s corrupt political system keeps the country stuck in a post-modern moral and spiritual confusion that the West can at least confront with a common moral vocabulary, strong critically-minded education system, and history of democratic governance; the average Chinese citizen has none of these resources.

This message is brightened by a few brief moments of light, mainly the parts where Yu describes how reading and writing lifted his psychology out of the mind-numbing senselessness of the Cultural Revolution. Another anecdote about how the town morgue was his only refuge as a child is oddly calming. But he mainly focuses on just smashing the CCP’s legitimacy to smithereens, especially with this perfect description of modern China:

“What is revolution? The answers I have heard take many forms. Revolution fills life with unknowables, and one’s fate can take an entirely different course overnight; some people soar high in the blink of an eye, and others just as quickly stumble into the deepest pit. In revolution the social ties that bind one person to another are formed and broken unpredictably, and today’s brother-in-arms may become tomorrow’s class enemy.” (137)

If it’s any consolation, Yu ends by saying, “A bamboozler is quite likely to end up bamboozling himself or–in Chinese parlance–to pick up a big stone only to drop it on his own foot.” (221) I think if he were to make it any clearer that he hoped the CCP would bamboozle itself, this book would not only be banned but Yu Hua would find himself “disappeared.”

This Die Welt interview with Netanyahu conducted on Holocaust Memorial Day (of all days) is astounding for various reasons:

• Netanyahu compares Günter Grass to a “teenager in a Neo-Nazi party” for calling for inspections of Israel’s nuclear weapons in the poem “What Must Be Said.”
• Netanyahu cements the Nazi-Iran analogy in front of a German audience.
• Netanyahu misses any sense of perspective as he makes the jump from the Jewish people in WWII to the nuclear-armed Jewish state, speaking of the “power inversions” Grass makes in his poem when he supposedly conflates aggressors with victims, while completely ignoring the power inversion Netanyahu himself has just made in the analogy with the Holocaust.
• And finally Netanyahu quotes Bernard Lewis, saying he thinks that in Iran’s mind, “mutually assured destruction is not deterrence but an inducement.” Netanyahu also exclaims, “This is not true!” when the interview begins a question saying, “Iran might be a vile regime but it hasn’t proven to be a suicidal regime…”

I can accept some arguments in favor of the hypothetical of striking Iran’s nuclear weapons program (for example, that Iran’s mere possession of nuclear weapons will remove constraints on Iran, which will respond by increasing its support of and the violence perpetrated by Hamas, Hezbollah, and terrorist and US interests-undermining and state-subverting activities in Iraq and Afghanistan).

But Netanyahu is not making those arguments. Netanyahu is making bad arguments that push the “jihad” mindset onto a nation-state that is interested in expanding its power and influence and preserving its existence like any other state.

Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group, gives a great interview at the World Economic Forum blog, summarizing the possibilities for conflict between the U.S. and China. Currency adjustments, cybersecurity, trade disagreements, and North Korea are all mentioned, although China’s naval expansion and relations with Burma, Iran, and various states in Africa are all suspiciously left out. This, however, will never happen:

If the Chinese suddenly decide, we are moving away from the dollar and into the euro, but we are going to demand strong conditions, political and economical conditionality in return for us bailing these guys out. That could be the end of NATO. This would certainly be the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and would completely change the way we think about global geopolitics.

I cannot accept this will ever happen. NATO members would never accept any conditions that would result in the breakup of NATO. That’s because these conditions wouldn’t just result in the breakup of NATO–it would mean a significant loss of trust between the U.S. and its European allies. Who would Europe depend on then? China? That’s ludicrous.

I spurted out my coffee when I read that headline in this morning’s Playbook. As James Fallows notes, this is yet another example of false equivalence in the media. Yes, President Obama is by far better off than the vast majority of Americans. But who is wealthier? Mitt wins this no contest.

The United States news media’s coverage of the possibility of Israel or the U.S. targeting Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program is not really about Iran; it is about us. Just as Herbert Gans noted that Vietnam was primarily a domestic news story in the 60’s and 70’s, the Iranian nuclear threat is also. (Gans, 37) Most recent news coverage has devolved into a few dominant narratives, representing different political factions. Different media outlets either report on or explicitly represent the factions, and they generally make arguments that have very little to do with the substantive evidence for or against the existence of Iran’s nuclear capability; rather, the news follows election year trends, the possibility of war as it relates to the Jewish population in the United States, and criticism of the political actors involved.

The first narrative, representing the contingent of neoconservatives who pushed for war with Iraq in 2003, also supports not only a limited tactical strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but even a large-scale war. This perspective mainly shows up as representing the policy positions of the GOP presidential candidates or as the author’s view in opinion pieces. And then there is the narrative told by the traditional news sources such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Most major news organizations were embarrassed by the general failure to “get it right” on Iraq a decade ago, when they almost uncritically accepted the administration’s arguments that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). This time around, mainstream news is slightly more cautious in tone, but it still rarely publishes explicitly foreign-centric stories or stories with a serious consideration of the evidence on both sides, for and against Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons. The mainstream media much prefers to focus on the domestic political situation. Finally, there is the more liberal coverage, which often focuses on politics or criticisms of the neoconservatives for being so blithe about war.

Before one can even approach these narratives, one thing is glaringly clear: the news does not focus on the fact that the U.S. Intelligence Community still stands by its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stating that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that Iran continues to only enrich nuclear fuel, which could be used for a variety of peaceful purposes. This was reported on once in February by The New York Times, and scarcely appears in any of the related articles that I surveyed, either at the New York Times or at any other news organization. Much more common is the domestic political news story: “U.S. Backers of Israel Pressure Obama Over Policy on Iran.” This story is far more newsworthy. Why write about the intelligence community when you can report on Eric Cantor at the meeting of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): “We must stop following mirages in the Middle East and start following through on this reality: our mission in the Middle East is to drive our stake in the sand with our values—to proclaim our values rather than apologize for them.” If the news chose to highlight Senate testimony by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper saying that Iran is not building the bomb, the media would kill the most profitable and long-lasting angle by which to view a possible war with Iran. Political squabbles can extend on forever. The story will never end—according to Paul Begala (writing in The Daily Beast), war with Iran is one of the GOP’s biggest strengths going into this election year.

One factor complicating Israel’s and the United States’ decision to strike is the two countries’ on-and-off-again relationship. And it has become “a complication” in this otherwise calculating story of whether to strike Iran precisely because the media has made it so. President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have notoriously not gotten along—it is mentioned in almost every newspaper article where the two are discussed in tandem. And they are supposed to disagree: President Obama comes from the center-left party in the United States while Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party is partnered in a coalition government with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s nationalist and ultra-conservative Yisrael Beiteinu Party. But instead of focusing on the conflict between two governments based on legitimate policy differences, the media casts this as an acrimonious personal dispute between the two men. Why cast this as a story of, “If Mr. Obama trusted Mr. Netanyahu more, he might issue a more muscular statement of military threat to Iran…And if Mr. Netanyahu trusted Mr. Obama more, he would be less jumpy over every statement of caution emerging from Washington,” as so many stories do? Surely the entire diplomatic decision-making process does not rely solely on a pop-psychology assessment of the two.

And when the media cannot play up “Bibi” and Obama’s disagreements, they focus on how the President and every other mainstream politician must remain unswervingly loyal to the state of Israel. One might think that these are two contradictory narratives. But this oath of support to Israel is apparently the sole metric by which Jewish Americans decide who to vote for. Obama, even after clashing with Netanyahu over military action against Iran and even after denouncing the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, cannot completely rebuke Israel (when push came to shove, he did not even follow-through with support of a UN resolution officially rebuking Israel for the “illegal” settlements). For the Republican Party, “fealty” to Israel is a solemn vow. For the Democratic Party, “fealty” to Israel is (mostly) a solemn vow. At this past week’s AIPAC meeting, President Obama assured the attendees that he is behind Israel every step of the way: “So there should not be a shred of doubt by now — when the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.” In a blog post by Colum Lynch on ForeignPolicy.com, President Obama’s Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice is quoted as putting it in even more emotionally charged terms, relating her memories “as a 14 year-old tourist where she floated in the Dead Sea,” of a visit with then Senator Barack Obama where she touched the “charred long remnants of the rockets that Hamas continues to fire at the brave unyielding citizens of Sderot,” and of her favorite psalm, “’Hinei ma’tov u’ma-nayim, shevet ach-im gam ya-chad’ — or ‘how good it is and how pleasant when we sit together in brotherhood.’” Rice went even so far as to say: “Last October, when the Syrian regime’s ambassador, speaking in the Security Council, had the temerity — the chutzpah — to accuse the United States and Israel of being parties to genocide, I led our delegation in walking out.” (Ital added) How is this any different than when Obama delivers a sermon in a Black church speaking Ebonics? What is surprising about this whole episode is not just that Susan Rice quoted psalms in Hebrew that have an almost comically transparent political effect and chose to sprinkle in some Yiddish to play up the schtick—it is that the blogger, Lynch, not only thought to make a whole post revolve around that schtick but also to entitle it, “Has Susan Rice found her cojones moment?” And this happens in the media all the time. Do politicians say these things because they think the AIPAC attendees and the American Jewish population will simply accept it uncritically, that it won’t sound like pandering? And do journalists dutifully report these speeches because they don’t know any better? Or do they not want to make a fuss over a common political trope, so they pass it along with a nudge and a wink? Or did Lynch write that post because he actually supports these theatrics, and didn’t stop to think that his title might be misogynistic? It is hard to accept the last conclusion, but it is probably the most correct (perhaps a combination of the latter two).

But some in the media have commented on the absurdity of AIPAC and the reversal of Israel’s “client state” dynamic with the United States. Israel, after all, receives nearly three billion dollars annually in foreign aid from the United States. Why does the U.S. President, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, and politicians of all political stripes have to speak in emotional terms of their undying loyalty to the state of Israel, when it is in fact Israel that needs us more than we need them? In his blog at The Atlantic’s website, James Fallows noted (speaking of the President’s AIPAC speech), “I can’t think of another situation where an American president, speaking to an American audience on American soil, would find it necessary or dignified to plead his bona fides in a similar way.”

And in the latest issue of Washington Monthly, Paul Pillar makes the same meta-argument that this paper is making—that the rhetoric surrounding a possible war with Iran is not aligned with the evidence: “Strip away the bellicosity and political rhetoric, and what one finds is not rigorous analysis but a mixture of fear, fanciful speculation, and crude stereotyping…we find ourselves on the precipice of yet another such war—almost purely because the acceptable range of opinion on Iran has narrowed and ossified around the ‘sensible’ idea that all options must be pursued to prevent the country from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

The media is an intentional accomplice to political actors who want to sensationalize impending war with Iran. The media is interested in GOP conflict with the President over Israel and Iran because it is a better story, a more relatable story to the American public. The media cares about and politicians pander to the Jewish-American population because they are a substantial portion of their readership and electorate, respectively. But the media also forgets the essential truth behind any future war with Iran, as articulated by the President in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg: “[I]f people want to say about me that I have a profound preference for peace over war, that every time I order young men and women into a combat theater and then see the consequences on some of them, if they’re lucky enough to come back, that this weighs on me — I make no apologies for that. Because anybody who is sitting in my chair who isn’t mindful of the costs of war shouldn’t be here, because it’s serious business. These aren’t video games that we’re playing here.”

In his conclusion, Gans is annoyed by what are relatively common complaints against journalism: that journalists are prone to charges of distortion, that they don’t select the right facts, they don’t ask the right questions, and they don’t inform a lay audience in the right way. He also makes the point that these inherent problems with journalism arise because as Karl Mannheim said, “all knowledge is relational to the knower’s perspective.” Our perspective determines what facts we recognize, what questions we ask.

Gans’s solution to this, what he calls “Multiperspectival News,” is both an unworkable solution to an impossible-to-solve problem, and fully realized in the modern internet. Let’s start with the fully-realized bit. His described solution, and especially the “two-tier model” is the internet and modern media landscape. The internet consists of a multitude of heterogenous news outlets that “devote themselves primarily to reanalyzing and reinterpreting news gathered by the central media…adding their own commentary and backing these up with as much original reporting, particularly to supply bottom-up, representative, and service news…” (318) What Gans describes sounds like the blogs I read every day.

Modern media does of course fall short of Gans’s ideal: even though it is structurally similar, no outlet is really multiperspectival in the ways Gans wants them to be. And as I said before, I don’t think they can be. Gans briefly mentions my critique on page 311: you cannot add up every perspective together. If you try, you end up with nonsense and incoherence. As he says, “One cannot be a Marxist and a libertarian concurrently.” And we can’t each adopt only a single, pure perspective either. That is too limiting and not realistic to our life experiences. Instead, every person must synthesize, and this involves blending perspectives together. And once you do that, you automatically leave some things out of your perspective. That’s why no individual journalist can ever approach the ideal of “multiperspectival news”, and why collectively no journalistic organization will reach it either. We just have to live with this limitation; and we might do better for ourselves if we didn’t view it so much as a limitation, dropped the goal of “multiperspectival news”, and asked a different set of questions!

Herbert Gans presents the news as telling two different, contradictory stories: a story that affirms the status quo social order, and a story that pushes for Progressive reform of the type we read about in the readings last week on journalism in turn-of-the-20th-century Detroit. I cannot analyze the news environment that Gans deals with from personal experience, because I was not alive during the 60’s and 70’s. But I can relate Gans’ conclusions to the modern media environment. Given the way the news acts today, it seems far more likely that the news is interested, albeit unwittingly, in preserving the status quo.

This seems an unlikely conclusion to make given the national mood since the recession started. The amount of muckraking journalism to expose corruption and malfeasance in the public sphere, and especially in private industry and finance, seems to have risen extraordinarily. The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are not treated unsympathetically as mindless violence, a la the “ghetto violence” and war protests Gans mentions from the 60’s, but as serious movements with admirable policy platforms.

In theory, journalistic outlets are progressive because they identify the “moral disorder” of elites (per Gans’s terminology). But this is, I think, very much a facade. Gans already identifies the ways in which the news does not reflect what I would call “true” progressivism: it mainly allies itself with the values of the upper-middle class, professional elites that make up those news outlets’ readership. It doesn’t pay attention to the plight of the poor. It does not truly question authority.

That might be a naive standard to set. But journalists have to question authority to conduct true journalism. Journalists failed in their charge after 9/11 and in the lead-up to the Iraq War precisely because they failed to question authority and allied themselves with the predominate moral and political opinions of those in power, politically, economically, and socially. The examples of this malfeasance of the journalistic class abounds and are too many to continue.