Sometimes I think I'd like to live in a world where inconvenient truths can be ignored or ridiculed or denied. Oh wait, I do live in that world and so do you:
Conservatives have become very good at taking inconvenient facts and insisting that they are frauds perpetuated by liberal conspiracists. We’ve seen it with the dismissal of the last few weeks’ election polling. We see it with inflation statistics and voter fraud. Most important, we see it with climate change.
Liberals are drawn to conspiracy theories, too (remember the claims that George W. Bush was wearing a wire in the first 2004 debate?) but with a key difference. Liberal elites push back on conspiracies that bubble up among the grass-roots, while conservative elites increasingly encourage the theories. Climate-change denial, in particular, has become a completely mainstream position for conservatives from the grass-roots up through the elites. The donors and benefactors behind conservative publications and think tanks aren't embarrassed by conspiracy mongering; in many cases, it’s exactly what they’re donating to support. There are also lots of conservative consumers willing to pay good money to be lied to. That’s why the left’s conspiracy-mongering remains a mostly volunteer activity while the right has Breitbart.com, the Daily Caller, The Blaze and a network of other well-funded for- and non-profit organizations that spread disinformation within the conservative bubble. (see link here)
We could develop economic and political policies and regulations to put people back to work, to lower the unemployment rate. But why bother if we can deny that unemployment is a problem?
This again seems like a problem of regulatory capture. In a sense, the news media is supposed to be the regulatory agency for politics, or at least the service organization for citizens to do this job. Increasingly, however, the media is controlled by a few tycoons who are themselves a part of the political establishment, and largely benefit from the government of, by and for the rich. Ironically, even the internet, which seems to have made media much more direct, has made it far easier to control public perception. It is truly unclear to me how our politics can improve without a massive (possibly extra-political) reshuffling of the deck.
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