Rationality
I feel like we're getting closer to the center of something.
Politicians have always stretched rationality. The way to mobilize a population is not to be objective, but to use analogy and hyperbole and unrepresentative examples to convince people that some course of action needs to be taken. But I think what we are decrying is that this administration has no sense of it's fallibility. When specialists and experts disagree with their positions, they pay to get new specialists and experts. They came in absolutely convinced that Iraq was the problem. And they pressured and cajoled and moved people around until they got the message they wanted. This travesty has repeated itself many times, in the EPA lead regulations, in the FDA deliberations for Plan B ("morning after pill"): the objective scientific community comes to a conclusion, they don't like it, they find the one person with a university appointment with a contrary view and state that that viewpoint has equal weight, and thus they will proceed with that. I feel like what checked previous politicians was their concern about posterity. But this administration has a fanatical, religious zeal which overcomes that. They are willing to deceive because they truly believe that what they are doing is right and that although posterity may look askance at their methods, posterity will approve of their results.
Of course their methods are maddening when you don't agree with their vision: A white America where most of the money and power is concentrated in a few, where military power is used to impose our will on a increasingly angry world. I don't think they actually feel they can fly in the face of basic laws forever (you must not spend more than you earn, etc) but they are media savvy enough that they feel they can convince the country to go along with them, and that in the long run, their vision will be recognized as prescient and ground-breaking.
This administration is scary because this Ends justify the Means (OK to stretch truth/deceive public because it is that importnat that our vision of America endures) has been invoked by many figures in history. And those societies usually had a pretty hard fall.
It's a scary time to be an American.
Politicians have always stretched rationality. The way to mobilize a population is not to be objective, but to use analogy and hyperbole and unrepresentative examples to convince people that some course of action needs to be taken. But I think what we are decrying is that this administration has no sense of it's fallibility. When specialists and experts disagree with their positions, they pay to get new specialists and experts. They came in absolutely convinced that Iraq was the problem. And they pressured and cajoled and moved people around until they got the message they wanted. This travesty has repeated itself many times, in the EPA lead regulations, in the FDA deliberations for Plan B ("morning after pill"): the objective scientific community comes to a conclusion, they don't like it, they find the one person with a university appointment with a contrary view and state that that viewpoint has equal weight, and thus they will proceed with that. I feel like what checked previous politicians was their concern about posterity. But this administration has a fanatical, religious zeal which overcomes that. They are willing to deceive because they truly believe that what they are doing is right and that although posterity may look askance at their methods, posterity will approve of their results.
Of course their methods are maddening when you don't agree with their vision: A white America where most of the money and power is concentrated in a few, where military power is used to impose our will on a increasingly angry world. I don't think they actually feel they can fly in the face of basic laws forever (you must not spend more than you earn, etc) but they are media savvy enough that they feel they can convince the country to go along with them, and that in the long run, their vision will be recognized as prescient and ground-breaking.
This administration is scary because this Ends justify the Means (OK to stretch truth/deceive public because it is that importnat that our vision of America endures) has been invoked by many figures in history. And those societies usually had a pretty hard fall.
It's a scary time to be an American.
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