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I have been arguing that recent political discussion has debased to a point where it can be likened to “Brain Surgery With a Butter Knife.” {For previous arguments see hereand here} Little did I know that this process would be elevated to the absurd. Here is what I said previously:

This gotcha attitude is the flip side of moralism. It is the elevation of small facts to the level of determinate character. Liberal pundits want to slice and dice words and sentences until they have some sort of rhetorical smoking gun to pin on Bush. The public will have none of it, because they are not obsessed with the minutia and sophistry of the media and their groupies.

Not to toot my own horn here but isn’t this exactly where we are today? A good example, as usual, is Michael Kinsley in Slate. For some reason Kinsley seems to think that being a weasely smart ass makes one a profound pundit. The media Research Center outlines CNN anchor Aaron Brown taking this kind of thing to a new level:

On his first night back since falsely impugning President Bush, by highlighting an already-revealed fraudulent Web site report about how a CIA consultant claimed to have informed Bush, before his State of the Union address, about the falsity of the report about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa, CNN anchor Aaron Brown failed to offer a correction.

Instapundit is outlining the Democrats inability to use language with precision or accuracy. All this just goes to show that irony is not dead but alive and well in politics. Here we have a group of people obviously unable to do what they demand of their opponents. Yet, they angrily demand action and change and anything else that they happen to think of when the camera is pointing at them.

Obviously there is no simple to answer for why political debates have become so shallow and absurd (or rather there may be a number of answers to why this is happening) but let me offer one answer that has been overlooked to my knowledge. What we are seeing is the chaos that results from what Fareed Zakaria calls the democratization of American society, culture, and politics. We have the fatal weakening of the structures and institutions that imposed order and restraint on the system; we have the death of authority. I am reading The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad and it is clear to me that Zakaria’s points are playing a key role in this cacophony of idiocy we seem to be in the middle of right now. I won’t attempt to cover all of the ideas in the book (I’ll save that for the book review) but I wanted to note a few issues that play a crucial part in this story.

One central issue is the complete neutering of the political parties. Election reform, the total reliance on the primary system, campaign finance reform, and a host of issues aimed at making politics more responsive and democratic have instead led to chaos and bad policy. At the presidential level political parties have practically no meaning. No one takes their platforms seriously nor do the party leaders carry much authority. Other than funneling money (and the most recent campaign finance laws may take that away), they have little leverage. Whoever is at the top of the ticket defines the party. George W. Bush is the GOP for all intents and purposes at the national level. He is the face and message of the party because no one else has the power or leverage to contradict him. Oh sure the Congress has a role to play but it is often reactionary rather than forward looking. Plus Bush sets the tone and agenda for the most part anyways. Whoever is not in the White House is defined by running against the current occupant. That field is determined by popularity and fundraising, not necessarily in that order. The parties have little control. Conservatives have learned this the hard way on issues from spending and education to Medicaid and trade policy. Bush does what he thinks is best and the party offers little but a whimper, if that.

What this means is that debates, like the one over WMDs, have little or no structural or institutional restraint. Since the parties? platforms, principles, and ideas have no meaning or currency, the dabate easily breaks down into pure partisan spin with the media adding its own. Add this all up and you get chaos. In the past there were forces within the parties that controlled and restrained debate and issues. They had foreign policy mandarins that were respected and who were expected to set the tone. Parties had important policy foundations that were not easily cast aside. Obviously partisanship was involved but so were long-term policy and the need for respect from both peers and the media establishment. The current crop of Democratic presidential hopefuls are, let’s be honest, for the most part devoid of foreign policy credentials and have no motivation to show restraint (before you say it, I know Bush is a bit green himself but he is surrounded by policy wonks and elder statesmen with reputations and careers to consider). They are stoking this fire for one reason: traction. They are simply throwing mud as quick as they can in hopes that something will land and stick. That issue can then be their vehicle for a larger media audience and the longed for momentum that is so crucial to the weird pre-primary process we have devolved to these days. A political and election process that is totally wide open and involves little more than fundraising success and media demagoguery is not likely to produce nuance and intelligent debate.

The other factor is the disconnect between the media and politicos and the public. This is the irony of the “democratization” of all things American. In the name of returning things to the “people” we have marginalized the people. Campaign finance laws have made fundraising the number one priority (remember that if you make something hard to get you make it more valuable). As a result the average politician must spend hours working on fundraising and kissing up to fundraisers and key organizers to the detriment of knowing the issues and communicating to the voters. If you can’t donate the maximum and get a bunch of your friends to do the same you are not high on the candidates list. As I mentioned above, the election process has this same irony. By taking power away from the parties we have given more power to money and media. The media now plays a huge roll in the election process because name recognition and momentum are more important than ever. The parties use to determine the candidates and their relative qualification for office then those candidates had to show signs of popularity in a few primaries. This mixed system produced more mature candidates and less reliance on the media. Voters had to spend less time getting to know the candidates because they were familiar with them to begin with or they could trust the party system to produce a candidate with credentials and party loyalty. The current crop of Democrat presidential contenders are largely unknown to the public and so must use every opportunity to get their name out there; i.e. media exposure. Again, a focus on money and face time does not make for good public policy or an informed electorate.

The undermining of any kind of cultural or societal authority means the media is focused on the least common denominator politics. Since rigid equalitarianism is the mantra of the media these days, everyone is assumed to be, to quote Russell Kirk, as good as the next guy or maybe even a little better. Combine this with the relentless relativism of the culture and you have no way to judge competing arguments ? everybody no matter how ?out there? is taken seriously and given a platform. Why else do we have debates with half a dozen or more candidates, when we know that most of them have absolutely no chance of getting elected? Because we insist on total equality in the face of reality. This is what leads people like Jerry Springer and Dennis Kucinich, to say nothing of the others, to be taken seriously. Does the media offer restraint? No, the media simply wants an interesting story. They grab their sound bites and feed them to the talking heads and sped hours in analysis and manipulation of an incestuous and absurd process (create story, ask a politician about said story, slice and dice the reaction, rinse repeat). The fact that Dean could seriously bring up the prospect of impeachment over Bush’s State of the Union Speech is proof that the debate is disconnected to reality and any search for truth. But the media doesn’t care because they feed on controversy and accusations. A careful and restrained policy debate is not in their best interest. They want wide open free for all debates with wild statements and high dungeon all around. They want to raise the rhetoric to a fevered pitch because that makes their job interesting and sells papers, magazines, and advertisements (provided ratings go up). Bloggers are not immune to this temptation either. Wonks and politicos with the requisite passion and interest in the minutia run most political blogs. Given the heightened tensions of war and the political stalemate on many issues, it is not surprising that the blogosphere is full of over-reactions and accusations, mud slinging and insults, no to mention semantics and second guessing at an absurd level. If you dig to deep in this area one becomes wearied by the noise that is out there. I for one quickly get a headache, and I generally like this stuff.

Rationality, balance, long-term thinking, and a sense of scope and relevance are thrown out the window when politics is unhinged from institutions, authority and restraint. Few people in this system have a motivation to bring these qualities to the table. This is not a partisan issue either it is just that the Democrats are taking it to the next level right now. The GOP certainly covered much of this territory during the Clinton years but I think the lack of serious presidential candidates and the splintering of the Democratic party has exacerbated the issue. The Democrats simply seem incapable of pulling it together, of outlining a coherent argument on a broad range of issues and weaving it into an compelling rationale for voting for them. Because of their focus on minutia and gotcha politics unaccompanied by a big picture, the public has largely tuned them out.

This means that instead of a public that is better informed and a majority party that is forced to defend its ideas and principles, we have a public that is increasingly cynical and tuned out and a majority party that has grown shallow and mushy. Bush simply triangulates between grumpy conservatives in Congress and wacko leftist Democrats running for President. He looks like the man in the middle, trying to steer the country in a very difficult time and getting smeared for trying.

So what is the solution? That is, as they say, a toughie. Perhaps we could start by looking at the big picture more often. The Democrats, for example, could attempt to come up with a coherent foreign policy strategy outside of Bush is evil and always wrong. We could also ditch many of the so-called reforms that led to our predicament. We could remove most campaign finance restrictions and instead use full disclosure. This way candidates could spend time crafting intelligent policy points instead of raising money and creating free media time via demagoguery. We could return some power to the political parties by moving past a winner take all primary system. We could attempt to shore up and defend intermediary institutions in our culture in hopes that they can restore some luster to authority and restraint. In reality I am not sure exactly how we put the genie back in the bottle on some of these issues but I am convinced that more hair of the dog that bit us isn?t the solution. All I am asking for is a little balance and a little restraint for starters. Perhaps if a few of us can take a step back and see the forest for the trees we can survey our options and proceed with some strategies. But to me continuing this myopic and absurd debate is simply brain surgery with a butter knife.