Tim Burke on fairness and balance

He's right about this, you know. A sample, below the fold, so I have a record of it:

But what some CT commentators seem to me to be saying is this: Politics is a dirty, hard business, and we have to play dirty to win. They're saying, don’t come in here with your effete intellectualism, your Marquis-of-Queensbury rules, your naïve pomposity. Moore works, he’s down with the people, he’s telling it like the American people need to hear it.

This is precisely what I took up in my Cliopatria essay: is Moore effective, and effective at what? So I don’t disagree with the CT commentators who say that you have to play politics to win, and that if Moore is effective, that’s a countervailing virtue that outweighs any pedantry one might unload at him. What I think is the CT commentators are actually revealing, however, is why the American left is on a persistent losing streak in the tough game of political struggle (not to mention a nasty little streak of intellectualized anti-intellectualism that is another classic kind of left-wing panic button).

They assume that fairness and intellectual discipline are somehow antithetical to the crafting of effective political argument and rhetoric and they assume rather than demonstrate that Fahrenheit is positively influencing the constituencies whose mobilization against the Iraq War and the Bush Administration is useful or needed at this point.

Fairness and open-mindedness is a pretty crucial part of my own political and intellectual voice. That’s first because I assume that it is a positive good, an ethical position, and to adopt an ethical mode of acting in the world is itself a political strategy. It is a commitment to the dispensation that one hopes to build. I assume, very deeply and I hope not unreasonably, that there would be enormous social good that would come to pass if the American public sphere was everywhere authentically marked by fairness, open-mindedness, and mutually agreed-upon standards for rational argument and use of meaningful evidence.

This the critics would be right to say is an insufficient reason to criticize anyone failing to reach that standard. By itself, it is a luxurious high-mindedness. However, fairness also works as politics in the operational sense. An operatic, performative commitment to decency, an over-the-top acknowledging of the legitimacy of potentially legitimate arguments, an attempt to reduce cheap shots, a showy constraint for saying only that which can be said based on strong evidence: these all function as powerful tools in political struggle within the American public sphere.

Who brought Joe McCarthy down in the end? Not somebody playing “dirty”, down in the same gutter with McCarthy, but someone who waited for their moment and caught McCarthy in a decency trap, who revealed the man’s fundamental unfairness and viciousness in part by being scrupulously decent themselves. How did Archibald Cox defeat Richard Nixon? By walking the straight and narrow. Being decent and fair and meticulous isn’t intellectual wankery: it’s hardball.

It’s especially important in the context of the metapolitics of weblogs as a subdomain of the public sphere. Crooked Timber’s contributors regularly take other webloggers to task for the inconsistency of present arguments with past positions, or for their contradictory use of evidentiary standards. That kind of critique only has political influence, e.g., the capacity to alter the way that others think and act, inasmuch as it is a performative, demonstrated constraint on those who offer it. This is what I understand John Holbo to be talking about most centrally in his own comments. If you hold someone else accountable to standards that you do not maintain when you're talking in the public sphere about someone on your "home team", you've shot your wad, you've blown your credibility, you've lost political capital.

That’s the league that Michael Moore is in: the public sphere, weblog and otherwise. Within that league, there are or ought to be rules. Playing by the rules earns you political capital—and if you have political capital, and spend it wisely, you’re effective in influencing other players in the public sphere, even sometimes those who may pretend not to care about those rules. If you have none, you never get the chance.