Propaganda With Better Manners Is Still Propaganda

The new 60 Minutes will tip the scales for conservatives; ironically, many mainstream news outlets already do the same thing, less intentionally.

I doubt many readers of this newsletter hold high hopes for the coming season of 60 Minutes, with its new roster of contributors. Few of you, presumably, have been taken in by special pleading from Bari Weiss and David Ellison, who’d like the public to believe their hostile takeover of CBS News is motivated by something (anything) high minded.

I’m also not sure how much stock newsletter readers place in the professional customs of prestige opinion journalism.

But because we know who Weiss has recruited, it’s straightforward enough to peer into the future, see at least the contours of what she has in mind. What does 60 Minutes look like when you replace priceless investigative-journalism talent and experience with Ross Douthat? And what does Douthat’s view of his own purpose as a commentator tell us about what’s gone wrong among gatekeepers of elite discourse?

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Fortunately there’s a paper trail. Here, in his own words, is how Douthat understands his role.

To argue effectively, you need to understand why people you disagree with hold the views that they do, and you need to start from a version of their argument that is high-minded rather than low-minded, and that is the best version of the perspective that they hold.

And that doesn’t mean that you can’t think that secretly or subconsciously they hold their opinion for bad or wicked reasons, or because they want to just destroy their enemies and salt the earth. You can believe that exists somewhere in their mind. But to argue with them, you have to actually engage with the version of the argument that they themselves would put forward as their own best defense.

So the obvious examples: I’ll pick one from the right and one from the left. So if you are pro-choice and you want to argue with pro-lifers, like actually argue with them, you cannot start from a description of the pro-life position that says: The point of pro-life politics is to subjugate women and punish them for sexual immorality.

You’re allowed to think that’s out there and is part of the socially conservative psyche. You’re allowed to think whatever you want. But you’re not going to get anywhere arguing unless you start with the fact that pro-life people think unborn human lives are human and worthy of legal protection in terms of being human. That’s just where you have to start.

And then to take an issue from the other direction: If you are a conservative opponent of liberal views on immigration, you’re allowed to think that liberals are politically Machiavellian cynics who are bringing in lots of illegal immigrants to vote Democratic. But you’re never going to get anywhere arguing unless you start with what liberals themselves would say, which is that immigration is a humanitarian and economic benefit to immigrants and to the country that receives them.

The influencer’s objective, as he describes it, is this: Try to persuade people with opposing views that they are wrong, or that they have blindspots, by first flattering their collective sense of righteousness, then chipping away at it. Understand why they believe what they believe (or at least the reasons they claim for holding the views they hold), stipulate to it, then call it into question.

Sounds unobjectionable, right? And in certain realms it is unobjectionable. This is what candidates for high office do. It’s the kind of thing you might pick up in How To Win Friends And Influence People, though I’ve never read that book. But it is a strange and telling conception of journalism.

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The load-bearing assumptions here are that persuasion operates on a single channel, and that the targets are and must always be open-minded members of the ideological opposition.

I don’t really think this is how journalists, even opinion journalists, should conceive of their purpose. I don’t think it’s what journalism consumers believe they’re signing up for. The conceit is that journalists know a lot of things that elude the public, because they’re closer to the source material, and have chosen, as a vocation, to convey facts and arguments faithfully. Their customers are civilians who have different lots in life, and thus need information distilled to them by trustworthy professionals.

Facts are facts, and should be reported as such. The relative importance of facts is a matter of subjective judgment that should be informed by sober expertise. Opinions vary, but should be rooted in truth and sound reasoning. They should be well crafted, of course, but the craft shouldn’t be employing rhetorical tricks that might spin an audience of less-knowledgeable people into a state of self-doubt.

The idea that these professionals might conceal crucial information to avoid controversy or be more enticing flies in the face of the whole enterprise. Yet this basic practice has, in one form or another, become endemic among mainstream news outlets. False balance is in some sense a Douthatesque tactic for disarming hostile readers. Opinion editors strive to recruit writers who exhibit this exact kind of politesse.

It is of course wise to assume a degree of healthy skepticism within any audience, and try to overcome it. But that’s different from treating readers and listeners and viewers as marks who need to be seduced.

Bringing things back to basics like this—where things that appear in the newspaper, or on the evening news, are meant to be maximally transparent and true—opens up new avenues of persuasion: facts that might make partisans feel defensive, but god help us we would not be reporting them if they weren’t accurate and important; arguments that are forceful, honest, and logically rigorous, such that someone coming in blank and unbiased would find them compelling, and have a hard time refuting them.

This does not typically require rhetorical tools for disarming people with strong priors and convincing them to rethink, or to open their minds. Public intellectuals draw on both sets of tools. Persuasion is a billion dollar industry. People devote careers to understanding what’s persuasive to swing voters. We take great care to reach loved ones, when we disagree with them, by first seeking common ground, then trying to ease them toward different points of view. Some issues aren’t quite as polarized and polarizing as immigration and abortion.

But this is roughly the line dividing journalists and political operatives.

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Do we really think opinion journalists should, by and large, be doing the same persuasive work that national politicians do? Is the job really to make people change their minds irrespective of the whole truth? Or is it for the commentator to make the most truthful possible case for the world as he sees it; to make what he believes—and maybe can show to be true—clear and compelling, without flirting with outright deceit?

I’d always thought it was to make our public discourse—polluted as it is by lies and hyperbole and euphemism—legible to the people who are the intended dupes of all this obfuscation. What motives and objectives lie behind the fog?

Consider the two issues Douthat selected. He stipulates that, to be persuasive:

• Liberals should argue against the view that “unborn human lives are human and worthy of legal protection”

• Conservatives should argue against the view that “immigration is a humanitarian and economic benefit to immigrants and to the country that receives them.”

• Both should avoid inquiry into ulterior motives: that immigration is a Trojan Horse; that abortion bans are about enforcing sexual morality.

Douthat’s view of persuasion is convenient, because it forecloses inquiry into questions like: Are those ulterior motives real? Or are they fabricated? If they’re fabricated, who fabricated them, and what does that tell us? Stick to the text and the merits.

When you imagine an audience of people who are simply less informed—who don’t know who really believes what, and why we fight about these issues the way we do—that whole framework falls apart. Because Great Replacement is fake, but sexual puritanism is real and pervasive. And these are both relevant facts.

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Douthat is right about this much: To persuade liberals that lax immigration policy is a bad idea, you can’t start with the precept, if you hold it, that liberals want immigrants to serve as political usurpers. This won’t be persuasive. Not because it’s rude. Because it isn’t true. If it were true, it would be essential information, and a project worth repudiating on the merits. But it’s not true as to the belief of any prominent liberal, and it’s not true as a matter of theoretical possibility.

If I managed to sneak a million voting-age immigrants into the country, bestow them all with citizenship, and plant them methodically in swing states, what would happen? Well, if it was illegal, I’d go to jail, and they’d all go home. But if it was legal, would it be the end of Republican power for all time? Only if you make at least one of two assumptions: First, that all brown-skinned immigrants are themselves liberal, or will align in gratitude (possibly for all time) with the liberal party that welcomed them. Second, that the Republican Party is immutable or highly stubborn, and should never be expected to compromise with the electorate. Immigrants without citizenship must thus remain in the shadows or be removed to vindicate the Republican birthright to nativist policy. The borders must be closed so that nothing ever changes.

This is what the people who make the Great Replacement allegation, or who object to immigration on these grounds, confess implicitly. Many of them are simply motivated by racial animus.

And if that’s what we know, as a matter of truth, about the motive force behind right-wing ideology, our obligation is to expose it. If that’s what a conservative thinks about why this regime of mass deportation is ultimately just, his obligation—if he thinks of himself as a journalist—is to be transparent about it.

When he discards that obligation in favor of politician-style persuasion, he begins to spin. For many years, before the mask slipped, the intellectual populists of the right, including Douthat, pleaded across the ideological divide that nativist views weren’t bigoted, and weren’t about the preservation of right-wing political dominance of the United States. They were about avoiding a supply glut of low-wage labor. They were also about the rule of law. We have laws in this country. Immigrants who overstay visas or cross the border between ports of entry break the law. Presidents must be constrained by the same set of laws. They can’t set enforcement priorities so expansively as to, in effect, create law that isn’t on the books. Why, that’d make them no better than two-bit caudillos!¹

Who now thinks any of this was candid? Who now thinks New York Times readers, as the targets of this persuasion, were dealt with honestly?

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If conservatives ran a newspaper with the reach and influence of the New York Times, how would we liberals want a liberal columnist to broach the issue of abortion with the paper’s mostly conservative audience? How would I do the job?

This thought experiment feels far-fetched, because it’s almost impossible to imagine. Not because liberals enjoy hegemony over the written word, but because conservatives would not allow such a thing to exist. To match the reach and influence of the New York Times, conservatives would have to be willing to hire and promote liberals willing to expose conservatives to contrarian views in appealing and forceful language. They would not do this! They would hire Alan Colmes.

But let’s pretend.

To be persuasive, I’m told my obligation, as a jumping off point, would be to not observe or suggest that opposition to abortion is rooted at least to some degree in right-wing revulsion at female promiscuity. Instead, I’d have to steelman² their position, and argue against the view that fetuses are human, and thus entitled to inalienable rights.

Fine. I’m up to that challenge. But here, as in the immigration case, I would also feel compelled to ask, Is the less generous interpretation of their view true?

Inconveniently enough, it is, and I’m being asked to deprive myself of powerful evidence. There is no Great Replacement, but the impetus to control women (or, at least, to impose conservative sexual morality on reluctant humans) is widely held, and not particularly well disguised.

I know this, in part, because I’ve read Douthat’s memoir. Here I’ll quote the passage that recirculates online every time he’s in the discourse. But I’ve included several additional paragraphs, because my intention isn’t to mock him personally. It’s to grapple with his meaning.

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a Chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point —Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want? she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure that this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to breathe. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business... and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered -

“You know, I’m on the pill

I’m on the pill.... She wasn’t from Harvard, but on that night, in that dank basement bedroom, she spoke for all of us, the whole young American elite. Not I love you, not This is incredible, not Let’s go all the way, but I’m on the pill. Because that, after all, was the critical information.

Formal sexual education is thick with charts and diagrams, statistics and gruesomely cautionary photos. This is what chlamydia looks like, my high school biology teacher would tell us, shoving a picture of a chancrous penis in our face. These are the odds of getting pregnant if you don’t use birth control — this is how you put a condom on a banana — this is the vas deferens, this is the urethra, this is the fallopian tube, and this is the clitoris. Little of this information sticks. Nobody remembers the exact risk of pregnancy, or the timing of the menstrual cycle, when they’re fumbling in the dark with a naked woman, and nobody thinks back to that Trojan-and-banana demonstration when it comes time to put on the condom. Sex ed works, if it works at all, because of the underlying message of those classes, which has less to do with clinical details than with economic and social imperatives.

Remember what matters, the young elites are told, first by high school teachers and then by college administrators, parents, and even peers: Remember your career, your parents’ hopes, your grad school applications, your earning potential as a single Ivy grad in your early-to-mid-twenties, remember all this, and be careful whom you screw and how.

This culture of safety begins with birth control, the Harvard administration’s main contribution to keeping students out of harm’s way: condoms in every residential bathroom, birth-control pills from University Health Services, the morning-after pill if things go slightly awry, abortions in Boston if all else fails. Do whatever you want, but remember your rubbers…

Why would Douthat, in his op-ed column, profess to oppose abortion? Because “unborn human lives are human and worthy of legal protection in terms of being human.” But what does he really believe? What is in his psyche? That, no doubt. But also, apparently: revulsion—mood-killing revulsion—that society has made it possible for women to have sex for fun, or even just as part of the process of deciding when to settle down, and with whom. Someone says to him, We can do this without worrying that it’ll alter the course of our lives, and he thinks, No, I want the risk looming over the decision—not just for us but for everyone—and if you aren’t willing to accept it, because you mean to keep your options open, you are grotesque to me.

I obviously don’t agree. But this is a very common belief, in the United States and around the world. And that tells me something important about how a major political faction wants to remake society. As a journalist, I should feel compelled to share this fact with the wider public. Readers lose when journalists take it upon themselves (and call upon others) to imagine it out of existence for the sake of “persuasion.”

The public case against abortion is extreme enough. If fetuses are entitled to all human rights, then abortion is murder, and conservatives will not stop until abortion is banned everywhere. Some will blow up abortion clinics; others will be methodical, and inch toward fetal-personhood in increments. But there will never be a morally satisfying permanent settlement. That’s the only available inference if their views are sincere and their values coherent. But if underneath it all they’re also just repulsed by the freedom many women currently have, via contraception, to all-but-eliminate the likelihood of needing or choosing an abortion, they will come for contraception, too.

Confronting conservatives with this, and trying to disabuse them of it, is hard but important. Laying it out plainly for the broader public is essential.

This is not quite coterminous with the idea that “the point of pro-life politics is to subjugate women and punish them for sexual immorality.” Generously, traditionalists are disgusted by promiscuity across lines of gender and sexuality, in the sense that it takes two (or three or four…) to tango. But in practice, most of the freedom lost will be women’s freedom.

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So this is what I suspect is coming to 60 Minutes: Programming by people who are conscious of their own political aims. Programming that’s deviously designed and designed to be devious.

It’s unfortunate, if I’m right, because 60 Minutes was good. Not perfect, but good. Now it’ll be political persuasion, operating slyly on two levels. The content of the broadcasts will be instrumental. The presentation will be genteel. It’ll seem like the dispassionate exploration of ideas, rather than the dogma served up on Fox News. But the aims will be substantially similar.

Maybe the silver lining is that, as 60 Minutes is unmade, it’ll throw the broader perversion of journalism into sharper relief.

What does it say about how we’ve gone about our work if a prized colleague can take his wares from the most coveted real-estate in opinion journalism to the Weiss-Ellison project, and slot in perfectly?

1. Unless, of course, they change enforcement priorities for the purposes of disappearing thousands of people a day.

2. This isn’t really what steelmanning is, at least as I understand it. When you steelman an argument, you present and argue against the most logically rigorous version of the opposing argument. What Douthat proposes is arguing against the most well-spun, generously framed version of the opposing argument. If there’s a term for that, I’m not aware of it.