Bill O'Reilly, the tumescent personality of Fox News, said on his Friday show "Robert Reich is a communist who secretly adores Karl Marx." (This came after Fox News' Neil Cavoto called me a "sanctimonious twit" for suggesting the rich should pay more in taxes.)
O'Reilly's accusation is odd, to say the least. If we were living in the 1950s, amid Senator Joe McCarthy's communist witch-hunts, the claim might have some bite and cause me injury. But these days it's hard to find a full-throated communist anywhere in the world.
O'Reilly's accusation isn't even logical. How can he know if I secretly adore Karl Marx, if it's a secret?
For the record, I'm not a communist and I don't secretly adore Karl Marx.
Ordinarily I don't bother repeating anything Bill O'Reilly says. But this particular whopper is significant because it represents what O'Reilly and Fox News, among others, are doing to the national dialogue.
They're burying it in doo-doo.
O'Reilly based his claim on an interview I did last week with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, in which I argued that because America's big corporations were now global we could no longer rely on them to make necessary investments in human capital or to lobby for public investments in education, infrastructure, and basic R&D. So, logically, government has to step in.
Since when does an argument for public investment in education, infrastructure, and basic R&D make someone a communist or a secret adorer of Karl Marx?
Obviously, O'Reilly has no interest in arguing anything. Ad hominem attacks are always the last refuges of intellectual boors lacking any logic or argument. (Whoops, I think I just stooped to name-calling. Sorry, Bill.)
Yet this is what's happening to all debate all over America: It's disappearing. All we're left with is a nasty residue.
In Washington, Democrats and Republicans no longer even talk. They just vent charges and counter-charges.
The 2012 election doesn't seem likely to clarify any issue. At this moment the candidates and their surrogates are debating the treatment of dogs.
Across the nation, conservatives right-wingers and liberal or progressive lefties have stopped debating their respective views, or even listening to anyone they disagree with. They just find broadcasters and bloggers who confirm their views.
We're even sorting by belief according to where we live. Today your neighbors are more likely to agree with your politics than disagree. We've settled into like-minded enclaves where we don't need to think because everyone we meet confirms what we assume we already know.
It's not that the nation is more polarized than it's been in the past. America has been through searing conflicts, some within the living memories of most of us. The communist witch-hunts of the 1950s were followed by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, battles over women's reproductive rights and gay marriage.
What makes America's current polarization remarkable isn't the severity of our disagreements but our utter lack of engagement debating them.
So many Americans are so angry and frustrated these days -- vulnerable to loss of job and healthcare and home, without a shred of economic security -- they're easy prey for demagogues offering simple answers and ready scapegoats. Take, for example, Bill O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox News.
But people can only learn from others who disagree with them -- or at least from witnessing debates between people who respectfully and civilly disagree. Without respect and civility, it's not a debate -- it's just name-calling.
A democracy depends on public deliberation and debate. Without it, the members of a society have no means of understanding what they believe or why. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were notable not because they solved anything but because they helped Americans clarify where they agreed and disagreed on the wrenching issue of slavery.
Hence the danger today - when deliberation has stopped.
This morning I left a message on Bill O'Reilly's office phone asking him to invite me onto his show to debate whether public investments in education and infrastructure are needed.
What are the odds he'll invite me on?
Get #BeyondOutrage.　
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RBReich
As a liberal who lived in a red state for a while, you bet your last dollar I make it a point to live in neighborhoods now that lean toward democratic beliefs. Once my right-wing neighbors found out I was a liberal I was blacklisted, my car vandalized and call epithets. Right-wingers have become so intolerant to liberal ideas (thanks in large part to Fox's successful campaign to demonize us) that they are dangerous.
However, if it is held that the way forward, thus by nature progressive, is back to the past, it follows "conservatism" is "progressive", and thereby "regressive".
Conservatism starts where logic ends.
He is and should always be an academic.
Their point--made three years ago--is that we have sorted ourselves into like minded communities, states and regions. This encourages polarization because it creates safe congressional districts where the incumbent would be rapidly unelected if he/she tried to commit compromise. Not to mention people in like minded groups tend to be more vehement in their ideologies than they are alone.
Starobin pointed out that as a country we may have finally gotten too big as well as too polarized to create the kind of innovative atmosphere a country needs to be viable. His example of premium viability is Singapore. Even India is considering regionalizing itself around major cities to make the country more governable.
Perhaps it is time to consider a kind of friendly devolution where everything but defense, foreign relations and certain treasury functions are dumped on like-minded regions made up of several states. That way red and blue regions can have their own health care, retirement system and business regulation. Those who want a progressive system can get it. Those who want conservative government can have it. Give it a decade and compare. That is about the only way you are going to prove to one side or the other what really works.
An internal solution would be interesting. Have the flexibility to move around internally to what you want your government to be.
Hence...limit power of federal government to allow states make laws more closely that what their constituents want. Kinda sounds...conservative.
And note...not conservative from the GOP brand of it...that stuff is toxic.
Gridlock in the face of economic chaos is no longer an option, and the debt ceiling will need to be upped sometime around September-October. Care to imagine what will happen with a gridlocked congress 6-8 weeks before the general election?
"...It is obviously impracticable in the federal government of these states, to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all — Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest. The magnitude of the sacrifice must depend as well on situation and circumstance, as on the object to be obtained....
...In all our deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view, that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence. This important consideration, seriously and deeply impressed on our minds, led each state in the Convention to be less rigid on points of inferior magnitude, than might have been otherwise expected; and thus the Constitution, which we now present, is the result of a spirit of amity, and of that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensible."
Concession? Can you imagine our current legislators admitting to a concession? Yet, our Founding Father thought concession a virtue, not a vice. If only we could have such a civilized society.
Could you imagine our current representatives
The document they produced was not one which could easily survive ideological polarization. We have a highly representative democracy in a country which has gone parliamentary. Too many voters on both sides of the political divide fail to understand that about half the country does not agree with them. They continue to elect representatives who will only march in lockstep with their constituents' views even if it will harm those same constituents in the long run.