I’ve been thinking about this a lot today and I think I finally understand why Tom Friedman is so popular. He’s very simplistic. Dysfunction in Washington? Install a benevolent hedge fund manager/dictator. Trouble in the Balkans? Bomb the Serbians back to 1389. Terrorist attacks from extremist Saudi and Yemeni Muslims? Tell some other group of Muslims to suck on this.
A lot of people think this way sometimes. It’s easy to think “voters are stupid, let’s just cut them out of the equation”. It’s easy to think “this entire group of people sucks, let’s bomb them all”. Most adults don’t say these things publicly, but Friedman will, and that’s a feature not a bug.
Simplicity is a virtue in the political arena. Conservatives do well because, even though people don’t agree with them, their arguments are easy to understand, e.g. “we (white Christian job creators) are right, they (non-white atheist/Muslim moochers and looters) are wrong”. Liberal arguments are likely to rely on some amount of nuance, e.g. “we don’t like terrorism either, but that doesn’t mean we should invade countries wily nily”. Of course, libertarians do the worst of all this way, because, even though the underlying philosophy is simple, their argument is often that you need to read Hayek to understand the issue.
There’s never any nuance with Friedman. His positions are a grab bag, ideologically — pro-carbon tax, radically pro-open borders and free trade, generally pro-war — but they are always simple. There are never any CBO estimates or concerns about secondary effects.
Friedman offers faux high-brow reductionism. There’s always going to be a market for that. People like to read stuff that they think is intellectual and they also like to be able to understand it. Friedman writes about exotic locales and complex issues, but any ten year-old can understand what he’s trying to say.
Martin
Americans really have no concept of an unsolvable problem. At all. Everything has a deterministic path to the solution, we merely lack the will to pursue it. Rinse/repeat for every problem.
Reality Check
“Washington is broken, but the CCP is a group of reasonably enlightened people”.
DonkeyKong
“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision”
dr. bloor
…and the ten year olds also quickly realize he’s a simpleton.
Honestly, between the twaddle that he turns out, David Brooks’s disingenuous idiocy and the moralistic hatred that Douchehat turns out, the Times isn’t worth the paper the bird shits on.
DonkeyKong
Quote with full context-
Dunning and Kruger have demonstrated this best through a series of experiments. They tested a group of university students, those long-suffering lab rats of psychology, for their abilities in a series of tests on grammar, humour and logic. After finishing each task the students were asked the guess how they had performed relative to their classmates.
And here’s the kicker; across every test, the students at the bottom end of the bell curve held inflated opinions of their own talents, hugely inflated. In one test of logical reasoning, the lowest quartile of students estimated that their skills would put them above more than 60% of their peers when in fact they had beaten out just 12%. To put that misjudgement in perspective, it’s like guessing that this piece of music [music for 5 seconds] lasted nearly half a minute.
Even more surprisingly, the Dunning-Kruger effect leads high achievers to doubt themselves, because on the other end of the bell curve the talented students consistently underestimated their performance. Again to the test of logic; those topping the class felt that they were only just beating out three-quarters of their classmates, whereas in reality they had out-performed almost 90% of them.
The verdict was in; idiots get confident while the smart get modest, an idea that was around long before Dunning and Kruger’s day. Bertrand Russell once said, ‘In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.’
Reality Check
I think this is my “favorite” Friedman column, it perfectly encapsulates him:
http://tinyurl.com/335n98b
beltane
The “Green Tea Party” is a perfect example of this. It is a silly, bumper sticker-like slogan that is mildly appealing to a demographic that is educated yet intellectually mediocre.
jo6pac
Oh dog thank you. This has always been to me WTF
The discreet charm of Tom Friedman
Joseph Nobles
Friedman: Pooh with a penis. A columnist with very little brain.
LesGS
I suppose I must have read some Friedman at some point in my wandering through the intertubes, but I don’t actually remember doing so. So, despite his obvious influence as one of the Villagers, I can make no intelligent contribution to this thread. I can, however, pedantically point out that it is “willy-nilly,” not “wily-nily.” From “will I (or ye or he)-nill I (or ye or he).”
Ol' Dirty DougJ
Very well put.
Zach
Also note his fascination with how easy it is to get things done in China. He shares this with Bush-era Larry Kudlow (Obama-era Larry Kudlow has decided that dictatorial powers are a bad idea). I agree with Friedman that it’d be better to have a government that could act a little more forcefully and rapidly, but I think the ideal lies somewhere between Ben Nelson and Mao.
General Stuck
It’s not just that the wingers makes simple arguments that are easy to understand. It’s also that they have a lizard brain sense of vulnerability, or unresolved terrors in whom the message is intended.
Or, scare mongering if you will. But it actually is often more subtle targeting of the primitive brain, like with Obama not being born in America, and could be some son of African savages, that piques white fear.
With Iraq, I think they overplayed their hands by tweaking the trauma of 9-11, and ended up being liars to about everyone, except maybe the 27 percenters, who do not value truth to begin with.
It is why they squeal like little stuck pigs when dems turn that back on them, like Obama recently musing about how he wasn’t sure he could guarantee seniors getting their SS checks if there was a default.
But the tea party and tea party scared version of republican fear messaging has gone to hell of recent, and they are sounding more and more like a party having a nervous breakdown. But they can afford to, due to the media and a ready public wanting to forgive them quickly, in hopes they once again will lie to them, with more skill next time, like they used to
srv
I had a dream where my Balochi taxi driver and I were arguing about this very point on the 101 and Tom was standing on the shoulder trying to catch a ride with his laser pointer.
So I swerved the steering wheel into him. His reduction made nothing more than a short digital impression on the traffic website on my iPad.
dexwood
I’ve been thinking about this a lot today and I think I finally understand why Tom Friedman is so popular. He’s
very simplistic. a simpleton, just like all the rest.Just another highly paid idiot posing as an expert.
Baud
In my humble opinion, I don’t think the chief problem is that liberal arguments are more nuanced; it’s that liberals (as a group) are indecisive because we are always debating each other about every possible aspect of a problem.
L. Ron Obama
DougJ: “Faux high-brow reductionism” needs to be a tag.
dexwood
Tom Friedman, perfect example of why the Scarecrow should not have received a scroll.
different church-lady
Don’t look now, but half of the liberal blogsphere is no different anymore: “JUST USE A SIGNING STATEMENT!” “MONEY FOR BANKS BUT NO MONEY FOR US!” “CAVING!”
What happened to the days when we used to do nuance to a fault?
Jordan
God I hate to see this kind of resignation before mediocrity. Friedman is a blockhead as a thinker, but he has a gift for simplification. He’s like Carl Sagan in that way (but only that way).
But here’s the thing. Liberal ideas are simple too. Progressive ideals are simple too. Pragmatic centrist ideas are simple too. There’s nothing about “guaranteed health care for retirees” (Medicare) or “equal pay for equal work” that takes more than a basic fifth grade grasp of ethics & fairness to grasp and understand.
Trouble is, there are no popularizers. There are no liberal folklorists, no Reagans, no Limbaughs of the left beating the drum about how supply-side economics is transparent bullcrap, or how public spending on infrastructure helps economies grow, how market-government synergy can be incredibly powerful. There’s nobody arguing for progressive taxation (why hasn’t “diminishing marginal utility” been turned into a talk radio punchline yet?).
I’m not talking about propaganda, I’m talking about taking the progressive arguments that are out there and turning them into simple, comprehensible slogans, parables, and principles. Friedmanizing them. Why hasn’t anyone been doing that?
Clinton was great at explaining wonky details, but he never sustained the larger argument for big picture stuff.
Obama could be this guy, but he’s actually a moderate Republican by policy & temperament, and he hasn’t shown any inclination toward building a grand argument *for* taxes and *for* good government. Not in any big, sustained, movement-sparking kind of way at any rate. He’s not a bully pulpit guy at all, really. He governs like a Senator rather than like someone who could conceivably actually change the terms of debate all on his own. I’m not hating, by the way, and understand what he’s up against. But still, he’s not at this moment trying to change the conversation.
Phew. Long post is getting long. I’ll wrap with this: liberal progressive ideas are *not* inherently complex, wonky, nuanced, highbrow or elitist. Nor are they inherently disliked by “the people” — in fact the great tenets of progressivism come straight out of the oldest strains of populism in the English-speaking world.
Stop saying liberalism is too hard Ol’ Dirty DougJ!!! :)
priscianusjr
Mark S.
It is about the laziest political philosophy in the world. Every solution to every problem is “Let the market decide,” and then shut off your brain.
newhavenguy
Excellent post. Our commentariat is embarrassingly awful for the most part, but you hit the nail dead center on what is uniquely annoying about Tommy. (Now that I called him that, isn’t there a rock opera about such an impressively talented observer?)
Thanks… wait, you’re NOT a gay girl in Syria?
Chris Wolf
Let’s give him another 6 months…you never know.
batgirl
I posted this at the end of the last thread. Friedman’s new book coming out in early September has a print run of 1,000,000. What a waste of trees!
Jay B.
Some, but certainly not all. It couldn’t be easier to distill a strong liberal message economically, the trouble is that our putative representation in DC doesn’t want to do it. And even when it comes to things like terrorism, there is a simple message, but most liberals won’t say it because it’ll be attacked. I mean how easy would it have been to come up with the liberal counterargument to Iraq?
“This has nothing to do with global terrorism. It’s not worth a single American life.”
On terrorism:
“You don’t fight big wars to defeat a small number of people.”
Economics:
“The wealthy get the most out of country, they can add a little more into it.”
It’s just that most “liberals” in DC don’t really agree with it. So the message becomes unnecessarily opaque and over-explained.
ETA: Or what Jordan said.
driftglass
Some writers always shoot for the silver lining in things; the dove that returns in the evening, after the storm, with the olive leaf in her mouth. Nothing wrong with that, but that is emphatically not what Friedman traffics in.
Friedman hustles simpering, centrist bullshit in a way that is always carefully calibrated to avoid offending the Republican CEOs and Chambers of Commerce stiffs who buy his fawning, globalist twaddle by the job lot and force their middle managers to study it like holy writ.
But what pisses me off most of all?
Friedman is just a goddamn awful writer.
But he is very, very rich and has very, very rich friends.
This apparently counts for a lot.
Ol' Dirty DougJ
Ha!
jrg
Friedman reminds me of the buzzword-spouting management types I used to encounter working in telecom. Most of them have no idea what the fuck is going on, but love to use lingo to mask the fact that they really don’t have a clue.
That’s why I despised “The World is Flat” so much. All he was doing was coining meaningless terms for stuff most of us in tech realized years ago. Stuff which he barely seems to understand himself.
He reminds me of a manager I once had, who asked an engineer what the problem with a certain router was. The engineer told him he just “jiggled the flux capacitor a bit, and it came back online”. The manager then proceeded to send a mass page (back in the days of pagers) to the customer, explaining the problem with the flux capacitor.
People who fancy themselves “idea men” who do little but parrot ideas someone else came up with years ago bother me to no end.
NYT
Friedman is honest and smart compared to the average US political reporter.
Here is a story from this morning’s Guardian
“In an embarrassing development for John Boehner, the Republican Congress speaker, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) ruled on Tuesday night that his bill would have only cut spending by $850bn (£517bn)over the next decade, not the $1.2tn he had aimed for. Republicans are now racing to rewrite the legislation, and have pushed back a congressional vote on the plan from Wednesday to Thursday at the earliest.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jul/27/debt-crisis-republicans-plan-bungle
Simple right. Parties are rushing to meet the deadline and Boehner has f-ed up catastrophically.
But you will find this story in the New York Times or WSJ or Washington Post only if you read to page 2 or 3 in their stories.
THe Post is headlined “Boehner issues stern warning to GOP critics” – even though he is the one who has unquestionably screwed up. The NYT is headlined “Restive GOP Yielding to Boehner on Budget”
I dont care about Friedman. Anyone under 50 years old goes to blogs for sensible opinion writing anyway.
But the political journalismn is really really awful in the US.
Martin
@batgirl: Will there be any bookstores left by September? Waste indeed.
Violet
His simplicity makes no sense most of the time:
As Matt Taibbi points out:
Thank you, Matt. Exactly.
Friedman is so simple he doesn’t even make sense. He’s like a male Sarah Palin. He just strings words together. But unlike Palin, he does so with an all-knowing tone and people declare he’s got gravitas.
JPL
I am so sick of but Obama this and Obama that.. We are so fortunate that he has appointed two Supreme Court justices. Hopefully, he will have the opportunity to appoint one to replace a right wing one. If he does nothing else at this point, that is huge… Take that FDL and her minions.
Martin
Wait, like this place? Sensible? Us?
Mark S.
As for Tommy, From Beirut to Jerusalem is pretty good, certainly a billion times better than anything Bobo’s ever written (granted, a low bar). I don’t know what happened, but Friedman really started to suck about ten years ago. He got incredibly lazy and his foreign trips began to consist of staying in five star hotels and giving blowjobs to global CEO’s.
What I guess I’m saying is that in the aforementioned book, he was there and at least had contact with ordinary people in the countries he was writing about. Now he just hangs out with billionaires and politicos and has to invent conversations with taxi drivers. It’s a real good way to start sucking at foreign policy analysis.
eemom
so DougJ. I seem to recall some reference to a therapist. Have y’all made any progress in understanding why a fine smart professor of mathematics such as yourself spends SO MUCH TIME trying to penetrate the lizard brains of overpaid emmessemm hacks?
Martin
He doesn’t dangle adverbs quite like she does either. But that’s probably his editor.
Bender
FIFY
FIFY again.
You’re welcome.
Southern Beale
So our democracy is imploding, our econmy is circling the drain, the government is completely dysfunctional and threatening to take this whole experiment in representative democracy down with it and … today my editor assigns me a piece on fall color travel.
Yes, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket — aw, screw the handbasket, we’re going to hell and we don’t even have a ride — but here I am writing about fall color tourism.
So, dear, people, if you have a favorite fall color destination, please let me know.
fuckwit
Ever read a business book? The kind for executives? The kind that are designed to be read in an hour in between the in-flight movie and the in-flight meal on the flight between LAX and JFK?
That’s how Friedman writes, and for whom he writes. Managers and executives. Childlike in its simplicity. He’s the rich man’s Limbaugh.
Dave
THAT IS WHY YOU FAIL.
If you have a dialogue instead of a position, and better yet a slogan, you’re doing it really really wrong. Dialogue is essentially reactionary, you don’t need it. You need demands.
JAIL BANKERS
FORGIVE ALL DEBT
FUCK YOUR WAR
FREE MEDICINE FOR EVERYONE
And proceed from there.
Violet
@Southern Beale:
Blue Ridge Parkway and North Carolina Mountains.
Also, Park City, UT. The Aspens can be really gorgeous. Not sure it’s a destination just for fall color, but it’s really pretty when they’re in bloom. You could do a bit on Fall at Sundance. That might sell well.
Davis X. Machina
I blame Bertrand Russell:
Bruce S
I don’t understand your disdain for Thomas Friedman. He certainly passes my test for intellectual depth which is that I’ve seen him make Charlie Rose bend forward and furrow his brow.
Jay B.
From that Taibbi article Violet linked:
Great title, dude! Oh man, who the hell writes like this and means it?
dr. bloor
Rio, although I doubt that’s what your editor has in mind.
If you want to avoid the tired New England thing, the Finger Lakes region in western NY is a thought.
Ol' Dirty DougJ
That was just a lyrical reference.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Southern Beale
My backyard.
General Stuck
Tell me about it. And the argument he is really a republican is mind numbing wankery, that seems to never end. There is virtually no bill that he has passed that is republican, and you know why I know that. BECAUSE NO REPUBLICAN VOTED FOR THEM. Why is this simple truth not penetrate the knuckleheads that all day drop one steaming pile after another of Obama not measuring up to this or that standard. In just two frigging years.
And it began with the largest discretionary spending bill in history, by a long shot, that was the stimulus, where even the tax cuts were progressive, as was all the research cash for liberal wish lists. But it was too small according to some pundit in an ivory tower somewhere that has never spent a minute passing legislation.
And almost all of the compromises that occurred came from satisfying dem senators to get the votes to pass. But it’s always stated as Obama compromising and selling out to the wingnuts. So much bullshit on the blogs, it makes my teeth hurt.
Comrade Kevin
I have always suspected that Friedman has a bunch of those stupid “Successories” posters on the walls of his office.
Just Some Fuckhead
@JPL:
My heart is breaking for you and Stuck. I can’t imagine what it must be like to hear something you disagree with. How do you go on from day to day?
Baud
@JPL #43 and Stuck #49: I share your frustration. Neither the Republicans nor our crappy media get me down as much as the reactions I see from the left.
Catsy
@General Stuck: When Stuck is right, he’s right.
Just Some Fuckhead
You folks should form a support group, have meetings and stuff. What you are going through here sounds hideous enough not to try it on your own.
kdaug
@DonkeyKong:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
General Stuck
And you should get your empty head shrunk.
ditch digger
This would be a “feature, not a bug” if it was honest in its reporting/opinion, just way too often it isn’t.
Corner Stone
@General Stuck: Talk about 11-D Chess.
The actual Republicans are getting everything they want and can still demagogue against it all for future votes!
It sounds kinda like heaven to them, one would think.
General Stuck
LOL, Step away from the crack pipe.
Davis X. Machina
Quebec — the Eastern Townships.
Baud
If you think the Republicans are getting everything they want, you have no understanding of the dark depths of GOP desire.
Sharl
For anyone who appreciate David Rees’ cartoons assembled by adding goofy dialog to stock clip-art, here are some Tom Friedman classics:
The Moustache of Understanding
How Green Was My Moustache
And here’s where the environmentally sensitive guy lives, thanks to “marrying up”
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Isn’t this the kind of simple messaging that everyone keeps saying the Democrats need to adopt?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: What did Republicans want originally? 2 trillion in cuts? But Obama upped it to 4 trillion and demanded the elimination of some deduction or other, and now Reid is working on the compromise plan of 2.7 trillion in cuts with no revenue.
Did I get that right? (It’s all a blur.)
WereBear
Hey, now. There is a reason New England is justly famed for it’s fall color. Don’t contrarian!
For one thing, we have maples to add that dash of red and purple to make a real autumn blend. While the western mountains are gorgeous, they don’t have the depth and variety of the New England mix, being heavy on gold.
Also, eastern mountains are old enough to be covered with trees. The Adirondack Park, where I live, is the most gorgeous place in fall on the face of the earth. It has acres of untouched wilderness to form the perfect frame. Enough cold for actual maple syrup. Deep mountain lakes that turn deep blue.
That’s my pick, for certain.
Canuckistani Tom
39 @Southern Beale
Ontario, either along the Niagara Escarpment, or Muskoka and northwards
Omnes Omnibus
@ Southern Beale: Fall colors? Baraboo/Devils Lake region in Wisconsin.
aisce
@ general stuck
aw don’t need nonedat fancy book learnin’ to know dat owah lawd and savyuh
jesus christbarack obama done did all he could for dat dere ecawnomee. don’t be needin’ none of dem pointy headed libruls tellin’ me otherwise no way no how. jobs be comin’ back, y’all see.Norwonk
He’s awful. And to make matters worse, he is likely to come up with writing like this:
And so on… Matt Taibbi summed it up best:
Southern Beale
Ah, gotta love The Onion.
Kinda reminds me of some of my commenters.
Southern Beale
@ Canuckistani Tom:
Ah thanks!
I should have specified, it has to be in the Yoooonighted States.
Southern Beale
Violet:
Your yard is gorgeous. We’ll be sure to come by and visit in the fall.
:-)
Cliff in NH
@Southern Beale:
I recommend the Mt Washington Valley in NH
http://mollymaesden.blogspot.com/2010/10/another-beautiful-fall-morning_14.html
Little Boots
so, sooooo, soooooooooo sick of this man.
Batocchio
Points for the title. A fun film.
Little Boots
Friedman, not Doug, just to be clear.
Canuckistani Tom
71 @Southern Beale
Can’t blame a guy for trying.
Although, it is a nice side trip. See Niagara Falls from the side with the better view, visit some Niagara wineries, see the foliage, etc. (course, what the exchange rate will be like in 2 months, I’ve no idea)
Sly
Speaking as someone who studies global history in a professional capacity, Tom Friendman is not just “very simplistic.” The World is Flat was nothing more than a massive oversimplification of global economic trends, which it had to be in order to effectively mask what it actually was: a neoliberal apologia.
You’re not far off, actually. Colleagues of mine use TWiF in 9th and 10th grade (14-16 year-olds), though, praise Jesus, by no means exclusively. Its the one book on globalization that students always understand.
Little Boots
there’s not nearly enough abuse of Tom Friedman on this thread.
Or doug, for that matter.
Little Boots
seriously? I get the last word? that is so dangerous, people.
Upper West
Someone needs to create the equivalent of “Santorum” on Google for Friedman. Maybe “Captain Obvious,” the “Moustache of Authority” or “Suck on this.”
Little Boots
friedman unit was genius. are we allowed to say that Eschaton had the best friedman thing ever?
Chad N Freude
I have absolutely no, nil,zero time to participate actively in juicing the balloon, but this thread has forced me to type in.
This blog perpetually attacks, Friedman, Brooks, and Douthat, and I demand to know why you all discriminate against Jonah Goldberg. Equal rights/wrongs for JG ! ! !
And thank you @DonkeyKong. I appreciate this for several reasons that I won’t go into here, and I’m going to ask a friend to stitch the Russell quote into a sampler.
And Davis X (I hope you don’t mind the familiarity), I don’t think Russell was referring to 21st century liberal progressives, but it works anyway :-)
Little Boots
still no doug abuse. why?
and worse, not friedman abuse? what is wrong with this site?
Little Boots
I’m waiting.
James E. Powell
@Jordan:
Trouble is, there are no popularizers.
There are many such people. The problem is that the closest they can get to communicating to an audience is to run a blog. And that seems invariably to be preaching to the choir.
By agreement of the corporate owners of the press/media, no person promoting progressive or pro-labor ideas is allowed on the air. Cf. No labor section in any newspaper.
The problem isn’t the lack of people who can explain the liberal view in simple terms. The problem is that no one like that is ever permitted to do so in a setting where any significant audience could hear them.
Little Boots
thank god for blogs. really. thank god we do not have to rely on the editorial pages of the New York Times and the panels on the This Week and Meet the Press. Seriously, that shit is tired.
Little Boots
imagine if they had to allow one, just one, liberal blogger on one sunday talk show every week. that would make a huge difference. will never happen, but that’s kinda the point, isn’t it?
Corner Store Operator
Hilarious Friedman related comment from Yglesias today…
Why does Tom Friedman constantly quote Michael Mandelbaum? http://ygl.as/oVaRAl
He has quoted him 49 times over the life of his column.
Little Boots
and that’s just it. friedman would have the last word a few years ago. but not now.
Davis X. Machina
@Chad N Freude: The empiricism, the rejection of dogmatism, the preference for the ameliorative now, and not the perfect later, holds good and true — or ought to for small-l-post-Mill-liberal politics (And even for Mill himself. For the grim Manchester bunch, not so much.)
Russell’s Liberal Decalogue, of which I am fond.
Little Boots
well said, davis. whatever that meant, well said.
Little Boots
I don’t see any yelling at Doug, still, and that is worrisome.
Little Boots
still no yelling. oh well. they don’t care, doug, but I do.
I DO.
Chad N Freude
@Davis X. Machina: Dude, you are way better read than I am in this area, but I am very fond of “Why I Am Not A Christian”. (Do I get the Non Sequitur of the Day award for this?)
ETA: Didn’t know about the Decalogue till now. I understand your fondness.
bob h
And he brings the cosmopolitan perspectives of five star hotel coffee shop customers from exotic international locales.
arguingwithsignposts
@corner store operator: the answer is in one of the first columns in that search: “and co-author with me of a forthcoming book..”
Jim Pharo
It’s nothing to do with simple. It’s to do with savviness, insider-ness.
Tom got his start as a nice Jewish boy palling around Beirut and telling his readers that the Arabs were sort-of-people too. He was the ultimate insider: someone who was walking amongst the Other and and sending dispatches back.
His schtick is largely the same today: he walks with cab drivers and local bank officials and high government officials, which gives him the supposedly unique perspective from which he can practice his art: sloganeering.
Simple is his enemy. Things so subtle and complex that only Tom can see them? That’s right up his alley.
Jay Rosen is right.
arguingwithsignposts
I don’t doubt he walks with banksters and govt officials, but the cab driveer schtick is weak.
Jordan
@James E. Powell:
The problem isn’t the lack of people who can explain the liberal view in simple terms. The problem is that no one like that is ever permitted to do so in a setting where any significant audience could hear them.
True, I didn’t mean to suggest media gatekeeping wasn’t part of the problem. People who try to articulate such principles are assumed to have an agenda (Socialist Workers, union reps) or are simply deemed “unserious,” etc.
But part of getting a message out means blowing through media biases. National news twits aren’t going to report on notions like “regulation makes markets stronger” or “tax cuts cause deficits…duh” until somebody important enough to be newsworthy is articulating them…and the public isn’t going to notice unless those somebodies are able to make the case in simple, consistent, convincing language. Both of those conditions are absent.
More than one thing needs to happen to start changing the conversation.
Heliopause
One thing I’ve never quite understood about the whole Balloon Juice dynamic is that, as an example, Jane Hamsher can never be forgiven for having cosigned a letter with Grover Norquist, but the fact that the President uses Friedman as a policy advisor means, well, what exactly?