Camp Followers of the Political Wars

Small businesses stake out territory all the time. But a new small business has emerged which does more than stake out territory, it creates it out of whole cloth and then exploits it. It is reminiscent of the line about Lacoste shirts, "a club where you can nominate yourself--then vote yourself in." So someone endows a university chair in "environmental international politics" or "transgender studies" and a whole new world of unasked questions emerge which they now dominate by fiat. Charities are terrific for this. One can create your own charity and spend the rest of your life attracting tax-free capital to investigate anything you want, transgender studies included. You can give organizational leadership to your kids. (A Hollywood star asked that his son receive no gifts at his birth but rather requested that donations be made to a newly created charity that he would run when he grew up. His parents could also contribute unlimited money and deduct the capital their son would live on.)

These distortions are probably inevitable in a free and open minded society but the political entrepreneurs are increasingly harder to take. The Left and the Right have become their own propaganda machines that hawk products to reinforce the prejudices of their supporters, aided and abetted by their respective radio and television networks whose programs have become products themselves. FOX is the worst.It has become like a local sports show. Every story is inflammatory, everyone furious to keep the audience's blood (and viewership) up. Every interview has the ulterior motive of some nitch the guest is trying to fill. Every guest has a book and a website. (A radio station owner recently described his audience as "angry white males" with an emphasis on "angry.") There is no objectivity, no compromise, no progress and certainly no solutions to be offered when your audience is specifically characterized as "angry." Everything is designed to feed into this vortex of ever decreasing radius, pointing to the apex of isolation and fury, every step bought and paid for, every step with a book or a button or a shirt available as well.

The difficulty here is that we generally think of politics as debate, give and take, then resolution. But that is not possible when your opinions are a product.