House of Eratosthenes

The campaign inadvertently became public when video of a presentation by Pew vice president Sean Treglia to a group of journalists at the Annenberg Center let the cat out of the bag:

“The target was 535 Members of Congress and the idea was to create the impression that a mass movement was afoot, that everywhere they looked people were talking about campaign finance reform,” Treglia explained on the video.

Not one of the journalists listening to Treglia challenged him on the fact he was, in effect, admitting a massive, systematic pack of lies.

Nor did any of them do what was minimally required of them as journalists, which was to write a story about Treglia’s admission.

What it’s really all about is programming. We’re being programmed and we’ve been programmed for a very long time now.

Bill Clinton wants to spend more money and Newt Gingrich’s Congress doesn’t want to spend it, the result is a government shutdown, who’s to blame? Erm…must be those Republicans for not going along with spending. More money. Than has ever been spent before. In the country’s entire history…when it’s broke and leveraged. To the maximum extent allowable under its own laws.

Humans are genetically wired to do whatever has already been preferred by their peers, however they choose to define those peers. Copy off your neighbor’s desk, do whatever everyone else is doing. And so this creates an incentive for agenda-driven political movements to puff themselves up, to look bigger than they really are. I’m sure both sides are guilty, in this anecdote or in that one, of astroturfing.

The difference, in my mind, is that the lefty groups are reasonably well assured they’ll never get caught at it. Not in such a way that it will matter. You have to keep in mind, the damage is done not through the getting caught, but by the reverberation from the event of getting caught. Damage in politics is done more by the echo than by the actual percussion. The media controls the echo and the media wants the lefties to win whenever possible.

Just skimming over the Tapscott editorial, which has a decent round-up of all these Potemkin village incidents, I had previous knowledge of just about all of them and my initial impression of each of them — to some extent, anyway — was: The deception involved in the astroturf was only secondarily astonishing. The primary impact on me, with each one, was just how brazen the lefties are about it. It’s as if nobody stopped to let them know we’re now living in the age of YouTube. But then you have to think, waitaminnit, what actually happens if and when they get caught? The answer is: Not a whole hell of a lot.

People remember Watergate, they don’t remember things like the Standing Up For Families debacle. Our media sees to it.

Update: P.J. Tatler: On the question of “What if it’s all a Potemkin village,” there’s no “what if” about it.

The reality is, there is no “what if” regarding the nature of activism on the left. It is a nation of Potemkin villages from the local to the national level. These Potemkin operators created a network of activist fronts that turned Colorado from red to blue a few years back. A similar network was set up in Texas in 2007 and 2008, centered on Matt Angle’s Lone Star Project. That group lives off of the money left to it by the late trial lawyer, Fred Baron, and a few major leftwing foundations. I documented how Angle’s group operates back in 2010. Angle’s group failed in 2010, but they’re still active.

The primary impact on me, with each one, was just how brazen the lefties are about it.

It’s the “noble lie,” comrade — anything, anything at all, is permissible if it hastens The Revolution. (There’s a reason philosopher Leszek Kolakowski started his Main Currents of Marxism with Plotinus).

Thing is, though, they were always pretty up front about it. Credit where credit’s due for the courage of their convictions, I suppose, but the American left was full of “come The Revolution” talk into the 1950s. (I have a pet theory that one of the reasons movements like the Wobblies never really took in America is that unlike in Europe, where they have revolutions about as often as they change their underwear, we’re pretty jealous of ours).

When “The Revolution” was exposed for the vicious, bloodthirsty lie it always was, though, they weren’t willing to give up their cherished beliefs — or their nice cushy jobs in academia or the State Department. And that’s when they invented Postmodernism (Stephen Hicks’s excellent Explaining Postmodernism explicitly, and devastatingly, argues that a bunch of French pointyheads came up with it so that they could continue to spew subsidized anti-Americanism while hitting on unwashed hippie girls and smoking Gauloises on the Champs Elysees).

Ok, well, he doesn’t put it quite like that, but you get the point — postmodernism deals with the unpleasant facts of The Revolution by denying that there’s any such thing as a fact. It’s all a function of your race/class/gender background, you see, and so what looks to you like wanton slaughter unparalleled in human history is really just the unavoidable (and possibly necessary!) mistakes of a few misguided but pure-hearted idealists.

That’s such a seductive line of reasoning — allowing as it does for us to rationalize away any bad act or unsavory impulse whatsoever — that we’ve all more or less internalized it. And given that’s the case, it’s not too surprising that the modern left is increasingly comfortable returning to open, brazen “come The Revolution” talk. They’ve got prettier euphemisms, but other than that almost any Dear Leader stump speech could’ve come straight from the pages of the Daily Worker, circa 1920.
- Severian | 03/18/2012 @ 12:24

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One Potemkin Village After AnotherSunday, March 18th, 2012

One Potemkin Village After Another
Sunday, March 18th, 2012