The Eclipse of Equality: Arguing America on Meet the Press - Rilegato

Simmons, Solon

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0804777985 ISBN 13: 9780804777988

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2013

Riassunto

Red state vs. blue state. Republican vs. Democrat. Fox News vs. The Daily Show. The so-called culture wars have become such a fixture of American politics that dividing the country into rival camps seems natural and political gridlock seems inevitable. Entering the fray, Solon Simmons offers an intriguing twist on the debate: Our disagreements come not from unbridgeable divides, but from differing interpretations of a single underlying American tradition—liberalism. Both champions of traditional liberal values, Republicans have become the party of individual freedom while Democrats wear the mantle of tolerance. Lost in this battle of sides is the third pillar of liberalism—equality. Simmons charts the course of American politics through the episodes of Meet the Press. On the air since 1945, Meet the Press provides an unparalleled record of living conversation about the most pressing issues of the day. In weekly discussions, the people who directly influenced policy and held the reins of power in Washington set the political agenda for the country. Listening to what these people had to say—and importantly how they said it—Meet the Press opens a window on how our political parties have become so divided and how notions of equality were lost in the process.Telling the story of the American Century, Simmons investigates four themes that have defined politics and, in turn, debate on Meet the Press—war and foreign affairs, debt and taxation, race struggles, and class and labor relations—and demonstrates how political leaders have transformed these important political issues into symbolic pawns as each party advocates for their own understanding of liberty, whether freedom or tolerance. Ultimately, with The Eclipse of Equality, he looks to bring back to the debate the question lurking in the shadows—how can we ensure the protection of a peaceful civil society and equality for all?

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Solon Simmons is Associate Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. He makes frequent appearances on radio, television, and in print media, discussing issues of politics and group conflict, and his work has been discussed on most of the major national news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Morning America, National Public Radio, and Meet the Press itself. He blogs about U.S. politics and culture on Confrontations (solonsimmons.wordpress.com).

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THE ECLIPSE OF EQUALITY

Arguing America on MEET THE PRESS

By SOLON SIMMONS

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-7798-8

Contents

Preface....................................................................
xi
1. Nothing Is More Important: Arguing America..............................
1
2. Basically Totally Dysfunctional: The Rhetorical Roots of Protracted 
Social Conflict............................................................
13
3. Spreading Democracy Around the World: A World Made Safe for Private 
Enterprise.................................................................
26
4. Taking Aim at the New Deal: To Restore the Idea of America..............
78
5. That Redemption We Dream Of: The Tangle of Intolerances.................
135
6. The Gravest Problem: Reds, Rackets, and the Unmaking of the Democratic 
Class Struggle.............................................................
191
7. Conclusion: To Clarify American Opinion.................................
245
Epilogue: If It's Sunday, It's Meet the Press..............................
252
Acknowledgments............................................................
259
Notes......................................................................
263
References.................................................................
285
Index......................................................................
295

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

NOTHING IS MORE IMPORTANTArguing America

A lot of things are important, but in the context of this week, nothing is more important thangetting that done, this week.

—Edwin Meese, March 16, 1986

ALMOST SEVENTY YEARS AGO, on a Sunday evening between the surrenders of theGermans and the Japanese in World War II, two visionaries of the public spirit named MarthaRountree and Lawrence Spivak launched a radio program in the basement of a Washington, D.C.hotel that would change the world. Like so many inventions that emerged from the chaos of thatgreat conflict, Meet the Press was something genuinely new. Their idea was to argue America, tosubject national decision makers at the peak of their influence to critical and probing questions infront of the mass public, thereby bringing the representative and the represented into closerdiscursive contact. Every week, Spivak and Rountree assembled a panel of ace reporters to firepointed questions at the week's most salient decision maker in order to get "the story behind thestory"—the strategic focus of the policy discussion without the technical dross. It is not that thiswas the first political talk show—other public affairs programming had been on the radio yearsbefore Meet the Press—but Spivak and Rountree had found the magic formula: they would useelite print reporters to stage a mass broadcast of a press conference in a conversational style. Theywould bridge the democratic divide by asking what was described as "the questions you wouldask if you were here" and dream big, as it was only possible to do in that pregnant moment afterWorld War II. Martha Rountree imagined that she might one day interview figures like WinstonChurchill, Joseph Stalin, and Henry Wallace, thereby transforming the way democracy was livedand performed. As we look back over the astonishing record of the program, which critiquedevery major news event from the establishment of the United Nations, hosted every presidentafter Eisenhower, and showcased the more memorable efforts of the world's popes, philosophers,poets, and kings, Rountree's dream has become our reality.

Center Stage of the National Conversation

In a book celebrating the fifty-year anniversary of Meet the Press, the official chronicler ofthe program, Rick Ball, made a claim about the show's first driving presence, Lawrence E.Spivak, that sounds hyperbolic but is really only descriptive: "Larry Spivak dared to ask the directquestion on behalf of the American people. He made Meet the Press part of the democraticprocess." It is fascinating to imagine that there was a time when one could not expect thesecretary of state or the winner of the Iowa straw poll to appear before an attentive and suspiciousaudience of more than three million people to justify her views and actions. Through a clevercombination of insider intrigue and mass appeal, Meet the Press muscled its way onto centerstage of the national conversation. Now, not only is it possible to use the intimacy of the cameralens to facilitate character assessments of our national leaders but leaders are also expected toreveal themselves to this kind of interrogation in order to reach the pinnacle of American politics.Through diligent commitment to its original format, Meet the Press has become the mark oflegitimacy in American politics. To avoid a Meet the Press appearance is to admit defeat.

On June 15, 2008, in a tribute program to the show's most famous host, Tim Russert, DorisKearns Goodwin, a celebrated historian and one of the most ebullient and devoted of theprogram's guests and commentators, responded to a question about Russert's legacy that holdsfor the program as a whole.

Tom Brokaw (NBC News): And it seems to me, Doris, that in the future, historians will have a rich archive in theMeet the Press recordings of the people who have passed through these studios—who they were, how theyevolved, and what they became.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: No question about that. I mean, think about the nineteenth century. We had diaries; wehad letters. That's what allows historians to re-create those people who lived then. In this broadcast world,what these recordings will show people years from now is not just the questionshe asked, not even just the answers he got, but which people were able to acknowledge errors, which peopleruffled under his questions, which ones could share a laugh. You'll get the temperament of these people.They're going to come alive.

As Goodwin recognized, these old shows are important records through which to satisfy our idlecuriosities and are also social science data that promise to reveal how American elites narratedhistory as it happened, revealing how they thought, felt, and spoke about their country, the valueson which they based their decisions and policies, and the historical examples and guiding imagesthey used to make their cases come to life. If Meet the Press is the mark of legitimacy inAmerican politics, the analysis of its archive is the study of legitimate American arguments. Forthose who did not live through these events, the Meet the Press archive reveals deep channels ofpolitical thought and culture, time out of mind of man. For those who did live through them, Meetthe Press is a systematic record of the state of the elite core of national conversation as it waslived rather than as it is remembered.

Meet the Press is the longest-running television series; there have been more than thirty-fivehundred episodes of the program over sixty-seven years of regular operation, and they continueeach week. Apart from innovations like adding a roundtable and reducing the number ofquestioners from four to one, the interview format has remained largely consistent over time, ashas the nature of the questioning. The array of guests is of consistently high quality and from thefull spectrum of national and global elites. Pick your favorite influential person, and you willprobably find him or her at some key moment in his or her career answering questions before anational audience with questions that you might have liked to ask. Put another way, Meet thePress is a longitudinal collection of consistently prepared and high-quality focus groups andinterviews that have been conducted with national leaders in steady intervals and with consistentmanagement for nearly seven decades from the end of World War II to the present time. If in1945 one had set out to produce a prospective study of the evolution of the national policyconversation over the course of the coming "American Century," it would have been difficult todevise a better plan than this.

Before we wax elegiac about the accomplishments of this organ of the NationalBroadcasting Company, it will be helpful to remember that there are reasons to be suspiciousabout the program itself and of the roleit plays in politics and society. Not everyone gets to appear on Meet the Press, nor are all ofthe issues vital to the republic discussed there. Meet the Press does reflect the central tendenciesof elite opinion, but the performers represent a rarefied slice of the public whose concerns areclose to those who have provided them with the opportunities they enjoy. The tension involved incharacterizing this kind of program reflects the tension of representative democracy; even as theprogram represents the vital center of the political classes, many people are left out and manypoints of view are ignored. In a 1991 interview on C-SPAN about Meet the Press's sister program,This Week with David Brinkley, Brinkley was asked about this tricky problem of elitism inshepherding the national debate.

Interviewer: Some critics charge that the Sunday-morning programs appeal only to an intellectual elite.

David Brinkley: What's wrong with that?

Interviewer: Do you have a sense of who your audience is?

Brinkley: Uh, I'm not sure it would be an intellectual elite, but there is very little of a popular, gossipy nature init, and I think that is a somewhat loaded term, intellectual elite, but I think it is designed for people whoreally care about public affairs in this country and the world, and would like to maybe bounce their ownopinions off ours and see how they compare. Um, not intellectual elite, but those who care about what'shappening in the world.

Brinkley's awkward response reveals the tension at the heart not only of public affairsprogramming but also democracy itself. Not all voices are heard, and not all ideas get equal play.Those that do are often restricted by their appeal to those who have power. The liberal economistJohn Kenneth Galbraith, a frequent guest on Meet the Press, coined a phrase to capture the kindsof arguments that one finds on the program: the "conventional wisdom"—"ideas which areesteemed at any time for their acceptability"—an ironic phrase that summarizes the challenge ofgoverning a polity in which, despite our best efforts, some people are more equal than others.Most of us are doomed to parrot the ideas of some defunct opinion leader, producing unavoidableinterpretive disparities. The historian Eric Goldman's description of our plight remains one of thebest.

The dominant groups in America had simply done what dominant groups usually do. They had, quiteunconsciously, picked from among available theories the ones that best protected their position and hadimpressed these ideas on the national mind as Truth.

What about political bias? It has become a national pastime to criticize the mainstream media fortheir gatekeeping function and implicit political biases, but bias is not a problem on Meet thePress unless by that you mean bias against the issues for which there is no effective andorganized interest or against the more volatile extremes of the political spectrum. The issues thatpeople care most about may never be discussed at length or in a balanced way on the program,but not because the producers and journalists are biased against them. Issues like immigration,gender equality, and abusive powers of corporations may find little play on Sunday morning, butthis only reflects the dominant ideology of the country, not that of the staff of Meet the Press.Inadvertently, the show's producers do act as gatekeepers of a kind, but what they protect is theintegrity of their take on the conventional wisdom as they go about protecting the company brand.One of the reasons that Meet the Press has survived what must be seen as several lifetimes in thetelevision news business is that a natural system of feedback in a competitive marketplace ensuresthat it keeps its focus on what it has set out to do. It is a barometer of the conventional wisdom. Itis an index of arguments that succeed, and those arguments that fail to convince will simplyprecipitate out of this level of the conversation.

The interpretations that make it across the Meet the Press threshold have something moreimportant than novelty; they have the robust aura of legitimacy about them. In this harsh glare ofpublic scrutiny, most arguments wither, as do many guests. Those that survive may be little morethan dressed-up clichés, but these are clichés with currency. They are the arguments that moveAmerica and, in so doing, channel American civic identity just as Jefferson's words in theDeclaration did in the beginning. This is what it means to argue America—to bring the countryinto existence through an act of cooperative imagination. In this sense, many of us can befounders of the republic anew by introducing arguments that stick, thereby delineating thecultural repertoire.

Few things are as important as knowing where this conventional wisdom is headed at anypoint in time. In the vernacular of our time we speak about this as "the story," "the narrative," orthe "theory of the case." What we are getting at is the gist of the policy debate and general directionin which our leaders plan to take the country. We often think of the history of politicalphilosophy as an enduring debate between ideas and interests between Plato and Machiavelli. Wemight better think of it as a debate between Plato and Homer, that is, between reason and myth:strategic and literary dimensions of political experience. It is along this literary dimensionwhere analysis meets imagery, and one doesn't find it in the Gallup Poll or the General SocialSurvey.

Less sophisticated than a conference at the Brookings Institution or a Yale seminar, whatyou see on Meet the Press is what you get—the leading plotlines of the American politicalstorybook. Love them or hate them, these are the ideas that will work, and they work becausethey have already worked in the past. This idea—known in some circles as "performativity"—isthe inescapable circularity of symbolic politics, and it remains the magic formula of Sunday-morningpolitics as it was in Spivak's day.

In a sour mood, a critic might justly say of Meet the Press that it is a platform for whatAntonio Gramsci called hegemony: a process of moral and intellectual leadership through whichpeople consent to and reproduce the structures of power that operate in their own society. Even inthe absence of coercive power, by changing the categories of thought itself, leaders find itpossible to direct the people toward ends that they never anticipated and to which they wouldnever have consented. The forum was well exploited by Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, andothers for this purpose. But it is also one where critical voices can think aloud in creative ways.Radical thinkers like Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Henry Wallace, Grover Norquist, and Ron Paulhave all made use of the show in that way.

I think of Meet the Press as a regular forum for the American influential, where the mostpertinent arguments for the most pressing social issues are shared before a relevant audience. It'sthe place where the rhetorical rubber hits the road of governance. Its archive should interest youbecause it is a unique record of peak-level American discursive history, and it is one that stillexists in largely uncorrupted form. Because of Larry Spivak's grit and determination, almost theentire record of the program—transcripts, radio broadcasts, television film canisters, letters, andother related material—is sitting in the Library of Congress waiting to be rediscovered. It is likean ice core of the political climate from which one can sample fresh snowpack each week.Thousands of articles have been written using Michigan's National Election Studies data orChicago's General Social Survey, but the Meet the Press archive is a data set that has as yet beenlargely unexamined. Just as we look back to the old Gallup Polls to investigate the tidal forces inAmerican mass opinion, so, too, we can use the Meet the Press archive to time the rhythms of thetides of the conventional wisdom. Both sources are indicators of strategic possibilities.

The Players

It would be impossible to review all of the outsized personalities who appeared on thisstage, but to orient and prepare the reader for the selections presented, it will help to have a senseof the most important players on the programs over the years.

Hosts and Moderators

Lawrence (Larry) Spivak—The font of this novel experiment in democracy, who not onlybankrolled the program and shepherded it through its first thirty years but also preserved therecords of the program at a time when such things were not done. A neocon beforeneoconservatism was cool, Spivak was a true public intellectual who lives on in this, his greatestproduct.

Martha Rountree—The visionary saleswoman of the Meet the Press idea who carried theprogram from an idea to full function. Her folksy accent and deferential tendencies belie herpowerful ambition, which was ever on display for those on the lookout for it. As is likely true ofmany pioneering women of this era, Rountree's experience on Meet the Press serves as a kind ofplaceholder for women in the public sphere more generally. It is not an exaggeration to say thatRountree was responsible for selling Meet the Press at the outset to the Mutual BroadcastingSystem, and she was a constant presence in the founding epoch. Yet she was alwaysovershadowed by Larry Spivak and the other larger-than-life men who appeared, and she madeher exit in 1954 when she sold her ownership stake.

Albert Warner—The first regular moderator of Meet the Press, providing a kind of starpower for the fledgling show. Warner was a true showman, with a lilting and engaging voice,capable of turning even the most fraught discussions into an entertainment spectacle.

Ned Brooks—The straight-shooting moderator of the program from 1953 to 1965. Brookshad been around the program from its early days. He was moderator through some of the mostvolatile moments of the period, including the civil rights movement and the Kennedyassassination.

(Continues...)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE ECLIPSE OF EQUALITY by SOLON SIMMONS. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804777985
• ISBN 13: 9780804777988
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 305
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile