The Hack Gap

[forsyth]

This is a term I first saw back in the election, on Matt Yglesias's blog. (here, here, and here.)

Basically, how it goes is the Republicans have more partisan hacks who are willing to get up and quote the party line, defend their guys, and attack the other side, regardless of the actual events. And because of this, the Republicans act more unified, more aggressive, and the Democratic defenders look weaker and/or incompetent, because they will go "yes, you're sort of right, except for all the things you got wrong" which takes too long and gets sound-bited to "SPOKESPERSON ADMITS DEMOCRATS ARE PANSIES!"

Noted Republican hack, Andrew Sullivan gives a sterling example today. You can argue his hacktactisty, since he endorsed Kerry and attacks Bush, but those were triggered by a) The Republicans using gays as a scapegoat for, well, everything and b) the fact the Bush Administration has been allowing and condoning torture. One of those is an attack on him, and the other proves he has at least SOME level of basic human dignity. But he also says things like this:

The civil rights movement was indeed a fundamentally religious phenomenon, and you cannot understand it without understanding that. It was also multi-denominational and included Democrats and Republicans. Its core religious principle was non-violence, and it drew enormous inspiration from Gandhi. It included Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, atheists and agnostics. And it never, in King's time, became a vehicle for one political party to win elections. Never. And in so far as it subsequently did, in so far as people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton used religion to buttress a partisan machine, what was left of the civil rights movement lost moral authority. And deserved to.

See what he does there? He attacks the civil rights movement for "deserving" to lose moral authority, because it was used "to buttress a partisan machine." "But," I hear somebody complaining, "All the civil rights leaders are Democrats!" Yes, they are. And you know why? It wasn't some conspiratorial decision to lead blacks into being a "buttress" for a "partisan machine". You know why blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic? It's not just because lots of them live in big cities. Back in 1968, Richard Nixon decided on a Southern Strategy, using "states rights" to play up to the southern white racists who had before been "Dixiecrats". Civil Rights leaders being Democrats is an effect of the Republicans pandering to racists, rather than a cause of "losing moral authority."

And that, my friends, is how you be a good hack, you leave out the inconvenient parts of the truth, confuse causes and effects, and insinuate things to make the other guy seem to be worse than he is. Even after seeing what monsters the modern leadership of the Republican Party are, .Andrew Sullivan's hack instincts are still too strong. Though this is a lot less than his infamous "The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts...may well mount...a fifth column." blogging after 9/11 and rabid support of the war. Why does Time feature this hack?

Comments

[pingu-the-great.livejournal.com]

They feature him because the editor is as bigoted as he is?

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

I have no idea about Time's editor. But for some reason, Andrew Sullivan is fairly famous, he was the editor of The New Republic for several years, and is on political talk shows and stuff with some regularity. I'm not sure why. But, as I mentioned, he's one of the most reasonable of the Republican hacks, because he's gay and has been driven from his party by the bigots and by the torture. Most of the rest of the article I pulled the quote from was fairly sane, he just throw in things like that even now.

[leticia.livejournal.com]

As long as we're talking about inconvenient parts of the truth, how about the fact the civil rights movement had to claw its way into even the democratic party?
Saying even now that the civil rights 'movement' belongs to either party is stupid. Civil rights is supposed to be /bigger/ than parties...
And if he feels incensed that the civil rights movement is a tool of the democrats, perhaps he should give some thought to urging republicans to defend civil rights.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have no particular love for the 60s Democratic party. The "Dixiecrat" faction was the white Southern racists who the Republicans started courting in '68. But the Republicans were the ones who ended up courting them and adopting them and letting them take over their party. In a lot of ways, the two parties have swapped their major power blocks in the past 40 odd years.

The 'movement' doesn't belong to either party, but when one party is coddling and wooing bigots, it's fairly obvious which party is going to get the most support from it.

[leticia.livejournal.com]

What I'm saying here, that the correct response to "This is an important, multi-party movement," is not to say "Which no longer matters because we're not involved," but to say "...which we are no longer as supportive of as we should be."
You see, he is using the fact that republicans are not supporting the civil rights movement as /justification for not supporting the civil rights movement/.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Awww, but I like the response of calling him a hacks and devaluing his whole opinion.

And yes, that's exactly what he's doing. That's what makes him a partisan hack.

[leticia.livejournal.com]

In essence the argument sums up to "Anything done without support from the republican party has no moral authority."

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Instead of consdiering, perhaps, the Republican Party has no moral authority because the coddle and pander to bigots, then wonder why minorities don't want to vote for them.

[leticia.livejournal.com]

Duh, because the democrat puppeted civil rights movement tells them not to.