{"id":26736,"date":"2014-07-09T08:16:30","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T13:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26736"},"modified":"2014-07-09T08:16:30","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T13:16:30","slug":"political-media-and-a-growing-lack-of-historical-awareness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/09\/political-media-and-a-growing-lack-of-historical-awareness\/","title":{"rendered":"Political media and a growing lack of historical awareness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2014\/07\/09\/media-ignorance-becoming-serious-problem\/\" target=\"_blank\">Mollie Hemingway<\/a> says that media ignorance has become a serious problem:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The real problem is the arrogance that goes with the ignorance. Take Kate Zernike\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/10\/02\/us\/politics\/02teaparty.html\" target=\"_blank\">2010 attempt at an expose of the ideas that motivate tea party activists<\/a> that ran in the <em>New York Times<\/em>. She wrote:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>But when it comes to ideology, it has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas. It has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers \u2014 in some cases elevating them to best-seller status \u2014 to form a kind of Tea Party canon.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Who are these obscure authors of long-dormant ideas? She points to Friedrich Hayek, for one. Yes, the same Hayek who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974 and died way, way back in \u2026 1992. Whose <em>Road To Serfdom<\/em> was so obscure that it has never been out of print and was excerpted in <em>Reader\u2019s Digest<\/em>, that obscure publication with only 17 million readers. The article doesn\u2019t get around to actually providing any insight into these activists\u2019 philosophy and it\u2019s probably a good thing considering that this is what she has to say about \u201cthe rule of law\u201d:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Ron Johnson, who entered politics through a Tea Party meeting and is now the Republican nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, asserted that the $20 billion escrow fund that the Obama administration forced BP to set up to pay damages from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill circumvented \u201cthe rule of law,\u201d Hayek\u2019s term for the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the pursuit of \u201cpersonal ends and desires.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Oh dear. Where to begin? How about with the fact that \u201crule of law\u201d is not Hayek\u2019s term. The concept goes back to, well, the beginning of Western Civilization and the term was popularized by a 19th century British jurist and constitutional theorist named A.V. Dicey. It\u2019s not an unwritten code, by definition. The idea that this would be an obscure concept to someone says everything about Zernike and the team at the New York Times and precisely nothing about Ron Johnson or Hayek or that sector of citizens of the United States who retain support for the rule of law.<\/p>\n<p>A few weeks ago, David Brat beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a stunning upset. The media didn\u2019t handle it well. You might say <a href=\"http:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2014\/06\/12\/brat-voters-arent-anti-semitic-but-the-media-sure-are-anti-christian\/\" target=\"_blank\">they freaked out<\/a>. Among other things, reporters sounded the alarm about a phrase Brat used in his writings that, they said, suggested he was a dangerous extremist: \u201cThe government holds a monopoly on violence. Any law that we vote for is ultimately backed by the full force of our government and military.\u201d As <em>National Review<\/em>&#8216;s Charles C.W. Cooke <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/380280\/david-brat-right-charles-c-w-cooke\" target=\"_blank\">noted<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>\u201cUnusual\u201d and \u201ceye-opening\u201d was the <em>New York Daily News<\/em>\u2019s petty <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nydailynews.com\/news\/politics\/hitler-happen-tea-party-sensation-david-brat-history-unusual-eye-opening-writings-article-1.1825497\" target=\"_blank\">verdict<\/a>. In the <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Reid Epstein <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/washwire\/2014\/06\/11\/david-brats-writings-hitlers-rise-could-all-happen-again\/\" target=\"_blank\">insinuated<\/a> darkly that the claim cast Brat as a modern-day fascist. And, for his part, <em>Politico<\/em>&#8216;s Ben White <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/morningmoneyben\/status\/476686752745148416\" target=\"_blank\">suggested<\/a> that the candidate\u2019s remarks \u201con Neitzsche and the government monopoly on violence don\u2019t make a whole lot of sense.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Unusual, eye-opening, and non-sensical, perhaps, to people who had never studied what government is. But that group shouldn\u2019t include political reporters, who could reasonably be expected to have passing familiarity with German sociologist <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/stream\/frommaxweberessa00webe#page\/82\/mode\/2up\/search\/%22monopolize+the+legitimate%22\" target=\"_blank\">Max Weber\u2019s claim<\/a> that \u201cthe modern state is a compulsory association which organizes domination. It has been successful in seeking to monopolize the legitimate use of physical force as a means of domination within a territory.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Or take the <em>Los Angeles Times<\/em>&#8216; David Savage, who argued just last week that the Supreme Court\u2019s decisions under Chief Justice John Roberts \u201crely on well-established rights, such as freedom of speech and free exercise of religion, but extend those rights for the first time to corporations, wealthy donors and conservatives.\u201d Perhaps it\u2019s just poorly written. Surely a man who has been responsible for informing Californians about the Supreme Court since 1986 doesn\u2019t actually believe that conservatives, corporations or wealthy donors were not covered by the Bill of Rights until John Roberts came along. As James Taranto of the <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/articles\/best-of-the-web-today-without-reason-or-empathy-1404757875\" target=\"_blank\">notes<\/a>, \u201cthat is as ignorant as it is tendentious.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mollie Hemingway says that media ignorance has become a serious problem: The real problem is the arrogance that goes with the ignorance. Take Kate Zernike\u2019s 2010 attempt at an expose of the ideas that motivate tea party activists that ran in the New York Times. She wrote: But when it comes to ideology, it has [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,28,53,13],"tags":[213,217,101],"class_list":["post-26736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-newspapers","tag-rights","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6Xe","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26737,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26736\/revisions\/26737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}