“Persistent, Chronic Up-is-Downism”
Josh Marshall has written a brilliant article in this month’s Washington Monthly called “The Post-Modern President.” In it, he gives a detailed account of how the Bushies and their supporters have exploited the ambiguity of post-modern consciousness to lay the basis for policies driven exclusively by ideology, without any need to prove their instrumental value in the real world (this is also a favorite theme around these parts, as seen here and here, among other places.
Here’s a sample from Marshall’s piece:
The White House seemed guilty of what might be called persistent, chronic up-is-downism, the tendency to ridicule the possibility that a given policy might actually have its predictable adverse consequences, to deny those consequences once they have already occurred, or--failing that--to insist against all evidence that those consequences were part of the plan all along.
What he describes is a rhetorical strategy designed to frustrate criticism by removing the critic’s most potent tool – appeal to the facts. It relies on a number of tricks borrowed from ancient sophists, easily debunked by the lost art of formal logic, but nonetheless effective enough to, as they say, fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time.
Armed with tools and insights like Marshall’s, the opposition in this country is finally finding a way to shine a light into the wide, dark gulf that separates Bush’s words from the truth of his actions. Here’s hoping Americans are smart enough to understand the argument.
10:14:06 AM 
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