The Era of Distortion
By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
Do you ever get the sense the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality? I started feeling that way awhile ago, when I was still working for The Weekly Standard and all these articles began appearing about how Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Bill Kristol and a bunch of "neoconservatives" at the magazine had taken over U.S. foreign policy.
Theories about the tightly knit neocon cabal came in waves. One day you read that neocons were pushing plans to finish off Iraq and move into Syria. Web sites appeared detailing neocon conspiracies; my favorite described a neocon outing organized by Dick Cheney to hunt for humans. The Asian press had the most lurid stories; the European press the most thorough. Every day, it seemed, Le Monde or some deep-thinking German paper would have an exposé on the neocon cabal, complete with charts connecting all the conspirators.
The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the
Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of
five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these
people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral
Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles.
We'd sit around the magazine guffawing at the ludicrous stories that kept sprouting, but belief in shadowy neocon influence has now hardened into common knowledge. Wesley Clark, among others, cannot go a week without bringing it up.
In truth, the people labeled neocons (con is short for "conservative" and neo is short for "Jewish") travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another. The ones outside government have almost no contact with President Bush. There have been hundreds of references, for example, to Richard Perle's insidious power over administration policy, but I've been told by senior administration officials that he has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office. If he's shaping their decisions, he must be microwaving his ideas into their fillings.
It's true that both Bush and the people labeled neocons
agree that Saddam Hussein represented a unique threat to
world peace. But correlation does not mean causation. All
evidence suggests that Bush formed his conclusions
independently. Besides, if he wanted to follow the neocon
line, Bush wouldn't know where to turn because while the
neocons agree on Saddam, they disagree vituperatively on
just about everything else. (If you ever read a sentence
that starts with "Neocons believe," there is a 99.44
percent chance everything else in that sentence will be
untrue.)
Still, there are apparently millions of people who cling to the notion that the world is controlled by well-organized and malevolent forces. And for a subset of these people, Jews are a handy explanation for everything.
There's something else going on, too. The proliferation of media outlets and the segmentation of society have meant that it's much easier for people to hive themselves off into like-minded cliques. Some people live in towns where nobody likes President Bush. Others listen to radio networks where nobody likes Bill Clinton.
In these communities, half-truths get circulated and
exaggerated. Dark accusations are believed because it is
delicious to believe them. Vince Foster was murdered. The
Saudis warned the Bush administration before Sept. 11.
You get to choose your own reality. You get to believe
what makes you feel good. You can ignore inconvenient
facts so rigorously that your picture of the world is one
big distortion.
And if you can give your foes a collective name — liberals, fundamentalists or neocons — you can rob them of their individual humanity. All inhibitions are removed. You can say anything about them. You get to feed off their villainy and luxuriate in your own contrasting virtue. You will find books, blowhards and candidates playing to your delusions, and you can emigrate to your own version of Planet Chomsky. You can live there unburdened by ambiguity.
Improvements in information technology have not made
public debate more realistic. On the contrary, anti-
Semitism is resurgent. Conspiracy theories are prevalent.
Partisanship has left many people unhinged.
Welcome to election year, 2004.
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