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Muffled Echoes
Ten years ago the Iran-Contra affair swept the headlines as the nation watched an indignant Lt. Col. Oliver North testify before a congressional committee. Although polls showed that most Americans were critical of North's actions and ambivalent toward the man himself, media coverage left the opposite impression, with its broadcasts of "Ollie-for-president" rallies and stories of congressional aides overwhelmed by a torrent of pro-North mail.
In this book, public opinion is more than the sum of a pollster's tally; instead, Amy Fried defines it as a political tool, integral to the political process, where vested interests compete to legitimize their interpretation of the public voice. Fried explores the construction, interpretation, and uses of public opinion, raising important questions about the media and the role of special interest groups in determining policy.
In this book, public opinion is more than the sum of a pollster's tally; instead, Amy Fried defines it as a political tool, integral to the political process, where vested interests compete to legitimize their interpretation of the public voice. Fried explores the construction, interpretation, and uses of public opinion, raising important questions about the media and the role of special interest groups in determining policy.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published April 15, 1997
6 people want to read
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February 3, 2022
The U.S. Supreme Court's _Citizens United_ ruling classified campaign contributions as a species of the free exercise of speech, guaranteed by the Constitution. The furor that followed arose from the horror at such a taxonomic judgment. The horror at the classification, I argue, was further premised on a fantasy landscape which is the same landscape into which Amy Fried in _Muffled Echoes: Oliver North and the Politics of Public Opinion_ makes a foray. Let me try to describe this landscape for the uninitiated. In this landscape, there is a wide open _agora_--it is almost obligatory that this space be the Socratic space of the ancient Athenian market place, situated unassailably as it is in the distant past--waiting to be filled with all able-bodied citizens, all politely listening and questioning one another in an uninterested pursuit of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. These citizens eventually reach some kind of consensus, not unanimous and not even, perhaps, of a dimension that would qualify as Rousseau's "general will", but enough of a consensus that the citizens know it must be conveyed to their elected officials, who all, equally politely and uninterested, are standing by to hear and respond to the people's unified voice.
Enter the bogeymen, our villains. Some citizens might make it to this open space but only to find much if not most of it already occupied by a small number of elites--corporations, media conglomerates, lobbyists--who are hogging up all the space. Worse, they are using artificial means to amplify their voices. The citizens are powerless to do anything about this state of affairs. Worse still, the political representatives have no choice but to hear and respond to whatever voice makes it to their ears first. Everyone checks their rulebook--yes, that one--to see if this is really possible. The judges--as in _Citizens United_--say it is. All free and fair-minded citizens can do nothing but bemoan this degradation of the public sphere, a feeling made worse by the knowledge that if only we could get those few individuals out of the way, the _agora_ would once again be the flourishing marketplace of ideas and democratic exchange that it once was.
Fried's gripe is not with the _Citizens United_ ruling (the book was written in 1998 and the Citizens United ruling was in 2010) but she participates in the same fantasy outlined above. As Richard Hofstadter taught us all in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", a bogeyman is the sine qua non of any meaningful and communicable framework for political mobilization in America. In Fried's view, the bogeyman is the distorted view of public opinion crafted by either the media (who amplify sensationalistic or polarizing positions), elites (who amplify the positions in which they are materially invested), or interest gorups (who amplify the positions in which they are symbolically--think, culture war--invested). This amplification can and often does give the distorted impression that the public supports some position far more or far less than it actually does. Because politicians have no other reliable framework, in Fried's argument, for gauging public opinion in such cases so as to correct for the inaccuracies of the distortion, politicians believe they are responding to the public, when in fact they are playing into the hands of either media or elites.
Why is this a "fantasy" landscape? In fantasies--think of your own and think about whether I'm right in this analysis--we imagine being where we want to be but we don't imagine realistic means for getting there. In fact, doing so--incorporating a contemplation of the means by which we might get to that endpoint--would most certainly destroy the fantasy by pulling us back into mundane reality until we could no longer straddle the gap.
Another way of saying all of this is to point out that it is much easier to imagine someone standing in your way and imputing responsibility to them than it is to acknowledge--keeping with the classical Greek theme--another Greek concept: _agon_. Like most public institutions in America--the market, our adversarial legal system, even education to an extent--the public sphere, including who participates in it and whose voice is heard, is the result of competition. There are instances in which participation can be deemed illegal--we can't bribe an official, for example. Nevertheless, just because some people--and ultimately even corporations ultimately reduce to people--prosper and win out over others in the ability to have influence because they use means like money or a disorted picture of public opnion, doesn't mean that this triumph is unfair.
One might argue that participation in the public sphere is different from a game or the marketplace. We are, after all, talking about civic participation in our own governance, so each person's equal participation should be guaranteed. This must be what Fried and others are arguing--equal participation and not just the equal right of participation--since the right to participate is already guaranteed. But how many people would want a society in which, not the right to participate but everyone's actual participation was guaranteed. Certainly not the people who don't want to participate. But even if somehow that were desirable and possible, who would think that the participation of those who didn't want to participate would contribute in a productive way to the feedback loop with representatives? The position regarding public participation that Fried and others represent seems to equivocate on this point, regarding the mere fact of uneven participation in the public sphere as a sign of unfairness or even malfeasance.
The instrument of such malfeasance is taken, presumably, to be the unfair means by which the individuals small in number are able to amplify their voices. Although, even here, it's not clear whether the use of any means of amplification at all is bad or just the particular means that are chosen. In either case, money is bad. The use of connections is presumably also bad. Ownership of media mouthpieces can sometimes be bad. What about education level? Even in the free and unrestrained Habermasian public sphere of ethical discourse (reason-based and disinterested deliberation), it would presumably require a certain level of education and rhetorical training before one would even be able to participate in this ideal public sphere. The response to this objection is, of course, that in a Habermasian public sphere, reason is something that anyone has the ability to participate in--we may all take a different route and require different amounts of time, but presumably are all capable of reaching the same rational and reasoned conclusion as even those with far more education and knowledge. My response to that would be, first--in light of the last 5 years of American politics--are we, though? But by this same logic, why are any means of amplification, morally palatable or not, an impediment to reason? Can't reason work its way through any distortion of means-ends rational deliberation created by amplification of some voices over others? To argue that it cannot is to participate in an even more egregious form of the fantasy outlined above, because in this more extreme fantasy, not only is there a bogeyman blocking the public space, but the citizens are all passive and immobile automata? statues? And the bogeyman must not only be expelled from this space (though by what agent remains another mystery of potentially baroque and paradoxical dimensions), but the citizens need to be set up there (again by some external agent).
In the fantasy, this agent is conveniently absent. In reality, there is no agent. The public space belongs to whoever wants to use it. What are you waiting for?
Enter the bogeymen, our villains. Some citizens might make it to this open space but only to find much if not most of it already occupied by a small number of elites--corporations, media conglomerates, lobbyists--who are hogging up all the space. Worse, they are using artificial means to amplify their voices. The citizens are powerless to do anything about this state of affairs. Worse still, the political representatives have no choice but to hear and respond to whatever voice makes it to their ears first. Everyone checks their rulebook--yes, that one--to see if this is really possible. The judges--as in _Citizens United_--say it is. All free and fair-minded citizens can do nothing but bemoan this degradation of the public sphere, a feeling made worse by the knowledge that if only we could get those few individuals out of the way, the _agora_ would once again be the flourishing marketplace of ideas and democratic exchange that it once was.
Fried's gripe is not with the _Citizens United_ ruling (the book was written in 1998 and the Citizens United ruling was in 2010) but she participates in the same fantasy outlined above. As Richard Hofstadter taught us all in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", a bogeyman is the sine qua non of any meaningful and communicable framework for political mobilization in America. In Fried's view, the bogeyman is the distorted view of public opinion crafted by either the media (who amplify sensationalistic or polarizing positions), elites (who amplify the positions in which they are materially invested), or interest gorups (who amplify the positions in which they are symbolically--think, culture war--invested). This amplification can and often does give the distorted impression that the public supports some position far more or far less than it actually does. Because politicians have no other reliable framework, in Fried's argument, for gauging public opinion in such cases so as to correct for the inaccuracies of the distortion, politicians believe they are responding to the public, when in fact they are playing into the hands of either media or elites.
Why is this a "fantasy" landscape? In fantasies--think of your own and think about whether I'm right in this analysis--we imagine being where we want to be but we don't imagine realistic means for getting there. In fact, doing so--incorporating a contemplation of the means by which we might get to that endpoint--would most certainly destroy the fantasy by pulling us back into mundane reality until we could no longer straddle the gap.
Another way of saying all of this is to point out that it is much easier to imagine someone standing in your way and imputing responsibility to them than it is to acknowledge--keeping with the classical Greek theme--another Greek concept: _agon_. Like most public institutions in America--the market, our adversarial legal system, even education to an extent--the public sphere, including who participates in it and whose voice is heard, is the result of competition. There are instances in which participation can be deemed illegal--we can't bribe an official, for example. Nevertheless, just because some people--and ultimately even corporations ultimately reduce to people--prosper and win out over others in the ability to have influence because they use means like money or a disorted picture of public opnion, doesn't mean that this triumph is unfair.
One might argue that participation in the public sphere is different from a game or the marketplace. We are, after all, talking about civic participation in our own governance, so each person's equal participation should be guaranteed. This must be what Fried and others are arguing--equal participation and not just the equal right of participation--since the right to participate is already guaranteed. But how many people would want a society in which, not the right to participate but everyone's actual participation was guaranteed. Certainly not the people who don't want to participate. But even if somehow that were desirable and possible, who would think that the participation of those who didn't want to participate would contribute in a productive way to the feedback loop with representatives? The position regarding public participation that Fried and others represent seems to equivocate on this point, regarding the mere fact of uneven participation in the public sphere as a sign of unfairness or even malfeasance.
The instrument of such malfeasance is taken, presumably, to be the unfair means by which the individuals small in number are able to amplify their voices. Although, even here, it's not clear whether the use of any means of amplification at all is bad or just the particular means that are chosen. In either case, money is bad. The use of connections is presumably also bad. Ownership of media mouthpieces can sometimes be bad. What about education level? Even in the free and unrestrained Habermasian public sphere of ethical discourse (reason-based and disinterested deliberation), it would presumably require a certain level of education and rhetorical training before one would even be able to participate in this ideal public sphere. The response to this objection is, of course, that in a Habermasian public sphere, reason is something that anyone has the ability to participate in--we may all take a different route and require different amounts of time, but presumably are all capable of reaching the same rational and reasoned conclusion as even those with far more education and knowledge. My response to that would be, first--in light of the last 5 years of American politics--are we, though? But by this same logic, why are any means of amplification, morally palatable or not, an impediment to reason? Can't reason work its way through any distortion of means-ends rational deliberation created by amplification of some voices over others? To argue that it cannot is to participate in an even more egregious form of the fantasy outlined above, because in this more extreme fantasy, not only is there a bogeyman blocking the public space, but the citizens are all passive and immobile automata? statues? And the bogeyman must not only be expelled from this space (though by what agent remains another mystery of potentially baroque and paradoxical dimensions), but the citizens need to be set up there (again by some external agent).
In the fantasy, this agent is conveniently absent. In reality, there is no agent. The public space belongs to whoever wants to use it. What are you waiting for?
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