In a post titled, Politico’s "Media Criticism" Multiplies The Errors", Emptywheel (EW) details the failure of conservative columnists to tackle the facts and evidence in making critiques of her work and Glenn Greenwald’s. Turning to my copy of John Dean’s "Conservatives Without Conscience", I consider why that would be the case. I conclude that for liberals, it’s about facts and evidence. For conservatives, it’s probably about seeking emotional security — particularly security based on their identification with Cheney as a ‘strong protector’.

The more Cheney is unveiled, the more alarmed conservatives become.
Expect ad hominum attacks and increased frenzy as their fears grow over the liklihood that a torture investigation will lead to legal action.

I argue that for the right, this is about threatened identity and emotional insecurity.
For the left, it’s about facts, chronologies, evidence, and patterns over time.

Authoritarians don’t value evidence as much as EW and Glenn do, at least not in the way that they’ve decided to conduct their ‘media criticism’ of EW and Glenn Greenwald. But as Altmeyer and others have shown, authoritarians have a difficult time viewing the world from any perspective but their own.

What is most striking is the way that EW’s observations about the ‘media criticism’ of her own work, as well as Glenn Greenwald’s, supports the view that for conservatives, ‘criticism’ actually functions as a way to demonize imagined opponents, rather than as a means to explore evidence and identify patterns.

EW and Glenn have not shown a desire to dominate others; in contrast, Bush, Cheney, Addington, and authoritarians seek to dominate others. It is worth noting that the smackdowns in the ‘media criticism’ that two conservatives make of EW and Glenn’s writing is consistent with the dynamic that we’ve seen many times before: if a conservative doesn’t have facts on their side, they’re going to make personal attacks in an effort to dominate the discussion.

If EW or Glenn don’t have good facts, they seek to find better ones.If an authoritarian doesn’t have good facts, they seek to demonize or marginalize anyone who provides good facts — whether those facts relate to media criticism, financial regulation, or climate change.

EW and Glenn appear to believe that ’safety’ lies in seeing the world as accurately as possible, describing it as accurately as possible, and searching out the sources of problems by tracing them to their roots (in people, documents, institutions). EW and Glenn don’t derive their sense of safety by identifying themselves with a ’strong leader’, appear to be able to tolerate ambiguity, and don’t overreact to threats.

In contrast, the more conservative columnists seem to feel exceptionally threatened by the contemporary world, obsess on topics of ‘security’ and ‘protections’, which mostly appear to mostly derive from identifying with a ’strong leader’ (Cheney, Addington, Erik Prince, and other authoritarians, including Putini…).

My hunch is that for Calderone and Smith, ‘media criticism’ is not about evidence.
Not at all.
They are not reading for facts.
They are reading to assess the level of threat to Cheney, or to their other supposed ‘protectors’.

We’re in the realm of psychology, not objective analysis.

If conservative columnists view their ’strong guy’ (Cheney, et al) as ‘threatened’ by the timelines, logic, evidence, and analysis developed by EW and Greenwald then by extension — or by identification — it appears that the columnists imagine themselves also feel threatened. Consequently, rather than engage in analysis based on facts, they launch into emotionally driven pseudo-analysis that seeks to demean or marginalize astute observers like EW and Greenwald. But doing it under the guise of ‘media criticism’ gives it a luster, an authority, a claim to ‘knowledge’ that pretends the conservatives are moving to a ‘level playing field’ with EW and Greenwald.
Except that they aren’t.
This is a fiction, but a fascinating one.

Why do the conservatives need to don the gloried vestments of ‘media criticism’ to take on EW and Greenwald? Well, it offers a shield of respectability for the mendacious knife-fight they want to wage.
They want to sanctify their little gangsta knife fight in the illustrious robes of Academese.
Why?

There’s surely more going on here than a simple ‘critique’ of EW or Greenwald.
After all, the pressure’s building to deny that Holder has the legal right to do his job.
After all, the prospect that Bush may well have thrown Cheney, et al, under the bus and that the long arm of the law may finally catch up with some of these people has to be a cause for consternation among conservatives, particularly the former defenders of the neocons and Free Marketeers.

As the pressure builds, I expect to see the weirdness escalate.
They’re cornered, and they’re fighting back with every teevee spot, pseudo interview, legal fiction, dissembling claim, and ‘media criticism’ that they can muster.
Why?

What’s the underlying ‘logic’ that drives these dynamics?
I don’t know for certain, but I’m giving this one a shot — because after reading EW and Greenwald for several years, and after being repeatedly awestruck by their insights and their integrity and their desire to be accurate and offer evidence, I’m damned if I’m going to sit back in silence while ad hominum attacks masquerade as ‘media critiques’.

We’re in the realm of psychology, and as we all realize, people have different tolerances for ambiguity.

People who dislike ambiguity tend to be politically conservative.
Ambiguity drives them bonkers.
They prefer rigid routines, are always prompt, and are often exceptionally good at their narrow range of expertise. Those can be wonderful traits in many roles and organizations. But they’re not fond of ‘change’.
They don’t like ‘change’.
Obama’s ‘about’ the one thing that they really, really dislike: ‘change‘.
So if Obama means ‘change’, and they hate ‘change’, then Obama must be a real threat to them.

And if EW and Greenwald are exposing the current system as corrupt, fraudulent, and mendacious, and aspects of the system are revealed as untenable over time, then rather than blame the system and create some health ‘change’ – which, BTW, requires a huge amount of sustained, metabolic, psychological, and emotional energy – they’ll keep their shitty system and blame EW and Greenwald.

Because the metabolic hit in attacking a perceived ‘enemy’ is a whole lot lower than the amount of metabolic, sustained resources required to achieve ‘change’.

No matter how bad the system may be, the uncertainty, risk, and anxiety involved in ‘change’ are even worse in the minds of quite a few people that I know. I strongly suspect they’d agree with Calderone and Smith’s ‘media criticism’ – because it doesn’t require them to do anything more than sit back in their chairs, self-satisfied, firm in their beliefs about their own prejudices, and scoff at anyone who points out that the floors beneath them have been nearly consumed by neocon termites, and that financial rats have gnawed the very fabric of the chair they sit in.

It requires nothing of them, other than self-satisfied contentment. Oblivousness, delusion, and self-satisfied hatreds are much, much easier than having to expend the energy required for change.But the more their ‘protectors’ (Cheney, et al) are exposed as liars, frauds, cheats, and authoritarian dominators, it appears that the ‘anxiety barometers’ of people who find safety in identifying with them rises exponentially.

So they’ll come at EW and Glenn and Jane and CHS like a swarm of wasps at an August picnic.
They don’t have any other psychological resources that would expand their means of finding safety.
How could they?

Cheney sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, and he sounds like he’s in charge, and he sounds like he’s tough. It’s hard to watch him and think, ‘Wow, the guy had 5 deferments!? And this is the guy who bought up the asbestos that put Halliburton at risk of Chapter 11 until no-bid contracts in Iraq funneled billions to their coffers?
’

If you look at ‘facts’, Dick Cheney is a deceitful person.
But if you don’t read a lot, if you don’t have background,g> if you only watch him on teevee where Chris Wallace defers to him, well if you’re that kind of person then Cheney looks like a giant who’s being insulted by lesser mortals.
And Cheney is not asking viewers to ‘change’!

And his daughter Liz produces the same mantra (‘you don’t have to change; just let us have all your money and obey us..’).
On teevee, the Cheney’s appear to know what they’re talking about.

The Smiths and Calderone’s rely on Cheney for a sense of safety.Anything that threatens Cheney or his reputation threatens them — at least, psychologically.

So it’s not about evidence.
It’s about how desperately people cling to ideology and ‘authoritarian leaders’ when the economy is a fiction of zombie banks and Ponzi schemers, with typhoons building up to Cat 4 and heading for land.

And if EW and Glenn Greenwald point to Cheney’s role in those disasters, then they’ll simply blame ‘the left’, because that’s the simple, easy thing to do.

This is all psychology.
It has zilch to do with facts.