Even More About Freedom of Speech in China and in the US

This thoughtful response is from my friend Scott Miller in Arizona:

As you suggest, there is nothing new about having serious shortcomings in America’s political institutions and leadership—and in its public discourse, including having quite a bit of outright lying at worst and selective use of “facts” at best by lots of folks.  As in other eras, the challenge is to find ways to address some of the major forces that undermine our discourse and political decision making. Unfortunately, several of the important forces in our era will probably not be easy to weaken or eliminate any time soon because they are either structural in nature or reflect important differences in values and beliefs among segments of the U.S. population.

I know that you are well aware of many of these structural forces and fissures in values and beliefs, but it is worth mentioning some of them here in order to get a sense of the size and scope of the challenges.  Some of the most important ones, of course, are technological, such as the emergence of a cable television world in which there are hundreds of channels and of an Internet world in which there are a gazillion sites from which people can choose to visit.  For a brief period—a little over a half century (from the late 1920s into the 1980s)—radio and, subsequently, television probably were forces for creating a meaningful body of common information/news for the public that was provided in a generally diplomatic, albeit homogeneous manner.  Then, with the advent of cable, information/news sources proliferated.  (I remember vividly a two hour session of a media seminar that I attended at the Columbia school of journalism in 1971 in which Peter Goldmark Sr., a leading figure in the development of color television, talked at length about the coming cable revolution and the fragmentation of the audience that would come with it.)

About a decade later, CNN was founded and, within another generation, several other cable news competitors had entered the marketplace as well.  Instead of a three-network oligopoly for national television news (and generally similar oligopolies for local news), Americans began to have several options.  Predictably, the information/news providers began to experiment with differentiated products in an environment in which the economics of cable meant that money could be made with relatively small audiences compared to the mass audience model of over-the-air broadcast news at NBC, CBS, and ABC before the cable revolution.

As you know, one of the successful approaches is providing “news” that caters to a narrow slice of the audience from the perspective of political ideology—an approach for which the folks at Fox have provided very creative “leadership.”   Another is to provide news in the form of comedy in an era in which “attack” humor and sarcastic humor at the expense of others are the coins of the realm.  The first approach “enables” people to avoid encountering alternatives to their values and beliefs presented in a manner that they might find credible. The second presents leaders as dolts, fools, and/or without principles in order to get laughs.  (I remember a dozen years ago coming home from work just after President Clinton had begun his state of the union address to find my sons watching it on the Comedy Channel.  Two comedians were making jokes about Clinton’s speech as he delivered it.  The Second Bush and Obama have gotten similar treatment.)

Some other approaches are entertainment as news (remember the pioneering work of the “happy talk” approach to news by the local ABC news program in New York City in the first half of the 1970s that relied heavily on news from the entertainment sector), murder and mayhem as news (which has its foundations in print newspapers at least as far back as the nineteenth century), and the “we feel their pain” news (in which the victims of terrible things are center stage).  Meanwhile, only a couple percent of the audience watches the PBS News Hour or Charlie Rose.  In fact, only a few percent are watching each of the competing news and quasi-news programs on most days, given that most of us have hundreds of viewing options.  The audiences for the national evening news shows of NBC, CBS, and ABC are a fraction of what they were at their peaks.

Meanwhile, the Internet is transforming the print world (and also changing video viewing habits in a manner that portends a post cable video news/information world).  As you know, leading and historically profitable newspapers and news magazines, such as The New York Times and Newsweek have seen their business models undermined.  They are also competing with new completely Internet-based entities, such as The Huffington Post,  that have blurred the line between straight news reporting and editorializing to an extent that would be greatly admired by William Randolph Hearst and his yellow journalism peers.     

Interestingly, all this has happened as the overall percentage of Americans with college degrees has reached heights that would have been unimaginable a century ago.  So much for the notion that education is an unrelentingly powerful force for creating a well-informed population for democracy in America—or for democracies across the world, since the technological forces discussed here are global.

As has been the case as far back as we have recorded history, technological change has been creating new issues and triggering long-term trends that are deeply challenging and divisive economically, socially, and culturally in many societies ( including America) and, therefore, politically as well. For example, in our lifetime, science has wrought changes in the sexual and reproductive arena that have created powerful fault lines in the United States that really didn’t exist a half century ago. That is to say, in vitro fertilization, human embryonic stem cell research, the pill (including its morning after version), etc. have produced deep values divisions that have almost inevitably spilled into our political arena in mostly irreconcilable ways.  When added to the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in the first trimester in the 1973, we have had quite a “sexual” political cocktail.  (It could become an even more politically potent cocktail if the Supreme Court eventually reverses its position on abortion.)  For many other nations, these changes have not been so consequential, but given the still powerful religiosity of America, we are in a different position. As a member of the very small group of admitted agnostics in the United States, I find this situation to be, in some respects, mystifying.  But, mercifully, at least some components of this cocktail have lost much if not most of their political saliency, e.g., in vitro fertilization.

Economic globalization made possible by all manner of technological change, is creating economic stress in America that will probably take the entire 21^st Century to work out.  As you know much better than I, the addition of 2.5 billion people in China and India to the global system’s professional, semi-skilled, and unskilled labor markets has been creating labor market competition in the United States that is greatly compounding similar pressures from other nations that began to emerge as far back as the middle 1950s.  Those forces, coupled with the changing demographics of America (which now has about two-fifths of its youngest children growing up in quasi-developing-country circumstances from a human capital perspective), the “over investment” in certain kinds of consumer consumption (that includes more than too many big houses), similar over investment in the military, and a health care system that is both weak on coverage for a large segment of our population and wildly expensive to boot, are making it very hard for political leaders (and the electorate) to develop stable consensuses in many economic and related policy areas.  (The divisions over Obama’s health care legislation are huge and there is some possibility that at least one federal judge will find parts of it to be unconstitutional, which will bring the Supreme Court into the fray.)  Certainly, these forces and issues provide fodder for demagoguery as well as for honest (albeit heated) differences of opinion.

Added to these factors are a number of other forces.  A key one is the realignment of our major parties that began to emerge with a vengeance in the late 1960s in the wake of the civil rights legislation of that era.  Of course, the realignment ultimately included more than just a lot of White Southerners who abandoned the Democratic Party for the Republicans. That shift also hastened the abandonment of the GOP by many moderates and liberals who could trace their Republican roots to Lincoln and the first Roosevelt.  It also was reinforced by religious social conservatives seeking a political home in response to various elements of the reproductive changes cited above and some related “lifestyle” matters, including the gay rights movement (although people such as the Log Cabin Republicans and Ted Olson may be demonstrating that both the military service and marriage aspects of the gay rights movement are rapidly losing their salience for many Republican conservatives).

Ever more sophisticated gerrymandering efforts in recent decades in states across the county have added force to this realignment by increasing the number of districts for the national and state legislatures that are “safe” seats for Republicans and Democrats.  That gerrymandering has interacted with a primary system that gives de facto disproportionate influence to the most highly motivated voters in the primaries of both parties—people who tend to be more conservative or more liberal than their parties as a whole, with the result that the political middle has been severely weakened on both sides of the aisle.

Also taking a toll has been the steady increase in the use of negative political advertisements (because they have proven to be effective) in primaries and general elections.  Here in Arizona, for example, John McCain just buried a very conservative opponent in the Republican senate primary with negative political ads that were almost always full of distortions of his opponent’s record.  Both McCain and third party groups supporting him produced the avalanche of negative and misleading ads even though McCain was never really vulnerable to defeat because his opponent’s actual record and views were quite extreme in their own right.  According to news accounts of this year’s campaign season, similar huge negative ad efforts have been mounted across the country by candidates in both parties.  As long as negative advertising is regarded as effective and lots of third party groups as well as the candidates and the Republican Party and Democratic Party have the right to spend aggressively and in many cases anonymously (as a result of a recent Supreme Court ruling) in support for or against candidates, it is hard to see the negative advertising trend abating very much. 

Finally, some longstanding structural limitations exist in legislative arrangements at the national level and in a number of states.  You understandably singled out the U.S. Senate.  The realignment of the parties coupled with the 60 votes required for cloture and the eased rules on mounting (threatening) filibusters, has made almost every piece of consequential legislation as well as presidential judicial and political nominees vulnerable to blocking or delaying by the minority. I don’t know if you have looked at the trend line on the use of the filibuster (both real and the threat) since the 1960s.  It is a startling trend line.  It was only used a few times in each congress in the 1960s, mostly for civil rights legislation.  By the 2000s, the use/threat of the filibuster was the norm. (Ironically, back in the 1970s, the number of votes required for cloture actually dropped from 67 to 60, but the eased rules for using/threatening a filibuster trumped the drop in the number of required votes.)

At the state level, the requirement of a two-thirds majority to pass budgets and/or the ease in which propositions can get on the ballot to revise constitutions to lock in or prevent funding in various areas have brought incredible distortions in several states, including where I now live, Arizona.

When one steps back to take in a fuller range of forces at work (several have not been mentioned here), there is reason to believe that political leaders in the United States will have difficulty getting legislation passed, judicial nominees approved, etc. indefinitely.  Indeed, the many serious problems facing the county could lead things to worsen in the near term because divisions are so deep.

All in all, the United States and many other nations provide a lot of evidence on a daily basis that democracy is not a terrific form of government.  Indeed, as Churchill famously noted, the only thing in its favor is that it is the worst form of government except for all the others.  In that regard, possibly the best feature of democracy is that it is able to provide changes in leadership on a regular basis—even if one limited set of leaders is replaced by another limited set.   This is a strong point that should be of interest to the Chinese.  China might well have a fairly long period of relatively good government in many areas via its one-party system.  However, it carries a risk that some really bad leaders could take control for many year.  Presumably, a lot of people in China are well aware that they had a long period of that kind of government very recently.  That said, my guess is that, if Churchill could come back from the grave, he would make the point that democracies need to be well designed and modified as circumstances change.  He also might hold up the United States as an example of a country with a democratic system in need of revision owing to some serious shortcomings. 

If I were in a position to talk with a number of Chinese, I would go out of my way to concede that the United States has always had major shortcomings—and that there are many negative a well as many positive lessons that can be learned from current and past American experience.  My hope is that both China and India will be able to take at least two steps forward for every one step backward in many key areas over the course of this century in the political, economic, social, and environmental realms.  Indeed, to the extent that India is able to develop economically while retaining a functioning democracy, it may have more impact on China from a democratic/freedom of speech perspective than the experiences and exhortations of the United States and other western nations.  In any case, I have the same hope for the United States.  Moreover, I hope that most of the backward steps will not be too costly, although history suggests that some of them will be.

If we and they do make good progress, it is likely that we and they will have learned quite a bit from the other guy.  In any event, as has typically been the case, gains are likely to be hard won and will require a lot of hard work and sacrifice by many--often across several generations.  (As you know, it was nearly a century and a half between Abigail Adams’ 1776 letter to John asking him to “remember the ladies” during the deliberations of the Continental Congress and the ratification of the constitutional amendment in 1920 that gave women the right to vote.)

Here in the United States, I hope that we can find some ways to mitigate the polarization of the parties and to make it easier for simple majority rule to prevail in the U.S. Senate and in several state legislatures, rather than require super majorities to make so many decisions.  There are also some possible changes in procedures used to vote in primaries that might address the polarization problem in a meaningful way.  Changes on that front may be necessary for changes on the simple majority rule front in the Senate and on the state level.  Of course, if the Senate were to have another decade of stalling the people’s business, its members might become so unpopular that some significant internally generated reforms might be undertaken.  But, even with some improvement, democracy in America (similar to many other nations) is likely to remain pretty unpleasant in many respects.  If the Chinese are ever to adopt a democratic system, they will have to learn to live with a fair amount of coarse behavior in the electoral process and from their political leaders and fellow citizens on an ongoing basis.

By the way, as a slight digression, one of the things that is most worrisome to me is the (still) heavy militarization of the United States—something that has proven relatively easy to maintain with a “volunteer” military.  This past summer was the fortieth anniversary of my return from two tours of duty n Vietnam.  We haven’t seemed to learn much about avoiding wars in the interim, at great, great cost to so many people.  One potentially positive aspect of our current economically constrained circumstances is that it might lead to some reduction in our military spending and in our propensity to use force.  Of course, the opposite might prove to be true.  A period of extended economic duress could make the nation more prone to use military force in some situations.  I suspect that a fair number of people around the world hope for the first, but fear the second—including many folks in China.