Muzzled (30 page)

My apologies to my liberal friends, but imposing heavy restrictions on the money flowing into political races to level the playing field may be a good idea—but here is a better idea. Why not encourage more frank and open discussion and trust Americans to identify the kind of talk that actually gets us
somewhere? History shows that Americans trust one another when it comes to free speech. Across political lines we stand in fierce defense of that fundamental right. Even if we banned all corporate and union money from politics, we’d still have a 24-7 political commentary machine being used by liberals and conservatives as an echo chamber to issue marching orders for their separate and narrow-minded political orthodoxies.

At the extremes of speech, most Americans are comfortable knowing that a racist can say whatever he or she wants. Most Americans disagree with racists; their constituency is marginalized. In the marketplace of ideas, they lose. So how big a threat do they pose? Yet in our current political dialogue, there is a tremendous amount of energy expended by the far ends of the political spectrum—the right wing and the left wing—in an effort to convince themselves that their ideological opponents are extremists who must be not only shunned but also silenced. For them, faith in free speech is only pure for people who agree with them.

To them, the fight over campaign finance is just another battleground where the Far Left and the Far Right are seeking advantage for themselves. It is impolitic to say this, but I am less worried about overturned campaign finance laws than I am about maintaining the vitality of our political conversations in the middle ground occupied by most Americans. In that large space—remember, there are more independent voters in America than either Democrats or Republicans—there is a hunger for a place to find rational discourse where people can agree, disagree, learn, and listen. Campaign finance laws will not help the American people to take the risk to speak honestly and openly to one another.

That is why I am not that worried about our overturned
campaign finance laws. Both sides can raise obscene amounts of money. Both sides have the support of corporations, unions, the wealthy, and manic individuals tweeting and blogging frightening messages about the other side in order to generate more money. Yes, there may be some differential in spending, with conservatives perhaps getting the better of the money wars. But the difference is not so vast that the liberal view is eclipsed in paid advertising or the number of phone banks and money paid to consultants and preachers. President Obama, a Democrat, broke all fund-raising records. More to the point, for every campaign finance law enacted there will be ingenious new ways found to get around it. That is why political consultants and lawyers get paid the big bucks. That is why so much of the conversation about campaign finance as a free-speech issue feels like a petty feud, a wheel-spinning exercise in which both sides are at their giddiest when it is their turn to demonize their opponent. On one side, the public is frightened into believing that those trying to rein in corporate spending are destroying free speech. On the other side, the public is warned that those who support the unregulated flow of money in politics are opening the door to shadowy, nefarious international groups seeking to control our national and local elections. Really?

The whole point of dissent and the American experience is that Americans are not afraid of other views. We do not run from difference of opinion. It is our national sunshine. Our greatest alarm has to come when we encounter people who are unwilling to engage and join the debate in good faith.

Unfortunately, that realization dawned on many after a terrible, violent tragedy.

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was hosting a Saturday-morning
open house for her constituents in a Tucson, Arizona, strip mall when a young man, Jared Lee Loughner, shot her in the head at point-blank range. She survived, but six others died as Loughner continued his shooting spree. Eighteen more were injured.

Given the vitriolic speech that characterized the political debate over immigration in Arizona at the time, there was initial speculation that Loughner had been incited by rabid right-wing rhetoric. Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County, said the constant fury at immigrants, legal and illegal, made Tucson the capital of “the anger, the hatred and the bigotry that goes on in this country.” Investigators found that Loughner regularly read a Web site with antigovernment tirades. The
New York Times
reported on its front page, “Regardless of what led to the episode, it quickly focused attention on the degree to which inflammatory language, threats and implicit instigations to violence have become a steady undercurrent in the nation’s political culture.”

The words and actions of conservative talk-show hosts, politicians, and Web sites came under intense scrutiny as reporters looked for evidence of their role in the attack. Analysts noted that Sarah Palin, the former vice presidential candidate, had used the symbol of a gun’s crosshairs to highlight Giffords’s congressional district as a target for a Republican takeover and defeat of the Democrat. Had that been a factor in Loughner’s thinking?

The
New York Times
editorial board wrote a few days after the attack that it was “facile” and wrong to blame conservatives and Republicans for the violence. But the paper concluded, “It is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the
gale of anger that produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the Right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants or welfare recipients or bureaucrats. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.”

Further out on the Left, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann argued that it did not matter if Loughner was found to be mentally ill and unaware that he was shooting a political leader. The crime was a product of the times. “Assume the details are coincidence. The violence is not. The rhetoric has devolved and descended past the ugly and past the threatening and past the fantastic and into the imminently murderous.”

Conservative talk-show hosts, sensing they were being blamed for the shootings, responded defiantly. Their indignation rose when it became clear that there was no explicit link between Loughner and right-wing groups or subversive tracts of the kind that had inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Rush Limbaugh castigated liberals for trying to benefit from the tragedy by using it as a reason to “regulate out of business their political opponents.” Sarah Palin, who had become a leader in the strongly anti-immigrant Tea Party, issued a statement that argued against any tenuous ties being manufactured by the left wing to tie right-wing vitriol to the attack. “Acts of monstrosity stand on their own,” she said. “They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio … not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their first amendment rights at campaign rallies.”

The frightening shooting did cause a pause in the normal
tit-for-tat bickering between Republicans and Democrats in Washington. Congressmen on both sides of the aisle pledged to be more civil in their tone and language. Some members of Congress broke from the usual seating pattern for the State of the Union address, crossing party lines in a show of national unity. And President Obama, in a speech in Arizona after the tragedy, cautioned against using the tragic situation to further polarize the national debate: “But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized—at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do—it is important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”

The media coverage of the Tucson shooting was much more focused on possible ties to rhetoric than it was on lax gun control or inadequate treatment for people with mental illness. Somehow those relevant issues proved to be too loaded for debate, even though they are obviously at the center of the equation.

Most Americans did welcome the opportunity to reassess the nature of American political discourse, especially the extreme, circus-barker versions that attract so much attention. It was a wake-up call. As much as we might loathe an individual politician, all political parties agree that it is wrong to kill.

Yet even that kind of speech cannot be banned in America. After they bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, the militia groups remained free to circulate their anti-Semitic, racist screeds about conspiracies. Until he starts sending actual bombs in the mail, the Unabomber is free to post his bizarre manifesto on the Internet. Free speech gives him that right. Pundits like Palin, Ed Schultz, Glenn Beck, Michael
Savage, Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, and those writing on DailyKos and HuffPo and in publications much further to the Left or Right have the right to say and write almost anything. Their high-voltage provocations and fearmongering are a daily staple of Web sites, American talk radio, and prime-time cable news shows.

Why are such shows so shrill? Why are they so popular? Why is their language so unforgiving? Why do bellicose hosts regularly invoke military jargon about targeted opponents, political battlefields, and tactical opposition research? How can a Tea Party candidate like Nevada’s Sharron Angle think that it is acceptable to suggest fixing Washington through “Second Amendment remedies”?

The Tucson shootings are a reminder of what we cannot tolerate in our society. It is not relevant what motivated Loughner. The point is that Loughner’s bloody assault was a reminder that for all of the bluster and bravado of American politics, it is still based on good and decent people engaging one another in conversation and debate, not violence and demonization. What we need is more honest, genuine debate. We need to talk to one another, not at one another.

I don’t blame Rush or Olbermann for the events in Tucson. But when it comes to Rush, why is it that the king of the airwaves thinks it is a wimpy idea to encourage more civil discourse? He is a leader in the media industry, and his angry, defensive posture leads his audience to react similarly, rather than reaching for some common ground. Why can’t we act more responsibly? Can those who help shape public opinion not see that vitriolic talk leads us into a sea of bitterness, with no safe harbor for rational debate?

The answer is plain and simple. The media industry cannot
afford to stop and look at itself. Its members are scared. Limbaugh admitted to worrying after Tucson that there are people waiting for an excuse to “regulate out of business their political opponents.” But adverse reactions are not about removing political opponents. Commentary based on envy, anger, resentful mocking, and intolerance play to our late-night cravings but give us only empty calories. The talk-show crowd fears that Americans are sick and tired of lowest-common-denominator talk that yields no upside except for the big paychecks of those who produce it.

The power of the Tucson tragedy was not that it imposed self-censorship on our ideas. It did not. Our freedom of speech remains vibrant, strong, and intact. The real power of that dark winter day in the desert was the suggestion that we must modify our behavior to increase our openness to one another, to carry on a civil conversation, and to listen respectfully to one another’s ideas.

To quote President Obama in his speech in the aftermath of Tucson, a speech that was overwhelmingly heard as positive by the American people, on the Left and the Right,

I
T HAPPENS ALL THE TIME.

In the middle of a political fight, I’ll ask people where they get their news. What is the basis of their argument? The reply is the equivalent of brain mapping. The liberals say the
New York Times
, Jon Stewart, the Huffington Post, and NPR. The conservatives say Fox News, the
Wall Street Journal
, Rush and Sean on the radio, the Drudge Report, and Powerline.com.

Left wing or right wing, they are revealing their politics by announcing the locales they gravitate toward for news. And most of the time they admit those ideologically aligned outlets are their only sources of news.

The biggest critics of Fox admit they never watch the news channel. Most of NPR’s loudest critics concede they don’t listen to it. I’ve lived on both sides of the divide. For ten years NPR and Fox simultaneously paid me to speak to their distinct audiences. When I made personal appearances for speeches in front of the different camps, I got used to people asking me,
“Why do you work for the other guys?” For conservatives it was, “Why don’t you leave NPR and work full-time for Fox?” And for liberals it was, “Why do you have to work for Fox?”

When people come up to say hello to me at basketball games or airports, most introduce themselves by first telling me they are liberal or conservative. Only then do they say it is a pleasure to meet me, although a good number quickly add that they don’t agree with all I have to say. All this happens before they tell me their names. When people announcing differing ideological credentials come over within seconds of each other, I find myself wondering what would happen if these people ever broke out of their tight cocoons in their respective liberal and conservative media worlds and met each other.