Author: Right wing intellectuals make wishful thinking sound rational Mike Aivaz and Nick Juliano

Published: Tuesday February 19, 2008



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Print This Email This Prominent Freethinker warns of America's 'flight from reason' Susan Jacoby, a prominent intellectual who worries about the growing disregard for reason in American political debates, says the dumbing down of political discourse is affecting how citizens choose their leaders and is letting candidates manipulate their audience. "Without a base of knowledge of how things are you can't really have a reasonable talk about how things ought to be," Jacoby recently told PBS's Bill Moyers. "In other words, you can say, 'Oh, we don't want a [healthcare] program which will prevent people from choosing their own doctors.' Well, are we able to choose our own doctors? I'm not. I have to choose within a managed care network." Jacoby says political culture should not be viewed separately from the culture at large. Rather politics is an extension of everything else that is happening in the country. She credited former President Franklin D. Roosevelt with convincing a reluctant country to enter World War II by trying to educate, rather than manipulate them. "It's been forgotten now in the mythology of World War II that even when the Nazis invaded Poland and attacked England, overwhelming majority of Americans were opposed to American involvement in the war," she said. "The reason they came around is not just Pearl Harbor. Franklin D. Roosevelt spent several years trying to educate a resistant public about the stake that America had in the future of Europe. The renewal of the draft in 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, in the summer of 1941, passed by one vote. Imagine what would have happened if the Army had been disbanded, if FDR had not made all those educational efforts, where we would have been six months later when Pearl Harbor was attacked." She accused Bill Clinton and George W. Bush of abandoning that educational spirit. In the case of the current president, she said he capitalized on the country's post-9/11 desire for revenge to invade Iraq. "To be non-partisan about it, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are two of the biggest failures as teachers in chief of any presidents we've ever had," she said. "Bush at foreign policy obviously. It's great to bring people along with you when everybody's in favor of the war as they were in 2003 'cause there was this desire to strike back at somebody, anyone, for 9/11. So Bush just said, 'Oh, yeah. Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.' And people believed it." The problem of American irrationality, she said, is compounded by right-wing thinkers who have pinned the label of "intellectual" purely on liberal ideas, allowing them to make their own fantasies seem rational. "For example, when you will talk to right-wing intellectuals about the Iraq war-- it doesn't matter that it hasn't worked out to them. They still think it was right. And the evidence of how it got started, how it got started on false pretenses and so on, it doesn't matter to them," she said. "They make wishful thinking sound rational. It's the same thing now when we're hearing that the, quote, surge is working. Well, the surge is working as long as we have those troops there. But when anybody says to me in the right-wing intellectuals that the surge is working-- it's working. There are fewer people being killed in suicide bombings every day because we have a lot more young soldiers there in harm's way than there were six months ago. How many people were killed in suicide bombings in Baghdad before America entered the war? I believe the answer is none. So what they're doing is comparing, you know, apples and oranges. The left-- on the other hand-- to be intellectual is not necessarily to be rational. And there are many-- there are many anti-rational intellectuals." The following video is from PBS's Bill Moyers Journal, broadcast on February 15, 2008



