by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n We live in an age of falsity, in which words have lost their meanings and concepts are reinvented as the situation demands. The United States is in a jobless recovery \u2014 even if that phrase largely disappeared from the American lexicon about 2004. Good news somehow must follow from a rising unemployment rate, which itself underrepresents the actual percentage of Americans long out of work.<\/p>\n At the same time, we are supposed to be relieved that we are in a contracting expansion, where fewer goods and services are proof of a resilient economy. In our debt-ridden revival, borrowing $1 trillion each year is evidence that we don\u2019t have a spending problem.<\/p>\n If an unemployment rate of 7.9 percent and the economy shrinking by 0.01 percent a year \u2014 with a fifth consecutive $1 trillion annual deficit \u2014 are indicators of recovery, what would the old 5 percent unemployment, 4 percent growth in GDP, and $300 billion annual deficits mean? Or do the meaning of words and the nature of \u201cfacts\u201d depend on who is in the White House at the time, or rather on whether the president is trying to make us more equal or to enrich the 1 percent?<\/p>\n At key points, whole controversies vanish without a trace. Suddenly, about four years ago, Guantanamo was no longer a gulag. Then it became no longer much of anything \u2014 in the manner that renditions, preventive detention, tribunals, and drone assassinations likewise disappeared from public discourse even as they became institutionalized.<\/p>\n We can scarcely remember now that the country tore itself apart over the waterboarding of three confessed terrorists, as it snoozes through its government blowing apart 2,500 suspected terrorists \u2014 and anyone caught in their general vicinity when the drone missiles hit. I think the logic must have been that a reactionary George Bush wished to waterboard a few confessed terrorists more just to bend the law than to derive any information that might save Americans \u2014 whereas Barack Obama actually reads the great ethical philosophers as he \u201creluctantly\u201d signs off on targeted assassinations that have no doubt saved more people than he ordered killed. And we have to understand that if we were to object to such a kill tally, we would thereby be endangering the greater good to come at home over bothersome details abroad.<\/p>\n We have only a faint memory of promises of no more lobbyists in government, no more revolving doors, a new civility, a new transparency, and a new bipartisanship. Do we now even remember all those slogans that went up on the barnyard wall, and have since been painted over? When the president lectured us that the captains of Wall Street were not to get bonuses for snagging federal bailouts, he was not speaking of his future secretary of the Treasury, a progressive who does what must be done for the people.<\/p>\n An ambassador and three other Americans were murdered, ostensibly because of an anti-Muslim video whose producer still languishes in jail in California. The party line was that Libyan demonstrators, irate over that Internet production and out for a walk one evening, brought along their GPS-guided mortars and machine guns to spice up a demonstration at our consulate. Things can always get out of hand, when a right-wing chauvinist makes a hurtful video.<\/p>\n In this age of fakery, what is legitimate dissent? Is it Hillary Clinton attacking an administration in 2003 (\u201cI\u2019m sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you\u2019re not patriotic. . . . We have the right to debate and disagree with any administration\u201d) or Hillary Clinton nine years later, as an administration insider, turning on her interrogators in an effort to deflect inquiry (e.g., \u201cWas it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they\u2019d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?\u201d)?<\/p>\n Al Qaeda must be imploding, as its new profile from Libya to Mali is proof of its overstretched presence. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular; jihad is a personal spiritual journey; we ordered an overseas contingency operation to get bin Laden, who had been responsible for some man-caused disasters, and one of whose acolytes waged workplace violence that threatened our diversity programs. After Chuck Hagel forgot what he had said, what the president had said, and what his inquisitors had said, we knew he would be confirmed as defense secretary. All these are mere bothersome details that should not impede the general truth that the United States is now on the right side of history, at home and abroad.<\/p>\n Suddenly our troubles are blamed on those now known as the 1 percent, who make more than the new moral cutoff line of $250,000 per year. These public enemies are fat cats and they use corporate jets. Worse, they don\u2019t build their own businesses, and they profit when it is no longer time to. They make money way beyond the point where they should have stopped, they don\u2019t spread their wealth, and they don\u2019t pay their fair share. Sometimes we would almost imagine that they worked for Citigroup, vacationed at Martha\u2019s Vineyard, or used insiders to cash in on cattle speculations. Millionaires are rightly grouped with billionaires, who have 1,000 times the money, but they are not the same as thousandaires, who have one-1,000th the money.<\/p>\n Whether the president is responsible for the economy depends on the circumstances. Bush did nothing to improve the economy between 2001 and September 2008. But he is responsible for the bad economy from September 2008 to January 2013. Neither house of Congress has any real responsibility for our economic fate, so between 2007 and 2011 both were irrelevant. But one house of Congress does sometimes. So starting in 2011 the House of Representatives in two years caused the mess we\u2019re in now, in a way that the Senate and House had not in the four previous years.<\/p>\n Golfing used to be proof of plutocratic remoteness and idle folly, where rich guys dress up in funny clothes and putter about. Now it is a green sort of downtime for our commander-in-chief to unwind in the best tradition of Dwight Eisenhower. Thanks to Barack Obama, golf is now finally recognized as politically correct recreation. The president shoots guns \u201call the time\u201d; we know that because the White House both released one picture of him with a gun and earmuffs, and ridiculed those who thought the occasion unique rather than ordinary.<\/p>\n When watching Al Gore plug his latest alarmist book to progressive interviewers, I can no longer remember whether he is supposed to be a selfless public intellectual who, at enormous financial risk, started a new progressive television channel to promulgate long-needed awareness about politics and the environment, or whether as a rank speculator he scrambled to push through a secretive deal to sell his $100 million inflated interest in that channel to an anti-Semitic, anti-Western news conglomerate, run by an authoritarian Middle East dictator laden with oil-cartel profits \u2014 right before new higher capital-gains taxes might lessen his take by 5 or 6 percent. There are apparently two sorts of wealthy people: those on the left who reluctantly make big money and seek hyper-profits and tax avoidance as means to a noble social end, and those on the right who eagerly seek needless profits and tax reduction to enrich themselves and not society.<\/p>\n The world\u2019s premier cyclist says that he was lying about his doping for most of his career, when it was in his interest to fabricate, but that he is no longer lying now that it is even more in his interest to come clean. The hottest singer in popular culture now confesses, after a long silence, that she faked singing \u201cThe Star Spangled Banner\u201d at the Inauguration \u2014 that she lip-synched not a ballad at a football game, but the National Anthem at the president\u2019s inauguration. And she faked it for our sake, she says, out of a sense of professionalism. Both believe that once they crossed the threshold of fame, the prosaic protocols no longer applied to them.<\/p>\n In the tradition of heroic Notre Dame football stars, we are moved by a collegiate football standout sharing his lamentations about a dying girlfriend on the eve of his Big Game \u2014 except that the story is so contorted and fanciful that most are more confused by the truth than they were by the lie. To reinforce the prevailing narrative of race and class in America, we want to believe that Trayvon Martin \u2014 no doubt innocently walking home from the store \u2014 was gunned down by a racist redneck vigilante, and so we must invent a new term to describe his shooter, \u201cwhite Hispanic,\u201d as our media endlessly air a doctored telephone transmission to produce the desired result. If the therapeutic culture wants something to be true, then why should inconvenient things stand in the way of what should have happened?<\/p>\n \u201cImpartial moderators\u201d in the media used to go through the motions of declaring that their intertwined Washington marriages or their prior partisan employment did not affect their objectivity; now they don\u2019t even make the effort. If in 2008 Gwen Ifill had a hagiography coming out about candidate Barack Obama, as she was pegged to moderate the vice-presidential debate, by 2012 Candy Crowley had no inhibitions about fact-checking Mitt Romney \u2014 and only Mitt Romney \u2014 in the middle of his answers, even though her interruption and editorializing were less factually accurate than the statements by the object of her scrutiny. Again, there are no rules\u00a0per se<\/em>; the question is who has good intentions and who is without them. The facts follow accordingly.<\/p>\n Even on the rare occasions when public figures are caught, doublespeak follows. \u201cI accept full responsibility\u201d is the new nothing sentence of contrition, rarely to be followed up by resignation or demotion in rank and pay. \u201cWe will not rest until the guilty parties are brought to justice\u201d means even less \u2014 nothing much other than to remind us that after six months the latest terrorist killing will be mostly forgotten. \u201cMy actions were entirely inappropriate\u201d is a banality offered as verbal penance in order to continue, rather than end, a career. Plagiarism \u2014 ask Maureen Dowd or Fareed Zakaria \u2014 is an archaic word for a little borrowing, an e-mail confusion, an overzealous research assistant, the complexities of Microsoft Word, or a right-wing gotcha game. To preach against hubris, one must practice hubris.<\/p>\n Why do we now live in an age of so many meaningless things?<\/p>\n Our elites in academia and the media have some culpability. Thirty years of nihilist postmodern relativism \u2014 no absolute truth, just constructs based on race, class, and gender privilege \u2014 have finally filtered down to the popular culture. An obsession with celebrity also has meant that we increasingly worship the antics of the wealthy and famous and decreasingly worry what they had to do to obtain or maintain both.<\/p>\n In the new progressive age, the exalted ends of equality sometimes require that the means of achieving a place on the public stage should remain largely unexamined. If there is no consistency, no transparency, no absolute standard, then it is because the task of fairness is hard and occasionally requires extraordinary sacrifices for the greater good. And to the degree that someone is deemed cool, then cool trumps most everything else: Google executives don\u2019t outsource. Rappers are not misogynists. Green apostles don\u2019t have conflicts of interest. And men in camouflage with assault weapons don\u2019t just kill less than 1 percent of those Americans lost each year to gun violence, but account for all sorts of vastly more evil things that we cannot even begin to describe.<\/p>\n \u00a92013 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online We live in an age of falsity, in which words have lost their meanings and concepts are reinvented as the situation demands. The United States is in a jobless recovery \u2014 even if that phrase largely disappeared from the American lexicon about 2004. Good news somehow must follow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11],"tags":[161,12,178,105,73,1043,162,180,1052,67],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-5F","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":18,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/angry-reader-6-responds-to-bush-reconsidered\/","url_meta":{"origin":351,"position":0},"title":"Angry Reader #6 Responds to “Bush Reconsidered”","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 4, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Angry Reader #6 wrote: \u201cVDH Trash\u201d VDH do you actually believe\u00a0this? I have to doubt your sanity. So many examples but I think the breezy dismissal of Iraq, not mentioning torture, the health of the economy circa 2009 and the Bush tax cuts relationship to the deficits are the real\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":742,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-face-of-things-to-come\/","url_meta":{"origin":351,"position":1},"title":"The Face of Things to Come","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 20, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Campaign Rhetoric The campaign contour is pretty clear: The Obama reelection team will not make the case for the advantages and popularity of Obamacare, for the Chuian advantages of $4-a-gallon gas, for the dynamism of a 1.7 percent GDP growth rate, for the stimulatory\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11989,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumped-out\/","url_meta":{"origin":351,"position":2},"title":"Trumped Out?","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 17, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The new post-Mueller media narrative is \u201cweariness\u201d and \u201cexhaustion\u201d with President Trump\u2019s tweets, his cul de sac Sharpie controversy, his ideas about buying Greenland, his unorthodox art-of-the-deal foreign policy that resulted in a plan to talk to Taliban leaders in the United States, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11472,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/midterm-optics-are-bad-for-progressives\/","url_meta":{"origin":351,"position":3},"title":"Midterm Optics Are Bad for Progressives","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 25, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review For progressives, the looming midterm elections apparently should not hinge on a booming economy, a near-record-low unemployment rate, a strong stock market, and unprecedented energy production. Instead, progressives hope that race and gender questions overshadow pocketbook issues. The media are fixated on another caravan\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Midterm"","block_context":{"text":"Midterm","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/midterm\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11910,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-economy-father-of-us-all\/","url_meta":{"origin":351,"position":4},"title":"The Economy, Father of Us All","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 24, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Nationals Review Each week we are warned of a recession. And each week the economic news \u201cunexpectedly\u201d and \u201csurprisingly\u201d improves or stays steady \u2014 in ways well aside from the staples of continued near-record-low peacetime unemployment (3.8 percent), near-record-low minority unemployment, booming annualized GDP (3.1 percent),\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":645,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/biden-unbound\/","url_meta":{"origin":351,"position":5},"title":"Biden Unbound","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Joe Biden is at it again, accusing the president\u2019s opponents of hoping for bad news and the Republicans in particular of rooting for dismal economic reports, by virtue of opposing legislation of the sort they supposedly earlier would have supported. I am sure, as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5715,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions\/5715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}