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November, 1999

The Soundbite Society By Jeffrey Scheuer Four Walls, Eight Windows Publishers Click on the title to buy the book

The best kind of non-fiction book is the one that leaves you thinking: "Of course! That's right! Now I understand how it all works." But since those are rare, it's good that there is also value in the book that leaves you unconvinced but makes you actually stop to think about why you disagree.

The Sound Bite Society is valuable in this second way. To me, its central argument just does not hold up. (Even one of the book jacket blurbs, by Victor Navasky of The Nation, says "I'm not sure I buy" the main thesis of the book.) But I found thinking about the holes in---and implications of---Jeffrey Scheuer's argument more stimulating and enjoyable than simply nodding along with a number of other books. And in making his case he offers a number of incidental insights that are original and ring true.

Scheuer's intention is to connect two aspects of modern life that, taken one by one, are beyond dispute. One is television's increasing dominance of culture in general and political discourse in particular. Compared to a generation ago, politicians spend more time thinking about TV coverage; journalism is more talk- and TV-centric; TV ads matter more; and the general tone of political discussion is both choppier (because of ever shorter sound-bites) and more visually-oriented. The other trend is the modern conservative ascendancy, from Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 through the Republican victory in the House of Representatives in 1994---or as Scheuer puts it on the first page of the book, "the nearly complete collapse of American liberalism in the face of a resurgent New Right."

The assertion of sweeping conservative victory is what would leave some right-wingers unconvinced by Scheuer's book. After all, they would say, they've permanently lost the abortion battle; they've had to stomach a Democrat in the White House through the 1990s; they feel under siege on a variety of cultural fronts. But what Scheuer means by a conservative victory is the clear shift-to-the-right of the center of political argument. Everyone complains about today's health care system, but almost no one dares talk about the kind of government-run, single-payer approach prevalent in the rest of the world. Clinton has stayed in office largely through the Dick Morris strategy of pre-empting the most attractive parts of the Republican agenda. The labor movement is dead; "liberal" is still an embarrassing term; and there is surprisingly little political grumbling about today's Gilded Age-style economic inequalities.

The heart of Scheuer's book is his claim that these two trends---rise of TV, decline of the left---didn't just happen to occur at the same time. Instead, he argues that one caused the other. The more that political argument shifted to TV, the more it became simplified. And the more simplistic it became, the more the rules of argument favored the right wing.

Explaining exactly why this should be so is what takes Scheuer several hundred pages (of sometimes dense prose) in the book, and I won't try to sum it all up here. An important part of his contention is that something more than surface level political slogans---"No New Taxes!" "Bridge to the 21st Century"---is involved in the simplification contest. At a deeper level than that, Scheuer contends, the fundamental beliefs of conservatives are simpler than those of liberals.

To simplify his argument (hmm, let's call it "distilling" instead), if the conservative credo revolves around (a) every man for himself, and (b) people being individually responsible for their success or failure, rather than being part of a social network, then those ideas are easier for the mind to grasp than their liberal counterparts. Conservatives have an easy time arguing that regulation and government are per se bad, and that business, the military, and individual enterprise are always and everywhere good. Liberals, meanwhile, are left tugging their forelocks while trying to explain that the right balance between government and enterprise makes them both stronger, that the military is crucial but must be properly controlled, that human satisfaction involves the combination of individual and collective goals, and on and on in terms that TV makes seem mushy and

ridiculous.

When Scheuer is talking about TV, he's completely convincing, and capable of coming up with new insights into an often-explored topic. For instance, he explains how hard it is for TV news to show that one event is connected to another, in either a cause-and-effect or a historical sense, since every bit of news appears as its own random narrative. "What is simple, fragmented, short-term, or localized plays well on the tube; what is compound, integrated, long-term, or general does not." The point sounds familiar but he adds many new wrinkles.

But when it comes to his larger "television causes conservatism" thesis, I have three reasons for resisting.

First, as a procedural matter, it's always worth being suspicious of a claim that one's own side in a debate is hindered by some weird unfairness of the rules. (At the U.S. Open tennis tournament this summer, Yevgeny Kafelnikov took this approach in explaining why he'd been upset by the humbly-ranked Cedric Pioline in a big match: "It was very windy out there.") Conservatives would seem to have an easier time than liberals rolling out reasons why the rules of debate are stacked against them. Clinton is unnaturally gifted at TV-style emotive argument (as Reagan was before); the "media establishment" is a bunch of limousine liberals; the White House press corps always votes Democratic, and so on. When you have an ugly candidate, you complain that society places too much stress on looks.

Second, at the tactical level of policy argument, the stress on simplicity seems as much a headache for the right wing as for the left. (Granted, Scheuer is not talking about this tactical level, but it affects the plausibility of his larger case for the decline of the left.) Yes, some left-wing arguments are easier to ridicule than to explain within the confines of a bumper sticker or an eight-second sound bite. Affirmative action would be number one on the list.

But it's not as if it's always so easy for the conservatives. The next time there's a school shooting, it will be the right wingers and the NRA saying: "Wait a minute, don't rush to conclusions. The problem is not really the truck load of Uzis that the teenagers took into the building, it's much more complicated than that." Or the next time a corporation lays off 10,000 workers, while increasing dividends and paying a $5 million bonus to its CEO, someone like Michael Moore will have a much "simpler" argument to make---that this is wrong---than will the conservatives saying that this is really the best opportunity for everyone in the long run. The entire fuel for Ayn Rand's writing, and for her continued popularity, is the idea that in the normal rush of "simple" thinking, people don't see that selfishness is actually altruism, greed is actually generosity, etc. One hundred and fifty years ago, right-wingers were stuck trying to argue that the "simple" view of equal human dignity was not really right, when matched against all the complex nuances of the Southern plantation economy, states' rights, the "peculiar institution" of slavery, and so on. Thirty years ago, the simple argument was "Make love not war." The other side was left trying to explain its way out of the principle that you sometimes had to "destroy the village to save it."

Third, we have Scheuer's deepest contention, which may provoke the most useful self-examination by liberals. This, again, is his idea that in truly fundamental ways liberalism is more complicated than conservatism, and that therefore it is doomed as modern discourse becomes simpler and snappier.

Is it true that the basic liberal ideas---that people live for more than their own selves, and that they're embedded in a social network rather than existing as atoms---are too complicated to convey? The best counter-evidence would be the moments when simple American imagery has gotten across these liberal concepts. Yes, it's true that the most familiar illustrations are all out of date: Frank Capra movies in general, World War II foxhole images of shared sacrifice. But the currently best-known of Capra's movies, "It's a Wonderful Life," qualifies as contemporary, since it is run wall to wall each Christmas season. And other figures of the TV age, from Mario Cuomo in his prime to Stephen Spielberg in "Saving Private Ryan," provided very similar, modern, "liberal" images of human connection.

Although I leave the book doubting Scheuer's contention that liberalism is inherently more complex than conservatism, I'm glad to have been forced to think about it. I've thought even about that great store of convenient simple aphorisms, the Bible. The conservatives can turn to it for their simple message: An eye for an eye. And the liberals can come back with: the Golden Rule.