Walking Straight Into the Echo Chamber, or Why Sarah Palin Gets Away With It

It’s too easy to anger the mind.

I was catching up on my growing pile of New Yorkers this weekend when I came across a book review by Elizabeth Kolbert that got me to thinking about Sarah Palin and her whole phony “death panels” meme, which she reiterated on Saturday on her Facebook page. (Screw the MSM!)

First thought: I can’t believe I just went to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page.

Second thought: Anger. People believe this?

The occasion for Palin’s screed, of course, was the House vote on the health care reform bill. “What’s in this bill?” she “wrote.” “The ‘death panel’ provision is in it.”

Needless to say, this is still not what end-of-life counseling means. It has never meant what Palin claims it means. “Death panels” is a nefarious phrase—willfully misleading, politically expedient, morally repugnant. It’s a retreat to the cowardice of empty polemic. In other words: vintage Palin.

But why do so many people believe her? Why does she continue to get away with it?

The idea of group polarization is nothing new, especially on the right—Richard Hofstadter published The Paranoid Style of American Politics in Harper’s 45 years ago this month—but the scale, variety, and extremity of the current conservative outrage over health care defies both logic and belief. Consider the insane rally Michelle Bachmann organized last Saturday:

Many in the crowd held signs demeaning President Obama – and their feelings were echoed on stage.

["Cringemaking" actor Jon] Voight invoked Obama’s now-strained relationship with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright in his speech, saying “the lies and deception are blatant… Maybe it was the 20 years of sub-conscious programming by Rev. Wright to damn America.”

One sign in the crowd read: “Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds,” a reference to theories of Jewish world dominance centered around the prominent Jewish family of Rothschilds.

(More lunacy here, if you can stomach it.)

There are two things that strike me as unusual about the vehemence of the right’s response to health care reform. My first question is about choice: Why does health care, of all policy debates, stir up such passions among conservatives all of a sudden? Health care is an important concern, to be sure, but the debate is more a matter of details than ideology. What does insurance have to do with ideology?

My second question is about tenor: Why the rage? This is perhaps the most mystifying aspect of the debate. Thousands of people are eager to march on Capitol Hill, angry as hell, carrying embarrassing, offensive signs and chanting nonsense, over the possibility of changes to abstruse policies they almost certainly don’t understand.

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t mean to assert a sense of elitism. Much of the debate about health care is way outside my realm of expertise, even my awareness. I’m a well-educated guy, I keep up with current events, and I have a strange interest in the minutia of many types of policy, but health care? Move along, nothing to see here. The details are so complex that the thought of jumping into health care policy gives me shivers.

Which is exactly the point.

Hardly anyone understands this stuff. Hardly anyone even understands the broad strokes. When people protest with signs saying “OBAMA AND HIS MARXIST BUDDIES ARE AFTER YOUR FREEDOM” or (my personal favorite) “Don’t Socialize My Medicare,” they’re not engaging in serious debate, or even serious rhetoric. They’ve been whipped up by the paranoid style of American politicians—politicians like Palin and Bachmann, and adjacent media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity—into actually believing things that are either easily falsifiable, meaningless, or both.

What I’m trying to say, and it’s complementary to the point Cass Sunstein was making in the book Kolbert reviewed, is that in choosing who to listen to we ultimately choose what to believe.

This seems like a nonsensical statement: How can we choose what to believe? We believe what we believe to be true; the truth is not elective. But to use the tea partiers as an example: By watching Fox News instead of CNN or MSNBC, by reading Newsmax instead of the New York Times, by going to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page instead of President Obama’s, the tea partiers and their ilk are choosing how to receive their information. They’ll either find things they agree with or they’ll disagree and move on. If they agree, they’ll continue watching, or reading, or listening. That choice will lead to myriad other choices, including, for some, the choice to spend their Saturday afternoon marching on Washington because they think the health care bill will lead to concentration camps.

Conor Friedersdof, one of the right’s more level-headed observers, asked yesterday:

As someone opposed to [the House's health care bill], is it too much to ask that my fellow critics stop using rhetoric so hyperbolic, ahistorical and obviously wrongheaded that they are bound to be deemed idiots by a sizable percentage of their audience, and probably everyone who doesn’t already agree with them?

The answer, I’m sad to say, is yes: It is too much to ask. That ship sailed—a long time ago, if Hofstadter had anything to say about it. What’s left for us to do is make convincing, evidence-based arguments for our own side—David Leonhardt explicated many of the reasons I’m not wild about the health care package, either, by the way!—and do it well enough, rhetorically and politically, to make Sarah Palin’s death panels look like the cartoons they are.

That won’t be easy, but then again, little is easier than anger.