Andrés Ruiz
Sep 9, 2018 · 2 min read

I imagine Shapiro wasn’t deliberately trying to be dishonest. More than likely, he listened to the speech once, maybe took a few quick handwritten notes, then immediately set about writing his response and referring back to his memory or hasty notes and responding to what he remembers.

Unfortunately when you’re this knee-deep into the world of politics, the sheer systematic bias with which you filter everything you’re listening to effectively renders your memory of what just happened completely unreliable. Everything Obama says is being interpreted through the least charitable lens possible, attributing malice whenever possible, and simply opting for the worst explanation available any time he says something vague enough to require interpretation.

And the problem with this is not only the hive-mind thinking that prevents actual reasonable discourse from happening, but because there is no accountability, this kind of thing goes unchecked.

Unlike academia, you’re not writing for a grade, nor are you being as careful as possible in order to get an article to pass peer-review. If either of those were the case, Shapiro’s response would never have made it past the drafting phase of composition. He’d immediately be sent back to revise the entire thing with instructions to actually quote the speech, not reference his own memory of events.

But since the political world has standards less rigorous than even a high school composition class, we get this kind of shit. Your opponents will call you out on it, but neither you nor your readers read what the other side has to say, and even if you sometimes do, there’s no room for the kind of humility required to say “well, looks liked I fucked up, thanks for pointing this out, I’ll revise it accordingly.” This just isn’t the kind of game we play that values accuracy or charity. And that’s what’s so deppressing about politics. The game we play with the highest possible stakes in the real world also has the most embarrasingly lenient standards of play.

How do you go about elevating the quality of discourse in the political realm once it has reached these types of lows?

    Andrés Ruiz

    Written by

    MA, MSW, LCSW-A. Zig, Zag and a bottle of Zen.