Pundit Shamanism

One small not on the press and pundits: part of their pseudoscience of political strategy is to assign causes to events. They do this with a disregard for analysis that amounts to superstition. Hillary won last night because of her 3-am ad, because of Obama’s negative press coverage, and so on. They quickly forget that Obama eliminated large Clinton leads in Ohio and Texas to make these states closer than they were supposed to be. We are meant to interpret a shrinking of Clinton support as a strategic victory. Even barring these inconvenient facts, there is simply no way to know how effective certain strategies are. The assignment of causes is merely free association that flatters the notions of “strategy” and the role of the press in determining elections. It’s the same sort of free association that underlies the art of prophecy in less intellectualized societies–the reading of birds or entrails. These superstitions have merely been cloaked in enlightenment trappings–polling, “strategy”, and other pseudosciences. Finally, the machinery that drives all of this is the distinctly American value of nihilistic Machievellianism: nothing is good or bad, but power makes it so. And so the pundits read their tea-leaves in the service of the mysterious art of power-acquisition; deep down even the pundits know that what they do has no predictive power, that is really an excited ritual dance around the idol of the deity Power, who requires that intellect be sacrificed at her altar.

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