It was Rembrandt who gave us a provocative image - Aristotle in then modern dress contemplating Homer as a historical figure. One of the most interesting points of any moment in time is who they feel speaks to them with modern voice. Right now on PBS there is a program where Micheal Tilson Thomas makes Beethoven into Mahler, and his third symphony into Mahler's zeroth symphony. Because Beethoven is a modern to him, and therefore must have been Freudian and interior.

Kinsley, writing in the New York Times Book Review puts Aristotle in postmodern dress.

First he reminds people that Aristotle's question has two prongs -

We have to be careful about sour grapes. The current result of American democracy (though this may change on Tuesday) is Republican control of the presidency, both houses of Congress and (undeniably by now) the federal courts. And that, in turn, has produced policies that, unless I badly misjudge the demographics, most readers of The New York Times Book Review don’t care for: unjustified tax breaks for the rich, a miserable war in Iraq, unbelievable indifference to civil liberties (Secret prison camps? Torture?? America???), among other treats. But this doesn’t prove any flaws in democracy itself. Maybe it’s what people want.

Maybe good behavior in a Democracy is the kind of behavior that people in a Democracy reward, even if it is not the kind of behavior that is best for the Democracy in question.

He then turns to the question of "cheating":

It is considered tiresome to complain that the White House was stolen in 2000. In fact, the ultimate triumph of the George W. Bush forces in the 2000 dispute has been to stamp any discussion of that episode as bad sportsmanship and therefore, in a way, undemocratic itself. You lost fair and square: “Get over it,” as Justice Scalia advised.

Call me bitter: I am not over it and don’t want to be over it. I still find it shocking that democracy was so openly subverted, and even more shocking that so few others seem to share my shock. “Stolen”? That depends, as the man said, on what you mean by that word. Here is what I mean. First, a clear majority of those who voted in Florida intended to vote for Gore and walked out of the voting booth (or away from the mailbox) sincerely believing that they had done so.

I agree with Kinsley that Florida was stolen. In fact, various Republican operatives stipulated, on the record, to enough illegal actions to change the result of the election, specifically correcting absentee voter forms and absentee ballots. This leaves aside ballot design, hanging chads and legal votes for Albert Gore which were not counted (the write in over votes).

However, I disagree that what followed was "cheating". This may sound strange, but let me spin this out.

The point of an election is to produce a government. There are other reasons for a campaign, or for political theatre in general, but an election must be won by the people who can run the apparatus of government. This means that if the apparatus of government is corrupt, it must be won by corrupt people. In short: bad people get bad government out of Democracy, precisely because bad government is the only kind that can work. Elections often lead to goo men and women being unable to cope with the problems of, not merely a bad government, but a bad people. And Machiavelli's warnings about how good peoples will make good laws, while bad peoples will make bad laws - is still in force.

Bush won Florida primarily because his side was far better at handling the media system. The hysteria generated in small scale to paralyze government, confuse the public, and the coup de grace of having a Supreme court issue an unconstitutional decision - are all prototypes of how Bush governed in the aftermath. America wanted Rove's Republic, and got it in spades. Florida was illegal, but it was not cheating. This may sound wrong, but it is a state that exists in many parts of our society. Intentional fouls in basketball are one example - it is a foul, it is not cheating. This is because "cheating" means breaking the faith, not breaking the rules.

This may sound odd, but in fact, it is how we are as people. We have one sense for what is the ordinary course of business between people, and a completely different one that determines whether our expectations of fairness have been met.

Kinsley argues a point which is the converse - that it is possible to obey the rules, and still break faith:

The biggest flaw in our democracy is, as I say, the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty. Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don’t believe. There is no reward for logical consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending on the circumstances. Yet one minor exercise in disingenuousness can easily have a greater impact on an election than any number of crooked voting machines. And it seems to me, though I can’t prove it, that this problem is getting worse and worse.

Underneath Kinsley's long catalog of books, primarily from the left, which criticize the state of our Democracy, lie these two central questions. The first question, the intellectual one, is whether our current process is meeting some rigorous and external test of fairness, consistency or reason. Whether one is talking, as Kinsley does, of our discourse, or about constitutional mechanisms, or voting machines - these are all the same question. Merely the discussion is over which standard what part of the process is to be held to.

It isn't even unlikely for all of them to be right. Kinsley's critic of spin and PR is certainly easy enough to document - the creation of plausible lies which are repeated endlessly is the half of the business of "response" and "message" in politics. The other is the creation of stories which make the other sides message and response untenable. Implausible is much harder. It is easier to get people to believe that something should not have been said, than to get them to disbelieve it. An example of this is: "It's outrageous for anyone to claim that our troops aren't winning the ground war in Iraq."

However this doesn't mean that the other problems in the various books he talks about aren't true as well. In fact, if intellectual dishonesty is acceptable, it makes it easier to believe that you can't hold the same election once, that is, you will get different results depending on how you count the votes, and the voting counting process doesn't conform to the legal process mandated for them. It also makes it easier to believe that political interests are working to corrupt the process of registering voters, granting access to balloting and counting the votes on the ballots.

But the more interesting question is the one that Kinsley asks earlier - what if this is what people want? What if intellectual dishonesty in the media system is what people want. It is no less probable than bad policy being what people want in the democratic polity. Particularly if they are the Pauls that various Peters are being robbed to pay.

- - -

So do people want a public discourse that is dishonest?

In the sense that Kinsley thinks of public discourse, yes, they do. This is because there are several dichotomies between inner and outer which our present discourse allows us to maintain.

The first is the dichotomy between what we feel right now and what we believe. In a society where plans take a very long time to rise and fall, and there is no general belief in a divine providence, there is, therefore, a need to be able to say one thing, believe a second thing, but be fixed on a course of action which is a third thing. A candidate must always say he believes he is going to win, even though every candidate in a meaningful election has moments where he is sure he is not going to win.

This point also underlines that mere intellectual integrity - that is believing the same thing on the inside as on the outside - is over-rated. There are plenty of people who can be dredged up who truly believe some useful idiocy. In fact, a good deal of the right wing noise machine is just this - equipping the insane to chant the impossible. See "economic libertarianism" and "Intelligent design" for copious examples.

The second reason that people want an intellectually dishonest public discourse is that it allows them to consume it, rather than be subjected to it. What this means is that people don't want information, but confirmation. They don't want to make new decisions, but protect the decisions they have already made. The reason people consume plausible lies, is because they feel the cost of this is less than rearranging their lives each time new information comes out.

Consider if you will, global warming denial. The cost of replacing the internal combustion engine economy as we know it is substantial. Thus there is an economic bayesian logic going on here - people will only believe something when they believe that the cost for not believing it is higher than the cost for believing it. This is why the Y2K bug exploded into business consciousness, only when it seemed that the problem was going to be right there, on next year's balance sheet, was something done. This is particularly important because people have a reasonably good idea of what their capital is, and where their livelihood comes from.

However, this is a psychic, not merely self-interested, point.

I say this because the media stream pours down on top of us. As the modern mechanized system punctured the Victorian way of being in a variety of ways, and the art of the early 20th century reflects this - the post-war era saw media become omnipresent in a manner that it had not been before. At a certain point, people formed a substantial fraction of their sense of reality and normality from moving images that were from far away.

The shift from a media that portrays itself as an attempt to present a synoptic view, to a variety of medias, is representative of the shift from media imposing itself on the viewer, to the viewer imposing himself on the media. The power has shifted from producers to consumers.

This feature is generally negative. The reason the old line media - such as newspaper reporting and television reporting, is openly and actively courting the conservative world view - even when that world view requires them to directly lie to the public, repeatedly and crassly - is that conservative media is the organized media stream that they have to compete with - there is, for all intents and purposes nothing on television as far to the left as Fox News is to the right - and because that is where the marginal viewers are.

The consumer view of media does more than simply select for the media it likes, it attacks the media it does not like. This game is now so pervasive that even people who do not like it, must participate in it. Everyone works the refs - that is, everyone does it, so it is no longer "cheating" even if it is against the rules.

These two aspects combine into what there is a demand for - not information about the world, but training to impose and assert your world view on the others around you. Training videos on talking points, stance and attitude. Ammunition to win the battle of the water cooler.

The third reason we want an intellectually dishonest system of public discourse is more pernicious, that is, it means that the results of the present fight will not come back to haunt us in later fights. Each argument starts fresh with a fresh search for new first principles that just happen to be tantamount to assuming our own self-interests.

The solutions to these realities will not be found in changing the electoral college to a popular vote, nor will they be found in changing the rules of discourse, since those rules will be betrayed instantly even if we could enforce them. They are not going to be found in paper ballots, internet blogging or any other systematic change to the present market place of ideas. It is what people are buying, not how they are buying it, which is fundamentally at issue.

The solution to this, to use the answer implied in Aristotle, is reality. Unreality of court flourishes on credit from others. Court systems invariably suck more money in than they pour out, or they rob from another, larger, court system. When this process stops, the court system unravels over the course of a decade or so, and there is some kind of reformation, restoration or revolution. People stop worrying about convincing other people of half truth, and begin being desperate for truth itself.