Why I Am Bothered and Why I Bother

As an empirical matter, I think what has been happening for mid-term GOTV on Spanish-speaking media and in Black churches matters more than Jon Stewart's "Rally for Blandity" audience does (not least because his audience wouldn't watch his show if they actually bought the phony equivalence he was peddling at the rally itself), and I also think it matters in ways that few pollsters or punditocraps are accounting for. I am very worried about Tuesday because the stakes do indeed seem to me to be high given the well-exposed fragility of both houses of Congress as remotely functional institutions and given the actual extremity of many who may be elected to them, but I won't be shocked by pleasant surprises any more than I am willing to count on them. No, the reason I'm paying attention to the Jon Stewart thing is just because he's made an argument, I disagree with his argument, I do think arguments matter and are worth having, and in the bigger scheme of things my particular disagreement with Stewart points to what seems to me the rather urgent problem that liberals still don't make a positive factual case for what they are doing often enough, don't testify repeatedly to their factual accomplishments in plain terms and hence allow deceptive mass-mediated narratives to commandeer conventional perception, don't seem entirely comfortable making appeals to their sense of the facts at hand or calling out deceptions or errors as such even when this is called for, and retreat all too readily instead into discussions of tone and mood that better reflect the comfort level of a comparatively (or imaginary) privileged speaker than the actual stakes or facts at hand, and all this in ways that render liberalism much less effective than it really has to be to be equal to the real problems we face (anthropogenic climate change, neoliberal class war, high-tech militarism).