Nostalgia for answers

Last night, I was reflecting on Breitbart article and its account of contemporary political truth-blurring, where every fact is subject to reinterpretation and manipulation by people like Breitbart. In the current media climate, where journalistic authority is undercut by blogs, tweets, and other forms of opinion, a relatively straightforward fact--black congressmen being called racial slurs--can be twisted into a conspiracy against the people making the slurs. Within this context, every truth claim is subordinated to the spin or effect of the truth claim in a political game. Every truth claim, then, is presumed to function as some sort of surface "play," with the real story endlessly receding--into, perhaps, the clandestine realm of conspirators, though the analogy is not exact. At the same time, though, some version of conspiracy theory also functions nostalgically, manifesting a cultural desire for a more stable symbolic order. Conspiracy thinking is both part of the muddling and a way out of the muddling.

This morning, the Times published this, in an article asserting the continued presence of the sixties in contemporary politics:

On a deeper level, though, [the Rand Paul controversy around civil rights and the Blumenthal controversy around Vietnam service] probably has as much to do with our basic human tendency toward moral clarity. As much as conservatives may view [the sixties] as the crucible of moral relativism and the beginning of a breakdown in established social order, there remains something powerfully attractive about the binary, simplistic nature of it all, the idea that one could easily distinguish whether he was for war or against, in favor of equality or opposed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/politics/26bai.html

I'm not sure that this claim holds up--one could argue equally that we're still working within the rhetorical framework established by Reagan and other conservatives in the eighties, a framework that explicitly responded to the sixties, and that the continued relevance of Vietnam results from the shadow it continues to cast over contemporary politics. But I do think that Bai is on to something in identifying a longing for clarity in the continual reemergence of sixties politics.