Short, Obvious Point
Let me advise against watching too much cabel news. Logical loops like the following will get stuck in your head, you will feel compelled to say something about them, but in the end you'll feel stupid for having brought them up to yourself.
For example, it grates every time I hear an American politician preface every remark, from the profound to the banal, with 'America is the greatest and strongest nation on earth.'
This is clearly the sort of value judgment that even the hardest-nosed moral realist is going to realize does not have any obvious truth-conditions. Not having truth-conditions, it is not asserted as a claim or belief. It is rather a meat-headed sort of performative, intended (whether consciously or not) to signal tribal identification and standing.
Now, this wouldn't necessarily be a problem, were it treated as the mere formality that it is, on par with a hand-shake or a salute. However, it commonly occurs that if one goes on to a make an actually contentful statement critical of some aspect or other of American society, then this statement is regarded as inconsistent with the previous utterance. The charge is then voiced, 'So you don't believe that America is the greatest and strongest country on Earth?' But this is clearly ridiculous. It is like arguing that I could contradict your policy proposal by voicing a loud belch. Ironically, this is precisely what usually happens: since one can't respond to the charge with further assertions or claims, one can only respond by re-uttering the initial statement more loudly and more often. And thus, we descend to Walrus politics, and the project of deliberative democracy is all the worse for it. I would add finally that, if this analysis were only true to the utterance 'America is the greatest and strongest nation' then it might not be such a big deal after all. But I feel like I am making an obvious point when I say that most of our political discourse--especially as found in the most-consumed media formats like cable news--is much more like Walrus- rather than deliberative politics.
