There are a few things we can say definitively about the mainstream media. One is that they tend to latch onto the most superficial issues imaginable and cover them with mind-numbing repetitiveness. Another is that they love, love, LOVE the two-party system and believe in the concept bipartisanship more than any normal human being.
When I say bipartisanship, what I mean is any effort to reach across the aisle, compromise, and reach consensus between the two major parties on legislation, appointments, and so on. The media’s fealty to this concept is pretty much absolute, and mostly makes no allowance for the fact that (a) bipartisanship has kind of a toxic history, and (b) one of the two major parties has gone bat-crap crazy over the past 30-40 years.
Toxic consensus
When I think of bipartisan legislation, I think of the 1994 Crime Bill, so-called “welfare reform”, the Patriot Act, the resolution to authorize the use of force in the War on Terror and to extend that authority to Iraq, and so on. Suffice to say, a lot of misery and death has been strewn in the wake of bipartisanship over the years, and I don’t think it’s coincidental.
The same might be said of presidential appointments, particularly with regard to the Supreme Court. John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and even Neil Gorsuch were confirmed on a bipartisan basis, lopsidedly so in the first two cases. The Democrats who voted to confirm these justices bear some responsibility for the results of their opinions.
Praising the maverick
If you’re old enough, you remember the degree to which the press loved John McCain, mainly because he straddled the center-line in a politically strategic fashion. It’s typically enough for these “mavericks” to adopt a controversial opinion on a single topic for them to be carried on the shoulders of the mainstream media. For McCain, it was campaign finance. For Liz Cheney, it’s Donald Trump.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard MSNBC talk about a congressional representative more than they have about Liz Cheney over the last two weeks. They’re doing this on the basis of her refusal to accept her party’s line on who won the presidency in 2020. In other words, she’s being roundly praised for speaking a very simple, obvious truth. As a result, they are helping her build her national brand in a dramatic way, though she voted to support Trump’s agenda from one end of his regime to the other.
Don’t buy it!
Bottom line, MSNBC and other mainstream outlets are working overtime to mainstream extremists like Liz Cheney as well as Wall Street reactionaries like Mitt Romney. As people on the left, we can’t adopt the standard of the enemy of our enemy being our friend. These people are building a national brand that they hope will carry them to higher office. The difference between that and a Trump 2.0 presidency is one of degree, not of kind.
luv u,
jp
This is the program Trump inherited from other Republicans like Tom Tancredo, Mitt Romney, and many more. Obama’s first term, in particular, was an extreme accommodation to it as well. That’s likely because the big lie about invading armies of dark people is an effective distraction for disaffected workers. The bipartisan neoliberal economic experiment that’s been underway for the last forty years is a total failure for working people in this country; Trump is working to deepen that failure, and the only way a politician can maintain some measure of popularity while conducting these deeply unpopular policies is by encouraging working-class white people to blame brown people for all their troubles.
Second, there’s some reason to believe that Trump’s success, in the absence of a traditional ground GOTV campaign, was based in large measure on free media in the form of speeches and appearances that ran on practically every news channel for hours a week over the last year. I have heard NBC reporters (sometimes referred to as “journalists”) connect this Trump phenomenon with the large number of Trump signs they saw in rural communities. That, of course, was just a symptom of the mental disease that afflicts non-rich Trump supporters. The vector by which the disease spread was their own “reporting” – namely, serving up hours of this man’s bullshit on multiple platforms to millions of hungry minds, hence the signs. But they are no more reliable an indication of the level of support than the number of people showing up at Trump rallies. Sure, he had large crowds. So did Bernie. So did Ralph Nader in 2000. When the day came, the numbers were pretty flaccid.
The danger in this is that we have developed a political economy around this practice of perpetual elections. One leg of this stool is the pay-to-play culture of political fundraising. Office holders are spending increasing amounts of their time with potential donors, dialing for dollars and addressing $10,000 a plate dinner crowds. Another leg is the media feeding frenzy that attends every twist and turn of the competition. Plenty of news to be served up, with lots of red meat. And then there’s the ad revenue, in the billions of dollars, ultimately.
claiming that this can be balanced by closing loopholes on upper income earners. Horseshit. Where’s the proof? They don’t have any numbers. They can’t name deductions that they would suggest in any negotiations with Congress. They’re talking about an enormous gap that their plan would greatly expand, they claim they can close it, but they offer no details. They’ve got a secret plan to cut taxes and balance the budget while raising military spending: it’s called “Just trust us.”
And Romney. Has a man ever run farther or faster from his own proposals? Can conservatives truly celebrate the candidate they saw on Wednesday night? Just a few small points:
American military might. They mark the beginning of the recession in the Obama administration, not the Bush administration. They see the national debt as the cause of unemployment. On their planet, the only problem with our electoral system is fraudulent voting – i.e. people (perhaps “illegal” immigrants) breaking federal law to usurp a franchise very few Americans are inclined to exercise legitimately. All domestically produced fossil fuel, in their tiny minds, is somehow reserved for use by Americans alone, not simply dumped into the global market and snapped up by whoever pays for it (i.e. how it actually works).