Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
To me this is an interesting bit:
The US under Trump wasn’t North Korean style fascism, although it may have been headed in that direction. It was maybe fascism with strong overtones of democracy. People still got to vote, and their vote mattered, it’s just that Dear Leader had his thumb on the scale. Congress members and senators still showed up to work, and the decisions they took still mattered, even if some of the Republicans were constantly violating precedents and norms. The judicial system still kept churning and mostly following the laws and precedents, even if Trump appointed a lot of unqualified partisan judges.
My guess is that many Trump voters wanted this kind of system. They didn’t want a full-on North Korea sort of situation, and they were deluded enough that they thought they could keep a Trump presidency from becoming a full-on dictatorship. What they wanted was basically a “flawed democracy” where people who looked like them still got to vote and their vote mattered, but they definitely wanted their vote to matter much more than the votes of other people.
At the same time, the alternative was definitely also a flawed democracy. To get elected requires raising a ton of money, which ties strings to almost everyone who runs. The DNC largely picks who’s allowed to run as a democrat, and one of the main qualifications to run is a person’s ability to raise money. As a result, even when the democrats are in charge, common sense things that are supported by a majority of the population don’t pass when they’re opposed by any special interest with money.
It’s easy to understand why there was initially so much overlap between supporters of Bernie Sanders and supporters of Trump. People were tired of the oligarchy-controlled pseudo-democracy, and they wanted radical changes.
The advertising duopoly of Facebook and Google has weakened journalism at a time when we desperately needed good journalism. What’s left is basic horse-race and scandal-focused coverage for politics, and click bait for the rest. There are still some journalists out there doing good work, like the folks at Pro Publica. But, that kind of journalism is difficult and expensive.
I’m scared that the window for journalism being able to rescue the US might have passed. If Trump wins again, you know that the freedom of the press is going to take a serious hit. On the other hand, if the democrats win big they’re going to be completely tied to the people who fund their campaigns. And the corporate-owned media isn’t going to be doing stories on how the corporate-owned politicians are handing even more power to corporations.
Both questionable statements, considering massive systematic voter suppression that has been going on for decades, and also on account of the US political system, not least first-past-the-post and the electoral college, your vote may easily end up not mattering at all (as compared to countries with proportional representation).
This is only because an insurrection and attempted coup failed.
Though they didn’t help, honestly the faux both-sides “journalism” is taking its own L’s, mostly. I canceled my sub to the Times quite a while back because of this type of thing, and I find it rare to see actual journalism quite a lot of the time. Headlines like “deadlock in congress due to continued failure to reach consensus on tax bill.” Actual reality: Republicans want to cut taxes for the wealthy and provide loopholes for yacht owners with no plan to pay for it, Democrats want to spend approx 0.00000001% of the military budget to provide free meals for elementary students.
See also, any trans issues. “Controversy roils over trans athletes in sports.” Reality: one fucking asshole in Iowa or Idaho or Mississippi or wherever want to blanket ban on trans athletes in sport because one MTF wants to play a sport. Oh, and they don’t even have a kid that goes to the school/participates in the sport and the MTF player hasn’t broken the top 10.
Or climate or Trump or anything with the slightest bit of controversy. Butchering the quote, but it’s something along the lines of “as a journalist, if someone tells you it’s raining, and another person tell’s you it’s not, it’s not your job to report disagreement, it’s your job to stick your head out the window and see if it’s raining.”
Applied to that first quote, if journalism was doing its job, every outlet would be reporting in no uncertain terms that the former president tried to deny your right to vote and overthrow democracy.
I think the last decade or so of GOP actions are a clear example of why any norm or precedent that’s actually vital to how things run needs to be codified into an actual rule or law with a clear punishment for violations.