Look, I know as well as the next person that the American public, much like the Cookie Monster, likes boobs more than position papers on banking, and I like Matt Taibbi (I really do), but his latest article is a piece of shit and he’d probably admit as much in a candid moment.
His overall point is one I agree with, which is that it’s simply not the fault of the American media that Donald Trump is doing so well that he’s currently within a few odd hiccups of history of controlling enough uranium to extinguish all sentient life on Earth.
The fault for this does lie largely with the American people.
But, people, whether they’re American or not, are an imperfect and easily broken lot. Demonstrate good leadership, make their lives easier, keep your promises, don’t piss away their money on stupid shit, appeal to their better angels, and you’ll get a happy and somewhat virtuous electorate.
Our current president has done his best. We’ve been fortunate to have him. People are beginning to grasp just how fortunate we’ve been, and just how much worse things can be without that kind of decency and common sense in charge.
But he’s been stymied, let’s face it, and he inherited a smoking husk of country and an opposition that huffs glue every waking moment of the day.
Maybe you should try to turn around a ship of state built by the Dulles Brothers, sustained by a generation of Kissinger acolytes, and policed by folks who’ll garrote you for having a beer summit.
We never did figure out how to be half as good as we tell ourselves we are, but, shit, we really did have a goddamned awesome country here for a while. We knew to throw out a president who breaks into your psychiatrist’s office, not one who horses around with an intern. We could figure out how to pass a 14th Amendment or a Voting Rights Act, not convince half the country that we need neither of those things because of ACORN.
What broke this country couldn’t possibly be its people because the people don’t lead. They are led.
What broke this country is that the people were led poorly.
You can try to put it all at the feet of some all-consuming neoliberalism, and anything that helped hollow out our towns and middle class has to take a lot of the blame. But being pissed off about globalization and corporatism can take a lot of forms, and Trumpism isn’t the only logical one.
Plus, there’s a difference between telling someone that we’ll retrain you to get a job to replace the one that went to India or Mexico, and telling them that you’ll make us safer from 9/11-style attacks by occupying Iraq. Or, you know, that things will be all sweets and candy if we just get rid of that thug, Gaddafi.
Lies, broken promises, and egregious mistakes have a lot to do with how we got here, and, yeah, the media played its part in that. But they get led, too.
Ultimately, it’s the kind of lies you have to tell to get away with this shit that is really the problem here. You’ve got to tell people that banksters fucked up the world by giving poor people a mortgage rather than by setting up a system that depended on them giving out no-doc mortgages. You have to tell people that it’s the Mexicans’ fault that their kids are still living at home at twenty-six, instead of our gutting our public education budgets with voodoo economic theories and no-tax pledges.
If you want to let people down like this and not get your political ass handed to you, you have to introduce The Fear.
You can spread the blame around here with a 7″ mortar hoe, so I’m not saying this is all the fault of the right, by any means. But, ultimately, Trumpism is about race. It’s about opposition to a pluralistic, ecumenical, heterogeneous, cosmopolitan America. It’s about blaming religious and ethnic and racial minorities for our problems and empowering reactionary assholes.
So, why is north of 40% of the country going for this shit?
It’s not because people know more about the Kardashians than Mike Pence’s plan for your miscarriage, or because they’d rather read Trump’s latest insults than Clinton’s plan for revitalizing coal country. And it’s not because the New York Times made some mistake or took too many shots at Hillary Clinton or didn’t hit Trump hard enough.
It’s because they’ve been suffering under bad leadership for so long that the chickens started coming home to roost. That’s what thwarting Obama at every opportunity accomplished. We finally learned that we can’t do shit even with a good president. We learned that our government is every bit as broken as the Republicans told us it was, and they get Trump for their efforts.
Maybe we’ll get Trump, too. I still doubt it, but it could happen.
If we do, it won’t be because of the media or because we somehow deserve it.
It will be because people stopped trusting anyone and finally said, “screw our elites, let’s string them up by their necks.”
