I was prepared to be receptive to John Daniel Davidson’s column in The Federalist. The premise seemed promising. He’s been traveling across the country to cover the Democratic primaries. In doing so, he’s made a habit of talking to Democratic voters to see what’s on their mind and how they feel about the various candidates. He doesn’t adopt a confrontational tone, but instead hides his own political beliefs in order to get a more candid response from the people he interviews. By contrast, he feels that most reporters are not making the same good faith effort to understand Trump voters, and this is because the mainstream press loathes Trump and has nothing but contempt for his followers.
I was hoping he might offer me one of two things, if not both. First, I thought he’d tell me what he’s learned about the Democratic voters and what it might mean for the upcoming primaries and the general election. Perhaps he’d also find time to give an example or two where he’s learned something or modified his view on some subject. After all, it would be a bit strange not to find any merit in anything he hears people say about politics or to discover any new angles on policy after listening to people discuss their struggles and challenges.
Second, I thought he’d tell us some of what the mainstream reporters would likely discover if they were to adopt his respectful approach to listening to people he disagrees with. If there’s a story out there that helps explain Trump’s appeal that isn’t getting reported for lack of listening, then couldn’t Davidson give us at least a preview on that?
Unfortunately, Davidson did none of these things in his column. He provided no opinion on how Democrats are leaning in the primaries or whether or not one candidate or another is in a good position because they’re in tune with the voters. He didn’t say that he had modified a single opinion of his own through his interactions with Democrats or discovered some way that a Republican could attract a few of them. He said nothing about what really drives Trump voters to Trump.
His column was built entirely around documenting examples of mainstream journalists and television personalities showing condescension toward anyone who puts their trust in Trump.
As we move further into the 2020 cycle, you’re going to see a lot more of this sneering contempt for Trump voters from the media, especially for voters in rural and exurban areas. When you do, know that of all the reporters and pundits traveling the country to cover the election, very few are doing the relatively easy work of trying to understand and empathize with the people they’re writing about.
The media wasn’t interested in why so many people were drawn to Trump four years ago, and despite all that’s happened since then, they still aren’t interested. That’s why so much of the political reporting you’ll see this year will be flat and colorless, lacking any real insight or nuance, and dripping with a condescension bordering on hatred.
There’s a kind of circular reasoning that emerges from this, even though it isn’t openly expressed in the piece. Basically, Davidson is saying that Trump voters hate the media because the media hate them. What people like about Trump is that he has the same relationship with the elitist press that they do. It’s as if the mainstream press could make Trump less appealing by being more respectful to his supporters. Except that wasn’t supposed to the the point of the piece.
Most Democrats I encounter feel like there has been a lot of articles published about how Trump voters feel and comparatively few articles about what Clinton voters felt. Even after the election, this trend continued. As a major resistance rose up and got organized to fight President Trump, these organizers were profiled now and then, but not with the same frequency as the mainstream press filled their articles with quotes from Trump voters.
But even if we accept Davidson’s premise that reporters don’t actually talk to or listen to Trump voters, it’s clear that the entire point of his piece is to ramp up a feeling of grievance. Davidson wants to highlight examples of people in the press showing disrespect to Trump’s supporters so that they won’t give any credence to negative stories about Trump. He wants to feed their sense of victimhood so that they behave like a threatened tribe.
It’s too bad that Davidson has no higher ambitions than this. If he’s to be believed, he’s talked to enough voters to have plenty of interesting material. But he provides nothing interesting at all.
By and large, the political reporting that the vast majority of voters is exposed to is shallow, and more often than not gives them only horse-race type “analysis”, info-tainment sorts of storylines which are mostly meant to tickle their reality television nerve, or simplistic and non-contextual articles about issues. I think this is mostly due to the fact that those reporting it have made the choice that substantive information, based on facts and evidence, is simply much too difficult for both themselves and voters to understand, and neither of them are interested in taking the time necessary to become truly informed. In general, most everyone has childlike attention spans, and lacks the critical thinking skills that are required to actually make informed decisions when it comes to politics. This is not a partisan condition, it applies to portions on both sides of the political spectrum. It would be great if everyone took this whole democratic process seriously, but I feel that the percentage who actually do is relatively small.
I think Davidson’s observation that “much of the political reporting you’ll see this year will be flat and colorless, lacking any real insight or nuance…” is largely correct. It doesn’t take a significant amount of time observing it in order to come to that conclusion. The “dripping with a condescension bordering on hatred” part, well, that is something which requires a little more nuanced analysis in order to make that sort of generalization. When an entire Party has fully embraced grievance politics, has the full-throated support of white nationalists, and has openly and proudly decided that the foundational constitutional precepts of the rule of law, co-equal branches of government, and Congressional oversight is simply optional for them, then that is going to lead to some very hard questions being asked of those who support that Party, and who wholeheartedly support those kinds of efforts. It is inconvenient, I am sure, for many of those horribly underinformed and misinformed voters to be asked about those sorts of things. But that is what happens when you have enthusiastically removed almost all the constitutional guard rails and veered so far outside the lanes of small “d” democracy which have been in place and functioning for over 240 years. It is just too bad for them that a lot of us, political reporters included, have a very difficult time accepting that this is a desirable and acceptable path for our country. I understand that it would be convenient for Davidson if everyone would just continue to look on Democrats and Republicans as nothing more than opposite sides of a normal political coin. But the reality is, one side has decided that they are not beholden to any of the principles that have bound us together as a country. That, I am sorry to inform him, makes this a particularly unique and dangerous set of circumstances.
Do I look condescendingly on Trump supporters? You’re damn right I do. And it’s not because Trump is not on my side of the political coin. It is because he is anathema to everything that we as a country have purported to stand for. He is a danger to our existence. Anyone who supports that deserves scorn and derision, not understanding and compassion.
A couple of things.
First, the mainstream “media” this guy is writing about, i.e. the local television and “news” stations, aren’t condescending to Strongman Trump or his right-wing authoritarian followers. The mainstream local television and “news” stations that these people pay attention to are going to BothSidesDoIt™ left and right, because they have advertisements to sell.Those “news” stations also aren’t going to go into any detail as to why Strongman Trump, through his enabling right-wing authoritarian enablers, are destroying any remaining shreds of the “rule of law”. Instead they’ll continue with the “he said she said” bullshit, providing just enough cover for these right-wing authoritarians to continue supporting Strongman Trump as if he and they aren’t the problem. Because advertisement revenue.
Second, what most of these right-wing authoritarians are talking about when they say “mainstream media”, are celebrities on Late Night Television shows, and famous people on Facebook/Instagram/Social Media, that they see as they continue not paying attention to actual news sources.
The kicker, of course, is that right-wing authoritarians are always self-described victims, so they don’t give one good fuck about reality, and will instead continue believing whatever their authoritarian thought leaders tell them to believe. Basically, it doesn’t matter if they stumble into watching actual news with an accurate description of reality and the problems, because they’ll default back into “We’re the victims here, Mitch McConnell, Strongman Trump and Sean Hannity say so, and I’m one of them and they’re one of me”.
Right-wing authoritarians don’t just stop being right-wing authoritarians because of a good argument. Typically they either die off, or get themselves killed following the orders of their rightful authority figure. And ALL of politics for the past 30+ years, and especially today, is progressives trying to keep things OK long enough for them to die of natural causes. You know, “demographic changes”. The problem with the “demographic changes” argument is that they keep making new old people every day.
And NO, this isn’t just a phase. Unless the Democratic party can take back the White House and the Senate soonish, the next Republican president is going to be way worse than Strongman Trump, because that president won’t be nearly as loudly incompetent as they go about finishing the job of destroying the country. Imagine a 50-year-old handsome man who doesn’t boast of getting away with sexual assault, goes to church because he “believes it”, and doesn’t Tweet his ongoing crimes in real-time.
Yep, this is exactly the real threat that awaits. People have fooled themselves into believing that Trump is a singular aberration, rather than the logical outcome of forty years or so of Republican and evilangelical collusion — building parallel info systems, gaslighting the population with theatrical agitprop, predatory policies that pit working whites against working minorities, in order to distract from the plutocrats stealing from everyone.
The only thing that makes Trump different is that he’s shown them that the norms and rules don’t really matter, if no one has the guts to enforce them. The next model will be younger, smoother, slicker, more well spoken, more circumspect in his corruption and malfeasance. Probably Josh Hawley and/or Tom Cotton.
Seems Mr Davidson wrote that column to complain about the main stream media for not listening to his friends and neighbors around Trump. I suppose he is right there. I don’t much like Trump and friends. I like to think I was not always this way but after so many lies and evil done over the past three years, I really think they should be making amends or something. I mean riddle me this. In just awhile ago their friends in the senate would not call any witnesses and now I should give a rats ass what you think about — anything?
That Federalist article, while written in a seemingly pleasant tone of homilies and bromides about listening to one another, is one of the more deceptive and intellectually dishonest pieces I’ve read in some time (probably since the last time I read something from the Federalist). Instead of using his conversations with Democratic voters in IA and NH, he instead cherry-picks recent media episodes from Rick Wilson (a career GOP scumbag who now profiteers from his Never Trump pose) and James Carville (a shameless hack who lives in a four-story mansion but pretends to ventriloquize the reg’lar foke).
Cool. So instead of quotes from people he supposedly spent countless hours talking to, eliciting their concerns and opinions, he simply repackages the bumptious rhetoric of two weasel-faced consultants who have never done a day’s honest work and couldn’t care less about why people vote the way they do, insofar as they can monetize it for whoever is renting their services at the moment.
Next, Davidson takes it upon himself to characterize the repetitive insult-comic jabber from the rallies as just harmless bits of pro-wrestling kayfabe. We’re all jes’ jokin’ around here, see. All in good fun. He “jokes” about staying in office past two terms. He “jokes” about imprisoning people who have committed no crimes (unlike himself). He “jokes” about being besties with murderers and despots. Such a cut-up. What wonderful, misunderstood people these are, who sit and cheer on this stuff.
How many videos of the rubes waiting in line, spouting the same vicious rhetoric to random cameras, does Davidson need to see to understand that just because he doesn’t take the schtick literally or seriously, many of them do?
And frankly, I don’t think I’ve seen a single article that engages the depth and breadth of Clinton voters the way the countless, tiresome interviews with the same interchangeable fist-shaking codgers in their haunted Pennsyltucky diners. Not one. The supposedly liberal establishment media have failed spectacularly even in their usual sad mission of both-siding everything. I hope Davidson feels good about cashing his checks for basically lying through his teeth in a thousand words or less.
Lol, this guy went and interviewed folks on the “other side” to reinforce his bias against them. “Don’t bother me with facts, my mind’s made up!”
And, how many articles can folks do about rural folks in their Main Street diner from a town of 5000 or fewer? Apparently quite a few. I wish the same number of articles had been written about folks in the cities or suburbs who flipped Democratic and are not voting for any Republican anytime soon.