I just took a couple days off and went to the Jersey Shore to recharge my batteries. I didn’t consume much news while I was gone, although I did do a quick tour of the headlines on Tuesday night while I was getting ready to go to sleep. Even then, though, I restricted myself mostly to big ticket items like Israeli politics and the latest from Biden’s tour of Europe, so I haven’t been following the tick-tock of Republican insanity on the domestic front.
Now that I’m back, I just subjected myself to this nonsense after having more than a 48 hour break from it, and it’s remarkable how sick it makes me. It really heightens my awareness of how damaging it is to constantly read about stupid mean people doing stupid mean things that have no logical value. It does more than sap my spirit. It saps my faith in humanity.
It also makes something else clear. People often sensibly advise me that I should take a break from politics even though financially that’s never a viable option. But it’s not really politics that I need to avoid. It’s a very specific subcategory of politics that’s killing me. We could define this as Republican strategy. It’s not that they want to win that bothers me, but how they go about it and, most importantly, the fact that it is so effective.
If the most important thing is keeping Republicans out of power, and it is, then we can never get too far away from engaging with their strategy for gaining power. And their strategy is not just thoroughly dishonest but laser-focused on exposing and exploiting all the worst human emotions and all the worst logical fallacies. You can’t get anywhere by wishing people would be less selfish, braver, more self-confident, less petty, or generally better at basic reasoning. In fact, because the GOP is so good at amplifying these human faults, the electorate is kind of inexorably growing meaner and dumber. The job of steering them in a better direction gets harder every day, and it’s this constant type of losing that’s more depressing than any transitory disappointment at the ballot box.
I put a lot of hope in better leadership pushing people back toward sanity and decency, but when I see things still slipping even under new leadership, that’s when I struggle to maintain my optimism. This is why each new example of Republicans doing or saying something mean or stupid is demoralizing. It’s fresh evidence that nothing is working.
It would help if the media (NYT, WaPo, CNN) stopped screaming Republican talking points at every chance they get. Having been a journalist and taught Communications for several years, I think it is time to demand a change in news coverage. Or, more precisely, what the news is. Talking heads and insider quips aren’t news. Nor should they be treated as such. We can start by getting rid of the Sunday News Shows. Real dinosaurs.
While I agree of the humpty dumpty of US news media, there are two Sunday shows I like (I understand that Sunday is not to be taken literally, it just applies in this case):
1) Farid Zakaria GPS – while I disagree often with his choice of conservative guests (Neil Ferguson, and much much earlier Stephen Cohen), and I also disagree with him on some of his stances, I do like that he allows a slightly more in-depth discussion on few selected topics with respect for the speakers. And he often covers world issues outside US – often deeply neglected by US media – a good example is the Yazidi massacres by Al Qaeda – he has highlighted the work being done by Amal Clooney from time to time.
2) CBS 60 Minutes – again I had to grit my teeth during the 2016 election runup at their soft serve questions for candidate Trump, vs. much harder questions for candidate Clinton, and some of their correspondent who left for Fox (after her false reporting on Ben Ghazi) – but overall, in my book, they do a good job of ferreting out issues in-depth that are of significance, and often poorly covered by humpty dumpty media.
I would like to see them thrive.
Most of the time, 60 Minutes does okay. I did notice in 2020 that Leslie Stahl, who was interviewing Trump tried to be reasonably balanced. Norah O’Donnell was looking to throw Biden and Harris gut punches. Didn’t work, thankfully.
I have just about given up on decency and humanity. It just doesn’t seem to be in the cards, and I don’t know where that leaves us or what we find when we come to the end of that road. I suspect it will not be pretty, but it will probably make the Republicans and their base very happy.
And all the while, I see Democrats worrying themselves daily about thinking outside their box of traditional politics and political comity, for fear they will “set some precedent” that will give Republicans a future rationale to reciprocate in kind. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about that sort of seeming naivete on their part. The only reason Republicans haven’t done a particular thing is because they have not been in the proper position of power when the time was right to do it, or they have had higher priorities at that time. Fearing that acting boldly and decisively will somehow blow away imaginary Republican guard rails and push them into some sort of horribly maniacal and destructive phase seems, well…kind of a ridiculous concern at this point in our country’s slow unwinding.
I get this spidey sense that the Democrats are, once again, largely going to navel gaze themselves into irrelevance and the Trumpublican Party is going blow past them and do all of the things that Democrats worry they will do if they offend Republican feelings by acting boldly in both their policy and politics. Another iteration of Lucy and the football. Democrats in Washington just don’t seem to want to accept the reality of what the GOP has become.
Meanwhile, I see a headline that Joe Manchin has planted his flag on the compromise he wants to see in the Voting Rights Bill. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was something like a four-fifths compromise, where votes by minority Democrats count as four-fifths of the vote of “Real Americans ” (meaning white ones). It would be the logical middle ground between the three-fifths compromise of 1787 and actual democracy. And in our current condition, the politicians might just feel that’s a win-win and be proud to be able to put that bipartisanship bullet on their resume.
We are so fucking fucked.
The outrage about CRT is the most depressing thing to me. It isn’t taught anywhere until Law school or Grad school in select courses. Basically you have to choose an intentional educational path that will put you in contact with it.
And yet the GOP is able to push a button and a certain segment will react like lemmings. I can’t imagine being that simple-minded.
And in six months, they’ll change the sticker on the button and push it again (welfare queen, urban thug, latinos massing at the boarder, Afirmative Action, some random black person who somehow got away with something…. hell, the drug store madness in San Francisco seems perfect for this) And they’ll line up to cliff dive again. Cue the tears.
Any other circumstance and I wouldn’t give a shit if they want to jump. But the issue is that they are so numerous that they’ll pull the rest of us over that cliff too.
This whole country needs therapy.
I wish I could offer up something meaningfully hopeful. I have a job disconnected from politics so I had the luxury (due to COVID) of stopping the side-hustle my wife and I had going in activism in this suburban white community outside of Portland, OR. Neither of us are inclined to start it up again (though we know that IS where a lot of the meaningfulness of our lives will be found) because we too are fed up trying to make a difference…and having everything and everybody show us it didn’t matter.
What matters to us will ultimately prevail and we’ll get back into helping others get involved in their community – but for now, we are not jumping back in. Maybe you just need (if possible) to take more breaks like you did. Your readers, if they haven’t already, need to subscribe so you can.
I am rewatching Ken Burns’ Civil War and wondering when he will produce the sequel. I first started to notice parallels during Clinton’s administration, although there were obvious signs since Strom Thurmond, the John Birch society, and Barry Goldwater arrived on the scene. All this reminds me of a famous quote by William Faulkner, a keen observer of human behavior. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”.
I’ve been looking at the behavior of the majority of the GOP officials at state and federal level for a while. Found the data compiled by the V-DEM Institute to be very helpful The Democratic Party’s positions have barely changed over the last couple decades. The GOP made a very swift and radical transformation from something recognizably center-right, w/healthy enough respect for democratic norms to something more akin to Fidesz in Hungary. I’ve spent the time I can afford examining the V-Dem website, its summary reports, and data analyses. My conclusion is that we are in the eye of the hurricane. A sane person would realize that this would be a good time to expatriate if feasible. Update passports just in case, etc. Maybe it’s just knowing people as a preteen and teen who got out of Iran just months before the revolution there makes me a bit more hypersensitive to whatever seems to be going on here. Many were disgusted with the Shah, but appalled and later discouraged by what replaced him after his overthrow. Maybe I’m feeling that same energy right now. Admittedly a lot of this is visceral. I am worried that I am about to lose a nation that I’ve called home for too many decades, I am discouraged right now. I know there are plenty of leaders who seem to grasp the gravity of the situation and are trying to act, but not enough of the caucus seems to grasp the gravity of the situation we face. That’s discouraging.
If ever there was a time when Max Weber’s observation about politics being “a strong and slow boring of hard boards”, this is it. (Or you could use Jacob Riis’ “pounding the rock” analogy.)
If Manchin (who is likely speaking/providing cover for a small (e.g., 5-8) caucus of centrist Senate Dems) cuts deals to get significant voting rights and infrastructure legislation passed (either by winning over 10 GOP votes or by “saving” the filibuster by weakening it enough so that Dems can pass legislation with 51 votes) this summer, then there’s some short-term hope.
If not, then we’re in a situation similar to the 1850s (and 1920s) when there’s an anti-democratic minority wielding power nationally and in many states, and the rest of us are facing an uphill battle for the foreseeable future.