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.
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.
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).
Sure. But it’s not like they announce the election results before the election. Not everyone’s votes count, and there’s a lot of bullshit, but the results are still fundamentally influenced by the voting. That’s “flawed democracy” vs. “pretend democracy”.
The difference is that occasionally you can get upsets like the Roy Moore vs. Doug Jones election. Even with all the knobs and levers twisted to give Moore every advantage possible, the allegations that Moore had been having sex with numerous underage girls was enough to derail his run. In a properly functioning system it shouldn’t have even been close. But, in the end, it was very close.
I don’t think we have to get even as far as the technically-legal but obviously shady as fuck outcomes like this, but just look at the last presidential election. Our votes only mattered because they didn’t manage to get away with ignoring them, and that’s largely just because a couple of people found the barest of morals and they were rampantly incompetent.
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.
This is spot on.
The problem Democrats have is that we have to drag two huge stones around our neck.
We have to fight the fascist right
We have to do so while everything is controlled by corporate interest
Either of those is a massive undertaking on its own, doing both is near impossible.
We can’t push for more radical Democrats since the cost of losing is a fucking orange maniac… So we have to elect the corporate centrist.
Corporations have done a fantastic job keeping 50% of the population dumber than a bag of bricks and voting against their own interest.
I’ve also seen corporate interest drive wedges into Democrats as well. We’re starting to be split on bullshit like is it LGBT, or LGBTQ, or LGBTQ+, arguing about semantics and looking to take people down for accidentally using the wrong word.
Nevermind if everyone in the group agrees on equal rights for all, you’re using the wrong term this month, therefore we are building a divide between us.
It’s maddening how well it’s working.
nah turfs are now openly allying with Nazis, so we can safely rule hem out of the whole “being left” thing
A lot of people vote against their own interests, but I don’t think you can really blame the corporations for that.
Voting against their interests tends to be culture war nonsense, and corporations don’t really want to get involved in that because they never want to take sides, because that could cost them customers. See the recent Bud Lite nonsense for example.
Instead, what they tend to do is use their money to seed out candidates who hold views they don’t like (basically ensuring that the DNC and RNC only run candidates that the companies approve of) or doing things after elections to get loopholes and carve-outs in laws that benefit them. When you effectively have both the democrats and republicans on your payroll, you don’t really care which side people vote for, you just ensure that whoever’s elected is beholden to you.
As for keeping people dumb, again, not something most corporations work for. Some of them, like tech companies, even want an intelligent workforce. The more people in their hiring pool, the less they have to pay. Having said that, they’re happy if the government cuts funding to schools if it means tax breaks that benefit them.
But yeah, I think fundamentally you’re right. The only team that can beat the fascists includes a lot of corporate democrats. And with corporate democrats in the “big tent”, there are lots of reforms that are never going to be on the table. And, when people see corporate-owned politicians in power and refusing to even consider common-sense reforms, they get frustrated. Some stop voting entirely. Others give up and vote for the fascists because they hope that will at least disrupt the system.
Bringing it back to journalism, it seems to me like what we need is good journalism that exposes both the stranglehold the corporations have on a lot of politicians, and how much bribery and influence peddling there is, but also how the other side is outright fascist and what the consequences might be. Instead we get horse race journalism, and talking points, and both-sides he-said-she-said bullshit.
Yes and no…
to a large company, more legbor skilled in doing the thing you want them to do is excelant to drive wages down, everything else a person can learn is not their priority.
For their customers, adiction makes people unable to think no matter how smart they are. To force someone to keep buying, make them an adict. Super common in amarica, things like processed shugar, high fructose corn syrup, loot boxes and gambling come to mind.
Freedom of the press isn’t worth much though when the most watched “news” network is the propaganda machine for one party right? If a hundred million people watch the Disinformation Channel and ignore reality then all the free press in the world won’t help IMO
It’s still critically important. What’s happening in Russia shows that. Sure, the most watched shows in Russia are state-backed programs that blast out Putin’s propaganda. But, that doesn’t mean he was going to allow other news sources to exist.
From an outside perspective this is a good demonstration that while your system is somewhat flawed, it’s still resilient. By flawed I mean mainly the two party system and stuff like judges being appointed by politicians. However if your system didn’t have some builtin failsafes, it would have been much more vulnerable to influence from unwanted sources.
Even if most trump voters wanted to turn the US into a proper aristocracy, (some right wingers actually do*), the process would have been much more complicated in comparison to countries that have become dictatorships in the past decades.
*I’m referring to a somewhat new trend, where influential people are claiming that the US is suffering from a dumb population, and that experts should be given more power.
All things considered, I think our institutions are holding up pretty well. The coup attempt failed and the election was certified. Trump tried to coerce Georgia into falsifying the election results and failed. Trump stole classified documents and the agencies responsible for that escalated appropriately to the point where he got raided by the FBI. The DOJ is prosecuting all these accordingly. It took longer than I would like but overall it’s going pretty well.
We have enormous issues to address but it’s hard to attend to domestic policy if our democracy is effectively destroyed with the inauguration of a tyrant who stole an election. That’s pretty much game over…
This was well put and a good summary of the situation!
In a less resilient democracy attempts of interference in the election process might not cause the same uproar it has in the US.
This also works the other way. The prosecution of Trump seems to be handled with care to ensure that the charges are justifiable. In non democratic countries a political opponent would first go to jail and then the prosecutors would try to invent some kind of corruption charge.
What exactly do you mean by “aristocracy”? You could argue that that’s what the US already is. Lobbying by the very rich means they get their way much more often than the majority of the population gets their way. Even many of the senators and congress people are deci or centi-millionaires.
I’d say the Trump voters want a fascist state with some hints of democracy remaining. They want rich people (other than Trump) to have less of a voice than they currently do, and they’re willing to give up many democratic aspects of the current system to get it. I think most of them would still like to be able to vote for things, and would still want their votes to matter. But, I think they’d be willing to give up many of their rights as long as the strong man in charge hurts the right people.
Look, guardrails that can handle being hit hard once can’t be counted on to protect you again. Also, I think what’s meant by “brutal fascism” above is Trump’s end goal, not how he behaved in his first term. I’m only slightly to the right of Gramsci and Bookchin, and even I don’t think his first term achieved full-on fascism. But make no mistake, there’s good reason to believe 2024 will be our last free election (they’re already not fair) for a while.
Brutal fascism may be Trump’s end goal, but that doesn’t mean he has any likelihood of getting it. What matters more is what everyone else wants. Dictators don’t become dictators on their own. They need generals, lawyers, judges, cops, etc. to all work with them to achieve their aims. There are certainly some people in Trump’s orbit who would welcome a Trump dictatorship, but there are others who want him as a figurehead that allows them to become oligarchs. There are others who actually do believe in some form of democracy, they just want a democracy that looked a lot like the 1776 democracy, where only the opinion of white land-owning white males mattered.
As for the 2024 election, even if Trump wins, things will only get slightly less free and slightly less fair. They’re already badly bent, and they’ll get bent some more, but it’s not like elections are going to go from “free” to “non-free” over 4 years. There’s just too much institutional momentum and not enough popular support for Trump for that to happen.
If you think we don’t have a lot of institutional and popular support for right-authoritarianism, I don’s know what country you’ve been living in the last 20 years. Who’s going to stop him? The Democrats? The party that’d bring a policy paper to a gunfight? I hope I’m wrong and things are as rosy as you think. But I won’t bet my life on it.