[My apologies for the carelessness of the first installment: I left some stray notes and extraneous sentences at the bottom, and in the third, one-line paragraph, I asked what constrained the media’s reticence, as if reticence needs constraint. These mistakes are now corrected.]
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In that first installment, I suggested that two related ideological dispositions disfigure the media’s approach to political coverage in these times. One has it that the electorate is more or less benighted, quite possibly illiterate when it comes to significant questions of policy. The other has it that political extremes like socialism or fascism are external to the American body politic, something like foreign imports—remnants of the old world, where class struggle, ideological conflict, and intellectual disputation actually made a difference. I went on to say (these are slightly edited sentences):
These ideological dispositions aren’t better named “confirmation biases” that lead to “cherry-picking the evidence.” For the fact of the matter is that everyone, of every bent, comes equipped with a point of view that is ideological at its origin and in its effects. And because that point of view determines the scope, the scale, and the species of data from which the facts will be plucked, all evidence is necessarily “picked” from a limited set.
I have modified the conclusion that followed, to read:
In sum, there are no facts without values, “no cognition without purpose,” as a semi-famous philosopher put it. Your values will determine your purposes, and these in turn will convene the the scope, the scale, and the species of data you can then render as facts in your account of any event.
For example, when W. E. B. Du Bois set out in the 1930s to challenge the Dunning School of Civil War and Reconstruction historiography—the regnant interpretation for nearly all of the 20th century, which had explained these events as a needless tragedy and a doomed attempt to create racial equality—his values were those inscribed in his work at The Crisis, the NAACP’s house organ, in his biography of John Brown (1909), and in his pioneering work as a sociologist. His purpose was to find a usable past where Dunning and his dozens of graduate students had found a record of predictable failure. The archive he exploited (in effect, invented), the field from which he plucked the novel facts that demonstrated his argument, was the unpublished records of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the agency established in 1865-66 by the radical Republicans in Congress to enable the transition from slavery to free labor at the South.
Now, if there are rival accounts of the same event, the superior account cannot be chosen on the grounds that it is factual, or that it explains more facts. By 1935, to extend the example, the Dunning School had produced more facts than Du Bois ever could, proving that a republic based on racial equality was impossible because black folk were irretrievably backward. The choice can be made only by asking which account aligns more closely with the values you bring to the event, the values that produced the facts—and these are the values you want to prevail beyond its occurrence, as a consequence of your account of the event. That means disclosing your values as an essential part of your accounting, your reporting. It also means engaging the relevant issues as if they pose moral problems—what is good, what is evil?—that require discussion and debate if not resolution.
These are unthinkable proposition, even at FOX News [sic], where a “confirmation bias” is freely acknowledged and on proud display, and yet is never stated forthrightly, as either an ideological disposition or a moral principle. I cite FOX as an example of contemporary journalism not to single it out, but to emphasize the fact that its reticence is not unique to it as a right-wing organ of the Republican Party and/or its nucleus in MAGA Nation. The same moral silence has long since settled on the media as such.
The questions that remain are simple enough. How do these dispositions and corresponding silences manifest in mainstream coverage, and what would it take to get beyond them?
The principal manifestations of the ideological dispositions I have noted are:
(1) An inability to grasp the fact that the American people have been moving left, toward a consensus on social democracy, since the 1970s.
This shift has been especially rapid since 2011, as Occupy Wall Street took shape in response to the Tea Party’s insurgency, and then Bernie Sanders became a viable presidential candidate five years later; but it has been obvious, and measurable, for 50 years at least, which is to say before, during, and after the so-called Reagan Revolution. Think of the profound cultural changes that have reshaped everyone’s attitudes on race, gender, sexuality since 1969. Dismiss them as superfluous if you like—as “identity politics” that distract from the real thing, ye olde class struggle—but remember that every modern revolution on record, from England in the 17th century to America and France in the 18th, on toward Russia, China, Mexico, and Cuba in the 20th, has been preceded and prepared by a cultural revolution that radically reoriented the assumptions, beliefs, methods, and ideas that people could take for granted, and thus embody in their everyday lives.
(2) More specifically, a blindness to what is in plain sight, and a corresponding inability to treat certain constituencies with the seriousness they deserve.
The purloined letter in this case is the polling data which shows, time after time, that a substantial majority of the American people, including roughly 35-45% of those voters registered as Republicans or who call themselves “conservatives,” want from their representatives exactly what Bernie, AOC, et al. want from the system, that is, (a) affordable medical care for all based on the principle that it is a human right, not a privilege to be purchased according to one’s income, a commodity to be produced and distributed according to market criteria and profit considerations; (b) higher taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations, to fund (i) the solvency of Social Security, (ii) public spending on infrastructure and jobs, (iii) domestic manufacture of goods essential to national security, (iv) elections free of “dark money” as enabled by Citizens United [2010], (v) tuition-free higher education; (vi) subsidized child care, continuation of child tax credits, and paid family leave to permit female labor force participation and familial integrity, and, not least, (vii) the restoration of some modicum of fairness and equal opportunity in the larger economy; (c) the inscription in law of women’s right to control of their own bodies and attendant medical decisions, absent any restriction by husbands, fathers, brothers or their stand-ins among agents of the state; (d) the protection of the planet by addressing climate change in public policy; (e) political action and legislation to enable unionization, for the articulation of workers’ rights and the establishment of equity at the workplace.
In short: there is a consensus that converges on social democracy as the cure for what ails the American body politic. What seems to be paranoia on the Right about the contagion of socialism is actually a realistic fear of what this consensus suggests about the future of the republic. Look, it’s not as if the electorate has been suddenly radicalized by the urgings of avowed socialists (although Bernie’s effects on political discourse cannot be exaggerated). Instead, it has become obvious to most of us that the costs impose by 40 years of neoliberal savagery can be covered only by a reinvigorated federal government that does what is necessary to sustain the American standard of living if not the vaunted Dream itself. This ain’t “big government” we’re demanding, it’s just standard issue government of, by, and for the people—not the plutocrats.
(3) An inability to treat MAGA Nation seriously, as (a) a genuinely fascist social movement bent on the overthrow of the republic and/or (b) a movement animated by the very same grievances that inform the consensus on social democracy, as per (1) and (2) above.
The coverage of Trump’s obvious degeneration, cognitively and otherwise, thus proceeds as if he and J D Vance are just another Republican ticket vying for votes, not two political leaders who are alike in expressing and acting upon their utter contempt for anything approximating government of, by and for the people. They will almost certainly try to overturn the results of the election in November, one way or another. The journalistic straining for “objectivity” becomes both ridiculous and appalling in this context—something like treating the Great Depression as just another business cycle, or calling Hitler an anti-Semite and leaving it at that.
But notice that this context includes the liberal media as well as the right-wing outlets. In other words, the New York Times is no more capable of treating MAGA Nation as an “existential threat to democracy” than FOX, because, after all, its well-educated journalists know from their History and Political Science courses at Harvard and Yale that it’s a movement without a coherent ideology, or a militia, or an explicitly racist program . . . . Sure, Trump is unfit for office, but he can’t undo a constitutional order that has been in place for over two centuries. The center will hold, because, well, because it always has in the USA.
What, then, is to be done? How to get beyond the vacuous detachment from reality that the very idea of “objectivity” produces?
TK.