David I want to believe your fourth-to-last paragraph (fourth-to-last, if you count both P.S.'s and the one-liner one): the paragraph that starts with "American democracy...." and then extols it. I want to believe it and I am open to it; I'm not a 100% cynical person. Someone once said that the people who seem most cynical on the outside are often the ones who are most idealistic on the inside -- they're just feeling crushed about the bad stuff. (I think it might have been me who said it. Or, I.)
But listen, your assertions in the paragraph are partly backed up by the poetic eloquence with which you assert them. Things that are asserted poetically and eloquently just have a certain ring of truth to them, even if they're only wishful thinking. But you've also backed up the democracy-extolling assertions with the fact that the Republican Party seems only to have won the House (not true), and that only by a small margin; and did not seem to have won the Senate (below I'll argue that the Republican Party has controlled and still does control the Senate). And there is some relief that a handful of MAGA operatives did not succeed at slithering into some of the more dangerously positioned state-level posts of secretary of state. Hey man that's great.
But I'm not so sure -- are you really sure? -- that now is the time to be extolling American democracy rather than pronouncing it dead. I will not repeat the usual, tired list of complaints about our body politic, but posit that the theoretical underpinnings of any legitimate democracy have become, literally, defunct. Obsolete. They no longer apply. Let me explain why I think our democracy has not just recently died, but rather that its corpse already stiffened and went cold decades ago.
It is not just that the party of nearly-neofascist lunatics, in 2022, mostly controls a Supreme Court that anyway lost all credibility two decades ago when it overturned our country's 2000 presidential election. The unelected Court Justices blithely inserted into the White House, in a bloodless coup, the loser of the 2000 American election.
It is not just that a fully-neofascist neofascist did win the presidency in 2016, and came incredibly close to winning it again in 2020, and will certainly at least come close to doing so in 2024. It is not just that the nearly-neofascists have won control of the House now and also, contrary to our news headlines, have maintained their hold on the Senate. (Excuse me, people. The Republicans still control the Senate, as much as ever, as long as you recognize Sinema and Manchin as the undercover Republican moles that they are, seated for no particular reason (except as disguise) on the Democratic Party's side of the aisle).
And it is not just that supposedly vibrant democracies in recent years elected far-rightwing heads of state in Italy and Brazil, and not just that the largest democracy in the world -- India -- has had a far-right ruling party for nearly a decade. Granted, some far-right leaders are not hellbent on tearing down their countries' entire democracies; some of them only want to tear down key parts.
But here is what is more signficant than any of this, in my opinion. Regardless of which side barely won these midterms or has barely won or lost in nearly any of the recent, 21st-century American elections, the contests themselves are not actual elections.
If they were real, actual elections, victory or defeat would not be wholly determined, as it has been now for a long while, by a battle for power waged not among voters, but rather, between two media corporations: the New York Times, from which most news networks get most of their information, versus Fox Propaganda Inc.
Actual elections aren't lost or won based on the collective whims of, on one hand, masses of voters who are totally siloed within the fact-universe created by media on one side, and, on the other hand, other masses siloed in a different fact-universe created by media on the other side.
The idea that so-called "false news" and so-called "targeted voter suppression strategies" are relatively new phenomena is naive. Misguiding news narratives and concepts, biased framing of issues, absurd kowtowing by journalists to distorted and misleading "conventional wisdom" echo chambers ... these tools have been amplified and turbo-driven by mass media for decades, with those media themselves (including my former editors, colleagues and to some extent myself) influenced, blinded, biased, swayed, distracted and misled by paid political operatives, either of the parties, of the billionaires, or of the politicians seeking re-election via media manipulation. (Disclosure: I formerly reported for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Associated Press and others.)
Rival gangs of billionaires and the owners of rival industries have been lining up behind Republicans on one side, and behind Democrats on the other, for decades, and they have been systematically biasing the news-facts-narratives in separate mediaverses for just as long.
Ridiculous falsehoods are believed by blinkered, deluded voters of every stripe. (For example, such illogical and debunked but nevertheless alive-and-well falsehoods, as these: that deficit spending to help low-income and unemployed workers is a burden that we are handing down to our grandchildren; that U.S. foreign and military policy is determined exclusively by our security concerns and our values, not mostly determined by transnational corporations; or that, compared with the middle class in other countries, the American middle class enjoys a standard of living and quality of life that is either best in the world are among the best ..... these are the ridiculous falsehoods that I mean.).
The only reason these midterm "election" results feel like good news about democracy is that too many people think our democracy is still alive, and, even if some partial truth is conceded to their perspective, too many people are "worried that what amounts to a coup might be attempted in 2024." That's a false worry. It is a misleading concern.
There is no "might' and there is no future tense regarding the start of the current coup attempt. It is already occurring now in plain sight, it is already in progress, and regardless of whether the midterm elections look like they might have dealt the coup a small and temporary setback ..... regardless.... the coup leaders' success or failure will not -- not -- be determined by actual democratic elections. Not this year, not in 2024, not anytime soon.
The Framers, the Founding Fathers, the philosophers of modern democracy from Rousseau to Locke and beyond, constructed some theories that, for some time, made some sense, at least in theory. And for a century or so those theories of democracy could be rolled out and at least messily approximated, in practice.
But all of these democratic theories and nearly-democratic practices were long ago obliterated by the advent of nationwide mass media, harnessed to serve the objectives of competing billionaires and business groups, and the think tanks they fund, and the members of congress they own.
Restoring, reviving, resurrecting anything in America deserving of the name "democracy" will not be achieved at all, by staving off Trump and the Trumpist hordes, if it turns out that is even possible to do. There still will be no democracy here, unless democratic theory is overhauled, new measures are taken and profound structural changes are made. To think that a democracy is functioning at all, while a democracy-destroying, wealth-fueled, media-amplified propaganda juggernaut is roaming the Earth, is like thinking a Birthday Party is still going on in a house where lions entered long ago and are roaming through the rooms killing and eating any leftover partiers.
David I want to believe your fourth-to-last paragraph (fourth-to-last, if you count both P.S.'s and the one-liner one): the paragraph that starts with "American democracy...." and then extols it. I want to believe it and I am open to it; I'm not a 100% cynical person. Someone once said that the people who seem most cynical on the outside are often the ones who are most idealistic on the inside -- they're just feeling crushed about the bad stuff. (I think it might have been me who said it. Or, I.)
But listen, your assertions in the paragraph are partly backed up by the poetic eloquence with which you assert them. Things that are asserted poetically and eloquently just have a certain ring of truth to them, even if they're only wishful thinking. But you've also backed up the democracy-extolling assertions with the fact that the Republican Party seems only to have won the House (not true), and that only by a small margin; and did not seem to have won the Senate (below I'll argue that the Republican Party has controlled and still does control the Senate). And there is some relief that a handful of MAGA operatives did not succeed at slithering into some of the more dangerously positioned state-level posts of secretary of state. Hey man that's great.
But I'm not so sure -- are you really sure? -- that now is the time to be extolling American democracy rather than pronouncing it dead. I will not repeat the usual, tired list of complaints about our body politic, but posit that the theoretical underpinnings of any legitimate democracy have become, literally, defunct. Obsolete. They no longer apply. Let me explain why I think our democracy has not just recently died, but rather that its corpse already stiffened and went cold decades ago.
It is not just that the party of nearly-neofascist lunatics, in 2022, mostly controls a Supreme Court that anyway lost all credibility two decades ago when it overturned our country's 2000 presidential election. The unelected Court Justices blithely inserted into the White House, in a bloodless coup, the loser of the 2000 American election.
It is not just that a fully-neofascist neofascist did win the presidency in 2016, and came incredibly close to winning it again in 2020, and will certainly at least come close to doing so in 2024. It is not just that the nearly-neofascists have won control of the House now and also, contrary to our news headlines, have maintained their hold on the Senate. (Excuse me, people. The Republicans still control the Senate, as much as ever, as long as you recognize Sinema and Manchin as the undercover Republican moles that they are, seated for no particular reason (except as disguise) on the Democratic Party's side of the aisle).
And it is not just that supposedly vibrant democracies in recent years elected far-rightwing heads of state in Italy and Brazil, and not just that the largest democracy in the world -- India -- has had a far-right ruling party for nearly a decade. Granted, some far-right leaders are not hellbent on tearing down their countries' entire democracies; some of them only want to tear down key parts.
But here is what is more signficant than any of this, in my opinion. Regardless of which side barely won these midterms or has barely won or lost in nearly any of the recent, 21st-century American elections, the contests themselves are not actual elections.
If they were real, actual elections, victory or defeat would not be wholly determined, as it has been now for a long while, by a battle for power waged not among voters, but rather, between two media corporations: the New York Times, from which most news networks get most of their information, versus Fox Propaganda Inc.
Actual elections aren't lost or won based on the collective whims of, on one hand, masses of voters who are totally siloed within the fact-universe created by media on one side, and, on the other hand, other masses siloed in a different fact-universe created by media on the other side.
The idea that so-called "false news" and so-called "targeted voter suppression strategies" are relatively new phenomena is naive. Misguiding news narratives and concepts, biased framing of issues, absurd kowtowing by journalists to distorted and misleading "conventional wisdom" echo chambers ... these tools have been amplified and turbo-driven by mass media for decades, with those media themselves (including my former editors, colleagues and to some extent myself) influenced, blinded, biased, swayed, distracted and misled by paid political operatives, either of the parties, of the billionaires, or of the politicians seeking re-election via media manipulation. (Disclosure: I formerly reported for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Associated Press and others.)
Rival gangs of billionaires and the owners of rival industries have been lining up behind Republicans on one side, and behind Democrats on the other, for decades, and they have been systematically biasing the news-facts-narratives in separate mediaverses for just as long.
Ridiculous falsehoods are believed by blinkered, deluded voters of every stripe. (For example, such illogical and debunked but nevertheless alive-and-well falsehoods, as these: that deficit spending to help low-income and unemployed workers is a burden that we are handing down to our grandchildren; that U.S. foreign and military policy is determined exclusively by our security concerns and our values, not mostly determined by transnational corporations; or that, compared with the middle class in other countries, the American middle class enjoys a standard of living and quality of life that is either best in the world are among the best ..... these are the ridiculous falsehoods that I mean.).
The only reason these midterm "election" results feel like good news about democracy is that too many people think our democracy is still alive, and, even if some partial truth is conceded to their perspective, too many people are "worried that what amounts to a coup might be attempted in 2024." That's a false worry. It is a misleading concern.
There is no "might' and there is no future tense regarding the start of the current coup attempt. It is already occurring now in plain sight, it is already in progress, and regardless of whether the midterm elections look like they might have dealt the coup a small and temporary setback ..... regardless.... the coup leaders' success or failure will not -- not -- be determined by actual democratic elections. Not this year, not in 2024, not anytime soon.
The Framers, the Founding Fathers, the philosophers of modern democracy from Rousseau to Locke and beyond, constructed some theories that, for some time, made some sense, at least in theory. And for a century or so those theories of democracy could be rolled out and at least messily approximated, in practice.
But all of these democratic theories and nearly-democratic practices were long ago obliterated by the advent of nationwide mass media, harnessed to serve the objectives of competing billionaires and business groups, and the think tanks they fund, and the members of congress they own.
Restoring, reviving, resurrecting anything in America deserving of the name "democracy" will not be achieved at all, by staving off Trump and the Trumpist hordes, if it turns out that is even possible to do. There still will be no democracy here, unless democratic theory is overhauled, new measures are taken and profound structural changes are made. To think that a democracy is functioning at all, while a democracy-destroying, wealth-fueled, media-amplified propaganda juggernaut is roaming the Earth, is like thinking a Birthday Party is still going on in a house where lions entered long ago and are roaming through the rooms killing and eating any leftover partiers.