Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
President Biden attends a virtual meeting with Mexico’s president in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, March 1, 2021.
I have the greatest sympathy for any writer who, in writing about a problem caused by the Trumpification of the Republican Party and conservative movement (and media), decides that he or she can deal with only a small fraction of its horrific impact. Ditto when writing about the consequent desecration and still-ongoing attempt to destroy what remains of American democracy. But there is also a point where the desire to skirt over the phenomenon becomes collusion with it. And I think it’s fair to say that point was reached in this otherwise useful (and much lauded) discussion of what authors Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev describe as “How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire” in The Atlantic, which addresses the various deleterious effects of social media on what might be called the ecology of political information.
The article is worth a read. Go ahead, I’ll wait …
But I ask you, especially given Facebook’s well-known coddling-to-the-point-of-naked-promotion of Trumpian disinformation discussed in last week’s Altercation, how is it possible to discuss the problem with no mention of virtually any of what McSweeney’s has so helpfully identified as the 1,056 (so far) of Trump’s “cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes”?
What of the fact, as Jelani Cobb notes in The New Yorker, that
in August, the Republican National Convention convened without presenting a new Party platform. The Convention was centered almost solely on Trump; the events, all of which took place at the White House, validated an increasing suspicion that Trump himself was the Republican platform … Or consider the events of the past six months alone: during a Presidential debate, a sitting Commander-in-Chief gave a knowing shout-out to the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group; he also refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and subsequently attempted to strong-arm the Georgia secretary of state into falsifying election returns; he and other Republican officials filed more than sixty lawsuits in an effort to overturn the results of the election; he incited the insurrectionists who overran the Capitol and demanded the lynching of, among others, the Republican Vice-President; and he was impeached, for the second time, then acquitted by Senate Republicans fearful of a base that remains in his thrall.
And as Fintan O’Toole adds in The New York Review,
How do you govern in a democracy where one of the two main parties is incapable of escaping its own willing embrace of despotism and anarchy, and where such a party—through the system of grossly unequal representation in the Senate, the gerrymandering of House districts, the packing of the courts, and the suppression of voters—is able to embed itself as a minority that can frustrate the will of the majority?
What about the inextricable relationship between Trump’s “governance” and his grifting?
And how about the fact that, as Ari Berman reports in Mother Jones, Republicans are now nakedly seeking to suppress people’s ability to vote in Florida and Georgia? “Every single metric of voter access that has been a good in Georgia is now under attack,” Stacey Abrams tells him.
These are hardly isolated incidents. Again, from The New Yorker’s Mr. Cobb:
The Brennan Center for Justice reported that the redistricting put into effect after the 2010 census provided the G.O.P. with at least sixteen additional seats in the House of Representatives. In 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder eviscerated a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and allowed changes to voting laws which, in the name of preventing voter fraud—something that has repeatedly been proved to be a nonexistent problem—made voting more difficult, particularly for minorities. Those laws were overwhelmingly passed in state legislatures controlled by Republicans. (The Brennan Center is tracking more than two hundred and fifty bills, pending in forty-three states, that would restrict voting.) Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on an Arizona law that effectively restricts voting access for people of color, in a case that could undermine remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act; the conservative Justices appeared ready to uphold the restrictions.
This is the crisis. The social media companies amplify it, but the root cause is these criminals’ malefactions. Until our mainstream media faces up to this fact, they will continue to succeed in their quest.
For instance, in yet another series of terrible headlines for perfectly decently reported pieces, The New York Times announces that “After Stimulus Victory in Senate, Reality Sinks In: Bipartisanship Is Dead.” Were I to get the job of Times headline writer, I would swap out “Bipartisanship” for “Republican Commitment to Sanity, Decency and Democracy.”
Far worse, with an almost comic commitment to mindless bothsidesism, is CNN. Here is a headline over a story about the passage of the Democrats’ incredibly bold bill to shore up the deeply frayed U.S. social safety net (in the guise of emergency pandemic relief): “Negotiator-in-Chief Biden Notches His First Win but a Bipartisan Governing Loss.” Again, if CNN could afford to hire me, I would let them know that it’s this “bipartisan governing loss” that has enabled the enactment of a bill that, according to the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, is not only enormously popular, but also is viewed by a significant majority of the public as the result of a “good faith effort” by Democrats to work with Republicans. One imagines that to score a “bipartisan governing victory” in CNN’s eyes, Democrats would have to agree that storming the Capitol with the idea of murdering the vice president was a pretty cool notion, too.
YOU MAY HAVE READ that the great diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber died this week. Walt was my undergraduate honors thesis adviser and lifelong friend, mentor, and role model to me. I will write a longer appreciation for him this week and will post it next week, but in the meantime here is Cornell University’s account of his career, along with that of The New York Times. We LaFeber students were such nerds that we used to trade spots on the sign-up sheet for his office hours the way other students traded joints.
For some reason, I have paired his death in my head with this incredibly moving Twitter thread by a young man named Claudio Eduardo Cabrera. I’ve been teaching for 17 years now at the criminally underfunded, under-resourced, and underappreciated Brooklyn College, Mr. Cabrera’s alma mater, which is part of the CUNY system that educated my father and made it possible for him to earn enough money so I could go to Cornell without any concerns but to be the best student I could be under the tutelage of one of America’s greatest professors. But leaving aside my own failings as a teacher—Cabrera generously credits my colleagues Paul Moses and Anthony Mancini—none of my students have the kind of privilege that I enjoyed. Like this impressive young man, virtually all of them are burdened with all kinds of responsibilities—whether financial, familial, or what have you—that make a mockery of our allegedly meritocratic society. Anyway, I salute Mr. Cabrera and I wish our benighted punditocracy would pay attention to the fact that woke elite college students—annoying as they sometimes may be—are a trivial problem in a country where just a tiny percentage of our young people are lucky enough to attend such places. Public universities are among the most important investments we can make in our future. (I wrote about a related issue—“intellectual inequality”—a few years back in this New Yorker article.)
Odds and Ends
- Here is a video of Bruce Springsteen singing “Drift Away” but with too much talk of testicles for my taste.
- Here is just an audio version of the same song, this time with Steve Van Zandt, which is actually even better despite the, um, limited vocal gifts of said Sopranos star.
- Here is a posting of a group of great cover songs that I worked on for a ridiculous amount of time for the Times a few years back.
- Shannon McNally’s tribute to Waylon Jennings, “The Waylon Sessions,” which features Jessi Colter, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell, and Lukas Nelson, is definitely worth your time, if any of the above names are meaningful to you. Here’s audio of an awesome “I Ain’t Living Long Like This.”
I think the great Trotsky quote that goes something like “You may not care about the dialectic, but the dialectic cares about you” is quite likely apocryphal, and I’d be willing to bet big bucks that Putin never said it to Obama as is “reported” here by Mort Zuckerman. But I still think it’s a true and important observation, and has never been more so in most of our lives than in the cursed COVID and possibly proto-fascistic year just past. That’s a long and roundabout way of my recommending that you stream the movie Ida. It’s perhaps the most powerful and engrossing demonstration of Trotsky’s (or someone’s) principle of any work of art I know. It’s also a really good movie.
