THANK YOU, Bill. I felt SO desperate, throughout the entire summer, when I saw that THIS is the conversation that we urgently needed to have and no one was having it. Instead, the Bulwark (and in a very well-intentioned way) was 95% focused on ridiculing Trump as a person. Yes, of course, from a democratic perspective, most of what Trump…
THANK YOU, Bill. I felt SO desperate, throughout the entire summer, when I saw that THIS is the conversation that we urgently needed to have and no one was having it. Instead, the Bulwark (and in a very well-intentioned way) was 95% focused on ridiculing Trump as a person. Yes, of course, from a democratic perspective, most of what Trump said and did was ridiculous. But personalizing/psychologizing it all came at a tremendous cost: people did not realize that this WAS the VERY well planned and mapped out installation of fascism in the US, with Trump merely being their clown in chief. Biden and Harris said it over and over again: this is the end of democracy, it's bad, and it goes way beyond the usual policy debates between left and right. And yet, while the legacy media refused to have this debate AND massively focused on Trump's tweets (designed to generate clickbait headlines which the corporate media love above anything else) while ignoring 99% of Harris's message and limiting themselves to constantly insisting on wanting even more "policy proposal details" than what she was already providing... the Bulwark praised Harris for providing so many policy details and coming up with perfectly centrist and good policies, AND... also focused most of the time on the last Trump tweet or shocking rally behavior. In this way, we never ever had any debate about THE most important thing at stake during the 2024 election.
Fortunately, in the end, both NYT op-eds and the Bulwark DID use the WORD "fascism". But by then it was September already, and no one went beyond just calling it fascism. Result? Most people saw it as petty name-calling, with NO real consciousness of what was going on at all. Harris to me felt like the lone wolf crying out in the desert that the media landscape had by then become.
And, I have to admit, most of the The Bulwark reporting since Nov. 5 felt so utterly superfluous to me precisely because now, even the word fascism was no longer used. Most videos went back to just laughing at how stupid and ridiculous Trump had been again. We were literally "amusing ourselves to death", being entertained by the king of reality TV while a real disaster was going on.
So for all these reason, it's such a relief to see that you now interview Anne Applebaum yesterday, Bill, and are commenting on the NPR interview today (I missed it, so thanks for signaling it and posting the link to it).
Neoconservatism was always an ideology, not a real philosophy. But ideologies are what turns a democracy into fascism, so blatantly ignoring them, as the media are still largely doing today, meant literally "sleepwalking into dictatorship", as another expert whom I hope you'll soon interview (Kim Scheppele) called it years ago already. Irving Kristol was one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism. Imho it was one of the most disastrous decisions the GOP ever made, and one of the root causes of what is happening today. Still, he WAS a real ideologue. So I hope that from now one, starting to laser-focus on ideology to help people understand the "brutally serious consequences" (as Harris called it during the DNC convention) of the outcome of the election, will be what comes naturally to you, since it is a family tradition, after all, and some things do deserve "conservation"...
THANK YOU, Bill. I felt SO desperate, throughout the entire summer, when I saw that THIS is the conversation that we urgently needed to have and no one was having it. Instead, the Bulwark (and in a very well-intentioned way) was 95% focused on ridiculing Trump as a person. Yes, of course, from a democratic perspective, most of what Trump said and did was ridiculous. But personalizing/psychologizing it all came at a tremendous cost: people did not realize that this WAS the VERY well planned and mapped out installation of fascism in the US, with Trump merely being their clown in chief. Biden and Harris said it over and over again: this is the end of democracy, it's bad, and it goes way beyond the usual policy debates between left and right. And yet, while the legacy media refused to have this debate AND massively focused on Trump's tweets (designed to generate clickbait headlines which the corporate media love above anything else) while ignoring 99% of Harris's message and limiting themselves to constantly insisting on wanting even more "policy proposal details" than what she was already providing... the Bulwark praised Harris for providing so many policy details and coming up with perfectly centrist and good policies, AND... also focused most of the time on the last Trump tweet or shocking rally behavior. In this way, we never ever had any debate about THE most important thing at stake during the 2024 election.
Fortunately, in the end, both NYT op-eds and the Bulwark DID use the WORD "fascism". But by then it was September already, and no one went beyond just calling it fascism. Result? Most people saw it as petty name-calling, with NO real consciousness of what was going on at all. Harris to me felt like the lone wolf crying out in the desert that the media landscape had by then become.
And, I have to admit, most of the The Bulwark reporting since Nov. 5 felt so utterly superfluous to me precisely because now, even the word fascism was no longer used. Most videos went back to just laughing at how stupid and ridiculous Trump had been again. We were literally "amusing ourselves to death", being entertained by the king of reality TV while a real disaster was going on.
So for all these reason, it's such a relief to see that you now interview Anne Applebaum yesterday, Bill, and are commenting on the NPR interview today (I missed it, so thanks for signaling it and posting the link to it).
Neoconservatism was always an ideology, not a real philosophy. But ideologies are what turns a democracy into fascism, so blatantly ignoring them, as the media are still largely doing today, meant literally "sleepwalking into dictatorship", as another expert whom I hope you'll soon interview (Kim Scheppele) called it years ago already. Irving Kristol was one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism. Imho it was one of the most disastrous decisions the GOP ever made, and one of the root causes of what is happening today. Still, he WAS a real ideologue. So I hope that from now one, starting to laser-focus on ideology to help people understand the "brutally serious consequences" (as Harris called it during the DNC convention) of the outcome of the election, will be what comes naturally to you, since it is a family tradition, after all, and some things do deserve "conservation"...