I've always hated the whole 'democracy dies in darkness' thing. It's a horribly pretentious claim made by a paper that employs Hugh Hewitt. If you're going to claim that your lodestar is being pro-Democracy, you have to actually follow through on that and ask what that looks like. If you think that Trump and the GOP are so hostile to Dem…
I've always hated the whole 'democracy dies in darkness' thing. It's a horribly pretentious claim made by a paper that employs Hugh Hewitt. If you're going to claim that your lodestar is being pro-Democracy, you have to actually follow through on that and ask what that looks like. If you think that Trump and the GOP are so hostile to Democracy itself that you need to put that in your headline, then you can't also be both sides-ing Trump and employing sycophants like Hewitt. When an entire party is anti-Democracy, being pro-Democracy means shedding impartiality, in the same way that being pro-Nickelback would put you on the side of a debate with much lower stakes.
The whole 'Democracy dies in darkness' thing is transparent, empty branding by a paper that has no real desire to actually buck the trend of 'centrist' legacy news orgs that don't actually have a moral compass. Having one would stop them from being to the left of Jeb Bush. What the post actually is, is comfortable. It wants to be seen as liberal without having to actually, you know, be liberal. As JVL says, there's an imbalance here: you never seen conservative outlets fretting that they're turning off liberal readers.
The reality is, the Post has long been trading on its name as the place where Watergate was broken, in the same way that NYT trades on the idea that it's the 'newspaper of record.' These are lies, but they are beneficial lies from the paper's perspective.
The other thing is that Democracy almost never dies 'in darkness.' Almost all such projects die in the open, in full view, usually with popular support. Germany, Italy, Russia, Hungary, even going back to ancient Athens, their Democracies did not die hidden away in the shadows. They died in public, with thunderous applause. Even Republics like France did not die because of shadowy actions by hidden actors, they died in public with the full support of the people. Napoleon was only hated once he lost, and his name remained so popular Napoleon III took over soon after.
It's comforting to think that they die in the shadows, due to the nefarious actions by shadowy figures, but that's just not true. Democracies die because people like action, and they dislike compromise, and most people would prefer authoritarianism where they get to be the boot over Democracy where people vote to use the boot against them. That's simply the nature of humanity.
The post is not some brave freedom fighting organization, they're not radical nutjobs, they're not even really activists of any kind. They're cosplaying radicals while being too embarrassed to actually take a stand for anything. Again, if you believe that Democracy is so imperiled by the GOP, you wouldn't be keeping Hugh Hewitt on the payroll.
Yes, as you've shown, democracy died, and is dying, in broad daylight. But I disagree with you that most people prefer authoritarianism. According to political psychologist Karen Stenner, who studies what she calls the authoritarian disposition, a solid third of any society prefers authoritarianism, as long as they are in the in-group (authoritarians always have an out-group to blame and energize their supporters). See https://www.karenstenner.com/.
If most people preferred authoritarianism, we wouldn't have had an increasingly democratic republic, from the start, in our 235-year history.
WaPo became a clickbait for polarization, from Trump sycophants to Hamas whisperers. I canceled my subscription of 8 years and feel liberated. They offered my a 70% discount, but I didn't take the bait.
JVL often, rightly, talks about the asymmetry in our media landscape. Supposedly liberal news sources feel obligated to bring on conservatives in the name of 'balance' but this aversion to bias is not reflected in any conservative source. Where he and I differ in opinion is that I believe this has resulted due to a conscious choice by 'liberal' media sources.
Organizations like the NYT, like the WaPo, like CNN or MSNBC or any of the other 'mainstream' orgs could choose to be openly, willingly liberal. They could do this while still claiming to be 'fair and balanced' as Fox calls themselves. They choose not to. They choose to accept the terms of the debate as set by groups like FOX, that any liberal view needs to be balanced by a conservative one, but no conservative view needs to be balanced by a liberal one. They choose, consciously, to accept this paradigm, and have for years.
Conservatives felt no qualm about making their own organizations. As a result, papers like the Wapo have spent decades curating their views in a way that chases conservatives. This is, of course, untenable if the people they're chasing demand unquestioned adherence to the party line.
The Wapo has, at this point, decided to try and play both sides, and they've failed. They want to be seen as 'the resistance' without ever doing anything to resist. They're hedging. If Trump wins, they want to be invited to his press conferences, and they'll willingly allow themselves to be branded as enemies of the state so long as they have access to his words.
They're not brave truth tellers. They're toadies shadowboxing imaginary monsters and claiming victory, while folding under any pressure created by the accusation of the dreaded 'bias.'
They are not, simply put, serious people, even if they believe themselves to be.
Well said. This was not the case when Woodward and Bernstein first reported on the burglers at the DNC offices in the Watergate building. They and their boss, Ben Bradlee, were serious.
What accounts for this? Surely it's the disruption in the news business model that the internet brought about.
I’m Looking back at the last 50 years, the “paradigm shift” you mention became more perceptible after the 1980 Election. I could be wrong of course, my memory could be fooling me, but it seems like it was around that time.
I've written plenty myself on how the 1980 election was the first election that really shifted the balance across America in ways that no one could have predicted. Reagan's great idea, and it was one from a political standpoint, was to bring the religious right into politics. Furthermore, his 'big tent' allowed him to use them without having to give them anything truly important. It's important to realize that the religious right was paranoid even before the 1980s, and they weren't really large in number.
It also helped that 'the left' of 1980 were at their weakest point, perhaps ever. The socialists watched the broader communist project collapse, they were unpopular socially speaking in culture, and Carter's presidency was a bust. The 1980s were the point where conservative politics were the closest to pop culture. But those politics were decidedly on the 'freedom' and 'military first' bandwidth, not the religious bandwidth. There's a reason why the 1980s are defined by images of big muscled military guys shooting guns.
By 1988, the religious right knew they were needed, but no one in the party was ever going to cater to them because their views were electoral poison, and they knew it. They began to create their own organizations out of the remnants of the old John Birch society, using things like talk radio and Fox News as the places to air their views. The old, much more out of date views of the birchers were shelved and the focus became on 'morality' and things such as 'cultural decline.'
When the guy who founded the moral majority claimed he didn't believe in it anymore after the acquittal of Clinton, the feeling among the paranoid only grew. Their money, and the money of billionaires who felt equally concerned by their growing impotence in many spheres, boosted lots of voices who would now be very familiar to us.
There's also one other thing that changed over time. Reagan, wisely, focused his ideas on the economic systems that people felt needed to change. He overcorrected in my view, but Carter presided over 20% interest rates and people were willing to buy into something new. But what the GOP didn't really consider was that in 1980, the majority of conservatives were economic, not social, conservatives. Cut twenty years into the future, and that balance was more 50/50. Cut forty years into the future, social conservatives ARE the party.
The reason for this is obvious. The people who benefitted from Reaganomics, the Paul Ryan set, stayed in the GOP. Those who saw only false promises ended up in the Democratic party. The people who joined the GOP in the meantime were those who were turned off by the Democratic Party's embrace of more liberal social policies. Essentially, the people who ran the party in 2015 thought that the people in the party still looked like Mitt Romney. In reality, they looked like Trump. And when Trump offered them what they really wanted, they were happy to discard the past.
In other words, the first paradigm shift takes place in 1980 as you said. The Left as it had been was utterly shattered, and entirely rudderless. It wasn't until Clinton used his charisma to win that they regained power, and the modern left didn't really resurge until Obama, where a combination of middle eastern wars and economic crisis forged a new consensus among the various groups on the left. Meanwhile, the right in 1980 saw a decade of pop culture salience, but it also saw the hopes of the religious right dashed, and those groups paired with rich men to form new, parallel organizations.
Those, in turn, took power when the pop culture and popular views of Reaganism declined and atrophied. Those that had tried to be mainstream, like Fox, easily switched to catering to the social conservative right, because they were the people who actually existed. Thus, the second shift was in 2016, when Trump proved this thesis of the base being social conservatives not economic conservatives. What the next one will be, I don't know. But I can say that absent a crisis we're not likely to see another one soon.
Agree with all of this because I lived through it as a Dem. You left out a coupla steps in the path from Reagan's three-legged stool to MAGA. In 1992, Pat Buchanan gave the social conservatives a voice in the party. The debacle of the Iraq War ended the neocon's foothold, and the '08 crash ended the fiscal conservatives'. This left just the cultural warriors who we now call MAGA.
Not going to lie... I only ever read his columns to work myself into a lather or, more often than not, I don't bother to read the column and go straight to the comments and get a good laugh from everyone tearing his "reasoning" to shreds.
I have to confess I either ignore it (life is short) or do the same, straight to comments about why I was right to ignore it. Also, must confess that I never read a direct quote or tweet by trump or any of his sycophants when it's included in any article I'm reading, i just skip down to where the quotation marks end and resume reading from there. I trust the reporter or columnist will just recap the highlights for me. That's why they're paid the big bucks, they have to actually read the mindless drivel!
I've always hated the whole 'democracy dies in darkness' thing. It's a horribly pretentious claim made by a paper that employs Hugh Hewitt. If you're going to claim that your lodestar is being pro-Democracy, you have to actually follow through on that and ask what that looks like. If you think that Trump and the GOP are so hostile to Democracy itself that you need to put that in your headline, then you can't also be both sides-ing Trump and employing sycophants like Hewitt. When an entire party is anti-Democracy, being pro-Democracy means shedding impartiality, in the same way that being pro-Nickelback would put you on the side of a debate with much lower stakes.
The whole 'Democracy dies in darkness' thing is transparent, empty branding by a paper that has no real desire to actually buck the trend of 'centrist' legacy news orgs that don't actually have a moral compass. Having one would stop them from being to the left of Jeb Bush. What the post actually is, is comfortable. It wants to be seen as liberal without having to actually, you know, be liberal. As JVL says, there's an imbalance here: you never seen conservative outlets fretting that they're turning off liberal readers.
The reality is, the Post has long been trading on its name as the place where Watergate was broken, in the same way that NYT trades on the idea that it's the 'newspaper of record.' These are lies, but they are beneficial lies from the paper's perspective.
The other thing is that Democracy almost never dies 'in darkness.' Almost all such projects die in the open, in full view, usually with popular support. Germany, Italy, Russia, Hungary, even going back to ancient Athens, their Democracies did not die hidden away in the shadows. They died in public, with thunderous applause. Even Republics like France did not die because of shadowy actions by hidden actors, they died in public with the full support of the people. Napoleon was only hated once he lost, and his name remained so popular Napoleon III took over soon after.
It's comforting to think that they die in the shadows, due to the nefarious actions by shadowy figures, but that's just not true. Democracies die because people like action, and they dislike compromise, and most people would prefer authoritarianism where they get to be the boot over Democracy where people vote to use the boot against them. That's simply the nature of humanity.
The post is not some brave freedom fighting organization, they're not radical nutjobs, they're not even really activists of any kind. They're cosplaying radicals while being too embarrassed to actually take a stand for anything. Again, if you believe that Democracy is so imperiled by the GOP, you wouldn't be keeping Hugh Hewitt on the payroll.
Yes, as you've shown, democracy died, and is dying, in broad daylight. But I disagree with you that most people prefer authoritarianism. According to political psychologist Karen Stenner, who studies what she calls the authoritarian disposition, a solid third of any society prefers authoritarianism, as long as they are in the in-group (authoritarians always have an out-group to blame and energize their supporters). See https://www.karenstenner.com/.
If most people preferred authoritarianism, we wouldn't have had an increasingly democratic republic, from the start, in our 235-year history.
Thanks for a great post. Well said.
WaPo became a clickbait for polarization, from Trump sycophants to Hamas whisperers. I canceled my subscription of 8 years and feel liberated. They offered my a 70% discount, but I didn't take the bait.
Don’t forget Marc Thiessen is still on WAPO’s payroll.
Yes yes yes!!! "Hugh Hewitt" !!! That's like giving a column to Ann Coulter (if they haven't yet done that?)
JVL often, rightly, talks about the asymmetry in our media landscape. Supposedly liberal news sources feel obligated to bring on conservatives in the name of 'balance' but this aversion to bias is not reflected in any conservative source. Where he and I differ in opinion is that I believe this has resulted due to a conscious choice by 'liberal' media sources.
Organizations like the NYT, like the WaPo, like CNN or MSNBC or any of the other 'mainstream' orgs could choose to be openly, willingly liberal. They could do this while still claiming to be 'fair and balanced' as Fox calls themselves. They choose not to. They choose to accept the terms of the debate as set by groups like FOX, that any liberal view needs to be balanced by a conservative one, but no conservative view needs to be balanced by a liberal one. They choose, consciously, to accept this paradigm, and have for years.
Conservatives felt no qualm about making their own organizations. As a result, papers like the Wapo have spent decades curating their views in a way that chases conservatives. This is, of course, untenable if the people they're chasing demand unquestioned adherence to the party line.
The Wapo has, at this point, decided to try and play both sides, and they've failed. They want to be seen as 'the resistance' without ever doing anything to resist. They're hedging. If Trump wins, they want to be invited to his press conferences, and they'll willingly allow themselves to be branded as enemies of the state so long as they have access to his words.
They're not brave truth tellers. They're toadies shadowboxing imaginary monsters and claiming victory, while folding under any pressure created by the accusation of the dreaded 'bias.'
They are not, simply put, serious people, even if they believe themselves to be.
Well said. This was not the case when Woodward and Bernstein first reported on the burglers at the DNC offices in the Watergate building. They and their boss, Ben Bradlee, were serious.
What accounts for this? Surely it's the disruption in the news business model that the internet brought about.
I’m Looking back at the last 50 years, the “paradigm shift” you mention became more perceptible after the 1980 Election. I could be wrong of course, my memory could be fooling me, but it seems like it was around that time.
I've written plenty myself on how the 1980 election was the first election that really shifted the balance across America in ways that no one could have predicted. Reagan's great idea, and it was one from a political standpoint, was to bring the religious right into politics. Furthermore, his 'big tent' allowed him to use them without having to give them anything truly important. It's important to realize that the religious right was paranoid even before the 1980s, and they weren't really large in number.
It also helped that 'the left' of 1980 were at their weakest point, perhaps ever. The socialists watched the broader communist project collapse, they were unpopular socially speaking in culture, and Carter's presidency was a bust. The 1980s were the point where conservative politics were the closest to pop culture. But those politics were decidedly on the 'freedom' and 'military first' bandwidth, not the religious bandwidth. There's a reason why the 1980s are defined by images of big muscled military guys shooting guns.
By 1988, the religious right knew they were needed, but no one in the party was ever going to cater to them because their views were electoral poison, and they knew it. They began to create their own organizations out of the remnants of the old John Birch society, using things like talk radio and Fox News as the places to air their views. The old, much more out of date views of the birchers were shelved and the focus became on 'morality' and things such as 'cultural decline.'
When the guy who founded the moral majority claimed he didn't believe in it anymore after the acquittal of Clinton, the feeling among the paranoid only grew. Their money, and the money of billionaires who felt equally concerned by their growing impotence in many spheres, boosted lots of voices who would now be very familiar to us.
There's also one other thing that changed over time. Reagan, wisely, focused his ideas on the economic systems that people felt needed to change. He overcorrected in my view, but Carter presided over 20% interest rates and people were willing to buy into something new. But what the GOP didn't really consider was that in 1980, the majority of conservatives were economic, not social, conservatives. Cut twenty years into the future, and that balance was more 50/50. Cut forty years into the future, social conservatives ARE the party.
The reason for this is obvious. The people who benefitted from Reaganomics, the Paul Ryan set, stayed in the GOP. Those who saw only false promises ended up in the Democratic party. The people who joined the GOP in the meantime were those who were turned off by the Democratic Party's embrace of more liberal social policies. Essentially, the people who ran the party in 2015 thought that the people in the party still looked like Mitt Romney. In reality, they looked like Trump. And when Trump offered them what they really wanted, they were happy to discard the past.
In other words, the first paradigm shift takes place in 1980 as you said. The Left as it had been was utterly shattered, and entirely rudderless. It wasn't until Clinton used his charisma to win that they regained power, and the modern left didn't really resurge until Obama, where a combination of middle eastern wars and economic crisis forged a new consensus among the various groups on the left. Meanwhile, the right in 1980 saw a decade of pop culture salience, but it also saw the hopes of the religious right dashed, and those groups paired with rich men to form new, parallel organizations.
Those, in turn, took power when the pop culture and popular views of Reaganism declined and atrophied. Those that had tried to be mainstream, like Fox, easily switched to catering to the social conservative right, because they were the people who actually existed. Thus, the second shift was in 2016, when Trump proved this thesis of the base being social conservatives not economic conservatives. What the next one will be, I don't know. But I can say that absent a crisis we're not likely to see another one soon.
Agree with all of this because I lived through it as a Dem. You left out a coupla steps in the path from Reagan's three-legged stool to MAGA. In 1992, Pat Buchanan gave the social conservatives a voice in the party. The debacle of the Iraq War ended the neocon's foothold, and the '08 crash ended the fiscal conservatives'. This left just the cultural warriors who we now call MAGA.
Seems like NBC will be in the market for another paid contributor once they pay Ronna McDaniel out of her contract. You should apply for the position.
Trump paradigm shift revealed how amoral and hypocritical the "moral majority" is.
Somebody should hire you as a media analyst, like, today!
Not going to lie... I only ever read his columns to work myself into a lather or, more often than not, I don't bother to read the column and go straight to the comments and get a good laugh from everyone tearing his "reasoning" to shreds.
I do the same!
I have to confess I either ignore it (life is short) or do the same, straight to comments about why I was right to ignore it. Also, must confess that I never read a direct quote or tweet by trump or any of his sycophants when it's included in any article I'm reading, i just skip down to where the quotation marks end and resume reading from there. I trust the reporter or columnist will just recap the highlights for me. That's why they're paid the big bucks, they have to actually read the mindless drivel!
Wapo is letting their commenters carry the liberal torch for them.
Terrific, and it really is surprising that your points aren’t obvious to more people.
If we have learned anything in the last decade, “People” aren’t smart….
Ok, but how many ships are we going to build? (Sorry couldn't help it)