Writing for The Bulwark last week, Jill Lawrence noted that “[Y]ou can’t take it for granted that most voters remember their high school civics classes and pay attention to the daily workings of government. They don’t, and it has nothing to do with anyone’s smarts or political leanings. People are busy. Maybe they have kids or two jobs. Maybe they’re young and disengaged. Maybe— highly likely!— the work they do does not involve sitting at a computer or monitoring politics. In a poll last month, just over half of Americans knew which party controlled the Senate (Democrats) and House (Republicans). The rest, 44 percent and 42 percent respectively, did not. In the same poll, 65 percent correctly named the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government; 21 percent could name one or two, and 15 percent could name none.
I was born in 1948 and ever since I was a kid, I remember Republicans attacking and trying to defund public education, part of a broader conflict over who gets to shape our culture, identity and, ultimately, political power. Conservatives— especially the ones who adhere to a small-government philosophy that opposes what they see as unnecessary government intervention in citizens' lives and prefer privatization and market-based solutions— see public schools as battlegrounds where the future ideological direction of the country is determined, and defunding them is one way of tipping the scales in their favor. What I learned early in life is that Republicans hate schooling for the working class because it serves as a great equalizer, providing opportunities for children from various socioeconomic backgrounds, a threat to the status quo of social and economic hierarchies. Defunding public education would maintain those divides, ensuring the wealthy have access to better schools while others are left behind. The push for school vouchers and charter schools, under the guise of “choice,” accelerates this stratification.
After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that desegregated schools, many white conservatives, especially in the South, sought to undermine public education as a way to resist integration. Private schools— usually all-white— were set up in response. This legacy continues in some regions where public education is still seen as an engine for social change that conservatives oppose. A deeper, cultural strain of anti-intellectualism runs through conservative circles. Intellectual elites, often associated with universities and the academic world, are seen as out-of-touch with the values of “real” Americans. This perspective feeds a distrust of education as a whole, viewing it as breeding ground for “elitist” attitudes that disconnect people from conservative, rural or working-class values.
So when Michael Podhorzer wrote that the country is sleepwalking it’s way to fascism, he was being kind and non-judgmental of the cognitive abilities among Trump supporters. He says he’s “puzzled” how “polling shows the race in a dead heat despite Trump’s obvious unfitness for office and authoritarian intentions… Just as puzzling, and no doubt connected, is how much less attention the media is paying to Trump’s unfitness and authoritarian intentions now than it was four years ago, despite substantially more evidence of his intentions now than there was then.”
This is no small point. Over the last four election cycles, the margin of Democratic victories has been their margin with those who did not vote in 2016 and for the most part do not have favorable views of either party, but understood what they had to lose if Trump/MAGA won. Their likelihood to cast ballots has been in direct proportion to what they thought they had to lose if they didn’t.
And so, the most alarming thing right now is that America is insufficiently alarmed given what we know a second Trump Administration would mean. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a disaster. Especially with only a few weeks to go, the media should be far more concerned with whether voters know what will happen if Trump wins than whether voters know whether Trump will win, or, even more ludicrously, how this or that demographic group will vote… [T]his race is closer than it would be if more people understood what a second Trump term would actually mean for them.”
He the endeavored to outline what’s gone wrong:
The Anti-MAGA Majority— Democrats have been winning elections due to higher turnout of less partisan voters who are voting against Trump and MAGA Republicans, not necessarily for Democrats.
MSM to America: Ho Hum— The NY Times is paying much less attention to this presidential contest in general, and Trump’s fascist intentions in particular.
Deadly Disbelief— [S]o-called “swing voters,” especially soft Harris voters: (1) the overwhelming majority of them are as hostile to Trump as “solid” Harris supporters, (2) they have much the same substantive concerns about Trump winning as “solid” Harris supporters, but (3) they are much less likely to believe that Trump would actually follow through on those intentions.
He wrote that “At a time when nearly half of America does not identify with either party, and when politicians are deeply distrusted, only the media and other civil society institutions and leaders can make clear what Americans have to lose if Trump returns to the White House. As for Fox’s role in this… what more can even be said? Actually Thom Hartmann did have something to say about “the deadly toxins Fox ‘News’ has been spreading across the American media and political landscape for decades”yesterday.
The soil in which democracy grows and flourishes is truthful information held as common knowledge by the majority of the population. Lies, when presented as news or as truth-based information, become a poison that severely injures and can even kill a democracy.
Particularly when those lies are packaged and sold just to make a buck. Or, in the case of the Murdoch empire, billions of bucks.
Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of the New York Times) former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing news operations ‘the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy… The uncomfortable truth is,” Rudd wrote, “Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable... Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view… In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”
Murdoch’s positions aren’t at all ambiguous, Rudd noted. They’re simply pro-white, pro-billionaire, and pro-oligarchy and thus, by extension, anti-democracy. He’s simply following in the footsteps of his notoriously racist father, Sir Keith Murdoch, from whom he inherited his media empire.
“In Australia, as in America,” Rudd wrote, “Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change, and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.
“Given Murdoch's impact on the future of our democracy,” Rudd added, “it's time to revisit it.”
…[R]evelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the explicit encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself, who saw the lies as the key to increased profits. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and calling him a “sore loser,” they packaged slick lies saying the exact opposite to their audience.
Along with their relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6th— all while making more billions for Murdoch and his family.
Commentaires