The Nero from Queens
There may be a cause and effect thing here. Early this morning Nancy Pelosi told Jake Tapper that Trump is fiddling while people are dying.
So naturally, being the disordered toxic narcissist he is, he decided to show us how fiddly he can be.
Trump is a narcissistic nut case. Where is Impeachment #2?
I’m feeling particularly apocalyptic today, and I can’t help think that this feels like the moment that defines and delineates the end of an era in the United States. The election of Trump was monumental enough (monumentally grotesque, I mean), but this… a catastrophic pandemic is spreading, the President is doing nothing, and his ratings are at an all-time high because of it… that really says something to me in a deep way about total cultural collapse.
Looking back, I think the invention of Fox News was the catalyst for all this. We should never have allowed such a dangerous propaganda machine to take root. Fox News, more than anything — even social media, I’d say — has done more to isolate the American people from reality than anything else. Fox News is why so many Americans can’t distinguish entertainment from politics; why they don’t know what’s real and what isn’t; why they are perfectly comfortable living in a partisan bubble, isolated from points of view that would open their minds. And that was very much by design. Fox news was created to undermine democracy for the sake of a few greedy rich people, and it has succeeded wildly, to the point that democracy is all but gone in the US; replaced by a dysfunctional kleptocracy, exactly like what the remnants of that other great information-control apparatus, the KGB, did to Russia.
It should have been stopped sooner.
If only.
Artymorty #2
There’s a question of what’s causing what though. Are people into trumpism because they watch Fox News, or do they watch Fox News because they are into trumpism? I strongly suspect it’s the latter.
This comes up a lot with climate change. It’s often said that people reject the science of climate change because “they have been misinformed”, which seems to me like putting the cart before the horse. To be sure, there is plenty of misinformation out there, but that doesn’t explain why people actively and selectively seek out the misinformation and are determined to believe it over the real information (which, after all, is also out there). In short, people aren’t denialists because they believe the misinformation, but they choose to believe the misinformation because they are denialists.
I think I’m largely with Arty on this one. The conservatives have actually been winning the culture war. Sure, liberals have had some notable wins (increased rights for gay people being a notable one). In other respects though American culture specifically and western culture generally has become more dominated by conservative thinking. We treat the economy (and a very particular view of the economy) as the most important thing in our society, instead of an adjunct to it. We have to justify absolutely everything in terms of it’s financial worth. While a significant plurality of people have become relatively tolerant and open, an similarly sized plurality are if anything even more socially conservative than ever. These conservatives are very solid as a political block, where those who are more liberal quite frankly are not.
As a result political discourse has moved substantially to the right. So much so that many perfectly viable political positions from the late 1970’s and early 80’s are now untenable for any major political party seeking power anywhere in the western world.
The introduction of Fox news didn’t start this trend, but it sharpened and accelerated it. It reinforced the views of people who were already that way inclined and created a safe zone in which they could bring up their kids and grand kids. As more of the viewer-ship migrated to even more right-wing views, splinter media developed even further to the right. Often blatantly alt-right.
This is an intergenerational trend that will only be turned around with a major societal upheaval. frankly, I doubt that even 2-3 million americans dying of disease would do that, let alone 100K or so.
Feedback loop.
Self re-enforcing feedback loop.
Exactly.
If you wrote a novel in which your fictional president bragged about his television ratings while the death toll raced towards six digits, any editor would tell you that this character was cartoonishly unrealistic.