Institutional Rot And The Death Rattle Of America
Happy Friday!
It’s remarkable, when you step back and think about it, how toxically maladapted the power centers in U.S. politics have become to one another.
A simple-minded idealist might like to live in a world where the two major U.S. political parties advance competing visions of the future, and the free press picks those platforms apart for the public, in a stable equilibrium. Sometimes Democrats win, sometimes Republicans win, but the process always repeats.
You don’t have to be a naif to notice that the actual relationships between these institutions have become unsustainably perverse. The dysfunction makes everyone who participates in the system miserable, and leaves everyone in the country worse off. But, amazingly, almost nobody in the mix shows any interest in trying to force a reset.
Today there is no equilibrium, because the GOP has become a predatory, rule-or-ruin party. Its purpose, rather than to remake the world in some appealing way, is to crush obstacles to its own power. It doesn’t interact professionally with adversarial media figures, it tries to destroy them. It doesn’t try to compete with the Democratic Party, it tries not to compete with the Democratic Party, by rigging elections and the rule of law.
The less said about this perfidy the better—at least until justice arrives.
Who has time for such crushing frustration? For ruminating on all the bad acts they’ve committed without consequence?
But this approach of theirs has not left them well poised for one-party rule. They may derive sadistic satisfaction from owning the libs, but lib-owning nourishes very few Americans. And that’s before anyone becomes repulsed by the party’s corruption and incompetence.
Republicans are trapped in a vicious cycle, with special emphasis on the root word “vice.” It is causing them to unravel.
They enthralled themselves to Donald Trump and thus can not acknowledge, let alone redress, the manifest wreckage of his incompetence and bad faith.
Republican politics has become like Jackass, where degeneracy is a contest, and they applaud one another for new innovations in the field. They revel in vice. They go to the cameras, compete to tell the most outlandish lies, then pat each other on the back like players celebrating in the dugout.
It’s really the only way Republicans know how to be at this point, but the public is not impressed.
Fortunately for them, their mainstream media enablers can not help themselves either.
The list of media failures is also too long and depressing to dwell on at length. But just recently, media elites played dumb to portray blue-state retaliatory gerrymanders as a collective act of Democratic Party hypocrisy. They absorbed the gerrymandering arms race into a pre-fab horserace framing, and completely lost sight of Trump’s explicit purpose: that Republican gerrymanders will be elements of a November-January coup d’etat.
Legacy news outlets seemed to care quite a lot about Hunter Biden, following every twist and turn of that storyline (as dictated to them by Republicans) but do not treat the Trump children’s multibillion dollar festival of self-enrichment as particularly noteworthy. (It is in fact unprecedented in this country’s history.)
These choices represent favors to Trump. Americans would probably be better informed if journalists covered none of these stories. Ignored them entirely. We’d know fewer facts, but have a clearer sense of ground truth about the parties’ differing ethics and values. It’s almost impossible at this point to imagine mainstream news outlets applying breathless scrutiny to Trump, as if his sons sold oil paintings, or used private email servers. They showed some signs of crusading energy amid recent Epstein file disclosures. But then Trump’s administration announced it would simply ignore the law, by concealing millions of pieces of evidence, and can you guess how many New York Times frontpage headlines have blared “EPSTEIN FILES COVERUP CONTINUES”?
The free press is not supposed to develop Stockholm Syndrome for powerful abusers. But that is what happened, and it happened in part because the bullying only came from one direction.
Democrats are at a low ebb of power at the moment, but they still have mouths and prominent supporters, and they could behave as though the status quo dynamic of maximal Republican bad acting and minimal media scrutiny is an intolerable outrage. An offense to the country and its free people.
When I wrote about media ref-working earlier this week, I compared it to soccer flopping. But the purpose of a soccer flop is to be theatrical. To act wounded and wronged and outraged. Democrats, by contrast, tend to believe the ideal manipulative posture is to stand as stoic as possible. Sportsmanlike. Adult.
This impresses nobody. Democratic voters do not get to see their outrage reflected by their leaders. Republicans see a target that does not hit back. The press feels no countervailing pressure.
Republicans can thus extort useful news coverage by telling their voters abusive lies about the press—the news is fake; reporters are Democratic propagandists, etc—knowing that, from the press’s perspective, appeasement represents the path of least resistance.
Democrats should not be abusive or lie, but they could easily turn the mainstream media into a political foil. I use the term mainstream media advisedly, because the point isn’t to discredit journalism. It’s to single out a subset of media professionals and the institutions they work for.
Republicans say journalism is biased. Democrats can say journalism is an incredibly high calling—because it is—but that it is no longer what most corporate media outlets do. Not their political desks, anyhow. They can cite the failures I enumerated above, along with many others. They can cite corporate payouts to Trump, and the MAGA-aligned executives who control, or will soon control, the lion’s share of mainstream television news outlets. They can cite sanewashing and indefensible double standards. It’s not just that the Trump children make Hunter Biden look like the world’s most honest hustler. Remember EMAILS? Remember how people who do sensitive diplomacy for the United States must use government email servers, and it’s a huge scandal if they don’t?
Can anyone in mainstream media even say with certainty whether Jared Kushner has a government email address?!
As maladapted as Republicans are to liberal society, and as maladapted as legacy media is to Trump, Dems are just as maladapted, just as set in old ways, but with different pathologies.
For years, they told themselves the Republican fever would break. They appealed to voters by promising “bipartisanship” then chased bipartisan cooperation to nowhere. They were intentionally shy about meting out accountability after two corrupt GOP presidencies. Even now, as they awaken late to the ugly reality, they choose not to fight as hard as possible.
I want to say here that while Republicans were quite clearly galloping toward extremism before Trump, the idea that they might burn themselves out was not crazy. Barack Obama, who popularized the fever-breaking metaphor, watched the Democratic “fever” break after the party lost three consecutive presidential elections. He reasonably suspected the same would happen to Republicans. Human nature and our shared democratic heritage would assert themselves. If an approach fails long enough, competitive men will succumb to selective pressure and change.
Maybe something like that would’ve happened if Republicans had lost the 2016 election. But a) the fact that they cheated their way to victory in 2016 suggests extraordinary desperation to gain power on their own terms, and b) 2016 was 10 years ago, quite long enough for Democrats to have abandoned their outmoded intuitions about how politics is supposed to work.
They are adapting now. But the process has been excruciating, because it’s been led by the same actors—same leaders, same understudies, same strategic class, same machinery. Ideally it would be led by new people, who saw things clearly as they unfolded. But at the very least, the familiar faces making all the decisions could acknowledge that they assessed the situation incorrectly; that they made a big bet many years ago on how to respond to right-wing fanaticism, and it was wrong.
They show no such self-awareness.
Thus, the political establishment slides idiotically into oblivion. And we’re left to wonder: Will this continue until the whole system collapses? Or will aspiring leaders emerge (from within or without) to place us back on stable footing.
Yours is the best summary of politics in America and its current relationship to corporate news outlets that I have read. The best label that I can find for this is shameless capitulation. This I would blame on corporate profit placed far above love, honor, and duty to the American people who did the work of building this country.
Thank you for crisply framing all of this. As a former member of the mainstream media who did not envision that our political infrastructure would be weakened the way it has, I agree it is time for all of us to recognize that our system of governance is broken and n eeds, if not replacement, a serious overhaul. A 21st-century Voting Rights Act that enshrines full democracy, including the principle that voters select politicians, not the other way around. An end to slavery-era vestiges like the Electoral College. A term-limited, less partisan Supreme Court. Curb the power of corporations and the wealthy to drown out the voices of other citizens. That's just for starters.
But we will never get our politics right until we get our culture right. There has always been in America a robust segment of the population not committed to the idea that all of us are created equal and that all of us deserve a life of freedom and dignity. But somewhere in the heart of our country has always been this notion that being "one nation" means that we share a common bond and a common destiny—that we can and should only rise if we rise together. The challenge for those of us who believe in that vision is to find ways to reassert it through the relationships and communities we build, the institutions we work through, and our artistic expressions.