The idea of American politics used to be pretty simple.
There were powerful interests, and they had lots of nice advantages, and there was our political system giving everyone a vote so they could limit the abuses of the powerful -the people.
“Of the people, by the people, for the people”- that was the idea.
As opposed to what? As opposed to those powerful interests.
Times have changed.
And the way they’ve changed isn’t just those powerful interests getting more powerful than ever, which has happened, in important ways.
It’s in a media war for public opinion that the founding fathers couldn't conceive of, that the powerful interests are winning.
It’s taking the idea of our democracy of ‘the people’ being able to do this or that, and corrupting it, by corrupting the views of the people themselves.
One step is “divide and conquer”. You know those people whose environment is being polluted, who are being overcharged for healthcare? They’re split, by abortion, racial issues, and much more.
And another key part of the war is that the public’s faith in the media is shaken. The media’s role is to serve the people and help them be informed and organize against those powerful interests.
But instead, the media’s mission has become to profit — and that means, as a ‘free market’ industry, that any pandering and fluff and anything else that gets ratings, is the priority.
Solving problems is not.
This has been a direct assault, with Fox telling people the media are liars except for Fox, and a big right-wing media industry with the theme of “lamestream media” attacks.
There are two clear ways to defeat democracy. One is to defeat the system — as authoritarians have done in many countries.
America’s strong traditions would make that a very hard sell, and hard to maintain, here.
The second way is far more doable and sustainable, which is to use modern advertising and large sums of money to influence and mislead public opinion. That has been done.
Liberals are used to thinking in terms of supporting democracy, and of the right policies that are for the public good. But the battleground now is less policy debate than a media war.
And the public side is fighting with bows and arrows at best against a modern military.
Interests that stand to make billions have very large warchests to spend — nice citizens giving a few dollars for the public good have far less to spend.
Most good causes don’t have many lobbyists and not much money. For example, the cause of ending fossil fuels to not destroy the climate.
There is a broad and strong interest in not destroying the climate. It threatens trillions of dollars of damage.
But where is the funding for the political campaign to convince the public and politicians on this?
It’s mostly a few public-minded citizens donating for a good cause, it seems. A guy named Al Gore making a nice movie warning about it.]
On the other side is an industry with billions at stake spending millions year after year to fund hundreds of organizations paid to lie about it and get their agenda passed — and they’re winning.
Or, take medicines. Big public interests in what drugs are made and having them be affordable. But the political effort for that is funded mostly by a few good citizens donating for the public good.
On the other side, billions are at stake for an industry with an army of lobbyists to fight for the system that is far too expensive to benefit it, where what drugs are made is profit-driven.
Liberals don’t have a good war plan for this media war.
They have lots of good arguments, which is like having lots of good arrows in a gunfight. Those arrows run into the armor and bullets of well-funded propaganda and the media to distribute it.
And so, the liberals lose on issue after issue.
Take the 2008 economic crash. That was an opportunity to rein in Wall Street, and to fund the American people, with bailouts and infrastructure spending for economic recovery.
Whichever party was in power, that’s not what happened. Lip service to reform, no banksters convicted of crimes, and the government pouring hugs sums to bail out banks, not the people.
We liberals need to recognize the battleground is now the public opinion industry. The other side has many ‘think tanks’ and media organizations dedicated to its corrupt agenda.
We have a fraction as many think tanks, a ‘neutral’ media, and relatively fringe advocacy sites. They have Fox, we have The Young Turks. They have 90% of talk radio, we have Democracy Now!.
This war isn’t about who’s right and what policy is the best policy, any more than who won WWII was about which side was more evil. Guns and planes and bombs decided who won.
But how much is the left looking at this war and how to fight it? And we see the results in this last election which had an incredibly clear choice between the two candidates.
Republicans have the presidency, all of the Congress, the Supreme Court soon, and 34 states.
Hm, maybe there’s a problem. And it has little to do with who is right, but rather who is influencing public opinion.
It is incredibly perverse when a corrupt interests convinces voters it’s on the right side and its opponent are the real corrupt people. But that’s what we’re seeing.
It’s one thing to have a fight between the racists and the bigots. It’s quite another when the bigots convince the majority of people that THEY are the ones against bigotry and win.
It’d be like the KKK winning by running on a platform claiming they’re against bigotry. That example isn’t happening, but similar ones are.
When trump can win a lot of votes by claiming he’ll “drain the swamp” when he represents the swamp, it shows how that perverse messaging is happening.
They know they can’t win by defending the corruption, but they can win by fooling the people that they’re really the ones against the corruption.
Back in the day, a good argument was likely to carry the day. Now, it’s far more a function of money, and that’s not an accident — because that’s what the other side has.
Democracy was created to replace money with votes; modern Republicans were created to return money to the dominant role over votes.
Millions of natives were killed when they fought with bows. And democracy is losing badly as it fights with the equivalent of bows in this new media war.
We need to look at this as the media war it is. The occasional battle — like Lakoff writing about ‘framing’— isn’t going to win much.
We need to recognize that almost half of America is living in a delusional state now, that was intentionally induced, and how hard but needed it is to learn to counter that.
I don’t have all the answers but a few steps are:
1. The first we can’t take, which is limiting the money in politics. That war is lost because their Supreme Court has made corruption a constitutionally protected right now.
And the bar for a constitutional amendment is far beyond what they can’t easily block.
2. The second doesn’t have a clear answer — funding our own media effort. But by recognizing this as the media war it is, we can prioritize that spending, at least.
One reason funding is key: repetition is a powerful force in persuasion, and repetition is a function of money.
Liberals are not comfortable that repetition is effective whether the message is right or wrong — but it is.
3. Returning to the principle that telling the truth can mean saying the other side is wrong.
That journalism just saying “Republican says this, Democrat says that” isn’t enough. It needs to say, “Republican tells this lie, and Democrat tells this truth”, when it’s justified.
Reporting what each side says is fine with reasonable, well-intended sides. But not in a war of lies.
4. We need a plan to convince the American people the Republican are who they are and that they are lying — to move the demonization to them from the liberals.
It’s not enough to get that once in a while, after Watergate, after Iran-Contra, after the 2008 crash — all of which the Republicans can make the public forget if they are ahead in the media war.
I think of the Joni Ernst Senate race.
If we could make the election about issues, the Democrat could win. But we can’t.
Between the media’s refusal to make the election about issues, and Ernst’s campaign being able to spread effective ads about her folksy castrating pigs as a young woman, we didn’t stand a chance.
That’s what need a media war plan for. So that we’re not just on ‘the side of the people’— but that the people are no longer convinced the Republicans are the ones on their side.