HOW DID WE GET HERE RANT

      The other morning, I listened to a woman extol Don the Con’s virtues on C-SPAN’s morning program, Washington Journal. This woman loved everything about Trump, presumably even the hair and the raccoon makeup, but she was especially drawn to the Con’s honesty. Trump, it seems, unlike the deceptive politicians on the other side, always speaks from the heart.

      PolitiFact is a website that rates the truthfulness of statements made by politicians of both parties. They rated 69% of the statements made by Trump, during the campaign and after his election, as either mostly false, completely false or pants-on-fire false. By contrast, 16% of Hilary Clinton’s statements obtained similar ratings. But PolitFact’s judgments amount to little more than preaching to the choir. Confronted with the truth, as determined by PolitiFact and FactCheck, the woman I listened to on C-SPAN would simple close her eyes and whisper the magic mantra: liberally biased media. Whereupon all those nasty facts will be sucked into the great void of liberal propaganda, there to be lost forever.

      How did we get here?

      Conservative think tanks have produced a convoluted explanation for the alt-fact reality we now face. This explanation, with some variation, follows a consistent narrative, one well-expressed by Bruce Thornton on the Hoover Institution’s website. Until late in the 19^th Century, Thornton explains, newspapers were biased by design. Wholly owned by a political party or an individual or even a trade union, they spewed the company line. This was all right because competing interests produced an essential balance - my propaganda versus your propaganda - but then something odd happened. Late in the 19^th Century, led by the New York Times, the movers and shakers in the newspaper business decided to focus on objectivity. Ferret out the truth, print the facts, inform the reader.

      Sounds good, right? An informed public making fact-based decisions? Who could object?

      Thornton and other conservative historians have a ready answer to these questions. Advocates for an objective approach to the news, which grew to include radio, television and now a digital universe, never sought to achieve objectivity. No, no, no. Objectivity was merely a pretense, a disguise for the liberal agenda they intended, all along, to promote. In direct contrast with the unconcealed biases of the 19^th Century, deception was the name of the objectivist’s game. Liars and cheats, their control of the media, especially television, resulted in the mass propagandizing of American culture.

      And that’s why conservative media bias, as an antidote, is ultimately defensible. That’s why FOX News, when it propagates right wing positions, merely provides a just balance to mainstream media’s left wing positions. Plus, unlike the mainstream, right-wing media outlets don’t hide their conservative orientation, making them the only honest actors in the equation.

      Thornton would have you believe the New York Times or the Washington Post are just as biased as Breitbart or Rush Limbaugh. (The Wall Street Journal, too, when it questions Trump.) Preposterous as that may sound, the conservative attack on the mainstream media, ongoing since the 1970’s, has been extremely successful. The first forty-five minutes of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, a daily program beginning at 7 AM every morning, are set aside for viewer phone calls on one topic or another. As I listen on most days, I’ve heard hundreds of callers express opinions utterly at odds with the facts. Remember the Obamacare death panels? And the millions of Americans who lost their jobs when Obamacare went into effect? And then there’s the NRA’s mantra: Look out, pardner, cause they’re comin’ to take your guns.

      The NRA told this lie for the entire eight years of the Obama administration. Millions of people believed it even though no agent of government confiscated a single, legally-owned firearm. These same members would surely have continued to believe themselves under threat if Hillary had been elected. But don’t knock the propaganda. The NRA’s hysteria has produced results at the highest levels of government, including the Supreme Court. In D.C. v. Heller, five Republican-appointed justices established a personal right to gun ownership the framers surely did not intend. I’ll explore this at length in a subsequent posting.

      Thornton offered no proof that liberal bias resulted from a conscious decision on the part of the mainstream media to spread liberal propaganda under the banner of objectivity. Hardly surprising, because he didn’t provide evidence of liberal bias, either. The firewall between the editorial and news divisions of the better newspapers, like the Times (New York and Los Angeles), the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal were, apparently, unworthy of mention.

      There’s a bottom line here. I’ll get to it now, though I am mightily tempted to fill a few pages with a catalogue of the many lies told by conservatives over the years. And that includes the newest, that Obamacare is in danger of “imminent collapse”, a phrase we’ll hear many times as Obamacare repeal moves forward.

       The woman I listened to this morning, along with the great majority of Trump’s supporters, cannot be reached. Maybe down the line, but not at present, and not in the near future. They voted for a man labeled a racist by members of his own party, a self-confessed sexual predator who has flagrantly displayed a consistent xenophobia, a man who lies almost every time he addresses the public.

       Face it, they didn’t care and we’re not going to reach them with pie-in-the-sky promises to abrogate trade agreements. Remember, these white, working-class voters regularly turn out for the same Republican office holders who provided majority support, without exception, for every trade pact that came up for a vote. Until these voters abandon their alt-fact dream world, they are lost to the Democratic Party. We’d be far better off courting those country-club Republicans, now a distinct minority, who find themselves uncomfortable with the Republican Party as the White People’s Party.  

      Democrats can only succeed by maintaining the Obama coalition. Our future lies in diversity, not false promises, not drill-baby-drill, not build-that-wall, not lock-her-up. This country has weathered bad times before. Consider the No-Nothings in the mid-19^th Century, or the red purges following the First- and Second World Wars, or the post-Civil War Supreme Court. Consider the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment of Japanese-Americans. Consider centuries of slavery followed by Jim Crow. We survived those attacks on our basic principles and we can survive this one, too. Eye on the prize.