Jon Chait makes a compelling comparison between Putin and Trump's susceptibility to believing their own bullshit propaganda. They become trapped in the falsehoods that they have fed their subjects. Trump can't move beyond the Big Lie and Putin can't accept that Ukraine isn't what his propaganda said it was.
While I am cautiously optimistic that Trump himself is becoming a spent force in American politics - he's old, he's stupid, he's morbidly obese, it wouldn't surprise me if he has Long Covid - but the particular type of patrimonial strongman politics that he's infected America with seems alive and well. It's particularly alarming to think that Biden has presided over job growth so robust it's actually causing inflation, led an international coalition to support Ukraine and stymie Russian imperialism, made Covid mitigation efforts widespread and passed a major series of bills on everything from infrastructure to child tax credits...and Democrats could still get creamed in November.
As Chait notes, Democrats don't have partisan news sources. MSNBC and to a lesser degree the Times and WaPost are liberal in the personal politics of their reporters, but they are not partisan in their coverage. There is no equivalent of Fox News for Democrats.
And there shouldn't be.
In the end, propaganda dependent regimes like Putin's fail, precisely because they cannot assimilate negative feedback. There is no room for objective truth in Russia or Mar A Lago.
However...and this is a huge however...Fox News has undoubtedly create the conditions to destroy American democracy. (I had a quote from NZ PM Jacinda Ardern about Fox News, but then I looked it up and it was fabricated. I was able to assimilate that this information that was not accurate but clashed with my argument and was able to discard it. You know. Objectivity.)
Chait notes that there was an experiment that paid Fox News watchers a stipend to watch CNN instead. There understanding of the world became much more tethered to reality. Recently I was at my (very Red( town's Facebook chat page. Some idiot was asking of "Transgenderism was being taught in our schools." The comments were a medley of people saying that CRT was now just being renamed SEL. SEL is Social Emotional Learning and it's a really good curriculum for young kids to learn proper socialization with other kids. I guarantee, Fox will turn SEL into rabid, untethered lies about transgender kids and "grooming" and everything else.
If you shut off Fox News, you shut off the firehose of bullshit fearmongering that has been a staple of Rightist politics since forever, but now has the immediacy of an entire TV network to amplify it. Recently, most cable and satellite providers have removed OANN from their roster of channels because of the rampant falsehoods and overt racism and sexism. I am hesitant to advocate for censorship. That's a horrible slope to start down.
But if Fox News went off the air - or at least their worst offenders like Carlson, Ingraham and Hannity shut up - my guess is we could have a politics that was something approaching normal. Reasoned discussions about the role of government, instead of whether admitting that gay people exist is called "grooming."
I used to think Roger Ailes was the horrible font of our horrible politics. But since his death, it's gotten worse. No, it's Rupert Murdoch who is breaking this country. He can't die soon enough.
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