- Democrats have fixed the economy, but many people don’t “believe” it;
- CBS News’ Ted Koppel visits a Wisconsin State Fair;
- The crowd cheers Trump’s latest word salad;
- How conservatives actually hate American values;
- And how the mainstream press in America is failing — by not calling out Trump.
Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria [whose book I quite liked], 6 Sep 2024: Opinion | Democrats have fixed the economy. But that won’t be enough to defeat populism., subtitled “Without addressing immigration, Trump-style populism is likely here to stay.”
The great German statesman Otto von Bismarck is reputed to have said that “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.” He might not have actually said that, but it captures the sense that many around the world have about America’s continuing ability to “surprise on the upside,” in the words of a businessman friend of mine. But it remains unclear whether the incumbent party, the Democrats, will be able to benefit from this good fortune.
The latest evidence for its “special providence” is that the United States appears to be doing the near-impossible: getting inflation down far and fast without triggering a deep recession. Alan Blinder, a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve, points out that, using strict definitions, the United States has been able to achieve an undeniably soft landing only once before in the past 60 years. In recent remarks, Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, has all but declared victory, and he deserves considerable praise for getting the balance of policy about right through some very treacherous times. The U.S. economy has low inflation, low unemployment, a boom in manufacturing and dominance in technologies of the future, such as artificial intelligence and gene editing. Even inequality, which has soared for decades, has recently abated.
Yet many Americans simply don’t “believe” the economy has gotten better.
And yet these factors are not giving the incumbent Democrats the advantage one might expect. In most polls, Donald Trump continues to lead Vice President Kamala Harris on the question of who would better handle the economy (though by less than he led President Joe Biden). Though Harris has improved on Biden’s disastrous prospects, her standing in the race, both nationally and in swing states, lags behind where Hillary Clinton and Biden stood at this point in their races against Trump. When you consider that Trump might do better than polling indicates (which happened in both 2016 and 2020), the race remains a toss-up.
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Similarly on CBS News Sunday Morning, this morning, Ted Koppel visited a Wisconsin State Fair and heard a woman say that “woke” means “judgemental” (!) while “reality check” guy David Pogue pointed out, just as Paul Krugman has done again and again, the people complain about the economy while personally behaving as if the economy is doing very well, i.e. spending a lot of money.
What to do about such people? Is this what populism means? Cultish adherence to a fantasy-land alternative reality?
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Applause for Trump’s latest word salad. They hear what they want to hear.
Boing Boing, Jason Weisberger, 6 Sep 2024: Trump’s incoherent word salad elicits applause
Asked about child care reform, Trump rambled “the kinda of numbers that I’m talking about” and “taxing foreign nations” and “having no deficits” real soon now, without addressing the question at all.
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We’ve figured this out, too.
Salon, Mike Lofgren, 7 Sep 2024: The far right actually hates America: Its dark ideology has foreign roots, subtitled “Why do conservatives wrap themselves in the flag so desperately? Maybe because their ideas are un-American”
Long piece. Near the end:
The logical weakness of reactionary movements has actually been their political strength. The seemingly contradictory elements of their platform do not bother their adherents; as we have seen countless times with the GOP, a new party line that flatly negates supposedly timeless Republican principles elicits barely a murmur among the true believers. If the leaders of the party know this fact, they are certainly not going to wise up their foot soldiers.
Perhaps the biggest contradiction of all is that the so-called thought leaders of the GOP — a party that wraps itself in the flag and feels called upon to judge the patriotism of others — are profoundly alienated from the real America as it exists today, the America in which normal people quietly live their lives, work and raise families, and dream their own private dreams. Unable to find solace in such petit-bourgeois domesticity, the socially estranged scholars of Claremont or Hillsdale or some mother’s basement have no problem ransacking the intellectual underworld of Europe during its most blood-soaked eras to find voices that can articulate their grievance, and their rage, more eloquently than they themselves.
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Finally, this piece that reveals how the mainstream press is failing America! Just as conservatives always thought! Well, no — it’s failing by failing to warn America about Trump.
The Guardian, Rebecca Solnit, 6 Sep 2024: The mainstream press is failing America – and people are understandably upset, subtitled “The media is still pursuing the appearance of fairness by treating true and false, normal and outrageous, as equally valid”
This is another critique of the American press as reducing politics to horse races, and ignoring the actual substance of policies. Currently, for example, Trump’s incoherence and extremism. Caption to photo above: “Trump’s gibberish gets translated into English and his past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over.”
The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.
I like the part about how “the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well.” There are critics of all media, even from the left, as here:
Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”
What is the solution? No easy answers of course, but one is this:
A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.
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Most mornings I reread, polish, and copy-edit my post from the evening before. If this comment is still here, I have not yet done so for this post.
