By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, September 06, 2022
My favorite local Barnes and Noble doesn’t clear out the
old magazines quickly, so this past weekend, I noticed the cover
of Newsweek dated August 12, sporting the headline “War on
Woke,” with a cartoon of a massive, angry elephant about to squish Mickey
Mouse. “As more companies take a liberal stand on social issues, the
right is fighting back,” the caption underneath the headline explains.
Think about the perspective you must have to consider the
Walt Disney Company a poor, small, endangered underdog in this dispute. In the
minds of those who create the offerings of Newsweek, Disney — with
its $67 billion in revenue in 2021; $203 billion in assets; rank of number 53
on the Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest
companies; its television networks, movie studios, streaming services, theme
parks; and its gargantuan global merchandising business, which more or less
makes it “American Childhood Inc.” — is the beleaguered, plucky underdog.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party, which does not control
the White House, the Senate, or the House of Representatives, is the menacing
giant that is on the verge of flattening Disney. This point is entirely
separate from what you think of Disney’s corporate philosophies, company
policies or messages, or its Republican critics. It is just an observation
about who Newsweek chooses to depict as powerful, and who it
chooses to depict as weak.
Considering the image on the cover, you might be
surprised to learn that Florida governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t appear until the
24th paragraph of the article: “Disney climbed the wokeness list in March when
it advocated overturning Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill. That
prompted Governor Ron DeSantis to threaten to take away tax and regulatory
favors that have been hugely valuable to Disney’s theme park business since
1967.” You may love DeSantis, or you may hate him, but note that his actions are
limited by the U.S. and Florida State constitutions and are subject to judicial
review. Also, the people of Florida will have a say in whether he keeps his job
in November. DeSantis isn’t powerless, but he’s not an unbridled colossus
striding across the landscape, crushing all in his path as the cover image
suggests.
This is part of a recurring pattern of immensely powerful
figures who believe or want others to believe that they are scrappy dark horses
or longshots or some relatable little guy taking on long odds. Everybody wants
to be the Rebel Alliance; nobody ever wants to admit that they’re the Empire.
Back in August 2016, I pointed out that the lyrics of
Hillary Clinton’s campaign song, “Fight Song,” didn’t fit the candidate because
she wasn’t the underdog, the small boat on the ocean that the singer claims to
be: “Put aside the fact that small boats do not actually generate big waves, at
least on the scale of the ocean. Clinton’s campaign cannot claim that she is
the most prepared, experienced candidate in American history and
[simultaneously] a scrappy underdog fighting the odds. This is a woman who has
spent more than two decades at the center of the American political system.
She’s not a rickety fishing trawler attempting to traverse the Atlantic in a
storm; she’s a luxury-cruise ship speeding along unencumbered.” In retrospect,
a more specific comparison to the Titanic would have been prophetic.
The entertainment world likes to mix up its concepts of
who is powerful and who is not. As I noted when Jon Stewart retired from The
Daily Show, his show frequently “punched down” at little-known
state legislators, small-town school-board members, or obscure local pastors.
When reviewing Aaron Sorkin’s HBO program The Newsroom, Jake Tapper wrote, “At a time when Democrats controlled the
White House and both houses of Congress, it’s telling that [protagonist Will]
McAvoy and Sorkin aim their sights at conservatives seeking power — not
moderates and liberals wielding it.”
Once Again, Someone Should Tell Biden What His
Positions Are
Thursday, during a primetime address, President Biden warned that
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens
the very foundations of our republic.” Friday morning, Biden reversed course and said to reporters, “I don’t
consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country.” But then later that day,
Biden’s Twitter account sent out the message: “Donald
Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very
foundations of our republic.”
So, Biden is confused — again. But ask
yourself, what do “MAGA Republicans” control? Right now, very little. Yes, they
have candidates who want to be secretaries of state, lieutenant governors,
senators, and so on. No doubt, some of them are cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and see
their primary mission as ensuring that Trump was declared the winner of the
2024 presidential race, regardless of the voting results. But we have nutty
candidates every cycle. Not too long ago, allegedly serious voices in American
politics believed that the country could abolish its police forces.
Certainly some members of the current congressional GOP
minorities qualify as “MAGA Republicans.” They can go on cable news and demand
investigations or indictments or resignations, but they can’t make those things
happen. They can’t get bills passed or amendments adopted. If they win a
majority in a chamber, maybe they will be able to do more, but their actions
will still be subject to the filibuster rule, a presidential veto, judicial
review, speedy injunctions handed down from skeptical judges, and the familiar
problems of cobbling together 218 House votes on any particular piece of
legislation.
And as for the man himself, Donald Trump is the odd kind
of authoritarian menace who can’t even get himself back on Twitter.
The message from President Biden and his Democratic
allies, from now until Election Day, will be that you, American citizen, dare
not vote for Republicans because of what they could do — the
threat they could represent to your rights in the future. In the process of
focusing on that, you will not focus on what has actually been done to you over
the past two years. Inflation bedeviled Americans for about a year, and a major factor was that the Biden administration and the
Democratic Congress agreed to spend an additional $1.9 trillion on “Covid
relief” in March 2021, just as the vaccines were arriving and the economy
was already recovering. Former treasury secretary Larry Summers warned that, “There
is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II
levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures
of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” [Emphasis added.]
All 220 House Democrats voted to pass the massive
spending package; all 210 Republicans voted against it. Every Senate Democrat
voted to pass it; every Senate Republican voted against it. A CNN poll from March 2021 found that 94 percent of
self-identified Democrats favored it.
And then we experienced “inflationary pressures of a
kind we have not seen in a generation.”
At least on this one consequential issue, Democrats were
wrong, and Republicans were right.
Contrast the potential threat that “MAGA Republicans”
represent to you with what the U.S. and state governments do to private
citizens on a regular basis.
The Internal Revenue Service recently admitted that
it had accidentally published the confidential information of
about 120,000 individuals. The New York State attorney general’s office leaked IRS documents naming
donors to Nikki Haley’s nonprofit political-advocacy group, Stand For America,
Inc. Last year, someone within the IRS leaked a vast trove of private
information about the country’s wealthiest taxpayers. Because of its power
over taxation and the authority to prosecute others for failure to pay or for
fraud, the IRS and similar state tax-enforcement agencies have enormous power
over your life.
According to Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during the
2020 election, “The FBI, I think, basically came to us- some folks on our team
and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. . . .
We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We
have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump of
that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’” As a result, Facebook limited,
but did not completely erase, the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop on its
newsfeed. The Biden administration apparently tried to create a Disinformation Governance Board — that even the DHS
didn’t think it needed — to formalize this arrangement of pressuring
social-media companies to remove information that the government deems
dangerous foreign propaganda.
Notice how frequently you are told that the biggest
menace that Americans face are those who criticize the government, even though
they themselves have little power over your day-to-day life. Notice how rarely
you are told that the biggest menaces America faces are those who operate in
the ranks in government in secrecy or obscurity, with great access to or great
influence over your life, and with little accountability.
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