By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
This isn’t a pitch for The Dispatch. If it
were, I probably wouldn’t send it to the members-only list (I mean the list of
people who already subscribe to The Dispatch, not our specially curated
list of people who wear bitchin’ windbreakers).
But forgive me a moment of pride in how our pirate skiff
has weathered the choppy waters of late. Part of the idea of The Dispatch
is to provide coverage and commentary that doesn’t get pulled by partisan
undertow and media groupthink, and I think we’ve been doing that pretty well this
year.
One reason I know we’re doing something right is all the
hate mail and scolding I’ve been getting from people saying we should be doing
something very different. Every day, someone tells me that we should be doing
everything we can for Trump, or Harris, or, until very recently, Biden.
Some make it quite personal, arguing, often vituperatively, that I have a moral
obligation to use my “perch” for the greater good. I’ve heard from
conservatives who insist that, given how terrible the Democrats are, I am
required to abandon or downplay my misgivings about Trump and do everything I
can to help him win. And I’ve heard from anti-Trump folks—on both the left and
the right—who insist that I need to get over my vestigial right-wing bias and
do whatever we can to make sure he’s not reelected. Some make the same
arguments about The Dispatch as an institution.
My response to everyone is, “that’s not our job.”
No one wants to hear me reprise my
weak
parties stuff,
but I think these complaints help prove my case. The idea that media outlets
should serve as instruments of the parties stems from the fact that so much
party work has been outsourced to the media. Lots of media outlets operate like
nursing home orderlies, helping the patients do the things they can no longer
do for themselves. There’s a built-in assumption that every institution should
bend its mission to the demands of electoral politics and get busy polishing
Republican or Democratic turds.
I have this weird habit. And I don’t mean the thing with
the Jell-O and tennis racket.
Whenever Katy Tur or Chuck Todd are trending on Twitter,
I check out why. It turns out that progressives are convinced that Tur
and Todd are Trump boosters, something literally no conservative thinks is
true, let alone Trump fans. As best I can tell, the only reason lefties loath
Tur and Todd so much is that they occasionally ask questions or make
observations that deviate from the prevailing progressive storyline.
One incident—an April interview
with Nancy Pelosi—looms particularly large with MSNBC’s core audience. The
former speaker was laying into Trump for having “the worst record of job loss
of any president. So we just have to make sure people know.”
At that point, Tur interjected: “There was a global
pandemic.” Pelosi went silent for a moment, staring daggers at the anchor,
and then said, coldly, “He had the worst record of any president. We’ve had
other concerns in our country. If you want to be an apologist for Donald Trump,
that may be your role, but it ain’t mine.”
This elicited—and continues to elicit—all sorts of “slay
queen” praise for Pelosi and unhinged outrage at Tur.
But Tur was obviously right. I mean, totally and
irrefutably right. Tur’s sin was simply that she got in the way of a very cheap
talking point that persuades no one who isn’t already 100 percent in the
anti-Trump column.
Look, I find the way we talk about presidents “creating”
or “destroying jobs” to be pretty idiotic and economically illiterate most of
the time. But that’s the way all politicians—on the left and right—talk.
Blaming Trump entirely for job losses during the pandemic is insulting to the
intelligence of people who think facts should matter. But the most intense
partisans don’t want inconvenient facts to matter, they want narratives. When
Pelosi said, “So we just have to make sure people know,” she was really saying we
have to make people believe this very slanted and distorted version of reality.
And her pique with Tur stemmed from the suggestion that Pelosi’s talking point
was a distortion.
We’re watching something similar play out on a huge scale
right now. Washington is like a massive construction site for narrative
formation. Prior to the debate, left-leaning pundits and reporters routinely
condemned or dismissed suggestions that Biden was meaningfully infirm as an
outrageous smear. Videos showing him dazed and confused were
written off as “cheap fakes.” After the debate, however, the praetorian
press scrambled hither and yon in different directions, some doing great work,
some covering their own posteriors, and some confused about which narrative
controlled that day.
When Biden was adamant that he would stay on the ticket,
many claimed that Kamala Harris was a flawed candidate, others redoubled their
aggressive coverage, and still others waited to see what color smoke would
emerge from Nancy Pelosi’s office. Now that he’s passed the nomination to
Harris, he’s a heroic
modern-day George Washington and she’s a superstar.
And, now, the people who scoffed at the idea that Biden was too old to run for
president are delighted to argue that Trump is too
old to run for president.
The right has been busy with its own Stakhanovite labor
to construct workable narratives as well. For starters, Trumpworld is now in
full agreement with the Joe Biden of three weeks ago. In
his July 8 letter to Congress, the president insisted that he couldn’t and
shouldn’t step aside because that would negate the votes of 14 million
Democratic primary voters. “Do we now just say this process didn’t matter?”
Biden asked. “That the voters don’t have a say?”
Now, Trumpers—who roll their eyes at suggestions that
Trump has an anti-democratic bone in his body—have their panties in a bunch so
tight they risk scrotal ischemia over the fact those primary voters have been
disenfranchised. Stephen Miller, who was deeply enmeshed in the effort to steal
the 2020 election, said Biden’s
decision to withdraw from the race is “as full frontal an attack on
American democracy as we’ve ever seen in the history of America’s major
political parties.” Jason Miller, another Trumpian Renfield, not only insisted that the
Biden-Harris switcheroo is an “affront to democracy”—he had the nerve to
suggest it’s an “obstruction of an official proceeding,” which is what Trump
was accused of doing on January 6.
“The idea of selecting the Democrat Party’s nominee
because George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a
smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard—that is not how it
works,” J.D. Vance declared
at a rally the other day. “That is the threat to democracy, not the Republican
Party.” Vance, you’ll recall, said
a few months ago that he would have accepted Trump’s fake electors on
January 6 had he been vice president at the time.
Just to be clear, internal Democratic Party decisions are
not “official proceedings,” and parties choosing their own nominees is
literally what democracy looks like in most democracies—and how American
political parties handled things until
the 1970s.
In other words, when Stephen Miller refers to this as the most “frontal an
attack on American democracy as we’ve ever seen in the history of America’s
major political parties” he might as well be a ventriloquist—or Ace
Ventura—talking out of his own ass.
Vance’s claim that this is a
backroom coup gets the causality exactly backward—as does the argument
offered by a lot of the folks across the ideological spectrum that this a
top-down, elite-driven, push (or putsch). Voters—Democratic voters—have
been screaming at pollsters for two years that Biden shouldn’t run again. The
elites refused to listen until it became clear that Biden would lose. Then, and
only then, did the narrative police change course.
All the talk about how this was a sudden development
reminds me of that scene in Fletch:
Doctor: You know, it’s a
shame about Ed.
Fletch: Oh, it was. Yeah, it
was really a shame. To go so suddenly like that.
Doctor: He was dying for
years.
Fletch: Sure, but … the end
was very … very sudden.
Doctor: He was in intensive
care for eight weeks.
Fletch: Yeah, but I mean the
very end, when he died. That was extremely sudden.
Oh, and since we’re talking about democracy, it’s worth
noting the staggering irony that the man who insisted
that unifying America was his highest priority has finally done so—on one
issue. From a CNN poll released
today:
Nearly 9 in 10 registered voters
overall (87%) say they approve of Biden’s decision to end his campaign for
reelection, including more than 8 in 10 across parties (90% of Democrats, 88%
of independents and 85% of Republicans approve). And 70%—including majorities
across party lines—say that he should remain in office as president through the
end of his term in January, while 29% say he ought to resign and let Harris
take over.
If the Trump campaign cares so much about democracy, they
should listen to what their own voters think. And the Democrats who pointed to
only minor changes in Biden’s poll numbers after the debate as proof there was
no popular demand to swap out Biden should explain why there’s been a huge
explosion
in grassroots excitement for Harris.
Which brings us back to “the media.” Throughout Biden’s
presidency, most political media coverage has been a lagging indicator. The
public didn’t buy the stories, the stories finally caught up with the public.
Oliver Darcy, CNN’s media reporter (and hence a colleague of sorts), wrote
on Monday that the negative post-debate coverage of Biden “punctured a hole
in the claim that Trump and the GOP have regularly peddled: that the news media
is in the pocket of Biden and the White House. That obviously has not been the
case, as exemplified by the hard-hitting coverage the president has been
subjected to since his poor showing last month at the CNN debate.”
As a debating point this has some merit. But come on.
Sure, the press was laudably tough on Biden after the debate. But this change
of heart was driven by two factors. First, Biden’s performance made the White
House press corps look like it was complicit in a cover-up of Biden’s real
condition. Some clearly
felt lied to, and they were pissed because the revelation seemed to confirm
the accusation that the press had in fact been in the pocket of Biden
and the White House. Nothing pisses off biased journalists more than losing
plausible deniability of their bias. Second, the gang-up on Biden was driven
not by concerns that he’s no longer up to the job of being president but
by concerns that he didn’t have the gas in his tank to beat Trump. It’s
unprovable, I suppose, but if Biden were leading the presidential race by 10
points, I very much doubt we would’ve gotten anything like the coverage we saw
the last three weeks. And now that Harris has been coronated, I am very
confident that we won’t be seeing nearly as much enthusiasm to investigate
whether he’s fit to serve out the remainder of his term. In other words, forced
to choose between what’s good for Democrats and what’s good for Biden, most
reporters and pundits chose the former.
One of the prices for getting Biden out of office has
apparently been a requirement on the part of left-leaning pundits to amplify
the claim that Biden has been one of the best presidents in American history,
doing more in one term than most do in two. Admittedly, this is Biden’s own
line and you won’t find many straight reporters repeating it uncritically. But
in the broader cable news echo chamber, it’s almost a catechism and you see
very, very, little pushback on it.
Now, it’s true that history often rehabilitates unpopular
presidents. Harry Truman and all that. But when you hear this stuff, it’s worth
asking why Americans don’t agree with it. For a long time now, Biden has been
the least popular president in the history of modern polling. A new
NPR/Marist poll finds that a whopping 13 percent of Americans think he will
be remembered as one of America’s best presidents. And let’s not forget that
this delusion is bipartisan: the constant cheerleading in right-wing media for
how popular Trump is runs up against the fact that he has never,
ever, been popular.
The narrative formation brigades have been making dog
food out of sawdust and packing peanuts, oblivious to the fact that the dogs
aren’t eating it.
As
I wrote two weeks ago, there are, broadly speaking, two groups of people
who think the elite media has incredible power to shape narratives and
manipulate public opinion: Members of the elite media itself—including Fox
News—and people who hate the elite media, whether on the left and the right. To
use one of Kamala Harris’ beloved Venn Diagrams, both groups overlap over the
shared belief that the press is there to tell you what the truth should be,
not what it is. But the actual truth is that narratives leave out
inconvenient facts in order to tell a convenient story about reality. And,
let’s be clear: The readers and viewers are a huge part of the problem, because
they—you, dear readers, excluded—literally demand to be spoonfed what they want
to hear. And when they don’t hear it, they freak out and claim the media isn’t
doing it’s job.
The folks who want me to “use my influence” to ensure
this or that outcome want me to tell stories I don’t believe are true for the
greater good as they see it. But the way I see it is that the greater good is
best served by telling people the truth as best we can. And the truth, as I see
it, is that American voters still face a crappy choice—perhaps slightly
less crappy than last week (I honestly don’t know). But it’s not my job to call
sh—t Shinola for either party or any politician. And it’s not The Dispatch’s
either.
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