No Fox News, no Facebook, responsible media, and decency in politics. They even cook from scratch! Source: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.
Once again, Ezra Klein, one of the smartest fools in the American media, is telling Democrats what’s wrong with them. The piece is “This Is the Way You Beat Trump — and Trumpism.”
Mainstream pundits like Klein would not be able to keep their jobs unless they kept to the now-standard centrist narrative. According to that narrative, Trump is in power because Democrats “lost touch” with voters. Here one can fill in the blanks about why that happened — “too preachy,” too far left, etc., etc. The pundits all have different answers according to their pre-existing politics.
But the question is not what’s wrong with Democrats and liberals. The question is: What’s wrong with voters? How does someone like Trump actually win a fair national election?
People are not more stupid than they used to be. But many things have changed since the days families gathered around their radios in the evening and tried to understand what was happening in the world. I would name four critically important — and I think obvious — things that help to explain where we are.
1. The world is much more complicated, much harder to understand, and changes ever faster.
2. The dark arts that are used to deceive people have made huge advances, and technologies have made the cost of deceiving people vastly cheaper than it used to be.
3. Changes in the world have eroded the privileges and status of millions of people. They’re not happy about that, they don’t really understand how it happened (because it’s complicated), and they are vulnerable to deceptions that offer easy answers that play on their prejudices and ignorance.
4. Those on the right are willing to do whatever it takes to get, and to keep, power and wealth. Deception, scapegoating, destruction and perversion of any institution that stands in their way — they don’t care. First they broke through the norms. Now they’re breaking through the law.
Though there are roots in the Reagan and Gingrich eras, this really began with Fox News in 1996. Fox News wasn’t a mere conservative outlet. It intentionally practiced deception. It featured rage as entertainment. It monetized anger. It drove moral panics. It fused right-wing politics and identity for white Americans, who had real grievances because of changes in the world. Back in cable days, academic studies found that voting patterns shifted to the right in counties where Fox News became available on cable.
What Fox News pioneered, social media industrialized. It weaponized the grievances of susceptible white people with deception fueled with rage. It enabled terrible people to win fair elections.
Now we need to ask: Who was not susceptible? Klein helpfully reminds us who that was in the piece I linked to above: “The only major group in which Democrats saw improvement across that whole 12-year period [2012-2024] was college-educated white voters.”
Why might that be? Again, I think the answer is obvious. Education exposes people to multiple ways of seeking and testing knowledge — scientific reasoning, media literacy, probabilistic thinking, openness to complexity. Aggrieved people with modest educations were never able to gain the tools needed to see through the right-wing deceptions. They were, and very much still are, systematically and intentionally misinformed. Their prejudices, their ignorance, and their religiosity make them eager believers, blind to another thing that is obvious to those who are not susceptible — that the right-wing centers of power and wealth that developed new ways to control the little people actually don’t give a damn about them.
Where we are today did not come about because of failures by the Democratic Party. Sure, the Democratic Party has made mistakes and might have done better. But some mistakes are inevitable in a fragile coalition with a faulty and self-blaming understanding of why right-wingers have been winning elections. Where we are today is, rather, the success of a decades-long project of epistemic capture by an unprincipled and ruthless right wing. Klein’s centrism is nothing but a comforting fable for elite moderates who don’t want to admit that one side has been waging cognitive war while the other kept insisting on reality, civility, fairness, policy.
No one in the mainstream punditry is anywhere near saying what I think is rather obviously true: There can be no real solution until the people who are being deceived somehow start caring whether what they believe is true. Right-wing centers of wealth and power are not going to stop lying and refining the industry that delivers the lies.
So here’s the problem, and it’s a huge problem: How do you teach people who have been taught otherwise that the solution to their grievances is the solution that Democrats propose: Reality, civility, fairness, and policy. Education can manage that. Propaganda can only tear it down. Education is hard, and expensive. Propaganda is dirt cheap.