In a Big Country, Dreams Stay with You

You might think that something called “the great unsettling” involved movement of some kind: the abrupt uprooting of communities and traditions, or the migration of the dispossessed across a continent. But in the opening salvo of the Washington Post’s pompous, turgid, and epically portentous account of Election ’16 and What It all Means (a.k.a. “Looking for America,” parts one through four) the main unsettling action is curiously static. Here is how series authors David Maraniss and Robert Samuels lay it all out:

Each presidential campaign has its own rhythm and meaning, but this one unfolded with dizzying intensity, an exaggeration of everything that came before. It felt like the culmination of so many long-emerging trends in American life. The decomposition of traditional institutions. The descent of politics into reality-TV entertainment. Demographic and economic shifts quickening the impulses of inclusion and exclusion and us vs. them. All of it leading to this moment of great unsettling, with the Republican Party unraveling, the Democrats barely keeping it together, and both moving farther away from each other by the week, reflecting the splintering not only of the body politic but of the national ideal.

Come again? In the weird, inverted social topography of earnest campaign reporting, sweeping and world-shaking upheavals in our common life are chiefly the prelude to a moment of dread polarization within the two-party system. Things are so dire they cannot be rendered in complete sentences—and even then, billow out uncontrollably into nonsignifying abstractions: shifts, both demographic and economic, somehow double as impulse-quickeners in what appears to be a glorified socioeconomic gloss on the old Dr. Seuss fable of the Sneetches: “inclusion and exclusion and us vs. them.” And it all adds up to . . . the incomprehension among and between Team Republican and Team Democrat. Because, gentle reader, no greater specter of doom stalks this land than that of failed bipartisanship.

The Breitbart Betrayals

There aren’t many hard-and-fast rules left in the grand digital Guignol of political journalism but, without question, a central organizing principle should be the old dictum of the schoolyard: when a bully pushes you, you push back.

However, over at Breitbart News—the gaudy home to the most truth-challenged persecution manias on the American right—the alleged physical assault of campaign reporter Michelle Fields by Trump campaign manager (and all-around thug) Corey Lewandowski was far from a call to arms; it was, rather, a call to roll over and whimper. News of the attack—which has since prompted Fields to file criminal charges against the Trump apparatchik—failed to spark any robust protest from Breitbart managers on behalf of their reporter. What’s more, the Breitbart operation—which has essentially doubled as a PR arm of the Trump campaign this primary season—published a report disputing the testimony of both Fields and Washington Post reporter Ben Terris, who confirmed (according to audio transcripts of the episode) that it was Lewandowski who had gone after the Breitbart scribe. Sure, Fields was grabbed by her arm and pushed roughly backward, the Breitbart post grudgingly conceded—but then went on to contend that video footage of the incident suggested that it wasn’t Lewandowski doing the actual manhandling.

The abject failure of a news organization to back up one of its own reporters was so shocking—and so poisonous to the already shaky morale of the Breitbart newsroom—that few paused to note the irony of Breitbart positioning itself as an authority on the interpretation of videotape. Breitbart’s Big Government section, after all, was once a self-standing site that was home to the first great pseudo-scoops of conservative agitprop auteur James O’Keefe, who persuaded some gullible ACORN workers that he was a pimp in need of federal grant money (even though he never, as he claimed, documented any illegal conduct on the part of the hapless ACORN staffers). Then, less successfully, O’Keefe and Breitbart trumpeted maliciously edited footage of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod making allegedly derisive comments about white farmers. (Sherrod, who is African American, was actually summarizing stereotyped misconceptions about such people she might formerly have held, and had since outgrown—i.e., she was making the polar opposite point that O’Keefe and the Breitbart organization claimed she was crudely advancing. Sherrod was eventually fired, and sued Breitbart in a libel complaint that was settled out of court.)

Straight Out of Centrist Casting

Say what you will about this demented presidential election cycle—it has, at a minimum, forced the myths of Beltway centrism out into gloriously open view. The meme that has lately captured the responsible commentariat is not that the rise of Donald Trump represents the unmanageable blowback from a decades-long conservative-movement assault on the theory and practice of government. No, gentle readers: the centrist insight du jour is that the hideous Trumpian cancer on the body politic stems from the hyperpartisan track record of Democrats in power. Back in their post-2008 heyday, the story goes, Obama and his congressional politburo threw their weight around in such obtuse, high-handed, and confrontational fashion that the avenging Trump moment we are now living through followed just as inevitably as a Spider-Man reboot or a Vox correction. Thanks, Obama!

Just behold the latest such brief, from National Journal hot-take maestro Josh Kraushaar, who confidently argues that “the notion that Obama was fated to face an intransigent Republican opposition has always been off-base,” in a work of speculative fiction bearing the suitably hallucinogenic headline, “How Al Franken Paved the Way for Donald Trump.” 

No, it isn’t only because both men are accomplished insult comics; rather, Kraushaar argues, Franken’s narrow victory over incumbent Republican Minnesota senator Norm Coleman in 2008 delivered Obama a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate. Just add the new Democratic president’s power-mad executive hubris, and you have the mother of all nightmare scenarios:

Your Media Future: Cheesy and Skeezy

For decades, American parents and authority figures have fretted over how the goddamn kids in their lives might be induced to pull themselves out of TV’s stupefying thrall and start really living. Now, however, media worthies are feverishly trying the opposite tack: to get our cyber-savvy, platform-proficient young people to bask once more in the boobtoob’s deathly blue glow.

Yes, “millennials”—as we understand they’re called—are the target audiences for two new TV startups, Jon Steinberg’s Cheddar network, which will specialize in business news reported from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and Vice Media’s fledgling cable network, Viceland, which will apparently broadcast Vice’s easily lampooned roster of international muckraking dispatches alongside a torrent of native ads championing the youthful authenticity of the skeezy Vice brand.

Both startups, in other words, are breathtaking exercises in generational cynicism, borne of a vast cultural armada of lazy theorizing about who millennials are, and what it is they think they want—and, more important to the media business, what they can be made to think they want.

Oh, the Civility!

It’s hard to know just what stage of the Kübler-Ross cycle of facing up to hard facts our media elite are currently mired in as the prospect of Donald Trump’s ascension to the GOP presidential ticket comes ever nearer—but it’s clearly a long way from acceptance. As Trump rolled confidently toward a double-digit win in South Carolina’s GOP primary and then another in the Nevada caucus, our respectable punditry has stepped forward to intone, in striking unison, that the man is simply too uncivil to be trusted with maximum executive power.

Admittedly, it’s not a case that lacks for evidence. Much of Trump’s popular appeal hinges on the illicit thrill of a powerful, well-known man saying what, in polite settings, is unsayable—whether it’s his libel of Mexican nationals as rapists and dopers, of Muslims generally as likely terrorists, or of the Pope as a quisling enabler of these and countless other enemies of the Great America.

Notably, though, what’s lately exercised our commentariat isn’t so much the old news that the GOP front-runner is a raving bigot. No, it’s that he’s particularly uncouth-to-belligerent in his posturing against them, the caretakers of the tone of the discourse. And in making this self-interested case, our punditocracy reveals a great deal about itself.

Power to the Pixels

It sure was a short “end of history.” Back in 1992, with the Berlin Wall leveled and Russia abruptly abdicating its self-appointed role as bureaucratic overseer of the historical dialectic, Francis Fukuyama and his neoconservative confreres surveyed the reconfigured world order and saw that it was good. Free markets would rule, and liberal democracy would cover the globe, lifting humanity into an agreeable state of material well-being.

Now, with a quarter century’s worth of hindsight, we know that history wasn’t about to sit still for its embalming. The 2008 economic meltdown delivered but one among many rude countervailing verdicts; we’re also living with resurgent economic, ethnic, and religious nationalisms, looming climate catastrophe, and unpredictable new populist and anti-austerity movements, here and abroad.

Hillary’s Handlers: We Need Some Muscle Here

What is it that makes so much of our national politics reporting so grindingly, predictably awful? We’re in an election cycle that—for all its many shortcomings—features a genuine clash of ideas and core philosophies of government. How is it that a wide and fast-multiplying agora of press outlets can so consistently treat it as a glorified Game of Thrones recap? Who’s up and who’s down? Who’s going negative and who’s doubling down? Who won the week? Who called who a pussy, and a liar? Who the fuck cares?

Thanks to the FOIA hounds at Gawker, we now have a partial, if profoundly demoralizing, answer to this puzzle. In the fierce jockeying for the meaningless distinction of a “scoop,” political reporters routinely barter away editorial judgment for the holy grail of access.

The key offender in this case is former Atlantic politics hand Marc Ambinder, but really, it could have been any among the hundreds of reporters tasked with mass-producing the appearance of novelty and insight for a politics readership. Ambinder’s sin, documented in nauseating detail from the trove of emails that Gawker FOIA’ed from the account of Hillary Clinton fixer Philippe Reines, was to allow Reines to dictate coverage of a speech that then Secretary of State Clinton was delivering before the Council on Foreign Relations, to showcase her expert foreign-policy chops. What Ambinder got in return for this pledge, quite pathetically, was an early release of the speech to trumpet across the digital media sphere. Reines, in his winning power-schmoozing style, set down three conditions for the deal:

Field of Dreams

 Because the Iowa caucuses are a perversely puny and undemocratic spectacle, heroic exertions are required to endow them with long-term narrative meaning. Worry not, though: Our media-political complex exists largely to billow the semblance of significance into the decaying husk of our public life, and Monday’s surreal and unhinged caucus balloting was certainly no exception.

Begin with the obvious trends that have upset the orderly progression of candidates through the presidential turnstiles. Primary voters in both major parties are in the throes of populist rebellion. A neoliberal leadership class on the Democratic side collects both its funding and its major policy initiatives via a system of glorified graft; the debt-ridden, not-yet-jaded working-class and youth vote on the left rises up in revolt to erase the 60-point lead formerly held by that class’s chosen administrator. Yet, sure enough, the consensus story is that Hillary Clinton has snagged an important victory from Monday’s caucus vote, and will roll on confidently to her eventual anointment as the savior of the Democrats.

Similarly, Republicans have spent the last six months in thrall to a mediagenic xenophobic billionaire, largely on the grounds that his candidacy permits them to say things that are unsayable in polite (or—horrors—politically correct) society. The ugliness of this license shouldn’t conceal that the inchoate Trump insurgency is also reacting to real economic marginalization—a decline in socio-political standing that easily gets translated into immigrant-bashing, self-dramatizing culture-war scripts and worse. Nevertheless, when Trump came up short in Iowa, this, too, was hailed as a long-overdue moment of vindication for the GOP’s own grown-up class of campaign fixers.