THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT Dec. 10

Hi there, here’s what you need to know for the week of December 10, 2021, in 9 minutes.

THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

① For any billionaires reading: Most of the things Fox News does for Republicans are replicable on the left, at least so long as this formation of the GOP remains intact

② Absent a liberal Fox, most Republican scandals vanish into thin air, and only the very worst of them make a lasting impression on mainstream news reporters, who are constantly gamed by Fox and Republicans  

③ That puts Democrats at a real disadvantage, but we should still expect them to make the most of what they have—which, at the moment, is quite a lot

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FOX BUT FRIENDS

It’s fun (ok, “fun”) to think about how recent events would’ve played out differently if Democrats had a cable-news organ like Fox working on their behalf, devoted exclusively to promoting democracy and ginning up outrage over the GOP's heinous conduct.

① MODUS GOPERANDI

This isn’t a novel thought by any means. Liberals have been kvetching about how hamstrung they are by the absence of a Fox counterpart since shortly after the network came into existence. And since we’re talking about liberals here, other liberals have exulted in the fact that Democrats aren’t poisoned by Fox-like propaganda for just as long. 

That conversation about a liberal or progressive Fox usually proceeds pretty superficially, pitting people who imagine a left-leaning Fox emerging fully formed and operating at peak performance, against those who imagine that any effort to create such a thing would fail as past efforts have failed, because liberals are too consensus oriented by nature, or because liberal agitprop isn’t popular enough to find an audience, or because no liberal comedian can hope to compete with Gutfeld!. 

But we can refine the thought experiment by breaking down exactly what it is that Fox does and reimagining its constituent elements in service of progressive or Democratic Party goals. 

From my perspective, Fox does a few things well and quite intentionally: 

It keeps the right-wing base in a lather no matter what is happening in the real news environment (war on Christmas garbage, “caravans,” etc); 

It ignores (or at least heavily downplays) any news that paints Republicans in a bad light or reflects well on Democrats; 

It comically overhypes any news that might help Republicans or hurt Democrats, in the expectation that mainstream outlets will eventually bite; 

If they don’t bite (and even if they do!) it smears those outlets as tankies for the left. 

It enforces discipline among Republican Party actors, particularly those who appear to lack battlefield mentality, even for a moment. 

Those (with some shameless lying thrown into the mix) are the central tenets of Foxism, and I think the on-and-off conversation about creating a Democratic Fox runs aground on point 1. There are a lot of old white people and Christians in America, which means Fox doesn’t have too many species of lizard brains to stimulate, or too many constituent groups to attract with different kinds of programming. Try to create a propaganda channel for Democrats, and you’ll run into the same difficulties the party has placating the usual logroll of stakeholders. There are only 24 hours in a day and only three primetime hours, and that’s not enough to satisfy all The Groups that they’re getting their fair share of airtime. 

That problem is real, but much diminished, at least for now, by the rise of Donald Trump. The Fox cinematic universe doesn’t exist to provide perfectly proportional representation to right-wing interests; it exists to savage Democrats, limit damage to Republicans, and exert gravitational pull on the broader media environment. There may be no Democratic, War on Christmas-like gimmick that recurs predictably with the seasons, but there is more than enough right-wing depredation and Democratic squeamishness to scare and anger a large audience all day everyday without running out of material, and without requiring anyone to lie.

② MEGAPHONING IT IN

I’m pretty confident of that for a couple reasons. First, the Trump years allowed a handful of hosts on CNN and MSNBC to prove the concept. But also, because I’m constantly immersed in political news, I witness new frontiers of shameless right-wing indecency just about everyday. The most egregious of these outrages make lasting impressions on mainstream reporters, but most fail to capture national attention for more than a day, and some end up on the cutting-room floor, never making it past a local headline or a brief viral social-media moment. 

“Grab ‘em by the pussy” endured beyond the moment, as has Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His campaign’s cooperation with Russia to sabotage the 2016 election produced a steady drumbeat of negative news, but Democrats hurriedly moved on from it once the special-counsel investigation ended, and mainstream news followed suit. You can tell much the same story about his wholesale corruption of foreign policy to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden, but most of Trump's corruption scandals barely rated at all. The more recent confirmation that he exposed hundreds of people to coronavirus (including Biden and Gold Star families) in the hope of covering up his own infection has already fallen out of the news, and the Republican campaign of islamophobic incitement against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is on its way out as well. Then there’s stuff like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) intervening to allow doctors who refuse to get vaccinated against coronavirus to keep their jobs, which go almost completely unmentioned.

An hour of Fox-for-Democrats programming just this week would struggle to cover everything that merits attention: An A-block segment on the Historic Biden Boom and the lamestream media’s partnership with Republicans to portray the economy in a negative light; another segment seeking to tally up all the people Trump most likely infected with coronavirus, mixed with some hounding of congressional Democrats for not demanding answers from Mark Meadows and Trump’s doctors about who knew what when; a What Are They Hiding segment, featuring a correspondent staked outside of Meadows’s house, aimed at fanning suspicions about the insurrection coverup. By then you’re almost out of time for Special Alerts on the latest Republican efforts to spread coronavirus or Republican failure to censure Lauren Boebert, marked perhaps by a recitation of various GOP corporate donors who might not relish being affiliated with bigotry or the anti-vax movement.

③ CROSSING MAINSTREAMS

Unless and until fantasy becomes reality, we should be honest with ourselves about how and how much the existing media imbalance complicates things for Democrats. 

The absence of a counterweight to Fox means that Republicans have machinery in place to flood the discourse with fleeting and fabricated outrages, but Democrats do not. This is Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss, and that one school in suburbia that did a bad teacher training, proving that Critical Race Theory is ruining public education. It also means that Republicans are better equipped than Democrats to work mainstream-media refs. Those refs enter the picture highly sensitive to bad-faith right-wing accusations of liberal bias, and Fox exists to exploit and compound that. To take just one example: The Fox effect, in an environment of mostly great economic news, is to directly misinform right-wing media consumers that the economy is collapsing, while simultaneously pressuring mainstream-media outlets into front-loading bad economic news. 

Those of us who want Democratic leaders to engage in a more confrontational politics sometimes downplay how difficult that is without a propaganda arm; they lack the direct means of whipping voters into a froth about stuff in the news, and the means to browbeat mainstream news into scandalizing rather than normalizing Republican behavior.

But that doesn’t render them powerless, particularly when they control the presidency, speakership, and Senate majority. The flipside of understating the difficulty of remaking Democrats as an oppositional, parliamentary-style party is giving them a pass for sanding mountains down into molehills to avoid fighting in the first place. And until some billionaire gives me hundreds of millions of dollars to stand up a cable network or a bunch of local affiliates, we should expect Democrats to do better with what they have. 

Fox News creates a perverse political logic for Republicans to make culture war out of Biden’s popular workplace vaccination rules, for instance, but it’s Democrats who undertook no effort to celebrate the rules or tar their opponents as cranks and cynics and killers—to make culture war out of it themselves—and the result is Democrats divided over a policy that polls at 55-60 percent. Democrats can’t dictate to mainstream news outlets how long and aggressively to dog Trump for spreading COVID, but they could use their legitimate investigative powers to keep that scandal in the news. They could have treated Republican legislators as pariahs in the aftermath of the insurrection, save those who fully disavowed Donald Trump, but they chose instead to treat them as governing partners. Ahead of the Virginia election, Republicans used their lesser platform in the minority to hound Biden appointees about issues they thought would help their candidate win the governorship; if Democrats want a say in how the public thinks of post-Trump Republicans like DeSantis and Kristi Noem, they can have one, but they have to want it first. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) gets how this might work in practice…

...but to leave a mark, the party would have to be committed and relentless. This, over and over again, past the point of tedium. Confrontational politics as a lifestyle, rather than a diet. Instead, the lifestyle is this:

On Tuesday’s Pod Save America Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) chalked the disjunction up, in essence, to a liberal predilection for nuance and reason. “We are at times, as Democrats, understandably addicted to legislating,” he said. “We loooove legislating. And so we pass something and then we move on to try to pass something else, right? We’re not so excited about messaging—in part because messaging involves saying the same thing over and over again, and that gets, like, super boring after a while. And as Democrats we want to be stimulated.”

To my eye Murphy’s thesis is correct, but not adequately explanatory. He made this observation in the context of imploring fellow Democrats to get out of their comfort zones to flog both the benefits of Biden’s agenda and the risks of returning to Trumpism, after the Build Back Better Act becomes law. And obviously they should! But intellectual restlessness alone can’t explain the likelihood that they won’t.

The unfortunate truth is that waging politics as a zero-sum contest for power, whether in the arena or the cheap seats of cable news, isn’t very satisfying if your life's calling is to seek out and understand and overcome complexities in the world. But Democrats have two professional obligations: govern well and win elections. If collapsing distinctions and flattening nuance for partisan gain is intolerable to them, they should retire and go write books. 

Fortunately, I don’t think most Democrats are constitutionally incapable of being vicious partisans. I think they like winning! But liking to win cuts two ways. The Republican way is to treat politics as an unending slugfest, to refuse to concede or apologize, no matter how terribly they back themselves into corners, on the conviction that they’ll eventually regain the upper-hand, and that behaving indomitably is galvanizing and thus its own reward. The Democratic way is to mostly avoid fights they aren’t certain they can win; to let Trump self-impeach or let Kevin McCarthy deal with Lauren Boebert; to conceive of political obligations entirely in terms of legislating, because that is a process they can control. The worst thing they could do is wait around for an allied media to materialize before competing with equal fervor for American hearts and minds.  

Speaking of which, in the absence of a force to neutralize right-wing media, mainstream media is at least as negative toward Biden these days as it was toward Trump when he was getting hundreds of thousands of Americans killed and fomenting insurrection.

Democrats should treat this tick tock of Trump’s one-man coronavirus super-spreading campaign as a challenge to investigate the coverup of his disease, and account for all the people he infected. 

If you haven’t already read this sequel to Bart Gellman’s pre-election piece anticipating the GOP’s multi-pronged strategy to overturn the 2020 election, make time. Related: USA! USA! USA!

Republicans seem real, real scared that the January 6 committee is gonna get their phone records. 

When last we saw David Perdue he was conceding defeat to Sen. John Ossoff (D-GA), but now he’s primarying Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, in a campaign whose single issue is that Kemp shouldn’t have certified that election.

I rapped with Bill Press for 30 minutes this week about the GOP assault on democracy, why the response has been so sluggish, and how to turn that around before the midterms. 

Bob Dole died this week, and revealingly, conservatives interpret the mere mention of the fact that Dole was an unrepentant Trump supporter, even after the insurrection, as a kind of slur. 

When she’s right, she’s right (which is usually).

From the no shit department?

BONG!

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