In his final column today, Paul Krugman reflects on what's happened to the country in the past 25 years:
What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then.... It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.
So what happened?
Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.
....The financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies.... [And] it’s not just governments that have lost the public’s trust. It’s astonishing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis.
Krugman is right, but with an asterisk. In a 1999 Pew poll, 70% of the respondents said they were optimistic about the nation. Fast forward to 2023 and here's another Pew poll:
The total number of optimists has gone down by ten points, but it's not evenly split. Democrats are nearly as optimistic as they were 25 years ago, but Republicans are 14 points less optimistic.
I think this provides the answer about what happened. Sure, we lost our faith in the elites, but it wasn't quite "we." It was Republicans who watch Fox News. They're the ones who lost their optimism.
This is because conservatism isn't Fox's core brand. Outrage is. And the outrage isn't just aimed liberals; it's aimed at big government, big medicine, big banks, and anywhere else that outrage can be mined. This outrage naturally produces pessimism—why else would so many gold scammers advertise there?—and that pessimism is ultimately directed toward authority figures of all kinds.
Whether consciously or not, Fox News is in the business of undermining faith in America and the people who run it. They're not alone in doing this, but they're by far the leader and the agenda setter. Because they know that nothing keeps viewers coming back like wanting to hear the latest about some giant, stupid cock-up.
I have little hope for a restoration of optimism until Fox News leaves the air. They just have too much invested in keeping their viewers on edge and constantly pissed off about the stupidity of both liberals and elites. But how likely is that to happen anytime soon?
Ah yes. All those 18-34 year old democrats lost faith because they watch Fox news. That's the answer.
You're right to say young people don't generally watch lots of Fox. Young 'uns have other venues to help them feel bad about the country.
But Fox has a pernicious effect on news, whether or not it's news that viewers see on Fox or news they get elsewhere. Fox has the largest audience for TV news, and it has replaced the newspaper biz for what sets the agenda for news every day.
Even for stories that don't "break" on Fox, Fox is where a story is amplified and often the reason why "everyone" is talking about it. Take the Springfield pet-eating hoax, for example. It was a story on Facebook first, and JD Vance picked up on it, but it became a national sensation when other outlets started talking about it, with Fox coverage leading the way. More than any other outlet, Fox is likely where more conservatives heard of the story and where they had their opinions about it formed.
In a better world, the story would have gotten different treatment in political news coverage. It could have been a disqualifying example of how Vance and Trump were manufacturing b.s. to create a blood libel against Haitian immigrants. How ugly and despicable of them! But instead it was covered as if there maybe was something to it. That's one of the effects of Fox.
Yeah, Fox News is a major component of creating and/or bolstering false narratives, but the cultural echo chamber being used to support this divergence was created by Newt Gingrich's revolution in the pursuit of power and the profane goal of Evangelicals to subvert the Constitution.
The consequence of that has been intransigence of the federal government to act except under extreme duress. And over time, that has led many people to believe that the two parties, aside from cultural issues, are the same, especially when post-election criticism of Ds is that they didn't embrace centrism enough.
It's clear that that's what Fox does. I always wonder why the other major media companies don't mock them for it. They're losing market share and doing almost nothing to fight back. Maybe some marketing around the idea that Fox's product is ginned up outrage, not credible news, would help?
I am intrigued by your screen name. Are you old, or are your pants old?
You know what I like? That PBS (especially their vaunted News Hour) hardly ever mentions Fox News as a factor in any of this.
And they've been that way for decades. A remarkable "achievement".
KD: "I have little hope for a restoration of optimism until Fox News leaves the air."
Don't hold your breath.
Fair enough, but don't underestimate the impact of conservative talk radio. Lots of people, old and young alike, who are driving trucks, running tractors or doing repetitive tasks hear nothing but talk radio all day long. Many of them never hear a liberal opinion, except to belittle it. Pravda had more balanced news coverage than what you hear on the radio.
When they quit broadcasting pop music, particularly Country music on AM radio, it had two big effects: It left the AM stations with hours of unsponsored air time to fill, and it left truck drivers and other people who spend all day in their vehicles with nothing to listen to. Enter right-wing talk radio. Those of us who worked in offices were completely unaware of the propaganda revolution taking place under our noses
The ownership rules for TV and radio stations changed under Reagan. A few big companies bought up thousands of stations and for AM radio it's been all Limbaugh and Limbaugh wannabes ever since. Once you leave metro areas, it's all right-wing politics, right-wing religion, and country.
That's how the country got radicalized.
As much as I like Krugman he can get stuck sometimes in conventional wisdom think that can blind him. The 2008 financial crash didn't prove that elites didn't know what they were doing. Quite the opposite. Elites who not only caused but also greatly benefited from the financial collapse knew exactly what they were doing. Those elites were committing fraud on a massive scale ripping off average people and they damn well knew. The Bush and Obama Administrations damn well knew what was going on as well.
The elites in the Obama Administration and elsewhere who bailed out the malefactors of great wealth knew exactly what they were doing when they let the crooks keep their ill gotten gains, let those same crooks take the lions share of the bail out money and left the average home buyer high and dry. In fact, I recall the elites blaming the victims of the crimes of the elites for taking loans they should have know they couldn't afford.
Letting criminals benefit from their crimes is far worse than mere incompetence.
+1000
+1
"Letting criminals benefit from their crimes is far worse than mere incompetence."
Perhaps, but the real problem is that the stuff the finance assholes did that lead to the 2008 crash was not illegal. What we needed were responsive changes in federal finance law, not a lot of feelgood prosecutions that would have resulted in acquittal after acquittal.
But we didn't get the changes in the law that we needed. Most of the blame for that falls at the door of Republicans who refused to regulate their moneyed buddies in finance. But some of the blame lies with people on the left who shrieked about being betrayed because Obama didn't hang banksters from gibbets by like royal decree or something, rather than doing the hard work of electing people who would enact laws that would constrain finance and big money going forward.
I definitely think that Obama&Co could have done better (for example: it would have been better had the bank bailouts been used to force structural reforms on the banks, even if those reforms would not have been permanent, and it's clear that a bigger stimulus package was needed), but it's also fair to remember just how colossal a catastrophe the 2008 crisis was (we were shedding a million jobs per month), and how little help the admin was getting from Congress. But I think on the whole it was ok, and it could have been a hell of a lot worse.
If by "bailout" you refer to TARP (for example) there is another big problem. They had to bail out money market accounts OR people who clearly had no responsibility for the financial crash would be severely hurt.
We were days away from money market funds freezing up. This means paychecks won't cash. And making sure that paychecks cash is more important than punishing people, in my book.
Which is how awful what those people did turned out to be. Mind you, some of those guys causing problems went belly-up. But the corporate entities went belly-up, and they probably got to walk away with cash.
I don't blame people for being angry with this, or wanting someone to arrange to do that for them.
Exactly. I don't think many people realize that their employers can't function without the banks.
There was also no appetite to let the government take over the banks (nationalizing them for a time). I remember seeing the surveys of the general public at the time.
Fox News leads the way (to loss of faith in the country), but I think that there is a more general loss of faith in our Republic. Conservatives often -- always -- prescribe large doses of that old time religion for this ailment, misdiagnosing it as a loss of faith in secularism, but people have lost faith in religion, too, and for many of the same reasons.
I think that Biden got one big thing right: Delivering the goods to working people and the middle class where the goods were most needed. Unfortunately, outrage is amplified in the modern media much better than his results.
this is my favorite hobby horse
Fox News averages like 1.6 million total daytime viewers and like 3 million primetime viewers.
You might want to put that horse out to pasture. I get what you're saying, but the impact of Fox News far exceeds its direct viewership, and it isn't the same 1.6 or 3 million people viewing every day anyway. If you really think those numbers are the measure of all people affected by Fox News, that's a big mistake.
More than just Fox… rage baiting for profit. Thanks be to social media.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gp555xy5ro
The growth in rage baiting content has coincided with the major social media platforms paying creators more for their content. These creator programs - which reward users for likes, comments and shares, and allow them to post sponsored content - have been linked to its rise.
Started by fox, perfected by social media.
Well, I beg to differ. Rage-baiting (aka trolling) was alive and well back in the days of Usenet news groups. (Look it up, whippersnapper).
Not at scale? And not monetized? It’s just not the same. My comments are ridiculed as “trolling” but it’s nothing. And I do it for free! 😂
I do not think that Fox News is the primary influencer any more. Facebook is. YouTube (especially ads on YouTube) is. X might be ahead of Fox, too.
Talk radio as an industry is ahead, too.
It's all part of the same echo chamber. I still think Fox often sets the agenda, but to the extent they are being replaced by social media, it's probably because said social media is even more awful and rage inducing. In other words, be careful what you wish for, because it's wrong to assume that things would get better without Fox.
I absolutely do not think that things are better with social media being the chief influencer. Nor did I say anything of that nature.
I just would like to refocus Kevin and other commenters away from Fox News. Social media drives pretty much everything they do these days.
Oh you should have seen Fox during the Bush II Administration! You would have thought Iraq was ready for statehood.
I'm sure they're not going to run the country down with Trump in charge or at least try to continue to focus on Democrat mayors! but with the Republicans in charge of almost everything even that is going to wear thin after a while.
What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then.... It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.
Indeed I remember those halycon days. People looked towards the new millenium with optimism and hope rather than fear of the apocalypse. Back then I was a Pat Buchanan supporter and we might as well have been shooting peas towards a wall given how many people listened to us. Pat only got 600,000 votes in 2000. Bob Kennedy Jr got even more votes and he wasn't even running.
Then 9-11 happened.
When a group of terrorists easily immigrate into the country, easily pose as flight students and easily get aboard and hijack jumbo jets and use them to take down two of the tallest buildings in the world and the Pentagon, well...things changes don't they?
Everything since then, every scandal in every institution, everything that has been exposed for corruption, mendacity, incompetence, stupidity, greed, perversity, willful blindness, I mean you name it, seemed to have happened to every institution in the U.S. since 9-11. Churches, Schools, Businesses, Government, Education, the Military, the Police, you name it. Maybe we were naieve back then, but we sure have been awake and exhausted since then. It's no wonder Trump took advantage of a populace looking for someone to "do something" away from these institutions, because he was never really a part of them.
And you expect people to happy after all that's happened?
Maybe things aren't as bad as they seem but are they good as they once were? I don't know but it's a lot easier to believe that's true.
You can also credit the 1996 telecommunications act.
One of the nails in the coffin.
This older Dem (67), who has never watched Fox, hasn’t been optimistic at all since Election Day. I think we’re in a lot of trouble, and the whole world is going to suffer from it, not just us.