Mother Jones has chosen my vacation to release my latest piece for the magazine. I can't blame them for that, though. Since I don't work there anymore they didn't know I was taking time off. Anyway, the payment for the article financed the vacation, so it all worked out well.
The piece is about why we're all so pissed off these days, politically speaking. I've been working on this for over a year, and I'm far from the first person to take on this subject. But the more I looked into it, the more I got convinced that everyone was ignoring the real problem. Or, at least, not giving it the credit it deserves.
The first thing to ask yourself is when this all started. In some sense, it began in the '60s, the wellspring of the culture wars. But we managed to survive for several decades after that without wanting to slit each others' throats.
Then there were Rush Limbaugh, Drudge, and Newt Gingrich. I give Gingrich credit for being the intellectual force behind our polarized politics, but he only lasted a few years and then faded away in ignominy. That doesn't really fit with (it turns out) the early 2000s being the point when fear and hatred really skyrocketed.
So what happened? It can't be social media, which only took off a few years ago. It's not an increase in conspiracy theories, which are no more popular then they've ever been (honest). And it's not likely to be material circumstances, since on a wide variety of topics most us are better off—or at least no worse off—than we've ever been. There are a few exceptions, but they just aren't numerous enough to wreck an entire country.
No, the only answer that really fits is an old, familiar one: Fox News. Many liberals don't remember this, but when Fox News started up in 1996 it was a fairly generic center-right newscast. But around 2000 that changed and Fox increasingly adopted the hard-nosed attitude it maintains to this day. Why? Maybe it was the 2000 election. Maybe it was 9/11. Maybe someone did some market research. I don't know.
In any case, around 2000 Fox became ever more vicious at the same time that its audience really began to grow. Liberals weren't just bad, they hated America. They were unpatriotic. They wanted to tax away all your money and give it to, um, you know. White America was on the precipice and there wasn't much time left. Etc.
The result has been not just polarization, but a genuine fear among many conservatives that if liberals are allowed in power, the America they know and love is doomed. And that's the heart of the anger and hatred that power our country today. You may hear a handful of Republicans finally criticizing Donald Trump, but you'll never hear any of them criticizing Fox News, the organization that put him in the White House in the first place. That's because they know where the real power lies.
There's much more to this, so I urge you to read the whole piece. Just click here. Let me know if I've convinced you.
I know when I learned to hate republicans… it was in the run up to the 1990 gulf war when I was listening to rush Limbaugh (he was mildly entertaining at first). He informed his audience that democrats wanted mass casualties for the US troops preparing to retake Kuwait. I had two brothers in the Army and they were headed to Saudi Arabia for real combat.
That’s when I finally grasped the hatred of republicans. And it’s been confirmed continuously for the last 30 years. What made Limbaugh such a hateful mess? No clue.
Living a lie?
You don't see spaces like this in a Howard Hawks picture.
https://variety.com/2010/dirt/real-estalker/rush-limbaugh-makes-good-on-promise-to-sell-his-new-york-city-apartment-1201230085/
Yeah lots you could say about tgat apartment. None of it good.
Whatever fox has done, Rush proved years before there was a market for demonizing, "otherizing" Democrats and liberals.
If this were peculiar to the United States, it could be Fox News. But it's not. Let's say Fox News is responsible for the US situation being particularly virulent. And the plethora of arms in people's hands for its violent nature. That still leaves the rise of the far right, of anti-minority sentiment and of authoritarianism all across the world. It would be wrong to blame Brexit on purely British elements, or Hindutva on purely Indian ones, or MAGA on Fox News alone.
I think the people who speak of an epistemic crisis are right.
There wouldn't be any logical fallacy , though, in attributing blame to Fox News for the situation in the United States, and blaming other forces for the problems in, um, other countries.
(Also, let's be real: at least among high income countries, America's political dysfunction seems by some measure to be the worst. The one factor I would also add in, though, is the country's Madisonian political system. That makes America substantially sui generis).
You forget that Murdoch press and TV are also present in the UK and have been using the same mantra. Hate of EU and lies lies....
Same goal , make money.
I agree at the same time that we are also at a turning point of the globalisation trend that have frustrated many workers and it is showing at the ballot.
the problem is that they are voting for the wrong people. hence the hysteria.
In the 80s with Dick Gephardt and Regan and GHWBush, repubicans were the party of globalism and democrats were anti globalism. Then there was the left winganti globalsim riiots of the aughts culminating in occupy wall street. That didn't work out for democrats.
Hih?
Gephardt switched parties?
FoxNews is just a bunch of hired hands, who'd be out on the street at the whim of one man, Rupert Murdoch. And Murdoch has made it plain that he lives and breathes for one thing--power.
'I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. “That’s easy,” he replied. “When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.”
https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/anthony-hilton-stay-or-go-the-lack-of-solid-facts-means-it-s-all-a-leap-of-faith-a3189151.html
Just as Jeff Bezos looked around and saw books as the easiest thing to ship., Murdoch saw the authoritarian right as the easiest demo to manipulate.
I have no doubt the fact that Murdoch can make money shilling for his worldview is a factor. But I also strongly suspect that, if pushing the right wing narrative started being a shaky financial proposition, Fox News would modify its stance. Indeed, back in the day Murdoch outlets were quite supportive of such figures as Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton.
Apparently there's a lot of money to be made in gold coins, mattresses and pillows, and dramatic readings of sections of the Bible.
Murdoch isn’t making any money in those things any more than shopkeepers made money from gold mining rather than selling things to miners. If Murdoch could make money selling advertising slots to tie dye companies, he’d sell them the slots.
somebody is making something to pay for those ads 😉
That ad money is chump change compared to cable fees. If you have cable, about $2 a month of what you pay goes to FoxNews. And there isn't a damn thing you can do about it, except to cut the cord.
https://unfoxmycablebox.com/
As an aside, yeah I'm mad at my plumber, they burned my house down in 2017. But I think I was more angry at the fact that I had to go through all that and there was no compensation except for what my homeowner's policy covered. Nothing to compensate me for the time spent working it all out and being out of my house for 13 months.
DLDR: I'm angry at the system being tilted in favor of the rich and not the small fish like me.
Would those other items of compensation been covered with additional riders (term?) on the policy?
Pretty much the deal is the plumber's insurance policy pays my homeowner's policy for the damage caused. In the state of Virginia, I can't also sue to plumber for hiring guys who were so awful they didn't use a heat shield while soldering the copper pipe together for the pain and suffering it caused, it would have been nice to get say 10,000-20,000 or so to cover things like putting my life on hold for the year in a crummy rental house and having to take time off of work to get my house back together again.
Is that prohibition absolute or more a matter of how high the bar is to show gross negligence?
In Virginia it's absolute, you get what you get from your insurer and nothing more if you weren't injured and your insurer covered your property damage. UGH.
Did you replace w/ copper pipes or did you go with PEX?
If you're upset that the American right is so hateful & dismissive of the left, blame a liberal....
I assume we have to blame Alan Colmes for FOXnews descent into vituperation, then.
Homosexuals are enemies of the proletariat. So says the real left.
I blame Anita Hill's granddaughter.
Bryant?
D'oh! Of course you're right.
But around 2000 that changed and Fox increasingly adopted the hard-nosed attitude it maintains to this day. Why? Maybe it was the 2000 election. Maybe it was 9/11. Maybe someone did some market research. I don't know.
Are they profitable? I assume they stumbled upon the realization that growing ever more outrageous was lucrative. And sure, no doubt they engaged in market research, too.
I look forward to reading the piece, Kevin. And I must say I'm delighted to learn you're still doing long form writing for MoJo. Your voice really deserves the amplification of a widely read and respected periodical.
I think the rise of folks like Drudge, who made it big during the Lewinsky fiasco, pointed the way for Fox. Print any rumor that makes Dems look bad and their was a ready made audience. I still think Gingrich is patient zero for this.
We are now something like six months, half a year, since you left Mother Jones and now they decide to publish one of your pieces? Perhaps it is me but that seems odd.
Sounds to me like he finished it only recently.
I can kindasorta see that but it seemed more likely the article was in the can rather earlier. If I get the inclination I might go ahead and read it to see if there are clues to when it was written.
This post is just dialectics. Everybody hates something. Whining about overblown organizations like Fox News represents your problem. Nothing is a 2 way street.
Yet another post demonstrating why this poster needs to cut down on their day-drinking. Say hi to the worm for me.
This comment made more sense when I thought it said dianetics.
When did the culture war begin? How about before there was even a United States. There were always people in the British colonies who relied on slave labor and those who wanted to abolish slavery. How about Lincoln as a major fomenter of culture war? Southerners knew that his position on slavery in new states would eventually mean the end of their power and of slavery, so they fought the Civil War. They lost that War, but they won the era of Jim Crow. Then white supremacists lost again in the Civil Right Era, but Republicans chose to make the racism culture war their principle tool to win votes from lower-income whites to be able to pass their plutocratic economic program. This has been going on since Goldwater's candidacy.
Fox has played an important role as a tool of Republican objectives, but it is absurd to make it responsible for the culture war. This ignores essentially all of the US history of conflict about racism. Republican leaders, who are the critical faction, have used other tools and would use them without Fox. Fox was not essential to the rise of Trump - in fact they opposed him at first.
Slavery was a globalist system bud and Lincoln himself was a "white supremacist" .
Republicans have had to focus more on the culture war because it has become more and more obvious that their conservative economic policies have led not to more prosperity, rather to more inequality. There is more discontent with this, even among low-income whites. Republicans are increasingly compelled to distract from real policy.
An argument could also be made that the pro-woke corporate owned media also saw economic movements like Occupy Wall Street as a real threat. Hence, now, what do ya know? Most progressives are no longer talking economic justice at all. It is all racial justice which doesn't harm the corporate overlords at all.
If this were completely true, the democrats would not have adopted the original republican position on free trade and Dick Gephardt would have become president.
Agree. Fox's role was laid out decades ago in the Powell memo. Fox itself is just riding the wave, very profitably, not causing it.
skeptonomist - Most of us armchair historians are aware of past examples of polarization, and we know over the centuries there have been a variety of rationales for tribal mistrust and hatred. I thought Kevin was trying to address our current situation. It's good you're hip to the past, but there's a culture war going on now, and the fact that Fox was not needed in 1860 to promote the Civil War does not mean they are not the cause of today's troubles.
Fox News is deplorable in my opinion. However, I must respectfully disagree with the article. Kevin believes it’s all about Fox News: I believe Kevin has the causation arrow reversed. I put it this way, what would happen if Fox News disappeared tomorrow? Would Tucker Carlson not just find another location and broadcast the same content? Would Trump loving Republicans disappear? Would stories about Critical Race Theory not just appear on another conservative new outlet?
The only way the ‘its all about Fox News’ theory works if you can prove that Fox has some unique evil genius that can’t be replicated. The weaker rating of Newsmax or OAN only provides that the market can’t sustain multiple similar players: this is the equivalent argument to claiming that liberal television would almost disapear if MSNBC closed. Rather, I would contend that a Fox News, or for that matter MSNBC, like clone would appear. The demand for the content would not disappear if you closed the news outlet.
The present conservative movement has roots going back before Fox News. Fox has only tapped into it and channeled it. As you say, if Fox weren't doing it, someone else would be.
But that presupposes that there is a perfectly-functioning market for ideas and mediaspace, which is plainly not the case. It also assumes that nobody is affected by what they watch/listen to/read, which likewise seems unlikely, and it also fails to explain why politics got more caustic on the timeline Kevin lays out. I'd agree that Fox cannot just snap its fingers and dictate the political beliefs of millions of people, but Fox ain't a passive actor here, either.
Fox is riding a wave, to be sure, but I'd suggest that Fox is also helping generate the wave.
Okay, but still, if Fox News weren't doing its part to generate the wave, someone else would take over. Maybe Fox has been exceptionally successful and evil where some other media enterprise would be less influential or not as pernicious; I don't know.
When I took Modern European History in 1967-68, my (fabulous) teacher told us to “beware any unicausal theory of history,” because it was highly likely to be incorrect, or at least would be a gross oversimplification.
Another thought: When there’s lots of dry kindling around in a forest, and someone drops a match, it doesn’t make sense to blame the match for the fire.
Without writing a 1000-word essay, I'll do you one better.
Conservatism, around the world saw that its tactics had failed to slow progress; that it was insufficient to argue on a level playing field in the "dialog and marketplace of ideas".
To rectify their perceived disempowerment, they sought to shift the paradigm in order to gain power and hold onto it. Specifically in the US, there were 4 parts to this:
I. State-level rule-changing to cement political power (gerrymandering, election law restrictions, etc.).
II. Embrace of religious affiliation to establish a Manichean political body and discourse.
III. The elimination of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, allowing the disaggregation of political beliefs into distinct echo chambers.
IV. Using the (generally conservative) courts to adjudicate elections, starting with Bush v. Gore.
The secret force destroying America is Conservatism.
This is a good outline.
It's about monetizing discontent. And once that's done, manufacturing discontent to get more money since the original well of discontented have been squeezed dry.
Added benefit--real policies to help most people may cost the very wealthy some money, so block them with the army of the discontented. They get someone to blame for their problems while staying discontented since the policies that could help them are blocked. And the closure is epistemic.
Take a look at the last twenty odd years. Planes crashing into tall buildings, two twenty+ year wars (one sold on false premise), a financial crisis born of greed and incompetence, and a president who took us to the brink of dismantling democracy. Clearly, things are not working. It's human nature to assume that things aren't working because of the other guy or the other party. Citizens at each others' throats is a symptom of (dare I say it?) a deeper malaise.
Let me propose an alternate hypothesis, namely the radicalization of US higher education, especially amongst the "influencing" professions (eg journalists, lawyers, teachers) over this period.
This happens over essentially the same timeframe (a slight imbalance at the start of the 60s gets magnified over the 60s and then becomes a self-reinforcing phenomenon). It takes time for the effects to be felt (ie we don't see them in full glorious fight of all against all until ~2000, then getting worse every year) because it takes time for the oldest influencers in various places, acting as an example of calm and trying to present both sides of any given story, to be retired out.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-dramatic-shift-among-college-professors-thats-hurting-students-education/
I don't see this as primarily a "the universities are making all the next generation gay", though there's some of that. It's more that the universities have created a certain worldview that is presented ever more unilaterally across the media spectrum, with angry reaction to that. Fox News is part of this, sure, but I think that it's as much reaction as it is instigator.
Once a particular worldview dominates public discourse, the usual consequent pathologies arise, in particular an insistence by the most radical on equating
- axiology
- morality
- law
which forces conflict with everyone else. We see this repeatedly today. For example the trans business is an insistence on moving axiology (a theory about what is good) to a theory of morality (how people should behave) to law (how people should be FORCED to behave). Most of the sexism and racism discussion follows the same pattern.
We can get along if people are willing to accept that your axiology or morality differ from mine; we can't get along when people insist that these be converted from rules of politeness, or differences of opinion, to laws with the full force of the state behind them.
And if you insist that "well damn well OUGHT to be the law" -- that's my point, isn't it? You're happy to complain about other situations where issues of moral agreement (eg abortion) have been forced to law, but you insist on doing the same thing.
So if someone wants to create a blame scorecard (something of little interest to me) I'd look at ways to track and measure laws that enforce axiology/morality. My gut feeling is that
- there are many more of these from the leftist side than the right
- the primary cases I can think of from the right are abortion (a clear example) and drugs (an example I would score as more varied over the political spectrum, widely supported by both sides at the time and today still with support/opposition not completely fitting clean traditional political boundaries)
- there are certainly cases where the right has pushed for stupid legislation, like the various gag orders in agricultural states about farming conditions. But the point is not "who passes stupid laws", it is who is passing laws that try to enforce a particular theory of axiology and morality. The gag laws are pure power plays, immoral and disgusting, but no-one on the right claims they represent some deep moral intuition, and you'll find plenty on the right who have contempt for them and their authors.
Gun are kinda a weird case. They do represent strongly held beliefs on the right (I would not call it morality, but one might calls it axiology), but some of it is also pushback against opponents. I would not score it as exactly fitting my model, but I wouldn't argue with someone who honestly disagreed with me on this.
You're the one who thinks that David Friedman is a stand-up sorta guy. No one here cares what you say ... or really think for that matter. Nor will they until you stop being a disingenuous little git.
Recommend one link, on an article full of links, one of which references a bunch of TECHNICAL statements by David Friedman and I'm forever whatever bad thing it is that is associated with David Friedman.
Full points for consistency. But you do realize this is EXACTLY the sort of behavior that gets you branded a tribalist rather than a rational thinker. Of course if tribalist is what you want to be...
Sigh. You just don't get scholarship, the scientific method, enlightenment values of inquiry, etc. So I'll explain yet again:
David Friedman is not ... reputable, to put it as charitably as I can. So it follows that anyone who links to him as if that's a good thing are themselves not reputable. It further follows that if I'm to believe anything this person posts, I'm going to have to research it independently myself. A total waste of time.
And the fact that you're unaware of this sort of automic background check is going on all the time for unknowns tells me that either you're not someone whose opinion I particularly value, or that you also think, like the guy you're linking to, Friedman is good and reputable. Either way makes you look deeply unserious, but more generally, you're not very good at that cite thing, of formulating clear ideas that are at least in principle checkable, etc. Sorry to be the one to have to tell you this.
Why don't you just short circuit the process and say that I share some genes with Hitler, so I'm probably a nazi.
That''s about as logical as the claim you are making.
The page that has you so incensed, I remind you, consisted of a collection of links, and the one of interest was not the Friedman one.
The Friedman link, of zero interest to me by the way, was, for what it's worth, a series of statements about quotations from The Wealth of Nations. Are you claiming that Friedman mangled his quotes from The Wealth of Nations? Are you complaining that if, say, Kevin linked to a page of Mitch McConnell's web site, for ANY REASON, you'd boycott jabberwocking?
And if not, then WTF are you complaining about?
Do you not get it? Seriously? Let me try one last time: If you link to someRandomDude to make a point, and I see that on the page that comes up he approvingly links to a Rush Limbaugh piece, well, I know that he is someone of no consequence. And the fact that _you_ linked to this person of no consequence -- approvingly, mind you -- marks you as no one of consequence as well.
I also note that you do think Friedman is someone in the know and that you think well of him, BTW. Don't think I didn't notice that. No, what he wrote wasn't 'highly technical' as you put it earlier; it was his usual trademark libertarian rhetorical dishonest hit piece.
Son, you're not the smartest kid in the room. In fact, the only reason you're not at the bottom of class is because we have a few committed day-drinkers posting here. Now that sucks, I know. But you can take heart from the fact that this is fixable. But it's going to take some work and discipline on your part. I hope you have the sticktoitiveness to become a better person ... but from bitter experience I'm not counting on it.
I think you’re wayyyyy overestimating how much college students pay attention in class…when they even go.
My dad recently spouted a similar line, blaming my university for filling my head with “Marxist bullshit.” Nevermind that I graduated almost 20 years ago (from a school with both undergrad and graduate business school ffs) and almost never went to class.
“Radical” professors and teachers are having little to no widespread impact.
Did you read ANYTHING I said. I guess not.
About the first 200 words, where you said university professors have created a certain worldview. Then I lost interest. Did you completely reverse course in the next 500?
Thirty words where 14 would do.
I did. And I can say that it's something that would have been red-pencilled to here and gone if this had been turned in as an English assignment. It was one -- call it two to be charitable -- step up from utter gibberish.
The problem with this theory is that it ignores that power within universities has drastically shifted from the arts field and fields that you label influencers to the STEM fields. The fields you mention attract very few students and hence very few new faculty members. No one cares about them in academia. And the STEM fields were originally right wing in the 60s through 70s in politics. Now it is true that STEM is over whelmingly democrat today but that represents the fact that conservative equates with high school or less education and rigorous scientific training means liberal.
I expect the fact that rigorous scientific training means liberal is a direct result of decades of republican efforts to ban the teaching of evolution in the nations high schools had a steep price.
this is a bunch of long-winded, pseudo-intellectual drivle.
You appear to have confused prolixity with erudition.
I like this theory and will happily parrot it at cocktail parties when cocktail parties happen again.
But I think a problem for the theory is this: Donald Trump is obviously a kind of apotheosis of a "problem with our politics being so nasty", and yet early on in his presidential campaign Fox opposed him. Megyn Kelly famously tried to take him down.
So the question is: if the reason our politics is so toxic is because Fox News benefits from it, why didn't Fox glom onto Trump from the beginning and champion him?
Having spent so much of the past 20 years reading my Drum and Krugman, I tend now to think that everything is about money, and especially about tax rates for billionaires.
What's making our politics so nasty, I would argue, is that there's money in it for billionaires. The nastiness is the billionaires' way of keeping their taxes low, put simply.
A capsule history of the past 15 years goes something like this: Republicans were completely destroyed in 07-08 having messed up the economy and the Iraq war. They whipped up the tea party to defend themselves and, luckily for them, had an African-American Democratic president to demagogue against.
Trump, being an excellent con man, could see the con that was going on -- tea party created to escape responsibility for the Bush era -- and thought to himself "I'm the best con man in the world, I'll take over from these pikers and show them how it's done." So he jumped in front of the Republican Party and the rest is history. But Trump's con was perfectly aligned with the billionaires' con (this is where you have to credit Trump for insight): scream "unfair" and "radical communists" and "criminal minorities" while scarfing up all the dough for himself. And Fox finally realized what a good con man Trump was and got behind him.
So in my theory, Fox News is invincible until somebody raises the taxes of the billionaires and proves that the lives of working people don't have to be so miserable. Maybe Biden can pull it off.
"So the question is: if the reason our politics is so toxic is because Fox News benefits from it, why didn't Fox glom onto Trump from the beginning and champion him?"
Well, it could be that Fox is not infallible, and that "Fox" is of course--like any corporate entity--a gestalt of lots of people making lots of decisions at different points in time. Initially, they thought Trump was too odious to win. But then he was the nominee, so Fox collectively thought "we can work with that." And work with that they did.
Yes I agree Aldous, but your explanation also shows how - contrary to KD's explanation - Fox does not always choose the most overtly toxic mode of expression in our politics, which suggests that the answer to the question "why is politics so toxic these days?" lies outside of Fox News.
FOX & the right-wing powers that be opposed Trump early in the primary season because they thought he would fail, that Hillary Clinton would coast into the White House, and all their nightmares would come true.
One by one, they fell in line because their voters told the they didn't have a choice. But they weren't fully on board with him until he won the election. They they realized they could be brazenly racist, openly corrupt, and stunningly incompetent, and they would still have a compliant press/media.
Rupert Murdoch was sure that El Jefe Maximo de Maralago was a cat's paw of Bill Climpton.
Ah. That was Bill getting back at Hillary after a spat, was it?
I have been banging the drum (no pun intended) about Fox News for over ten years and always like it when someone prominent calls them out. This year Kevin had a number of posts decrying Fox News: (I've saved them all in a single document, > 11,000 words)
JAN 06 Tucker: “It’s not your fault. It’s their fault”
JAN 07 When Will Republicans Finally Disown Fox News?
JAN 07 Forget Social Media: Fox News Is Still the Real Problem
JAN 08 At Fox News, It’s Always About Scary Threats to White People
JAN 11 What Can We Do About Fox News?
JAN 12 Why Did Trust in Government Plummet Around the Year 2000?
JAN 13 Why Did Trust in Government Plummet? The Answer Below!
JAN 18 Fox News Is the Source of All Evil
JAN 18 It’s Time to Crush Fox News
JAN 19 McConnell Denounces Trump, But Not Fox News
JAN 19 Fox News Decides It’s Not Right-Wing Enough
JAN 29 Here’s How to Fix What’s Wrong With the United States
FEB 11 Fox News Is Destroying America
FEB 17 Fox News Just Lies and Lies and Lies
MAR 15 Sean Hannity Is Outraged That Black Farmers Will Get 12.5% of Farm Assistance Funds
which ended with "Nuntes vulpes delenda est" [Fox News must be destroyed]
APR 30 Fox News Continues To Have a Huge Impact on American Voting
MAY 05 Rupert Murdoch Has Destroyed the Country, Part 753
MAY 18 Chart of the Day: Fox News, Republicans, and the Destruction of Democracy
JUN 15 Critical Race Theory Is Just the Latest Hysteria About Black People From Fox News
JUL 13 Fox News is the real source of right-wing vaccination paranoia
JUL 13 Looking for the real conservative culprit in the culture wars? Forget about politicians. It’s all Fox News.
JUL 16 Biden should call out the vaccine lies on Fox News
JUL 19 If I were a billionaire . . .
JUL 20 Do conservatives ever criticize Fox News?
This would have happened without Fox, probably.
History shows that people do not, as a general rule, lose wars well. Note, for example that large sections of the South still is fighting the Civil War, and that is only 150 years ago.
So, to go to first principals:
A. You would not expect, regardless of Fox News, a group who thinks that the US ought to be primarily Anglo Saxon to gracefully accept multi-culturalism and all that goes with it.
B. You would not expect, again regardless of Fox News, those who believe organized religion ought to drive government policy to gracefully accept an agnostic country where they are the minority.
Point B covers a lot, including LBTQ rights, and the fact that a trans woman graces the cover of the SI swimsuit issue.
The segment of the R coalition who constitutes rich people who don't want to pay any taxes only cares about that, they could care less about religious yahoos or racists dying to build a wall as long is it doesn't cost them anything.
Finally, Kevin has noticed the new issue, that Fox is amplifying, which is "you should hate liberals." But it probably would have happened anyway.
That's because when you are pushing a losing position the winning position, is just that, the winning position. Its not that universities are doing anything different then they ever did.
It stems from the losing. The only place for someone who thinks
Confederate statutes ought to stay up is the MAGA crowd. Now they can add the Cleveland Guardians to the list.
By all means push back against Fox, it would be great if Bezos bought it when Murdoch kicks the bucket, but we have to brace ourselves for a long fight.
3 comments
1) "In some sense, it began in the '60s, the wellspring of the culture wars. " This ignores the John Birch society which started in the 60s and very much wanted to slit the throats of liberals.
2) I would argue that in formal politics, it got bad when social conservatives swtcihed from being a wing of the democrat party to being the base of the republican party. (Combined with the destruction of the last vestiges of the republican party being the liberal party of this country with Ronald Reagan)
3) This article https://qz.Com/1973960/rush-limbaughs-short-lived-tv-show-helped-usher-in-fox-news/reminds people that before Fox TV there was Rush Limbaughs unsuccesful tv show. This is what Ailes was doing prior to the founding of Fox. It just took him 4 years to convince Murdoch that a failed tv show was the right model for all of Fox news.
MMMM??? Trigering events?
Sermon one the Mount
Justinian Plague
95 Theses nailed to church door
Election of Lincoln
archduke franz ferdinand assassination
Mein Kampf
Compare and contrast the Kampf book to FUX.
Where do we go from here???
I read and agree with the most of your article, but it does seem to be at odds with your multiple posts arguing the culture wars and conservative radicalization being driven by the democrats moving too far to the left.
The polariazation was much worse in the 1860's. And, as then, when the war comes, the rural right will be put down again. High volume manufacturing to produce arms requires cooperation...
I read the Richard Hofstadter essay from 1964 linked in Kevin's MoJo article, and it convinced me that Fox News is not the culprit here. Surely it's a despicable operation and deserving of contempt, but not the cause of what we now call the culture wars. If anything, we could say Fox wields extra power by virtue of the money behind it, which allows it to be distributed "free" on cable TV systems; which enables it to be dressed up like a real news station, with all the important looking graphics and urgent music; and with all the expensively dressed and coifed online personalities, sitting at desks on what appear to be news sets. No one before has tried to produce such a slick 24-hour Potemkin news village. Very convincing, but it's a little like saying the latest comic book movie is better than "The Wizard of OZ" because the effects are more believable.
In taking advantage of the audience that Murdoch bought, Fox is exploiting the fear and hatred that resides in all our lizard brains, and they are doing a bang-up shameless job of it, but they are not the first. They are just the latest to release the monster from the id.
I won't repeat at length my argument that the damage Fox does pales into insignificance compared to the damage wrought by talkback radio.
For my money, the reason for the increased rancor in society is that if liberals are allowed in power, the America reactionaries know and love is doomed. Reactionaries have perfectly valid grievances; the institutional arrangements and the culture which placed them in a privileged position for centuries are eroding. They will struggle to preserve what they believe is their rightful inheritance just as every other elitist group in history has done when challenged by social change. They are the rough contemporary equivalents of Charles the First's Royalists, fighting with increasing violence to ward off the demands for a parliamentary monarchy; of American slave owners surrounded by increasingly menacing forces telling them their whole way of life was immoral; of the Japanese military caste confronted by pressure to yield to Western-style civilian rule.
Fox News is just an amplifier creating a positive feedback loop.
The hatred and outrage have always existed. It's just that Fox News has been the longest-running mass-broadcast of that hatred, essentially everywhere and at all times, for almost 30 years.
Right-wing authoritarianism amplified by Hate Radio, Fox News, and now Internet/Social Media is now going on 40+ years. See: Rockefeller Republicans replaced by The Reagan Revolution, ca. 1980. It hasn't gotten better in the past 40 years. It won't be getting any better as long as the ideology hasn't outright adopted treason and then been beaten down by the remaining non-treasonous people. The time is almost here for Republicans to adopt outright treason...it's peaking through RIGHT NOW. It won't be much longer now, especially if Democrats can hold the White House, Senate and House.
The same hate, outrage and lies have just been amped up, spread farther and faster, for immediate consumption, absorption and re-transmission between particular groups, to create a more obvious Us vs. Them.
The 2 Minutes Hate of 1984 is now 1,440 Minutes Hate in the real United States. All day, all night, at all times.
Imagine a shitbag screaming on a street corner. Now imagine that shitbag with a camera pointed at him and broadcast on every screen in the country. Imagine this goes on for 40+ years. That's Fox News: providing hatred and outrage a platform on which to build a base of outraged shitbags on a trajectory towards outright treason.
Let's be real clear: Fox News' role in all of this has been open, transparent, and discussed for decades now.
That was journalism at it's absolute best. Be interesting to find out if MJ readership has dropped since KD retired from their ranks...I'll bet a bag of cat litter the answer is yes
At its heart it's an urban rural divide. And it applies to the entire world you see these same patterns in say South Korea, Turkey, India. Conservative rurals approving of cultural pasts battling more progressive urbanites.
Maybe Fox is responsible for it getting do bad in English speaking countries: Australia and Britain are following us though Canada and New Zealand are not.
But the truth is urban and rural used to need each other equally but that's not the case anymore.
Well, yes, but no. In the US, rural/urban (very) roughly correlates with Puritan/Quaker culture: Urban, Border/Royalist culture: Rural. The same is true to a lesser or greater extent of other countries around the world, from which I conclude that urban living is not conducive to an aristocratic culture, and that rural living most certainly is.
Well, one hypothesis 😉
Rupert Murdoch owns media companies in Australia, Britain, and the United States, but not in Canada or New Zealand. It appears that Murdoch is a malign force, which matches up with Drumm's thesis because Fox News is the Murdoch's most influential media holding in the United States.
Murdoch bought the New York Post in 1976. In the Jan/Feb 1980 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, the result is described as follows:
“The front pages regularly play to two emotions: fear and rage. And all too often what follows is meant to turn white against black, the comfortable against the poor, the First World against the Third. Murdoch has learned that exploiting the really grand social passions pays better than pandering to the small private ones. The New York Post is no longer merely a journalistic problem. It is a social problem -- a force for evil.”
In other words, very much in the Fox News mold, but not as influential.
Excellent article in Mojo...I wonder how many readers have left since KD "retired"
Liberals are to a man (and the women don't matter) ineffective awful helpless degenerate useless feckless pussies, AND you should be absolutely terrified of their ever gaining any power of any kind because they can easily destroy us and incidentally ar country. >>> /s
It's weird to ignore the fact that the Republican Party has been working to sell an alternate reality, and thereby polarize the electorate, since at least the sixties. That was the essence of the southern strategy: those damn black people are trying to get EXTRA rights, and the damned Democrats are helping them! And then in the seventies, needing an extra wedge issue, the Republican Party worked hard on the evangelical community -- which had supported Roe v Wade on women's rights grounds, and voted for Jimmy Carter -- to consider abortion murder and give their money and votes to the Republicans, in exchange for a seat at the table of power. And in the 90s, Gingrich taught his fellow Republicans to win by demonizing Democrats, calling them sick, evil, traitorous, etc. "Bipartisanship is date rape," said Grover Norquist, and that became the party motto. All before the birth of Fox News. So yes, Fox News is evil, but it's an outgrowth of fifty years of race-baiting, lying, pandering to the most rebarbative elements in American cultural life. Fox was invented as the propaganda arm of the right. But the right had already become what it was before Fox ever existed.