We can’t overlook the news media, I don’t quite mean the Post and NYT caving and bending the knee as that’s recent. The simple fact is that Fox News and its right wing copies (Newsmax etc.) lie and lie all the time. News that a republican would call left wing (I guess CNN or MSNBC) don’t lie, you may think they have a liberal bent depending on your own view but you can trust that what’s presented as fact is actual fact.
I can remember when Fox was basically like the WSJ I think still is, conservative but still reporting actual news and I guess it’s been a slow process going from bending the truth to ignoring it, but I think that goes a long way to explaining how this all happened. A large proportion of the population, and I mean more than just MAGA, still think Fox News reports the news.
Every person I know that voted for Trump - every single last one of them - watches Fox. And many have it on in their homes for hours and hours as the background to their lives. I’ve asked myself why it is I never watched Fox, why I never fell prey… the only answer I have EVER been able to come up with… the people I alluded to above who all watch Fox? Every single one of them also leans racist - it used to not be overt but that ship has sailed. Fox serves up racism and lies and their viewers line up at the trough pleading, ‘Please, Sir, may I have some more?’
Fox News, along with social media, is part of the disinformation industry funded by the billionaire class. We are living in a corporatocracy, not a democracy.
You are making an assumption that Democrats are in fact interested in eliminating the threat. I propose that the democrats are in fact in on the neoliberal grift.
It is quite puzzling to see you call naive, a suggestion to actually uphold the laws of the country. I think it is more naive to believe you can do without. In most other serious crimes, are you not jailed while the investigation is ongoing? In this case of arguably the most serious crime, he was allowed to roam free, hold rallies and spreading lies and organising the next takeover. Excuse me, but that always seemed like insane naivite to me.
Actually, some proposals are taken directly from Hitler's playbook in the 1930's, to establish his dictatorship in Germany. Extremely dangerous for democracy.
Nope. No one is reading your sh1t, even whachacallit #4. As a lawyer I can tell you straight out with no reservations that your comment is not correct in so many ways. A little shallow knowledge is dangerous in the wrong hands.
Our 2 party system gives the parties enormous power. If one of the parties doesn't care about democracy and won't work to maintain it, it's only a matter of time until democracy ends. The electorate doesn't care about democracy and take it for granted. The political class and other elites must maintain it. They have failed us.
I read about the city council of Portland, OR today and they passed ranked choice voting. They even have democratic socialists in the mix--like FOUR of them! Yes, when there are only two choices, big money can get organized and buy both parties. It would be too costly to attempt to buy all of the ranked choice candidates, defeating the purpose of money in politics. Those who are really in control behind the scenes really don't want democracy.
Good grief — just who is ‘the electorate’ you are talking about?? That is US and WE are responsible for solving the problem. Whining and blaming some nebulous ‘them’ gets us nowhere.
Democracy is a dynamic process. Nothing is fixed for eternity. Solving the problems NOW is necessary, then government amd politics need monitoring to prevent derailing.
I am sorry that "hypatia0761" felt the need to attack you. While I can agree that your "permanent fix" notion sounds naive, or perhaps too idealistic, I can't see any reason for the personal attack. If someone has paid to be here, they are either one of the sane, or a troll with money to waste (you are clearly the former!). I apologize, if I can presume, on behalf of the democracy loving pool of people that I'm sure have flocked to the Krugman banner. Maybe you'll get an apology from the offender?
Have posted this anecdote before but during President Obama's campaign for reelection I had a bumper sticker saying "Veterans for Obama". At a truck stop a morbidly obese trucker was fueling his big rig when he noticed and took grievous offense at my political proclamation. When I got the chance to ask him where he got his information it was of course right wing talk radio. He said, "Ah listen to both channels. Limbaugh on one and Hannity on the other". Not much chance that big dude will ever hear the truth before he has the inevitable coronary.
Yeah, my money is on the coronary...if Murdoch doesn't get you when you sit down in front of your TV, Sinclair will get you when you turn the truck radio on. It's almost like there's a "vast right wing conspiracy"???
Audio media (first talk radio and now podcasts) are especially well-suited to right-wing propaganda because they are convenient for people who spend much of their lives behind a steering wheel, and those people will be predisposed to right-wing politics anyway by the zero-sum competition for road space.
Yes, they fall readily into the mindset that there is zero-sum competition among "us" and "them" for the benefits of society, and "us" and "them" are very simplistically understood as depending on race or region.
When Trump said he loved the uneducated, he wasn't kidding. When I was in high school, I was taught by people who grew up during WWI and the Depression and taught during WWII and the Cold War. They had seen a lot of propaganda and insisted we observe events closely and critically.
The grandchildren of the people in your high school class probably did not receive the same education in civics, informed by the living memory of World War II. Sixty years after the Sixties, I am dismayed to see the degree to which all the lies about race, all the insularity about good and bad effects of government policy, all the ignorance about our place within the family of nations are back among the populace. Re-education is absolutely critical, but where to start?
Michael Hopf popularized the aphorism, "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times". While very simplistic and certainly not accounting for a number of factors, it does seem to apply at least to the idea of Americans' privileged position in the world leading to a certain degree of complacency.
I dunno. If things really have been building to this since Nixon, that means that much of it was when the Republicans were still the college-educated party. Some are misled by the hippies, but demographical voting statistics say that Republicans always did best with the highly educated until 2004.
You mean country club republicans? Think about the emptying out of small towns. Two attorneys I've known from families with legal backgrounds in the smaller communities they left weren't so prominent with connections in the big cities. In fact, they were disbarred hustling in the criminal world because there just aren't enough opportunities available for the elite over-production in a concentrated economy. Small towns used to have several independent businessmen, many who probably belonged to the local country club & voted republican. Once the majority of the educated were no longer their own boss, they start to vote accordingly. Nixon cut a deal with union bosses back in the day (from I Hear You Paint Houses, the book), as well as with the southern strategy. No one would vote against their better interests without propaganda leading them astray and that's why the republican party has to eliminate democracy, because eventually the propagandized will wise up and vote them out.
The Republicans have been especially deranged since the New Deal. They look like they will take us back to the 1920s or maybe the 1880s. Back then the Army broke strikes, usually with bullets.
I would quibble with "masquerading as news". I have VERY limited experience with Hate Radio, but it has always seemed like the pontificating and trolling are hard to mistake for news, though they do start with some little "outrage" (usually misreported?) and launch from there...
Related to this is the fact that companies like Sinclair control the TV consumption of most Americans outside the major metro areas. And Sinclair has been publicly devoted to spreading Rightwing propaganda for going on 30 years now. Joe Sixpack out in the sticks may never read the FNYT or WAPO, and he may never watch Fox, but he sure as hell gets his TV news and weather from Sinclair.
I did think that one possible upside of the Jimmy Kimmel saga is that when people's local affiliates didn't put it on when it came back on the air, people would be like, "wait, huh, why?", look into it, and realize that their local TV news was being run by a political operation.
Probably putting too much faith in people to put two and two together. Or to, you know, look into something they aren't sure about, instead of just making an assumption.
The local weather hides the fact that the accompanying news, read from scripts provided by Sinclair and read by local news casters, is right wing propaganda. Our local news called Obama, Obama (!) , a traitor, just the other day. A few years ago, someone compiled a vignette of local news people, all over the country, reading the very same script, right wing propaganda. I asked my mom, why are these journalists violating their ethics? She said " maybe they have families and need to feed them?" It was stunning ..all read lies, all over the U.S., the exact same script. As if it had been locally written.
Thanks Ethereal fairy. I sent it to a journalism major at U. of Missouri where I live. She was stunned and sent it out to classmates. What became of it? Alas not much. Stay courageous everyone. Oct 18. Faux king ( say that ha ha)
I agree and the right’s ability to dominate non urban media outlets has permanently created a radicalized rural population unaware of their own interests. It has enabled the right to establish their own political narrative as the dominant national perspective despite holding minority views on important matters such as Social Security preservation, Medicare and Medicaid as well as public support for higher ed and child care. Obviously that media dominance allows uncontrolled grievance stoking and targeted bigotry as a means of political control.
Lots of awareness now of the fiction of an enemy main stream media when the majority of media outlets is...right wing and controlled by illiberal interests. Welcome to the 1890s.
And the internet has made the media more dependent on billionaire patrons by depriving it of advertising revenue: first Craigslist and Ebay killed classified ads, then Indeed and LinkedIn killed job ads, and finally Google and Facebook killed commercial ads.
So true and to me one of the central issues of our time. The Democratic Party leadership is so busy making sure the young progressive stars who are incredible communicators are frozen out of power they have destroyed their own party. The Dems inability to message or understand how media control has converted half the country to hopeless MAGAts has become legendary. It all comes down to leadership that has been corrupted by corporate financing and lobbyists, especially AIPAC.
THIS. I'm not sure how Professor K didn't list this as a contributing factor when, in reality, it's THE contributing factor. We can't stop what's happening because a huge chunk of the country lives in an alternative reality buttressed by a massive propaganda ecosystem. If Trump shot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, FOX News would report it as self defense, OANN would claim the victim was ANTIFA, and Breitbart would suggest Trump give himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his own bravery. And Red America would believe every last despicable lie.
I have a bit of a "chicken and the egg" problem with this. I feel like it's more like they are giving their viewers what they want: confirmation of their world view or their fantasy world. People tune in to get their confirmation and of course the more viewers the more money. I guess it feeds on itself.
I watch MSNBC so I'm not immune to this. However, I do think they present facts and sometimes uncomfortable ones, served up with a point of view. I sometimes roll my eyes when they go over the top. I also consume a lot of news and analysis from other sources: local paper, NPR, NYT, WP, public television, The Atlantic, etc.
Fox news uses extensive focus-group testing to find out what its viewers want. It flows both ways. Even on topics such as health: the focus groups decreed that they didn't want to hear about exercise, so Fox allows mentions of exercise only very rarely in health coverage.
But not the tribe that is open to meeting & exchanging with other people, but the tribe that builds a wall around themselves. The type who would say that everyone should speak English because God does.
Hard to believe MSNBC is “over the top” when most of their anchors are former republicans and centrist and corporate Dems. I do feel MSNBC largely deals with the truth but has failed to understand how badly moving to the center has failed our 2-Party politics just like the leadership of the Democratic Party.
Definitely a feedback loop. But without the ability to get their prejudices confirmed daily, they had previously gone about their “business”, whatever that was, and I assume many did not vote. Murdoch’s business model was probably just to find these folks and confirm their conspiracies, but he and Trump inspired them to participate, now that they could easily find each other.Which is why 2024 was soul-crushing: 5 million voters stayed home, and 2 million switched sides (just using the vote totals compared to 2020; I don’t have hard numbers). 2016 was an Electoral College shafting, and the large section of the electorate that loves weird. 2024 was a tsunami of hate.
Oh, you are wrong about that....80% of my hometown vote republican and always have since Eisenhower, I imagine. It's an agricultural community that has lost a third of its population and most all of its businesses. A lot of grievance over that by the left-behind who have seen better days.
Agree, AP. And we also cannot forget the impact of social media, the "social anomie" Paul references with link to s substack "It's the Internet, Stupid". I think we can also blame the small screens which are driven by the behemoth tech companies and their "rage is engagement" pointed algorithms.
Go to the head of the class. At the behest of Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes created FOX. Roger discerned that a “news” outlet couldn’t make money by parroting the legacy media which at its core tended to report visual and functional reality. So an alternate reality had to be manufactured. He did it with the help of a willing lapdog Sean Hannity. Took them five years to make a profit and in the end what Kelly Ann Conway described as “alternate facts” became functional reality. This of course is just one facet of the equation but suffice to say that our Republic will not survive intact. The america most of us grew up in is gone and it’s not coming back. Glad i’m old and nearing my end ‘cause this is gonna be one shitty ride..
Ah, yes, the rise of alternate facts, and the irony that we had to invent the term "mainstream media" to distinguish it from Fox et al. Twenty years before you could get right-wing and Russian lies from your internet connection, Fox (and Hate Radio) gave you a place to go for right-wing and thinly-veiled racist bullshit. But behind it all lies Murdoch/Sinclair "economic model" of turning ignorance and intolerance into cold cash...
You have to wonder who is financing all of these rural stations because there's so few businesses left in these communities, so I surmise that billionaires save more in taxes by contributing to right-wing campaigns, which the majority goes to the media networks.
This. Because RW outlets like FOX News spend almost nothing on newsrooms and the salaries of actual journalists, their business model is much more profitable.
We need some sort of "Truth in Media" law, that somehow requires RW media to use actual journalistic standards when reporting a story--like 2+ sources, timely corrections/retractions when necessary, etc. Which would need to be crafted by the finest legal minds to pass 1st Amendment Constitutional scrutiny.
I remember early in tRump v. 1.0 when Kellyanne Conway distinguished between the reporter's facts and her "facts" (I can't remember her wording). It was painfully embarrassing to see her say it with a straight face. As much as I dislike Kellyanne, I hate to see someone humiliated, and I thought she surely would be by both sides. I was so naive.
excellent reply. .thanks for the added historical context. I had forgotten how far back Ailes goes. Having just returned from Vietnam i was only paying attention to the periphery of the working of his inner circle.
There is a nugget of truth to this but it is too facile: there is still a vast difference between the NYT, the Atlantic, New York Magazine, etc. and the right-wing media. The NYT has its hobby horses and its blind spots (note how comically it tried to avoid saying that Kirk's assassin's "roommate" was trans), but still has a commitment to what used to be considered "truth", even if it devotes ways to much space to "news analysis" and not enough to plain old "news". The smaller outlets have tended to fall into the traps of left-wing cancel culture: cf. New York's cancelling Andrew Sullivan, or the New Republic's conversion to utterly predictable leftyism from what used to be genuinely contrarian commentary (at least some of the time). But still, all that is vastly better than the right-wing media.
Yes, the foundations of the Fourth Estate have been compromised by corporate concentration and the growth of the Fifth Estate, Social Media.
As experienced in 2016, the fifth estate was used to drum up the crowd and unearth a lot of that divisiveness and begin the path to normalization.
Meanwhile, fourth estate outlets we counted on, NYT, Washington Post stopped speaking truth to power while muzzling it's talented staff. Many of whom we now meet here.
Welcome to the fifth estate ... we need to work hard to catch up.
THANK YOU. This is literally THE MAIN problem, by a GIGANTIC margin, and the fact that even a great thinker like Dr. Krugman didn't list it as even a CONTRIBUTING cause is incredibly disheartening. The media seems completely blind to it, and the Democrats need to be way more aggressive in how they talk about them.
In 1987 the Reagan adminstration ended the fairness doctrine that was in force from 1949 to ensure balanced coverage of political views. In 1988 Limbaugh began his one-man assault on the country, and was soon followed by others with suppliments to sell. In 1996 FOX goes on air claiming to be balanced but in reality being anything but. In 1971 Sinclair broadcasting began with 1 televesion station. Today it has 294. The decline of the US republic is the result of the rise of unfettered capitalism in media.
Nevertheless it did provide a standard, which once abandoned surrendered the media in all its forms to the capitalists, which led to the further reduction of regulations over media consolidation and to the hollowing out of the fourth estate.
I can't get around the realization that people WILLINGLY choose to watch Fox. They know there is an alternative but they WANT what Fox et al is telling them. It is some combination of cultural and personal laziness and lack of a truly "liberal" (not in the political sense) education. Even the non-Fox media like NYT are guilty of intellectual laziness; it is just easier to both sides things than to find out facts, weigh them and make judgements about what is true.
And that's the rub, isn't it? It is easier to be lazy but so much less rewarding not to mention dangerous. How do we change the American culture from short to long-term thinking, quality over quantity, cost vs value of things, being ethical vs toleration of corruption. etc?
The political right has adopted the playbook used by many religious cults, convincing people that no one outside the cult can be trusted. Followers will tell you that they don’t trust the “mainstream media,” a term which they usually abbreviate down to “MSM” because the message is so ubiquitous in right-wing circles. For people caught in the cult, there *is* no (trustworthy) alternative to Fox News.
yes--it's the people. Democracy cannot work if people are distracted and disengaged especially from the basics and especially now when it's blatant destruction and hate is pervasive from the top down ( and call it Christian - Christian Nationalism!!). We have fallen deep into this pattern of disengagement from what matters- even voting- to distractions: getting and spending. Dumbing down. When it hits home severely enough, to cause pain, people ( it would have to be en masse) will hopefully wake up and rally- or leave -or obey- or shrug and hide. I think (intuitively) that the rest of the people just hope this blows over and will hunker down... like my neighbor.
News media are for-profit businesses. Their main objective is to make money. They need ad revenue. They need eyeballs. Both will feed red meat to their watchers. Fox News folks are just old, irrelevant and no one cares about them so they mainline something that tells them it isn’t their fault their lives are a joke. And also sells them pillows
Professor Krugman: with last night's raid on that apartment complex in chicago, where almost all of the residents, at least some of whom were naked, were zip-tied, kidnapped in the middle of an icy cold night, and disappeared whilst the gestapo trashed all their apartments so even those who were not kidnapped had a giant mountain of destruction to deal with, is SO NAZI GERMANY. when will we do something to address this out-of-control evil?
All I know is that we’re in deep trouble. I read a recent article from the NYT, and it’s fairly clear that Vought and Stephen Miller can get Trump to sign anything they want. Vought and his coconspirators are very close to imposing a harsh, theocratic and plutocratic regime we didn’t ask for, and no one asked for it. You are correct in noting that Trump isn’t the sign of democracy dying, but a symbol of it. The GOP, religious nationalists and morbidly rich see Trump and Vance as tools to get what they want at the expense of most Americans, and at the expense of our relationships with our traditional allies. I am certain Putin is enjoying this immensely.
There was one Australian poster on another discussion site who was taking Trump at face value when Trump claimed he had nothing to do with Project 2025, and that he wasn’t going to do anything to implement it. We had to educate this guy that Trump is a constant and chronic liar, and you could never take him at his word on his claim he would not do anything with Project 2025. We knew well that Russell Vought and the other theocrats were going to have Trump implement Project 2025, and we knew it.
Trump’s voters might have asked for it, but many of us didn’t. There were also quite a few of Trump’s voters (such as the farmers) who:never expected he would impose his damaging tariffs, and yet here we are. They are facing financial ruin as they didn’t believe Trump would impose tariffs, and he did so.
Trump is a very accomplished liar, but I’ve noticed that on some things, he does tell the truth about what his intentions are. I think,he was telling the truth about the ICE raids and the various other attacks he wants to make upon people who say or do things he hates. I have always taken him seriously when he mentions he wants to do something clearly illegal or unconstitutional, because he absolutely will.
Trump 1.0 imposed tariffs that destroyed our farmers soy bean market but he paid them off with a massive subsidy payment. Campaigning for Trump 2.0 tariffs were a constant them as was mass deportations. Any farmer voting for Trump who believed tariffs would not happen was either solidly in the MAGA cult, was not paying attention or eagerly anticipating another massive welfare payment to bail them out. They are getting exactly what they voted for.
He's talking about giving every citizen several thousand dollars (the amount varies every time he opens his mouth) to compensate for the cost of his tariffs.
They are getting what they voted for, but they seem to have rather short memories. I don’t expect Trump to bail out the farmers this time, because he wants to give the money away to the morbidly wealthy in the form of tax cuts. I think one of the other consequences of Trump’s tariffs are that many farmers will wind up going bankrupt under Chapter 12, and they may find their property sold off to big agricultural businesses. Ever since Ford, secretaries of agriculture seem to be operating under the assumption that bigger agricultural businesses must be better. They’re not, and our current system of agriculture and food production requires large use of fossil fuels, and frequently requires product recalls due to problems with crops or food that may be bacterially contaminated. Factory farming and the huge amount of animal waste it generates is a huge problem for rural areas.
I agree, but they also believe the Trump 2.0 tariff talk would never be implemented or they trust there would be a bailout as there was in Trump 1.0. Also, rural America tends to be all in on the GOP culture war issues I view as a smoke screen to drive more wealth to the top 1% with policies that favor continued dominance of big ag in rural America with the results you describe. Rather than opening the eyes of rural voters the result will likely be further discontent and embracing GOP authoritarian rule.
Oh, absolutely. One interesting book on this topic is Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller’s “White Rural Rage.” It will never occur to Trump’s rural followers that he’s been lying to them all along, and that he will use their anger as much as he can without actually doing anything to fix the problems that are making them angry. If we had intelligent leadership in the Democratic Party, they would see this as an opportunity for them to gain support.
Trump isn’t going to get enough money from tariffs to bail them out. People will actually buy less with tariffs. It doesn’t make any sense for Trump to tell the WSJ this, and I am sure the reporter was not stupid enough to believe Trump.
Trump talked about tariffs incessantly on the campaign trail. Worse yet, there should have been no guessing about what would happen if Trump started a trade war with China - farmers would have known full well that China would retaliate by cancelling soybean orders when Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese products in his first term! To hear them bellyache now just boggles my mind. Wait, you trusted THAT guy? I read yesterday that many farmers and ranchers get insurance from the ACA and now will get hit with insurance increases at the same time they’ve lost markets for their products.
He always speaks the truth when the truth is abhorrent. He always tells a lie when the lie is morally or practically good for the sensibilities of most people.
That's the rule one should remember when gauging Trump. He is very easy to read. He is a child who is a autocratic too.
Also, no one who wishes ill upon other folks and fan flames of hatred and gushes about obliterating media people lies.
Bad people lies about the good stuff, but are usually open about the bad stuff.
He literally said in each of his rallies that he would impose excessive tariffs. I don't know what they were thinking. Either way people as stupid as those farmers shouldn't waste their vote in a democracy since they bring atrocities to other innocent folks.
They didn’t look far enough ahead to see the tariffs would wind up destroying their own farming operations. They also probably believe like Trump does that foreign countries pay tariffs. The countries don’t pay tariffs, American consumers.
Thirty years ago, Tom Delay, TX Representative and, briefly House Majority Leader, spoke aloud about the GOP goal of achieving a permanent minority government in the US. He was expressing the aspirations of a core of Texas oligarchs, the same bunch that crushed the Democratic Party in Texas, got George Bush elected Governor and President. And the same bunch that take Supreme Court justices on private hunting excursions and lavish vacations. Think of Texas as America’s laboratory of fascism.
You can tell that Texas is full of extraterrestrial MAGA creatures because residences don't have insulation and building codes don't mention it. Humans are mammals and enjoy a warm nest.
My stepson lives right outside of Dallas. Cold typically isn't a problem there - he can keep tropical plants outside all year 'round. Dealing with heat is the main issue, and his house has decent insulation.
Politics used to be about differing views of how we as a society deal with problems and get things done. Democrats tended to want solutions that involved government and (usually) the private sector working together to improve everyone's lives. Republicans tended to lean toward more free market solutions with as little government intervention as possible.
But the 1980s and 1990s brought about big shifts in how Republicans came to view their role in society. From Reagan's "government is the problem," Republicans devolved over the next two decades into a Party opposed to, first, government in general, and then in today's latter stages, opposed to the government of the United States specifically. Actual governance is no longer any part of Republican principles or philosophy. Today, Republicans view control of government solely as a tool to punish perceived enemies and to reward the wealthiest with more wealth.
Democrats still believe in a functioning government, and this leads to the chasm between the Parties. It's not so much polarization based on any coherent battle over political philosophy as it is a fight between those who believe we need a functioning and effective government, and those committed to destroying the government.
Thank you for that clear, and disturbing, picture. Looking at those charts and thinking about what’s going on in Washington, I wonder what, if any, actual problems republicans are solving. All those representatives of the people who are supposedly working to make life better for their constituents - what real problems are they solving? HCR reported this morning that ICE raided an apartment building in Chicago and took all the people, some naked, out in zip ties. Now it was cold in NJ on the day of the raid, it was likely quite cold in Chicago. All but a handful (37) of people were let back in - but their apartments had been trashed. This is thuggish, goonish behavior supported by republicans.
These people are improving the social status of their constituents. Their constituents, in turn, are willing to extend them extensive lines of credit because, for many, the present moment represents a period of correction. I did canvassing and the number of times I heard the phrase “you have to break eggs to make omelet”. This sentiment isn’t the only motivation for people’s political beliefs, but change isn’t as linear as exposing them to facts of this regime’s cruelty. You are waiting for a moment when they genuinely believe that Democrats care and can represent them, and that Republicans are not. Right now, this moment still seems distant for many people on the right.
The reasons? Everything you cite–income inequality, left behind regions, racism, etc–are valid, though I would start with a corrupt Supreme Court. But I think the real reasons are more fundamental: the two Senators per state compromise in the Constitution, the House being "frozen" in size in 1929 (making it increasingly less representative a la the Senate), gerrymandering, voter suppression, the flood of dark money after Citizens United and so on. For example, they say Florida is red, but that's only because of voter suppression and gerrymandering. Add in the million plus people the voters of Florida say deserve to vote but Republicans blocked and it might well be blue. Fixing all of this will be a decades-long task. Here's hoping the Dems will listen to the progressives and the spirit of the Roosevelts (Teddy and FDR and Eleanor) and champion workers over big business and get a chance to do it.
Yes, but … the majority of the current US Democratic party is more similar to EU center-right parties than it is to EU center-left parties. Examples: healthcare, military, climate policy, taxation, economic and wealth inequality.
Actually no. Context and the prevailing environment matters. In the presence of Right wing party of European nation, the Democratic Party will behave exactly as the center-left party of any European Union state.
Most of the time, the Democratic party is bound by the electoral compulsions and Congressional reality and the political system they operate in, which emphasize cooperation.
For example: Tories of the UK are far Right on the political spectrum vis-a-vis the Democratic Party.
Back to the US Democratic Party and European political parties: The policies of Goran Mamdani or Bernie Sanders are similar to policies of EU Center Left parties. The Democratic National Committee and many/most elected Democrats are clearly to the right of such policies. For example, even center-right EU parties support healthcare for all. Has that ever won a majority of Democratic votes in the US House or Senate?
Also, Mamdani and Sanders are trailblazers and therefore it's very difficult to conduct left wing politics in America. Put the EU center-left politicians into an American system or airdrop them into, say, US Congress they will seem less left-wing than their EU counterparts.
You see America, at the voter level, is center-right and the US Senate disproportionate representation to smaller states and Gerrymandering don't help either. That's why the realm in which the Democratic Party operate changes altogether.
This same Democratic Party will find it convenient to show their leftist credentials and conduct very progressive policies if are allowed to operate in multi-party, legacy-driven, parliamentary EU democracy.
Second, and the most important aspect is that the legacy of reforms and historically established institutions make it easy for left wing policies and left leaning institutions to continue to function.
For example: NHS will, more or less, continue to operate even under a non-left wing administration and we will wrongly attribute that to a center-right administration. A popular and historical institution is very difficult to be discarded, thus Tories find ways to defund the NHS.
Thus, the fact that the NHS exists and is working doesn't mean that the Tories are not more RIGHT than the Center-Right.
In America, those institutions aren't there in the first place and thus require an even extra left-wing effort from the likes of Sanders and Mamdani to create that left-wing environment.
Think of EU left wing architecture as ball in motion with a, more or less, constant velocity with very less friction.
US: Ball is begging to be set in motion. That requires a larger and a bigger left wing action.
Why is that? Historical background and the way politics evolved are different in both the EU and the US.
US' original sin of slavery has a role to play along with its federal structure and excessive capitalism.
You're right if we do one-on-one surface comparison, but not in the whole scheme of things.
Another analogy: New Yorkers are now more favourable to congestion pricing once they've got to experience its benefits and utility. It has a multiplier effect. Same with EU healthcare system.
Naysayers and skeptics who are in the fence become the cheerleaders. Also, it becomes a losing proposition to get rid of such a popular policy initiative or institution. Other thing is it is very easy to pin the blame on the guilty party when something goes wrong in the EU system. The nations are small and states don't bear much of the responsibility of running the healthcare. US is utterly complex in terms of jurisdiction and more often than not one can pin the blame either on the Congress, or on the State Legislative Assembly or State Governor or President. It all depends on which party controls which organ of the government.
Thank you for saying that the fight against dictatorship won’t end with Trump. His rise and continued presence and the far right lurch of his party has been aided and abetted by the business community from Main Street to Wall Street. The notion of a common good or a rising tide lifting all boats is beyond quaint and a business community that lobbies rather than associates is a key ingredient to extremism and totalitarianism that won’t be easily thwarted or dismissed.
Good thing going - great choice of a musical coda! Democracy is quite fragile...
I am saddened at so many levels - the supine Supremes, supine Senators, and Congress men and women who call themselves Christians. "You will know them by their fruits," Jesus said. Their fruits are rotting; I can smell the stench coming out of Washington from over 250 miles away.
Time for me to buy a hand gun and a long gun to protect myself and my property, like my ancestors 8 generations removed in the American Revolution. I hate guns, btw. Will need to learn how to use them.
Remember this: when the Nazi's seized control, they seized property (real - farms, homes AND personal stuff - gold jewelry, gold teeth).
Let's hope and pray that the military ignore any orders to kill protestors. I was a naive 19 year old when the National Guard shot 4 peaceful protestors at Kent State (Neil Young's 'Ohio' was written immediately thereafter).
So many young ppl are not aware of THAT episode in the nation's dark history. Today's ICE raids by masked men throughout the nation pale in comparison to Kent State...sing the refrain 'four dead in Ohio' loud and often, especially at the protests on 10/18/25. See some of you there (Philly for me).
Being a Nazi has always been about seizing property; it is to be a bottomless pit of greed and corruption, while playing at patriotism and morality for the cameras. Fascism is fancy terminology for organized political thievery. Steal elections, steal people for labor camps, steal countries and call it annexation.
Hitting health care causes more bankruptcies, making people more susceptible to losing their property to the economic scavenging class. People die younger, putting their property up for grabs, and keeping them from collecting their social security benefits. All part of their process.
I learned how to ride a motorcycle from my first husband (who died of natural causes), and now I'm leaning how to shoot and handle guns with my second husband. We recently took the state-mandated gun safety course and there were many brown and female faces and possibly a trans (who cares?) instructor in the group. Assume nothing about who is armed ... and who isn't.
I shot for my university rifle team, back when that sort of thing was more supported. I fired "Sharpshooter" in competition. I took five deer with my Mauser. My wife took a "Ladies' Day at the Range" deal some years back and liked it fairly well. Assume nothing.
I work for a big corporation and the silence is deafening. Do our esteemed business leaders not recognize the dire threat to our economy? Even if you don’t care about democracy, and your only concern is getting rich and mocking the libs, you’re complicit in destroying the country that made your wealth possible. Blue states must figure out how to stop sending tax money to Washington and starve this beast.
The economic damage will be equally hard to recover from or should I say mores. Russia and its black market. Now Poland seemingly operates well since it threw off the shackles of Soviet occupation. But Russia? Things may start going askew for us.
Nixon and Kissinger did far worse than watergate, and were never held to account; Reagan traded arms for hostages and never suffered for it, apparently due to being senile; Dubya slept while 9/11 happened and pushed us into Iraq for oil. No consequences for any of this. And here we are now.
I think a brief correction is necessary: The Democratic party in the US is not center-left from a European perspective. It is conservative or maybe center-right, but definitely not center-left. In Europe, both parties would be split into several smaller parties. Due to understanding their own history, a MAGA party in Austria and Germany would simply be illegal. It is far to the right of the AFD or the FPÖ.
We can’t overlook the news media, I don’t quite mean the Post and NYT caving and bending the knee as that’s recent. The simple fact is that Fox News and its right wing copies (Newsmax etc.) lie and lie all the time. News that a republican would call left wing (I guess CNN or MSNBC) don’t lie, you may think they have a liberal bent depending on your own view but you can trust that what’s presented as fact is actual fact.
I can remember when Fox was basically like the WSJ I think still is, conservative but still reporting actual news and I guess it’s been a slow process going from bending the truth to ignoring it, but I think that goes a long way to explaining how this all happened. A large proportion of the population, and I mean more than just MAGA, still think Fox News reports the news.
That I think is the central problem.
Every person I know that voted for Trump - every single last one of them - watches Fox. And many have it on in their homes for hours and hours as the background to their lives. I’ve asked myself why it is I never watched Fox, why I never fell prey… the only answer I have EVER been able to come up with… the people I alluded to above who all watch Fox? Every single one of them also leans racist - it used to not be overt but that ship has sailed. Fox serves up racism and lies and their viewers line up at the trough pleading, ‘Please, Sir, may I have some more?’
Fox News, along with social media, is part of the disinformation industry funded by the billionaire class. We are living in a corporatocracy, not a democracy.
You are making an assumption that Democrats are in fact interested in eliminating the threat. I propose that the democrats are in fact in on the neoliberal grift.
Your "solutions" are naive, and tantamount to the same sort of actions committed by Trump & associates.
As well, they only refer to relatively recent events.
The degeneration had started long before Trump's first term.
It is quite puzzling to see you call naive, a suggestion to actually uphold the laws of the country. I think it is more naive to believe you can do without. In most other serious crimes, are you not jailed while the investigation is ongoing? In this case of arguably the most serious crime, he was allowed to roam free, hold rallies and spreading lies and organising the next takeover. Excuse me, but that always seemed like insane naivite to me.
Actually, some proposals are taken directly from Hitler's playbook in the 1930's, to establish his dictatorship in Germany. Extremely dangerous for democracy.
Unfortunately for your point of view I did read your post.
You go over the top in your desire to counter right wing excesses. Being extreme doesn’t fight extremism, it just feeds it.
Nope. No one is reading your sh1t, even whachacallit #4. As a lawyer I can tell you straight out with no reservations that your comment is not correct in so many ways. A little shallow knowledge is dangerous in the wrong hands.
Well said.
Our 2 party system gives the parties enormous power. If one of the parties doesn't care about democracy and won't work to maintain it, it's only a matter of time until democracy ends. The electorate doesn't care about democracy and take it for granted. The political class and other elites must maintain it. They have failed us.
I read about the city council of Portland, OR today and they passed ranked choice voting. They even have democratic socialists in the mix--like FOUR of them! Yes, when there are only two choices, big money can get organized and buy both parties. It would be too costly to attempt to buy all of the ranked choice candidates, defeating the purpose of money in politics. Those who are really in control behind the scenes really don't want democracy.
Good grief — just who is ‘the electorate’ you are talking about?? That is US and WE are responsible for solving the problem. Whining and blaming some nebulous ‘them’ gets us nowhere.
Democracy is a dynamic process. Nothing is fixed for eternity. Solving the problems NOW is necessary, then government amd politics need monitoring to prevent derailing.
I am sorry that "hypatia0761" felt the need to attack you. While I can agree that your "permanent fix" notion sounds naive, or perhaps too idealistic, I can't see any reason for the personal attack. If someone has paid to be here, they are either one of the sane, or a troll with money to waste (you are clearly the former!). I apologize, if I can presume, on behalf of the democracy loving pool of people that I'm sure have flocked to the Krugman banner. Maybe you'll get an apology from the offender?
My experience too. They also love AM talk radio which is another hotbed of right wing opinion masquerading as news.
Have posted this anecdote before but during President Obama's campaign for reelection I had a bumper sticker saying "Veterans for Obama". At a truck stop a morbidly obese trucker was fueling his big rig when he noticed and took grievous offense at my political proclamation. When I got the chance to ask him where he got his information it was of course right wing talk radio. He said, "Ah listen to both channels. Limbaugh on one and Hannity on the other". Not much chance that big dude will ever hear the truth before he has the inevitable coronary.
Yeah, my money is on the coronary...if Murdoch doesn't get you when you sit down in front of your TV, Sinclair will get you when you turn the truck radio on. It's almost like there's a "vast right wing conspiracy"???
Audio media (first talk radio and now podcasts) are especially well-suited to right-wing propaganda because they are convenient for people who spend much of their lives behind a steering wheel, and those people will be predisposed to right-wing politics anyway by the zero-sum competition for road space.
Yes, they fall readily into the mindset that there is zero-sum competition among "us" and "them" for the benefits of society, and "us" and "them" are very simplistically understood as depending on race or region.
So, should we not ask what caused so many Americans to lose their critical thinking?
When Trump said he loved the uneducated, he wasn't kidding. When I was in high school, I was taught by people who grew up during WWI and the Depression and taught during WWII and the Cold War. They had seen a lot of propaganda and insisted we observe events closely and critically.
The grandchildren of the people in your high school class probably did not receive the same education in civics, informed by the living memory of World War II. Sixty years after the Sixties, I am dismayed to see the degree to which all the lies about race, all the insularity about good and bad effects of government policy, all the ignorance about our place within the family of nations are back among the populace. Re-education is absolutely critical, but where to start?
Focusing on quality education for everyone will help. Promoting diversity. Information about the rest of the world, the people, their systems of govt.
As well as laws against hate speech, much better gun control.
Every little step will help.
Michael Hopf popularized the aphorism, "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times". While very simplistic and certainly not accounting for a number of factors, it does seem to apply at least to the idea of Americans' privileged position in the world leading to a certain degree of complacency.
Not surprising that Trump "loves the uneducated". Despite his nominal education, he shows little benefit from it.
I dunno. If things really have been building to this since Nixon, that means that much of it was when the Republicans were still the college-educated party. Some are misled by the hippies, but demographical voting statistics say that Republicans always did best with the highly educated until 2004.
You mean country club republicans? Think about the emptying out of small towns. Two attorneys I've known from families with legal backgrounds in the smaller communities they left weren't so prominent with connections in the big cities. In fact, they were disbarred hustling in the criminal world because there just aren't enough opportunities available for the elite over-production in a concentrated economy. Small towns used to have several independent businessmen, many who probably belonged to the local country club & voted republican. Once the majority of the educated were no longer their own boss, they start to vote accordingly. Nixon cut a deal with union bosses back in the day (from I Hear You Paint Houses, the book), as well as with the southern strategy. No one would vote against their better interests without propaganda leading them astray and that's why the republican party has to eliminate democracy, because eventually the propagandized will wise up and vote them out.
The Republicans have been especially deranged since the New Deal. They look like they will take us back to the 1920s or maybe the 1880s. Back then the Army broke strikes, usually with bullets.
I would quibble with "masquerading as news". I have VERY limited experience with Hate Radio, but it has always seemed like the pontificating and trolling are hard to mistake for news, though they do start with some little "outrage" (usually misreported?) and launch from there...
THIS 100%. It feeds them the racism that they already know and love (barf).
and if you canvas for a Democrat and that woman in her bathrope tears herself away from FOX to answer your doorbell ring, guess what? It's a hardsell.
we still need to canvas though
So sadly true.
20 years ago I stumbled across Fox. It gave me the worst feeling in the pit of my stomach.
If Nixon had Fox News - he may have been King Richard I
Yep - what a guy - and how many women
did he sexually harass? Is harassment
an embarrassment or a qualification for
esteem in his circles ?
Thank you for sharing your observations. I have noticed the same thing too
Related to this is the fact that companies like Sinclair control the TV consumption of most Americans outside the major metro areas. And Sinclair has been publicly devoted to spreading Rightwing propaganda for going on 30 years now. Joe Sixpack out in the sticks may never read the FNYT or WAPO, and he may never watch Fox, but he sure as hell gets his TV news and weather from Sinclair.
I did think that one possible upside of the Jimmy Kimmel saga is that when people's local affiliates didn't put it on when it came back on the air, people would be like, "wait, huh, why?", look into it, and realize that their local TV news was being run by a political operation.
Probably putting too much faith in people to put two and two together. Or to, you know, look into something they aren't sure about, instead of just making an assumption.
"weather" ? There is right-wing weather ?
Well, yes. It doesn’t have climate change.
Have you forgotten the hurricane Trump diverted with his Sharpie?
The local weather hides the fact that the accompanying news, read from scripts provided by Sinclair and read by local news casters, is right wing propaganda. Our local news called Obama, Obama (!) , a traitor, just the other day. A few years ago, someone compiled a vignette of local news people, all over the country, reading the very same script, right wing propaganda. I asked my mom, why are these journalists violating their ethics? She said " maybe they have families and need to feed them?" It was stunning ..all read lies, all over the U.S., the exact same script. As if it had been locally written.
Thanks Ethereal fairy. I sent it to a journalism major at U. of Missouri where I live. She was stunned and sent it out to classmates. What became of it? Alas not much. Stay courageous everyone. Oct 18. Faux king ( say that ha ha)
It's always sunny in Trumplandia!
I agree and the right’s ability to dominate non urban media outlets has permanently created a radicalized rural population unaware of their own interests. It has enabled the right to establish their own political narrative as the dominant national perspective despite holding minority views on important matters such as Social Security preservation, Medicare and Medicaid as well as public support for higher ed and child care. Obviously that media dominance allows uncontrolled grievance stoking and targeted bigotry as a means of political control.
William: well-said. I would add climate change and civil rights. It’s a package. And benefits only the right-wing oligarchs.
and yet a strategic response from Dem leadership on this issue is not there.
Lots of awareness now of the fiction of an enemy main stream media when the majority of media outlets is...right wing and controlled by illiberal interests. Welcome to the 1890s.
B/c they are funded by the same class of billionaires.
And the internet has made the media more dependent on billionaire patrons by depriving it of advertising revenue: first Craigslist and Ebay killed classified ads, then Indeed and LinkedIn killed job ads, and finally Google and Facebook killed commercial ads.
So true and to me one of the central issues of our time. The Democratic Party leadership is so busy making sure the young progressive stars who are incredible communicators are frozen out of power they have destroyed their own party. The Dems inability to message or understand how media control has converted half the country to hopeless MAGAts has become legendary. It all comes down to leadership that has been corrupted by corporate financing and lobbyists, especially AIPAC.
THIS. I'm not sure how Professor K didn't list this as a contributing factor when, in reality, it's THE contributing factor. We can't stop what's happening because a huge chunk of the country lives in an alternative reality buttressed by a massive propaganda ecosystem. If Trump shot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, FOX News would report it as self defense, OANN would claim the victim was ANTIFA, and Breitbart would suggest Trump give himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his own bravery. And Red America would believe every last despicable lie.
I have a bit of a "chicken and the egg" problem with this. I feel like it's more like they are giving their viewers what they want: confirmation of their world view or their fantasy world. People tune in to get their confirmation and of course the more viewers the more money. I guess it feeds on itself.
I watch MSNBC so I'm not immune to this. However, I do think they present facts and sometimes uncomfortable ones, served up with a point of view. I sometimes roll my eyes when they go over the top. I also consume a lot of news and analysis from other sources: local paper, NPR, NYT, WP, public television, The Atlantic, etc.
Fox news uses extensive focus-group testing to find out what its viewers want. It flows both ways. Even on topics such as health: the focus groups decreed that they didn't want to hear about exercise, so Fox allows mentions of exercise only very rarely in health coverage.
The right wing media reinforces the existing prejudices.
The more reinforcement, the more credence a point of view gets - until it seems the only possible view with validity. "Everyone knows..."
Exactly.
Effectively, it's a form of tribalism.
But not the tribe that is open to meeting & exchanging with other people, but the tribe that builds a wall around themselves. The type who would say that everyone should speak English because God does.
Or if English is good enough for the Bible, it should be good enough for everyone. Hmmm... geezus! Ha ha
Hard to believe MSNBC is “over the top” when most of their anchors are former republicans and centrist and corporate Dems. I do feel MSNBC largely deals with the truth but has failed to understand how badly moving to the center has failed our 2-Party politics just like the leadership of the Democratic Party.
Definitely a feedback loop. But without the ability to get their prejudices confirmed daily, they had previously gone about their “business”, whatever that was, and I assume many did not vote. Murdoch’s business model was probably just to find these folks and confirm their conspiracies, but he and Trump inspired them to participate, now that they could easily find each other.Which is why 2024 was soul-crushing: 5 million voters stayed home, and 2 million switched sides (just using the vote totals compared to 2020; I don’t have hard numbers). 2016 was an Electoral College shafting, and the large section of the electorate that loves weird. 2024 was a tsunami of hate.
Oh, you are wrong about that....80% of my hometown vote republican and always have since Eisenhower, I imagine. It's an agricultural community that has lost a third of its population and most all of its businesses. A lot of grievance over that by the left-behind who have seen better days.
Agree, AP. And we also cannot forget the impact of social media, the "social anomie" Paul references with link to s substack "It's the Internet, Stupid". I think we can also blame the small screens which are driven by the behemoth tech companies and their "rage is engagement" pointed algorithms.
Go to the head of the class. At the behest of Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes created FOX. Roger discerned that a “news” outlet couldn’t make money by parroting the legacy media which at its core tended to report visual and functional reality. So an alternate reality had to be manufactured. He did it with the help of a willing lapdog Sean Hannity. Took them five years to make a profit and in the end what Kelly Ann Conway described as “alternate facts” became functional reality. This of course is just one facet of the equation but suffice to say that our Republic will not survive intact. The america most of us grew up in is gone and it’s not coming back. Glad i’m old and nearing my end ‘cause this is gonna be one shitty ride..
Ah, yes, the rise of alternate facts, and the irony that we had to invent the term "mainstream media" to distinguish it from Fox et al. Twenty years before you could get right-wing and Russian lies from your internet connection, Fox (and Hate Radio) gave you a place to go for right-wing and thinly-veiled racist bullshit. But behind it all lies Murdoch/Sinclair "economic model" of turning ignorance and intolerance into cold cash...
You have to wonder who is financing all of these rural stations because there's so few businesses left in these communities, so I surmise that billionaires save more in taxes by contributing to right-wing campaigns, which the majority goes to the media networks.
This. Because RW outlets like FOX News spend almost nothing on newsrooms and the salaries of actual journalists, their business model is much more profitable.
We need some sort of "Truth in Media" law, that somehow requires RW media to use actual journalistic standards when reporting a story--like 2+ sources, timely corrections/retractions when necessary, etc. Which would need to be crafted by the finest legal minds to pass 1st Amendment Constitutional scrutiny.
I remember early in tRump v. 1.0 when Kellyanne Conway distinguished between the reporter's facts and her "facts" (I can't remember her wording). It was painfully embarrassing to see her say it with a straight face. As much as I dislike Kellyanne, I hate to see someone humiliated, and I thought she surely would be by both sides. I was so naive.
excellent reply. .thanks for the added historical context. I had forgotten how far back Ailes goes. Having just returned from Vietnam i was only paying attention to the periphery of the working of his inner circle.
the so called 'liberal' media is as liberal as the corporation that owns it
There is a nugget of truth to this but it is too facile: there is still a vast difference between the NYT, the Atlantic, New York Magazine, etc. and the right-wing media. The NYT has its hobby horses and its blind spots (note how comically it tried to avoid saying that Kirk's assassin's "roommate" was trans), but still has a commitment to what used to be considered "truth", even if it devotes ways to much space to "news analysis" and not enough to plain old "news". The smaller outlets have tended to fall into the traps of left-wing cancel culture: cf. New York's cancelling Andrew Sullivan, or the New Republic's conversion to utterly predictable leftyism from what used to be genuinely contrarian commentary (at least some of the time). But still, all that is vastly better than the right-wing media.
Yes, the foundations of the Fourth Estate have been compromised by corporate concentration and the growth of the Fifth Estate, Social Media.
As experienced in 2016, the fifth estate was used to drum up the crowd and unearth a lot of that divisiveness and begin the path to normalization.
Meanwhile, fourth estate outlets we counted on, NYT, Washington Post stopped speaking truth to power while muzzling it's talented staff. Many of whom we now meet here.
Welcome to the fifth estate ... we need to work hard to catch up.
THANK YOU. This is literally THE MAIN problem, by a GIGANTIC margin, and the fact that even a great thinker like Dr. Krugman didn't list it as even a CONTRIBUTING cause is incredibly disheartening. The media seems completely blind to it, and the Democrats need to be way more aggressive in how they talk about them.
We just have to consider the possibility that we are part of the problem too.
I think we are part of the problem, but not in the way we are tending to self-diagnose. I think the problem is collective depression.
In 1987 the Reagan adminstration ended the fairness doctrine that was in force from 1949 to ensure balanced coverage of political views. In 1988 Limbaugh began his one-man assault on the country, and was soon followed by others with suppliments to sell. In 1996 FOX goes on air claiming to be balanced but in reality being anything but. In 1971 Sinclair broadcasting began with 1 televesion station. Today it has 294. The decline of the US republic is the result of the rise of unfettered capitalism in media.
The Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast media since the broadcast spectrum was limited and held to be a public good.
It never applied to cable or print media. Restricting these ran into the First Amendment.
Nevertheless it did provide a standard, which once abandoned surrendered the media in all its forms to the capitalists, which led to the further reduction of regulations over media consolidation and to the hollowing out of the fourth estate.
I suspect the internet did more damage to the traditional media than deregulation did.
for many of the same reasons; ie., soft regulation
I was thinking more in terms of the internet depriving newspapers of revenue, for example via Craigslist and eBay replacing classified ads.
Probably.
I can't get around the realization that people WILLINGLY choose to watch Fox. They know there is an alternative but they WANT what Fox et al is telling them. It is some combination of cultural and personal laziness and lack of a truly "liberal" (not in the political sense) education. Even the non-Fox media like NYT are guilty of intellectual laziness; it is just easier to both sides things than to find out facts, weigh them and make judgements about what is true.
And that's the rub, isn't it? It is easier to be lazy but so much less rewarding not to mention dangerous. How do we change the American culture from short to long-term thinking, quality over quantity, cost vs value of things, being ethical vs toleration of corruption. etc?
The political right has adopted the playbook used by many religious cults, convincing people that no one outside the cult can be trusted. Followers will tell you that they don’t trust the “mainstream media,” a term which they usually abbreviate down to “MSM” because the message is so ubiquitous in right-wing circles. For people caught in the cult, there *is* no (trustworthy) alternative to Fox News.
What made these people prone to being ensnared by a political cult in the first place?
Could the isolation of suburbia be a factor: the kind of thing studied in "Bowling Alone"?
Canada got around this problem, at least for TV & radio, by financing a national news media, much like the UK & other countries.
Politically neutral (like the civil service & the military), it brings news from across the country & around the world.
It also privides various programs/entertainment like private media.
Private stations exist as well, but right-wing media are often mocked by mainstream media.
There is a concerted attempt to create a Fox-like media, but so far it is going nowhere.
The truth leans left :)
Yes. Herr Murdoch has a lot to answer for.
yes--it's the people. Democracy cannot work if people are distracted and disengaged especially from the basics and especially now when it's blatant destruction and hate is pervasive from the top down ( and call it Christian - Christian Nationalism!!). We have fallen deep into this pattern of disengagement from what matters- even voting- to distractions: getting and spending. Dumbing down. When it hits home severely enough, to cause pain, people ( it would have to be en masse) will hopefully wake up and rally- or leave -or obey- or shrug and hide. I think (intuitively) that the rest of the people just hope this blows over and will hunker down... like my neighbor.
News media are for-profit businesses. Their main objective is to make money. They need ad revenue. They need eyeballs. Both will feed red meat to their watchers. Fox News folks are just old, irrelevant and no one cares about them so they mainline something that tells them it isn’t their fault their lives are a joke. And also sells them pillows
Professor Krugman: with last night's raid on that apartment complex in chicago, where almost all of the residents, at least some of whom were naked, were zip-tied, kidnapped in the middle of an icy cold night, and disappeared whilst the gestapo trashed all their apartments so even those who were not kidnapped had a giant mountain of destruction to deal with, is SO NAZI GERMANY. when will we do something to address this out-of-control evil?
If it is not in national news, then the country doesn’t see it.
Sadly the NY Times did not report it. Heather Cox Richardson had a horrifying story about it and that will get the word out
That's true - unless and until it goes viral.
I actually turned on the news that night but they never mentioned Portland or Chicago at all, very unnerving!
... always add the words "and we're paying for it".
All I know is that we’re in deep trouble. I read a recent article from the NYT, and it’s fairly clear that Vought and Stephen Miller can get Trump to sign anything they want. Vought and his coconspirators are very close to imposing a harsh, theocratic and plutocratic regime we didn’t ask for, and no one asked for it. You are correct in noting that Trump isn’t the sign of democracy dying, but a symbol of it. The GOP, religious nationalists and morbidly rich see Trump and Vance as tools to get what they want at the expense of most Americans, and at the expense of our relationships with our traditional allies. I am certain Putin is enjoying this immensely.
Trump's voters did ask for it. Stop saying that no one asked for it.
Read the comment of Aaron, which is somewhere up there.
Trump feigned total ignorance of Project 2025 until he was elected & now he’s executing it word for misbegotten word
There was one Australian poster on another discussion site who was taking Trump at face value when Trump claimed he had nothing to do with Project 2025, and that he wasn’t going to do anything to implement it. We had to educate this guy that Trump is a constant and chronic liar, and you could never take him at his word on his claim he would not do anything with Project 2025. We knew well that Russell Vought and the other theocrats were going to have Trump implement Project 2025, and we knew it.
And the media let him get away with it. AKA once he claimed to know nothing about it - voila.
Trump’s voters might have asked for it, but many of us didn’t. There were also quite a few of Trump’s voters (such as the farmers) who:never expected he would impose his damaging tariffs, and yet here we are. They are facing financial ruin as they didn’t believe Trump would impose tariffs, and he did so.
Trump is a very accomplished liar, but I’ve noticed that on some things, he does tell the truth about what his intentions are. I think,he was telling the truth about the ICE raids and the various other attacks he wants to make upon people who say or do things he hates. I have always taken him seriously when he mentions he wants to do something clearly illegal or unconstitutional, because he absolutely will.
Trump 1.0 imposed tariffs that destroyed our farmers soy bean market but he paid them off with a massive subsidy payment. Campaigning for Trump 2.0 tariffs were a constant them as was mass deportations. Any farmer voting for Trump who believed tariffs would not happen was either solidly in the MAGA cult, was not paying attention or eagerly anticipating another massive welfare payment to bail them out. They are getting exactly what they voted for.
He's talking about giving every citizen several thousand dollars (the amount varies every time he opens his mouth) to compensate for the cost of his tariffs.
I really don’t believe he’ll do any such thing, but his groupies will accept anything he says.
I agree. The RepublicRats criticized Biden's Covid payouts endlessly. This will be yet another "in two more weeks" deal.
They are getting what they voted for, but they seem to have rather short memories. I don’t expect Trump to bail out the farmers this time, because he wants to give the money away to the morbidly wealthy in the form of tax cuts. I think one of the other consequences of Trump’s tariffs are that many farmers will wind up going bankrupt under Chapter 12, and they may find their property sold off to big agricultural businesses. Ever since Ford, secretaries of agriculture seem to be operating under the assumption that bigger agricultural businesses must be better. They’re not, and our current system of agriculture and food production requires large use of fossil fuels, and frequently requires product recalls due to problems with crops or food that may be bacterially contaminated. Factory farming and the huge amount of animal waste it generates is a huge problem for rural areas.
I agree, but they also believe the Trump 2.0 tariff talk would never be implemented or they trust there would be a bailout as there was in Trump 1.0. Also, rural America tends to be all in on the GOP culture war issues I view as a smoke screen to drive more wealth to the top 1% with policies that favor continued dominance of big ag in rural America with the results you describe. Rather than opening the eyes of rural voters the result will likely be further discontent and embracing GOP authoritarian rule.
Oh, absolutely. One interesting book on this topic is Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller’s “White Rural Rage.” It will never occur to Trump’s rural followers that he’s been lying to them all along, and that he will use their anger as much as he can without actually doing anything to fix the problems that are making them angry. If we had intelligent leadership in the Democratic Party, they would see this as an opportunity for them to gain support.
I read this morning at the WSJ that he’s talking about bailing them out using tariff money !!!
Trump isn’t going to get enough money from tariffs to bail them out. People will actually buy less with tariffs. It doesn’t make any sense for Trump to tell the WSJ this, and I am sure the reporter was not stupid enough to believe Trump.
Trump talked about tariffs incessantly on the campaign trail. Worse yet, there should have been no guessing about what would happen if Trump started a trade war with China - farmers would have known full well that China would retaliate by cancelling soybean orders when Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese products in his first term! To hear them bellyache now just boggles my mind. Wait, you trusted THAT guy? I read yesterday that many farmers and ranchers get insurance from the ACA and now will get hit with insurance increases at the same time they’ve lost markets for their products.
he yelled tariffs from the rooftop during the campaign....were the farmers deaf?
He also claimed that the tariffs would be paid by the other countries AND that the other countries wouldn't dare retaliate.
He always speaks the truth when the truth is abhorrent. He always tells a lie when the lie is morally or practically good for the sensibilities of most people.
That's the rule one should remember when gauging Trump. He is very easy to read. He is a child who is a autocratic too.
Also, no one who wishes ill upon other folks and fan flames of hatred and gushes about obliterating media people lies.
Bad people lies about the good stuff, but are usually open about the bad stuff.
Definitely.
He literally said in each of his rallies that he would impose excessive tariffs. I don't know what they were thinking. Either way people as stupid as those farmers shouldn't waste their vote in a democracy since they bring atrocities to other innocent folks.
They didn’t look far enough ahead to see the tariffs would wind up destroying their own farming operations. They also probably believe like Trump does that foreign countries pay tariffs. The countries don’t pay tariffs, American consumers.
they certainly asked for some of it and some for all of it
Trump clearly didn't know Hegseth was calling all the highest ranking officers to come to Washington for a pep rally.
I wonder what Trump thinks about his stoney faced audience? Do you think maga will notice if the get rid of four or five hundred of them?
They may not. As far as Kegseth is concerned, I definitely believe he wants to purge anyone who won’t pledge their personal allegiance to Trump.
what's up with vought talking about Epstein and blackmail?
Very well be the case. He is now a tool at the hands of Vought and Stephen.
Thirty years ago, Tom Delay, TX Representative and, briefly House Majority Leader, spoke aloud about the GOP goal of achieving a permanent minority government in the US. He was expressing the aspirations of a core of Texas oligarchs, the same bunch that crushed the Democratic Party in Texas, got George Bush elected Governor and President. And the same bunch that take Supreme Court justices on private hunting excursions and lavish vacations. Think of Texas as America’s laboratory of fascism.
I would include Florida in that laboratory.
The magic word was spoken: oligarchs
Right On!
You can tell that Texas is full of extraterrestrial MAGA creatures because residences don't have insulation and building codes don't mention it. Humans are mammals and enjoy a warm nest.
My stepson lives right outside of Dallas. Cold typically isn't a problem there - he can keep tropical plants outside all year 'round. Dealing with heat is the main issue, and his house has decent insulation.
Politics used to be about differing views of how we as a society deal with problems and get things done. Democrats tended to want solutions that involved government and (usually) the private sector working together to improve everyone's lives. Republicans tended to lean toward more free market solutions with as little government intervention as possible.
But the 1980s and 1990s brought about big shifts in how Republicans came to view their role in society. From Reagan's "government is the problem," Republicans devolved over the next two decades into a Party opposed to, first, government in general, and then in today's latter stages, opposed to the government of the United States specifically. Actual governance is no longer any part of Republican principles or philosophy. Today, Republicans view control of government solely as a tool to punish perceived enemies and to reward the wealthiest with more wealth.
Democrats still believe in a functioning government, and this leads to the chasm between the Parties. It's not so much polarization based on any coherent battle over political philosophy as it is a fight between those who believe we need a functioning and effective government, and those committed to destroying the government.
Absolutely. Completely apt.
Thank you for that clear, and disturbing, picture. Looking at those charts and thinking about what’s going on in Washington, I wonder what, if any, actual problems republicans are solving. All those representatives of the people who are supposedly working to make life better for their constituents - what real problems are they solving? HCR reported this morning that ICE raided an apartment building in Chicago and took all the people, some naked, out in zip ties. Now it was cold in NJ on the day of the raid, it was likely quite cold in Chicago. All but a handful (37) of people were let back in - but their apartments had been trashed. This is thuggish, goonish behavior supported by republicans.
These people are improving the social status of their constituents. Their constituents, in turn, are willing to extend them extensive lines of credit because, for many, the present moment represents a period of correction. I did canvassing and the number of times I heard the phrase “you have to break eggs to make omelet”. This sentiment isn’t the only motivation for people’s political beliefs, but change isn’t as linear as exposing them to facts of this regime’s cruelty. You are waiting for a moment when they genuinely believe that Democrats care and can represent them, and that Republicans are not. Right now, this moment still seems distant for many people on the right.
The reasons? Everything you cite–income inequality, left behind regions, racism, etc–are valid, though I would start with a corrupt Supreme Court. But I think the real reasons are more fundamental: the two Senators per state compromise in the Constitution, the House being "frozen" in size in 1929 (making it increasingly less representative a la the Senate), gerrymandering, voter suppression, the flood of dark money after Citizens United and so on. For example, they say Florida is red, but that's only because of voter suppression and gerrymandering. Add in the million plus people the voters of Florida say deserve to vote but Republicans blocked and it might well be blue. Fixing all of this will be a decades-long task. Here's hoping the Dems will listen to the progressives and the spirit of the Roosevelts (Teddy and FDR and Eleanor) and champion workers over big business and get a chance to do it.
Yes, but … the majority of the current US Democratic party is more similar to EU center-right parties than it is to EU center-left parties. Examples: healthcare, military, climate policy, taxation, economic and wealth inequality.
Zohran Mamdani.
Actually no. Context and the prevailing environment matters. In the presence of Right wing party of European nation, the Democratic Party will behave exactly as the center-left party of any European Union state.
Most of the time, the Democratic party is bound by the electoral compulsions and Congressional reality and the political system they operate in, which emphasize cooperation.
For example: Tories of the UK are far Right on the political spectrum vis-a-vis the Democratic Party.
I don’t have any comment about the UK Tories.
Back to the US Democratic Party and European political parties: The policies of Goran Mamdani or Bernie Sanders are similar to policies of EU Center Left parties. The Democratic National Committee and many/most elected Democrats are clearly to the right of such policies. For example, even center-right EU parties support healthcare for all. Has that ever won a majority of Democratic votes in the US House or Senate?
Also, Mamdani and Sanders are trailblazers and therefore it's very difficult to conduct left wing politics in America. Put the EU center-left politicians into an American system or airdrop them into, say, US Congress they will seem less left-wing than their EU counterparts.
You see America, at the voter level, is center-right and the US Senate disproportionate representation to smaller states and Gerrymandering don't help either. That's why the realm in which the Democratic Party operate changes altogether.
This same Democratic Party will find it convenient to show their leftist credentials and conduct very progressive policies if are allowed to operate in multi-party, legacy-driven, parliamentary EU democracy.
Second, and the most important aspect is that the legacy of reforms and historically established institutions make it easy for left wing policies and left leaning institutions to continue to function.
For example: NHS will, more or less, continue to operate even under a non-left wing administration and we will wrongly attribute that to a center-right administration. A popular and historical institution is very difficult to be discarded, thus Tories find ways to defund the NHS.
Thus, the fact that the NHS exists and is working doesn't mean that the Tories are not more RIGHT than the Center-Right.
In America, those institutions aren't there in the first place and thus require an even extra left-wing effort from the likes of Sanders and Mamdani to create that left-wing environment.
Think of EU left wing architecture as ball in motion with a, more or less, constant velocity with very less friction.
US: Ball is begging to be set in motion. That requires a larger and a bigger left wing action.
Why is that? Historical background and the way politics evolved are different in both the EU and the US.
US' original sin of slavery has a role to play along with its federal structure and excessive capitalism.
You're right if we do one-on-one surface comparison, but not in the whole scheme of things.
Another analogy: New Yorkers are now more favourable to congestion pricing once they've got to experience its benefits and utility. It has a multiplier effect. Same with EU healthcare system.
Naysayers and skeptics who are in the fence become the cheerleaders. Also, it becomes a losing proposition to get rid of such a popular policy initiative or institution. Other thing is it is very easy to pin the blame on the guilty party when something goes wrong in the EU system. The nations are small and states don't bear much of the responsibility of running the healthcare. US is utterly complex in terms of jurisdiction and more often than not one can pin the blame either on the Congress, or on the State Legislative Assembly or State Governor or President. It all depends on which party controls which organ of the government.
That's not very much the case with EU nations.
the current US dem party is a center right party in Europe
Put this Democratic party in any nation of Europe with the corresponding political structure, it will operate as center-left party.
It is way left of the political spectrum than, say, Tories or Conservatives of the UK.
If by Europe you mean Scandinavian nations, then surely the Democratic Party will be more on the Right.
Thank you for saying that the fight against dictatorship won’t end with Trump. His rise and continued presence and the far right lurch of his party has been aided and abetted by the business community from Main Street to Wall Street. The notion of a common good or a rising tide lifting all boats is beyond quaint and a business community that lobbies rather than associates is a key ingredient to extremism and totalitarianism that won’t be easily thwarted or dismissed.
And, unlike Europe in WWII, there will be no one coming to save us. 😰
Most of Europe was "saved" by the Soviet Union. Hungary is again in chains.
US forces too.
Good thing going - great choice of a musical coda! Democracy is quite fragile...
I am saddened at so many levels - the supine Supremes, supine Senators, and Congress men and women who call themselves Christians. "You will know them by their fruits," Jesus said. Their fruits are rotting; I can smell the stench coming out of Washington from over 250 miles away.
Time for me to buy a hand gun and a long gun to protect myself and my property, like my ancestors 8 generations removed in the American Revolution. I hate guns, btw. Will need to learn how to use them.
Remember this: when the Nazi's seized control, they seized property (real - farms, homes AND personal stuff - gold jewelry, gold teeth).
Let's hope and pray that the military ignore any orders to kill protestors. I was a naive 19 year old when the National Guard shot 4 peaceful protestors at Kent State (Neil Young's 'Ohio' was written immediately thereafter).
So many young ppl are not aware of THAT episode in the nation's dark history. Today's ICE raids by masked men throughout the nation pale in comparison to Kent State...sing the refrain 'four dead in Ohio' loud and often, especially at the protests on 10/18/25. See some of you there (Philly for me).
Being a Nazi has always been about seizing property; it is to be a bottomless pit of greed and corruption, while playing at patriotism and morality for the cameras. Fascism is fancy terminology for organized political thievery. Steal elections, steal people for labor camps, steal countries and call it annexation.
Hitting health care causes more bankruptcies, making people more susceptible to losing their property to the economic scavenging class. People die younger, putting their property up for grabs, and keeping them from collecting their social security benefits. All part of their process.
I learned how to ride a motorcycle from my first husband (who died of natural causes), and now I'm leaning how to shoot and handle guns with my second husband. We recently took the state-mandated gun safety course and there were many brown and female faces and possibly a trans (who cares?) instructor in the group. Assume nothing about who is armed ... and who isn't.
I shot for my university rifle team, back when that sort of thing was more supported. I fired "Sharpshooter" in competition. I took five deer with my Mauser. My wife took a "Ladies' Day at the Range" deal some years back and liked it fairly well. Assume nothing.
The better word for “populist” is demagogic.
I think it's really simple, actually.
Trump commands the obedient attention of millions via his social media channels.
Everybody in the GOP who has spoken up has had their heads cut off, and quickly.
It is the party of tax cuts for the 1%. That's all they really care about. And anything — literally anything — that serves that mission is allowed.
And being in Congress is a nice gig. Why stick your neck out?
Well this is terrifying.
I work for a big corporation and the silence is deafening. Do our esteemed business leaders not recognize the dire threat to our economy? Even if you don’t care about democracy, and your only concern is getting rich and mocking the libs, you’re complicit in destroying the country that made your wealth possible. Blue states must figure out how to stop sending tax money to Washington and starve this beast.
The economic damage will be equally hard to recover from or should I say mores. Russia and its black market. Now Poland seemingly operates well since it threw off the shackles of Soviet occupation. But Russia? Things may start going askew for us.
Nixon and Kissinger did far worse than watergate, and were never held to account; Reagan traded arms for hostages and never suffered for it, apparently due to being senile; Dubya slept while 9/11 happened and pushed us into Iraq for oil. No consequences for any of this. And here we are now.
I think a brief correction is necessary: The Democratic party in the US is not center-left from a European perspective. It is conservative or maybe center-right, but definitely not center-left. In Europe, both parties would be split into several smaller parties. Due to understanding their own history, a MAGA party in Austria and Germany would simply be illegal. It is far to the right of the AFD or the FPÖ.
AOC and Bernie Sanders would be considered center left in Europe. In the US they are viewed as extreme left.
AOC is not considered extreme left by anyone except the Republicans of today.
Agree. The Democrats are definitely not center-left but right-leaning conservative liberals.