Today’s reading assignmen — Adam Serwer, The Trump-Trumpist Divide at The Atlantic. It makes the point that most Trump voters were either unaware of or did not take seriously his authoritarian, anti-democratic plans. Their reasons for supporting him went from the stupid to the delusional, and they either didn’t hear or refused to believe the warnings about how dangerous he was.

So Matt Gaetz is out as the AG nominee, and Pam Bondi is in. Bondi has been mentioned in this blog before. Back in 2012 while attorney general of Florida she was on the list of speakers for the RNC National Convention. In 2016 it was noted that she dropped a planned investigation into Trump University after receiving a $25,000 campaign donation from Trump. (The donation came from the Trump Foundation, which was a scandal in itself.) And I wrote this in 2018:

… recently Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Republican and knee-jerk Trump supporter, needed a police escort to leave a movie theater in Tampa because members of the audience were harassing her. (The film was Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which makes this story even better.)

After leaving the AG office in 2019 she chaired Trump’s America First Policy Institute and also was on Trump’s legal team in his first impeachment.  Anyway, the point is that she has long-standing right-wing credentials, she’s open to corruption, and she’s tied herself to Trump. Unlike Gaetz and most of the rest of Trump’s appointees, she does have some experience for the job, so I suspect she’ll have no trouble getting confirmed.

I seriously hope Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard are nixed also. Hegseth was an obviously inappropriate appointee when his name was first announced. Since then, more information has come out that suggests he not only should not be given a job in government; he probably needs to be kept under right surveillance.

Senator Tammy Duckworth explains some of the problems with Hegseth’s appointment here.

And this is from The Guardian:

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, has written in a book that he could imagine a scenario in which the US armed forces would be used violently in American domestic politics.

Hegseth, a former elite soldier turned rightwing Fox television personality, is Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon which controls the gigantic American military – by far the largest armed force in the world.

In one of his five published books he wrote that in the event of a Democratic election victory in the US there would be a “national divorce” in which “The military and police … will be forced to make a choice” and “Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”

Hegseth’s 2020 book exhorts conservatives to undertake “an AMERICAN CRUSADE”, to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents”, to “attack first” in response to a left he identifies with “sedition”, and he writes that the book “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies”.

And of course there’s also the little matter of sexual assault allegations. This guy is pure poison. See also Donald Trump’s Most Dangerous Cabinet Pick by Jonathan Chait and What Pete Hegseth’s Nomination Is Really About by Hanna Rosin at The Atlantic.

There’s such an avalanche of crazy coming out of the “transition” that it’s hard to keep up. But for right now I just want to focus on one small part of what’s going on. Let’s start with Oliver Milman at Mother Jones, Repealing Biden’s Climate Bills Won’t Kill Clean Energy, But It May Cripple US Manufacturing. Milman begins,

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80 billion of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50 billion in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.   …

… Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150 billion in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

See Where the Chips Act Money Has Gone at The Verge for more details into exactly where the new manufacturing investments have flowed so far. Back to Oliver Milman:

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

If Trump kills the program, this would not only erase the jobs that would be funded by the Chips Act. It would also keep American companies reliant on foreign sources for components, including microchips and batteries, that we could be making here. Basically, it would undercut domestic manufacturing on a massive scale and put the U.S. on the road to being one of those shithole countries Trump likes to complain about. Not to mention there are also national security issues regarding being able to provide our own microchips and batteries.

Politico reports that Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo “is aiming to commit nearly every unspent dollar in its $50 billion microchip-subsidy program before President-elect Donald Trump takes over in January, an effort that would effectively cement a massive industrial legacy before the GOP can reverse course.”

The Chips money alone is a massive undertaking. Congress allocated $50 billion in subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing and R&D. So far only two companies have received binding awards from the Department of Commerce’s manufacturing program. To hit her target, Raimondo still needs to nail down contracts with Intel, Micron, Samsung and SK hynix — multibillion-dollar deals that have, at times, been rocky and required renegotiations.

Surely the heads of those companies know the offer will likely be off the table after Trump takes office. But just watch — as manufacturing plants open, Trump will take credit for them.

Today Trump affirmed that he still plans mass deportations, and his plans involve him  using presidential emergency powers and “military assets.” Whether there is much more to these plans is hard to tell. Josh Kovensky at TPM writes,

For Trump, the lack of seriousness or specifics here is tangled up with the broader point: he wants “military assets,” whatever that may mean, in the United States. And, he wants you to know about it.

Policy shops staffed with officials from Trump’s first administration spent much of the once and future President’s time in the political wilderness drafting plans for domestic deployment of the military. One piece invoked War on Terror-era legal justifications to argue that the President could use active duty soldiers to conduct domestic immigration enforcement.

See Trump’s immigration crackdown is expected to start on Day 1 at Politico to appreciate the complexity of this issue. It’s going to be a mess.

A sign of the times — Sweden issues pamphlet telling citizens what to do if Russia attacks.

A Message from Vlad — This is from a few days ago. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before.  Fred Kaplan at Slate writes,

First, Putin waited two days before congratulating Trump on his victory. One can imagine Trump receiving phone calls from kowtowing leaders the world over—Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, the chief of NATO, the European heads of state—all the while wondering about the man whom he’s admired publicly and privately for the past eight years: When is Vladimir going to call?

Then, in response to Trump’s claim that during their phone call, he asked—in some accounts, warned—Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine, a Kremlin spokesman denied that the two had spoken on the phone at all. (Putin issued his belated congratulations at a news conference.)

I don’t know who’s telling the truth, a practice for which neither man has a sterling reputation. But either way, in the next few weeks, when Putin orders 50,000 fresh recruits (including 10,000 imported North Korean soldiers) to go on the next rampage—ousting Ukrainian soldiers from the thin slice of Russian territory they hold, then retaking soil across the border in Donbas province—he can tell a complaining Trump that he doesn’t recall any such conversation. If Trump thinks Putin actually will refrain from stepping up attacks on Ukraine as a friendly favor … well, maybe our once-and-future president will learn a lesson about the limits of personal relations in the face of perceived national interests early in his second term.

The final twist of this saga came on Monday, when Nikolai Patrushev, an aide to Putin who was previously director of Russia’s Federal Security Service, made the following comment in an interview with the Moscow newspaper Kommersant:

The election campaign is over. To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.

This is a mind-blowing bit of psychological warfare! The Russians are basically telling Trump: We put you in office. Now it’s time for you to pay us back.

No pressure or anything.

This is what I’m finding particularly disturbing today:

The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan. 

Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out, and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason, the U.S. official and person with knowledge of the plan said.

It’s not clear to me how solid the sourcing is on this story. No one on Trump’s team will go on the record to confirm it. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

The transition team is looking at the possibility of recalling several commanders to active duty for possible charges, the U.S. official said. 

It’s not clear the Trump administration would pursue treason charges, and instead could focus on lesser charges that highlight the officer’s involvement. “They want to set an example,” said the person with knowledge of the plan….

… Speaking to NBC News days before the election, Howard Lutnick, one of the two advisers leading the transition, said Trump learned after his first administration that he had hired Democratic generals, and he would not make that mistake again. 

Former officials who worked in Trump’s first administration have said they advised Trump against policies they thought would weaken U.S. national security, such as withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria. And they advised against actions that they thought might violate the Constitution or inflame tensions domestically, such as deploying active-duty U.S. troops to quell protests after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd.

I take it “Democratic” generals balked at following Trump’s orders when they were stupid or unconstitutional. A “Republican” general is one who will just follow orders. Okay.

This is about Trump punishing genrals who didn’t defer to him with sufficient servility and obsequiousness. He wants generals who will jump when he says jump. Like the guys who were tried at Nuremberg who were just following orders.

Just the use of the word “treason” tells me the people pursuing this are extremists and fanatics who want to punish someone, not people who are serious about improving the military. There are very high bars for a treason charge. It’s my understanding that treason requires siding with an enemy in a declared war. That doesn’t describe anything that happened in the Afghanistan withdrawal. Note that the feds didn’t try to bring treason charges against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, just espionage charges, because they didn’t think the legal definition of treason could be applied to their case (noting that Ethel probably was innocent).

I hate to think what Trump is going to do to the Defense Department.

I don’t even want to guess what’s going to happen with Trump cabinet picks. I don’t know if Senate Republicans will hang together to approve them all. I don’t know if Congress will roll over and go into recession for more than ten days so that Trump can choose who he wants without hearings. We’ll see.

I do know that pharmaceutical stocks dropped like a rock after RFK the Lesser was announced as Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services. That shouldn’t have surprised anybody; Trump had already said he’s let the Lesser “go crazy” on health.

Obviously, all of Trump’s choices are people who are intended to both be utterly loyal to Trump and to utterly muck up whatever agency or department they are supposed to be running. It’s Trump’s revenge.

In his first term, Trump obviously was unhappy to find out that Presidents can’t just issue orders about whatever and expect people to follow them. He’s never been constrained like that, you know. The only person who could override him was his father, and Fred Trump Sr. has been gone for about 25 years now.

At some point, someone must have told Trump that the powers of the presidency are listed in Article II of the Constitution. So for a while he was obsessed with Article II, claiming it gave him “rights” to do whatever he wanted. He seemed to think he was the first person to find out about it.

But of course, Article II does nothing of the sort. Article II is very short and gives presidents very little autonomous power. Most presidential functions require the cooperation/advice/consent of Congress. And I suspect all the other presidents before Trump knew that. They’d probably actually spent the three minutes or so required to read Article II. But for Trump, hollowing out the bureaucracies that carry out the functions of government is all about revenge. All those Deep State bureaucrats who wouldn’t obey him will be sorry. And since he doesn’t understand how any of this works and what these bureaucrats do, he doesn’t see the downside.

For months, I’ve been reading that European leaders have been making plans for what they will do when they can no longer count on Pax Americana. Well, that time has come, so I understand they’re preparing to defend Europe without our help. But with the likes of Pete Hegseth at DOD and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, we’ll be helpless to defend ourselves before long, never mind help Europe.

Earlier today I read a commentary that said our current allies will stop sharing intelligence with us with Gabbard in charge, and they’ll probably stop trusting intelligence from us. I’m sure you regulars understand how inadequate Gabbard is. But for anyone else floating through here, see Tom Nichols at the Atlantic,  Tulsi Gabbard’s Nomination Is a National-Security Risk.  Gabbard is a big fan of Vladimir Putin, btw.

And then there’s the Israel-Gaza thing. Trump won Michigan with a lot of help from the Muslims in Dearborn. The week before the election, Trump visited a halal cafe in Dearborn and promised to bring peace to Gaza. He didn’t mention he would let Bibi Netanyahu destroy it first, but that is emerging as the plan.

Of all the people in the United States, the president-elect has settled on Mike Huckabee as his nominee for ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist, has said he does not believe in the West Bank as a concept and that it is Judea and Samaria (the biblical name for the region) and that Palestinians as a people are not real. He has also put on campaign events from the West Bank. After Donald Trump’s announcement, Huckabee was asked whether West Bank annexation was possible during the coming presidential term. “Of course,” he replied. (Huckabee is a Christian Zionist, which is to say he believes that Jews should be in Israel—an area he deems to include the West Bank—so as to trigger the Second Coming, after which Christians can inhabit the land.)

Huckabee is but one part of a larger story: In the week or so since he won reelection, Trump has announced a series of people who either explicitly support West Bank settlement or annexation or bristle at the slightest suggestion of criticism of Israel.

As Galen Jackson, an associate professor of political science at Williams College, put it, “To the extent that Israel plans to hold on to the settlements that it builds in the West Bank, then almost by definition annexation has been proceeding for decades on a gradual basis. The main difference with Trump, in that case, is that he doesn’t even protest Israeli settlement expansion or deem it in violation of international law, whereas all other U.S. administrations have.”

Huckabee isn’t the only nominee that the far right Israelis must be thrilled about. Pete Hegseth and Elise Stefanik (nominated for UN Ambassador) have a long record of being all-in on whatever Netanyahu wants.

And there’s a broad consensus that an AG Matt Gaetz will destroy the Department of Justice and burn down the rule of law. Too bad for all those people who voted for Trump because they were afraid of crime.

And I haven’t yet started on what’s going to happen to the economy. But y’all know all that.

I hate election years, but I expect I will hate next year even worse.

I’m out of metaphors to compare to Trump’s picks for his cabinet and administration. They’ve all been bad. But this afternoon, when I saw a headline that said Trump wants Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard to be national intelligence director, I saw the English language itself surrender. There are no words.

Trump has been asking for the new Congress to go into recess as soon as it is sworn in, so that he can hire his people through recess appointments. No hearings; no embarassing questions, no votes. Right now I’m hearing some Republican senators say they are looking forward to hearings. Axios is reporting that Republicans are “stunned and disgusted” at the Gaetz appointment. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t fall in line and vote to confirm the appointment. He may not get his recess appointments, though. It’s possibly a good sign that John Thune will be Senate Majority Leader, and not Trump’s pick, Rick Scott. Scott had promised to give Trump everything Trump wants.

As far as Trulsi Gabbard is concerned, I second Fred Kaplan at Slate.

As I keyboard this the Senate race in Pennsylvania between Dem. Bob Casey and Rep. Dave McCormick is still too close to call. But it probably will be called by the end of the day. Control of the House is not yet called, but the Republicans are a lot closer to the finish line than the Dems.

Trying to access Will Bunch’s column at the Philadelphia Inquirer without a subscription is getting trickier, but I found a gift link to his most recent column on Threads. Try it if you hit the paywall. Highly recommended reading — 2024’s other big loser? The mainstream media. Is there any path forward? I’m starting in the middle here, after a description of how the old traditional news media are struggling to stay afloat financially these days.

And while newsroom leaders were getting a lesson (or, in many cases, not getting it) that balanced-but-bloodless journalism that equalized “both sides” would eventually drive both sides away, it’s also fair to ask whether this head-on crash between journalism and increasingly tribal ideologies even mattered that much in the end. The perfect-storm fluke of mid-20th-century media monopolies that the late David Halberstam famously described as The Powers That Be have been zapped by the electrons of the internet, creating other ways for folks to speak to each other on social media or read targeted websites that appealed to their niche interests and ideas or their prejudices.

But especially their prejudices. …

… The things that pundits have been talking about since Tuesday — an economy that hasn’t worked for the working class since the time of Ronald Reagan, anxieties among white voters about a potential end to white privilege and the patriarchy, and a Democratic Party that’s lost touch with the great American middle — all factored into this election. But nothing mattered more than this: Donald Trump was returned to power by the most badly informed electorate in modern American history.

Ultimately, it may not have mattered how brilliant Kamala Harris’s campaign was or how well crafted her proposals. Most voters saw little to none of it. They were stuck in a right-wing media bubble or getting information from other ignorant people on social media.  And they have absolutely no idea what they’ve just done.

I honestly don’t think the current Democratic party has lost touch with the American middle class, btw. The party worked hard to address middle-class issues. It’s Trump and his minions who don’t give a hoo haw about the American middle class or what it’s like to be a middle class American.

The problem with most Americans only hearing the right-wing side of political discourse has been going on for many years. I remember despairing about it during the George W. Bush years, and it was an old problem even then. I like what Bunch says about “balanced-but-bloodless journalism that equalized ‘both sides.'” A lot of this goes back to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on news media being biased toward liberals that went on to become gospel on the American Right. The news media establishment responded to the criticism by sacrificing accurate reporting in order to avoid the appearance of favoritism to liberals.

Paul Krugman addressed this in a column he wrote more than 24 years ago that’s worth reading again now. In Reckonongs, Bait and Switch, he described some blatant lies being told by George W. Bush in 2000 as he campaigned against Al Gore.

How has he gotten away with it? One answer is that voters can’t relate to big numbers. But it’s also true that the media haven’t helped them make sense of these numbers.

Partly this is a matter of marketing — insider gossip makes better TV than budget arithmetic. But there has also been a political aspect: the mainstream media are fanatically determined to seem evenhanded. One of the great jokes of American politics is the insistence by conservatives that the media have a liberal bias. The truth is that reporters have failed to call Mr. Bush to account on even the most outrageous misstatements, presumably for fear that they might be accused of partisanship. If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ”Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.” After all, the earth isn’t perfectly spherical.

Mainstream media refused to change course and became mostly useless as a means ot informing the public about political candidates. And now that the pre-Nixon press has retired or expired, everyone working in news media today has been well trained to produce artifically “balanced” but bloodness reporting. And here we are.

Democrats must stop assuming that they can get their message to the people through mainstream media. That hasn’t been true for a very long time. I remember I used to complain that President Obama was making that same mistake, assuming media would accurately explain what his administration was doing and why it was doing it. It did not. He was lucky that Mitt Romney was a less ruthless candidate than Trump, or Obama wouldn’t have been re-elected.

I believe I linked to this before, but it fits here too — at Talking Points Memo, Kate Riga says that the Dems really must develop their own media to talk to the people. “Democrats need well-produced, well-funded, compelling content that can go punch for punch with the Rogans and the Theo Vons.” she said.

See also Reckonings of Contempt by Josh Marshall. And the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for McCormick.

Heather Cox Richardson began her November 8 newsletter this way:

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. 

Yes, reporters are now covering that information. Why wasn’t it covered starting many weeks before the election?

One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil. 

I’ve lost the link, but yesterday I read that a lot of consumer product companies are planning to stuff their U.S. warehouses with their Chinese-made products or components as fast as possible before the tariffs are imposed. But even if they are thinking of moving their manufacturing to the U.S., it’s going to take awhile to get new facilities up and running. In the meantime, consumers are going to get slammed.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s Chips and Science Act was already bringing much of manufacturing back to these shores without adding to inflation. I suspect most voters never heard of the Chips and Science Act. Now companies are scrambling to get Chips and Science Act deals finalized before the new Congress can repeal it. Whatever happens, next year Trump will take credit for the new jobs being created by Biden’s policies. There will be little reporting to correct the lie.

In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.  An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” 

In the last post I discussed the failures of media. There is more commentary on those failures now. Let’s begin with Michael Tomasky at The New Republic. I recommend reading the whole thing. Here is his basic premise:

Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

I agree with him. It’s particularly obvious whenever mainstream reporters interview Democrats. The questions will all reflect right-wing media framing of the issues. Consider the interview of Kamala Harris by CNN’s Dana Bash, of which I wrote,

I started to watch that CNN interview with Dana Bash, but bailed before it was over because the questions were stupid. It was all “gotcha” (Why did you flip flop on fracking?) or bits of right-wing talking points, re-framed as questions. Instead of asking about her energy policies, Bash tries to trip her up by grilling her for changing a position on fracking. As a viewer, I found that annoying and tiresome. If I were the candidate I’d be frustrated also.

As for news coverage, even those who tune in to the standard network nightly news or scan the front page of a newspaper wouldn’t have been told anything substantive about Trump’s vs. Harris’s positions on the issues. But now reporters are shifting into “what to expect in the new Trump administration” mode, so they’re finally explaining what Trump’s tariffs are likely to do to inflation. Thanks loads, guys.

And Dan Froomkin at Press Watch echoes what Michael Tomasky wrote. Just go read it. See also Kate Riga at TPM. Mainstream media is doing an absolutely terrible job of informing news consumers about the issues and candidates’ policies, as opposed to the horse race and what nasty thing one of them said about the other that day. And the issues are being entirely framed by right-wing propaganda rather than actual facts.

Signs of the times — Trump is, apparently, refusing to agree to the standard ethics code regarding conflicts of interest, which is holding up the transition process.

While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.

Since Mr. Trump created his transition team in August, it has refused to participate in the normal handoff process, which typically begins months before the election.

It has missed multiple deadlines for signing required agreements governing the process. That has prevented Mr. Trump’s transition team from participating in national security briefings or gaining access to federal agencies to begin the complicated work of preparing to take control of the government on Jan. 20, 2025.

Not that he abided by the “conflicts of interest” codes in his first term. Now I take it he doesn’t want to be constrained by having to pretend he’s not using the power of office to advance his personal interests.

CNN reported that Pentagon officials are actively discussing what to do if Trump issues an illegal order, such as shooting peaceful protesters Trump doesn’t like. They’re also anticipating he will fire the top brass and replace them with his flunkies.

This is only the second day post election, but already it seems the Kamala Harris campaign was something that happened a hundred years ago. Various pundits have blamed just about everyone in North America for why Harris lost, especially Harris. She went too far left. She didn’t go left enough. Blah blah blah. I don’t fault her or her campaign, which I think was brilliant. But I see now the deck was stacked against her in many ways, and her being a woman of color was just part of that.

The best thing I’ve read so far about the election is by Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian, Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. It begins:

Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. Our mistake was to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it.

The three primary causes of our dysfunction, Solnit says, are  “the crisis of masculinity, the failure of the mainstream news media and the rise of Silicon Valley,” But let’s look first at the failure of the mainstream news media, which to me is the most obvious problem.

The media might be the simplest to describe. A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry.

This is a problem that goes back a whole lot further than eight years. And part of the problem isn’t really media’s fault, exactly. The media infrastructure is massively fragmented, much more so than it was back when most folks caught Walter Cronkite or Huntley-Brinkley at least a few times every week. I suspect a whole lot of U,.S. citizens have very little exposure to anything resembling “mainstream media” and instead are relying on social media and the massive right-wing media bubble. Still, mainstream media wasn’t exactly doing its job.

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed.

When it came to Donald Trump, they went easy on him, and they again and again let him and the far right set the agenda. They constantly treated asymmetrical issues as symmetrical ones – if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, both sides were “polarized”. In the media everything had two sides, even if one side was the truth and the other was the lie, one side was the human rights or the law and the other side was their violation.

The “sanewashing” of Trump and hyper-criticism of Harris were just too blatant to not notice, yet many cannot see it.  I give some credit to the New York Times and a few other outlets for sounding the alarm on Trump’s mental issues in the final three weeks or so of the campaign, but that was after us small-fry bloggers and independent media had been screaming at them about it for a long, long time,

[Update: See Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect, Time for Democrats to Abandon the Mainstream Media for another perspective.]

I’ve written about the “masculinity crisis” before, such as here. This may be a problem that goes back to the beginnings of human history, frankly. Joseph Campbell was writing about it back in the late 1940s. But exacerbating this is the rise of influence of the infinitely weatlhy Silicon Valley tech bros, like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who now have the money and connections to remake the political landscape to their liking. These guys do all seem to have massive gender identification issues.

And another problem is that too many Americans don’t seem to know the first thing about how government actually works.

One mistake I think Joe Biden made — and Barack Obama before him — is that he didn’t find a way to communicate directly and frequently to the American people about what he was doing and why he was doing it. I’m thinking about FDR’s fireside chats, which unfortunately wouldn’t work today because of the aforementioned fracturing of media infrastructure and the nation’s attention. But it’s obvious most Americans had no clue what caused the inflation they hated or even that it was a global phenomenon and not just something Biden caused. Biden was hailed around the globe for his skill at bringing inflation down without causing a recession, but most U.S. citizens never heard any of that. They just knew eggs cost more than they used to (mostly because of a bird flu).

[Update: I just saw this at TPM, and it speaks to the previous paragraph —

From TPM Reader CK …

I’ve been a reporter in North Carolina for 30 years, covering the coast and rural counties. For many months, and continuing to this day, there are millions and millions of dollars of Biden Infrastructure and IRA funds pouring into rural communities here for projects to address needs that have been neglected or ignored for decades: wastewater treatment system upgrades, removal of lead pipes in water systems;  repairs of rotting boardwalks and docks in small waterfront and fishing communities; mitigation of saltwater intrusion in farm fields, flood resilience in low-elevations; etc, etc. They’re all necessities that will result in real honest-to-god improvements in people’s lives. Virtually none of the beneficiaries — fishers, farmers, residents in communities vulnerable to sea level rise— have any idea that Biden was the reason they have those improvements, or will be getting them soon (when Trump will no doubt take credit.)  The Democrats and the administration should have been bragging constantly and everywhere about the funds and the economic recovery. Government subsidies have lifted a nascent renewables industry into a booming profitable job-creator. Again, the messaging to the public about all of these economic factors should have been short, sweet and constant. 

Yep.]

It’s a weird thing about group psychology that has long been noted by social psychologsts. A person who talks a lot about morality is perceived as being moral even if his behavior really isn’t. The most assertive/aggressive people in a group end up being leaders even if they are morons. Likewise, Trump is always bragging about what a great job he did or is doing, no matter how incompetent he is, and somehow a least some people assume he must be doing a good job. And the news sources they may consume don’t say otherwise, at least not strongly enough.

Control of the House still hasn’t been determined, althugh at the moment Republicans are somewhat ahead. This may take a few more days, I understand.

I am heartsick, as I’m sure most of you are. I had such hope we could move forward. Now we’re about to sink into a muck of corruption and ignorance. You probably know we’ve also lost the Senate. We still don’t know which party will take the House, so there’s still some hope House Democrats can put a brake on some things the MAGAts will try to do.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic reminds us that Democracy is not over. But we have a lot of work to do to save it.

And I need some time before I can write any more. Do feel free to express yourselves in the comments.