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 doings 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 bring 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.