For the past few years, the corporate/establishment news media oft analyzed Donald Trump’s presidency in an historical vacuum, ignoring the decades-long, bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism that helped bring about his successful candidacy while focusing sensationally on his cult of reality TV personality. Such bread and circus tunnel vision misses the bigger picture. Trump, even with all his faults, is a symptom of a much larger pattern brought on by increased privatization of the public sphere, especially in the realms of education and media, which go back over half a century, particularly the past forty years. With the continued degradation of these key pillars of our society, our civic and information literacy has suffered greatly at a time when the world has become more complex, and our country more unequal. As a consequence, we have become more partisan, more divided, and more estranged from one another as a society. We argued this in our book, United States of Distraction, and unfortunately our thesis continues to ring true.
Most legacy media outlets sought to persuade voters to choose Joe Biden for president because “democracy is on the ballot” and once Trump was out of office, things would return to normal, we could all go back to “brunch.” However, this analysis overlooks the crucial realities of how we got here and, as Lau Tzu might suggest, where we have been and are heading. The “return to normal” rhetoric distracts from the reality of American democracy: it is in such an emaciated state that a more adept and sophisticated version of Trump could easily come to power. It was our infatuation with what passes for “normal” that brought about this historical moment. The Democracy Index rates the U.S. as a “flawed democracy,” which means that the elections are free and fair, basic civil liberties are respected, but there are underlying issues (e.g. the erosion of the free press and suppression of opposition political parties and viewpoints). Prior to Trump, scholars noted that the U.S. was an oligarchy, not a democratic republic. However, rudimentary corporate news media narratives concerning the so-called “coup” at the U.S. Capital January 6th leave out crucial realities that can easily lead audiences to glean that Donald Trump and his followers single handedly undermined the American democratic experiment. To be clear, Trump as a person and as a symbol has been responsible for the proliferation of dangerous and disgusting attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. However, we have been heading here for decades. To alter where we are heading, we need to confront certain realties that media narratives distract attention from on a ritual basis.
The first reality is that we have to focus our energies on helping citizens discern fact from fiction. Trump’s behavior is unequivocally reckless, but his rhetoric would have been unsuccessful sans a significant population whose material decline, after 50 years of neoliberal policies, became susceptible to the fake news that permeates the internet. Indeed, their behavior illuminates a rarely discussed aspect of so-called fake news: it is particularly dangerous when it leads people to believe they must take aggressive actions they deem are morally justified. For example, the people at the Capitol would be heroes if there was actually well-sourced, demonstrable factual evidence that 2020 election was stolen. So too would the individual who shot up the restaurant in Pizzagate, to expose a pedophilia ring. In both cases, individuals showed concern for children and democracy, but reacted to false or incomplete information. That is to say, someone is not necessarily a bad person for engaging with fake news, but it can lead them to engage in horrific behavior. We saw this from left leaning voters as well. When it came to Russiagate, the Democrats repeatedly red-baited with the baseless and disproven claims that the Russians aided Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, colluded with Trump’s 2016 campaign, shut down a Vermont power plant, put a bounty on U.S. soldiers, hacked the Democratic Party’s emails in 2016, and released Hunter Biden’s computer. People who engage with fake news are not bad people, but too often lack the skills to evaluate and analyze content critically.
Read more at:
Ripe for Fascism: A Post-Coup d’Trump Autopsy of American Democracy - CounterPunch.org
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