Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last Fifty Years
________________________________________
Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last Fifty Years
By Neal Gabler [1] / Moyers and Company
March 11, 2016
Ah, the crescendo of complaint! The Republican establishment and the
mainstream media, working hand in hand in their unprecedented, non-stop
assault on the "short-fingered vulgarian" named Donald Trump, would have you
believe that Trump augurs the destruction of the Republican Party. Former
Reagan speechwriter and now Wall Street Journal/CBS pundit Peggy Noonan
expressed the general sentiment of both camps when she said on Super Tuesday
that "we're seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes."
But here is what no one in the GOP establishment wants you to know, and no
one in the media wants to admit: Donald Trump isn't the destruction of the
Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been
saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly
than his predecessors and intra-party rivals.
The media have been acting as if the Trump debacle were the biggest
political story to come down the pike in some time. But the real story - one
the popularity of Trump's candidacy has revealed and inarguably the biggest
political story of the last 50 years - is the decades-long transformation of
Republicanism from a business-centered, small town, white Protestant set of
beliefs into quite possibly America's primary institutional force of
bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, warmongering, intractability
and cruelty against the vulnerable and powerless.
It is a story you didn't read, hear or see in the mainstream media, only in
lefty journals like The Nation and Rolling Stone, on websites like People
for the American Way, and in columns like Paul Krugman's. And it wasn't
exactly because the MSM in its myopia missed the story. It was because they
chose not to tell it - to pretend it wasn't happening. They are still
pretending.
It is hardly a surprise that the GOP establishment and their enablers in the
media are acting as if Trump, the Republican frontrunner, is a break from
the party's supposedly genteel past. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, who
was "shocked, shocked," to find gambling in Rick's establishment, the GOP
solons profess to be "shocked, shocked" by Trump's demagogic racism and
nativism. Their protestations remind me of an old gambit of comedian Milton
Berle. When the audience was applauding him, he would shush them
demonstratively with one hand while encouraging them gently with the other.
Neither is it a surprise that the conservative media have been doing the
same thing - decrying Trump while giving us Trump Lite. Indeed, even less
blatant partisans who ought to know better, like every "thinking man's"
favorite conservative David Brooks, deliver the same hypocrisy.
No, Brooks isn't too keen on Trump (or Cruz for that matter), but he is very
keen on some mythological Republican Party that exudes decency. On the PBS
NewsHour last week he said with great earnestness, "For almost a
century-and-a-half, the Republican Party has stood for a certain free market
version of America - an America that's about openness, that's about markets
and opportunity, and a definition of what this country is."
Free markets? That's what he thinks defines America? Let me rephrase what I
said earlier: Trump hasn't just fulfilled the Republican Party's purpose; he
has exposed it. And he also has exposed the media's indifference to what the
party has become.
Obviously, I am not saying that the transmogrification of the Republican
Party happened surreptitiously. It happened in plain sight, and it was
extensively chronicled - but not by the MSM. The sainted Reagan blew his
party's cover when to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 he
spoke at the Neshoba County Fair, just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi,
where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered in 1964. He
wasn't there to demonstrate his sympathy to the civil rights movement, but
to demonstrate his sympathy to those who opposed it. This was an ugly
moment, and it didn't go entirely unnoticed in the media. In fact, David
Brooks would later be moved to defend the speech, which invoked the
not-so-subtle buzz words "states' rights," and to act as if Reagan had been
slandered by those who called him out on it.
But if some in the media did call out Reagan on his disgusting curtsy to
George Wallace voters, the press seemed to lose its nerve once Reagan became
president and the Republican Party lurched not just rightward, but
extremist-ward. Do you remember these headlines: "Republicans Oppose Civil
Rights"; "Republicans Work to Defeat Expansion of Health Insurance";
"Republicans Torpedo Extension of Unemployment Benefits"; "Republicans
Demonize Homosexuals and Deny Them Rights"; "Republicans Call Climate Change
a Hoax and Refuse to Stop Greenhouse Gases"? No, you don't remember, because
no MSM paper printed them and no MSM network broadcast them. Instead, the
media behaved as if extremism were business as usual.
I don't think the media would deny their indifference. They would say they
don't take sides. They're neutral. They just report. Partisanship is for Fox
News and MSNBC.
Of course, this is utter nonsense. Accurate reporting means taking sides
when one side is spouting falsehoods. I am still waiting for the media to
correct the GOP pronouncements that Obamacare has cost us jobs and sent
health care costs skyrocketing - both of which are screamingly false. I am
not holding my breath.
But even if it were true that the media are not referees, not taking sides
against extremism is just another way of taking sides by legitimizing
extremism and making it the new normal, which it now is - so long,
apparently, as you don't shout it. In any case, objectivity is a
rationalization. We know the media are afraid of a right-wing backlash. We
know that they protect themselves by insisting that our two major parties
are equidistant from the political center - more nonsense. And we know that
every story is framed by its political consequences, not its human ones. We
see that every day.
But if you really want to know why the media skipped the story about
Republican extremism all these years, you have to look to the force of
extremism itself and the way it reconfigures the political spectrum,
basically disorienting us. In Europe, fringe parties on the right and left
get savaged by the press all the time. If we had them here, no doubt the
same thing would happen, press objectivity notwithstanding. The difference
between Europe and America is that our right-wing extremists happen to
control one of our two major parties and theirs don't. To take on extremism
would reveal not only the Republicans' deficiencies, both of its elected
officials and its rank and file, but the deficiencies of the entire American
political system. That takes a courage very, very few people (OK, nobody) in
the MSM have.
And yet we now know that the media can be assertive if they want to be, that
they can take sides, and even correct the record if they choose. We know
because that is precisely what they are doing against Trump, but only
because they see Trump as an outlier from the GOP establishment - a
disruptive, fringe force. Trump has a right to feel blindsided by the double
standard to which he is being subjected. Cruz may be even more of an outlier
from the American mainstream than Trump, and yet the media don't seem
anywhere near as lathered about him.
But back to the big story: Something happened in American politics over the
last 25 or 30 years to release our demons and remove our shame. The media
didn't want to look. Now Trump has come along to reap what the conservatives
had sown, and stir up those demons, and the media are suddenly in high
dudgeon. Where were they when America needed them?
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ifty-years
Links:
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last Fifty Years
Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last Fifty Years
By Neal Gabler [1] / Moyers and Company
March 11, 2016
Ah, the crescendo of complaint! The Republican establishment and the
mainstream media, working hand in hand in their unprecedented, non-stop
assault on the "short-fingered vulgarian" named Donald Trump, would have you
believe that Trump augurs the destruction of the Republican Party. Former
Reagan speechwriter and now Wall Street Journal/CBS pundit Peggy Noonan
expressed the general sentiment of both camps when she said on Super Tuesday
that "we're seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes."
But here is what no one in the GOP establishment wants you to know, and no
one in the media wants to admit: Donald Trump isn't the destruction of the
Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been
saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly
than his predecessors and intra-party rivals.
The media have been acting as if the Trump debacle were the biggest
political story to come down the pike in some time. But the real story - one
the popularity of Trump's candidacy has revealed and inarguably the biggest
political story of the last 50 years - is the decades-long transformation of
Republicanism from a business-centered, small town, white Protestant set of
beliefs into quite possibly America's primary institutional force of
bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, warmongering, intractability
and cruelty against the vulnerable and powerless.
It is a story you didn't read, hear or see in the mainstream media, only in
lefty journals like The Nation and Rolling Stone, on websites like People
for the American Way, and in columns like Paul Krugman's. And it wasn't
exactly because the MSM in its myopia missed the story. It was because they
chose not to tell it - to pretend it wasn't happening. They are still
pretending.
It is hardly a surprise that the GOP establishment and their enablers in the
media are acting as if Trump, the Republican frontrunner, is a break from
the party's supposedly genteel past. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, who
was "shocked, shocked," to find gambling in Rick's establishment, the GOP
solons profess to be "shocked, shocked" by Trump's demagogic racism and
nativism. Their protestations remind me of an old gambit of comedian Milton
Berle. When the audience was applauding him, he would shush them
demonstratively with one hand while encouraging them gently with the other.
Neither is it a surprise that the conservative media have been doing the
same thing - decrying Trump while giving us Trump Lite. Indeed, even less
blatant partisans who ought to know better, like every "thinking man's"
favorite conservative David Brooks, deliver the same hypocrisy.
No, Brooks isn't too keen on Trump (or Cruz for that matter), but he is very
keen on some mythological Republican Party that exudes decency. On the PBS
NewsHour last week he said with great earnestness, "For almost a
century-and-a-half, the Republican Party has stood for a certain free market
version of America - an America that's about openness, that's about markets
and opportunity, and a definition of what this country is."
Free markets? That's what he thinks defines America? Let me rephrase what I
said earlier: Trump hasn't just fulfilled the Republican Party's purpose; he
has exposed it. And he also has exposed the media's indifference to what the
party has become.
Obviously, I am not saying that the transmogrification of the Republican
Party happened surreptitiously. It happened in plain sight, and it was
extensively chronicled - but not by the MSM. The sainted Reagan blew his
party's cover when to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 he
spoke at the Neshoba County Fair, just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi,
where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered in 1964. He
wasn't there to demonstrate his sympathy to the civil rights movement, but
to demonstrate his sympathy to those who opposed it. This was an ugly
moment, and it didn't go entirely unnoticed in the media. In fact, David
Brooks would later be moved to defend the speech, which invoked the
not-so-subtle buzz words "states' rights," and to act as if Reagan had been
slandered by those who called him out on it.
But if some in the media did call out Reagan on his disgusting curtsy to
George Wallace voters, the press seemed to lose its nerve once Reagan became
president and the Republican Party lurched not just rightward, but
extremist-ward. Do you remember these headlines: "Republicans Oppose Civil
Rights"; "Republicans Work to Defeat Expansion of Health Insurance";
"Republicans Torpedo Extension of Unemployment Benefits"; "Republicans
Demonize Homosexuals and Deny Them Rights"; "Republicans Call Climate Change
a Hoax and Refuse to Stop Greenhouse Gases"? No, you don't remember, because
no MSM paper printed them and no MSM network broadcast them. Instead, the
media behaved as if extremism were business as usual.
I don't think the media would deny their indifference. They would say they
don't take sides. They're neutral. They just report. Partisanship is for Fox
News and MSNBC.
Of course, this is utter nonsense. Accurate reporting means taking sides
when one side is spouting falsehoods. I am still waiting for the media to
correct the GOP pronouncements that Obamacare has cost us jobs and sent
health care costs skyrocketing - both of which are screamingly false. I am
not holding my breath.
But even if it were true that the media are not referees, not taking sides
against extremism is just another way of taking sides by legitimizing
extremism and making it the new normal, which it now is - so long,
apparently, as you don't shout it. In any case, objectivity is a
rationalization. We know the media are afraid of a right-wing backlash. We
know that they protect themselves by insisting that our two major parties
are equidistant from the political center - more nonsense. And we know that
every story is framed by its political consequences, not its human ones. We
see that every day.
But if you really want to know why the media skipped the story about
Republican extremism all these years, you have to look to the force of
extremism itself and the way it reconfigures the political spectrum,
basically disorienting us. In Europe, fringe parties on the right and left
get savaged by the press all the time. If we had them here, no doubt the
same thing would happen, press objectivity notwithstanding. The difference
between Europe and America is that our right-wing extremists happen to
control one of our two major parties and theirs don't. To take on extremism
would reveal not only the Republicans' deficiencies, both of its elected
officials and its rank and file, but the deficiencies of the entire American
political system. That takes a courage very, very few people (OK, nobody) in
the MSM have.
And yet we now know that the media can be assertive if they want to be, that
they can take sides, and even correct the record if they choose. We know
because that is precisely what they are doing against Trump, but only
because they see Trump as an outlier from the GOP establishment - a
disruptive, fringe force. Trump has a right to feel blindsided by the double
standard to which he is being subjected. Cruz may be even more of an outlier
from the American mainstream than Trump, and yet the media don't seem
anywhere near as lathered about him.
But back to the big story: Something happened in American politics over the
last 25 or 30 years to release our demons and remove our shame. The media
didn't want to look. Now Trump has come along to reap what the conservatives
had sown, and stir up those demons, and the media are suddenly in high
dudgeon. Where were they when America needed them?
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/blowing-biggest-political-story-last-f
ifty-years
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/neal-gabler-0
[2] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Blowing the Biggest
Political Story of the Last Fifty Years
[3] http://www.alternet.org/
[4] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
