Peter Daou blames media and the political establishment for failing to combat dishonesty, hypocrisy and Trump
Voltaire warned that” those who can build you believe silliness can attain you perpetrate atrocities “. In his new book, Peter Daou offers copious evidence that nothing has ever built that pernicious alchemy easier than the internet.
“Technology,” he writes,” has altered … the field of battle … The unrelenting toxicity of social media is a feature , not a glitch, of digital warfare .” He also offers an important corollary:” Nothing in American life is more of a threat to our republic than the Republican party's lurch to the far right .”
Daou says he writes not as an historian but as “an eyewitness”. He has been a digital strategist for two Democratic presidential candidates- John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008- but he guesses his earlier history is what attains him the perfect analyst for this conflict: he came of age as a Christian in Lebanon at the height of its own civil war.
Norman Ornstein was one the first Washington pundits to identify the big problem with the style the mainstream press is working with a sharply altered political cosmo, writing in 2014:” Insisting on equivalence as the mantra of mainstream journalism leaves the average voter at sea, unable to identify and vote against those perpetrating the problem. The populace is left with a deeper dislike for all politics and all legislators .”
Daou strongly concurs. The” mainstream media and the political establishment”, he writes, have failed to” serve as a counterbalance to the deceit and hypocrisy poisoning American politics “. Or as progressive analyst Zerlina Maxwell set it,” there will be literal Nazis marching in the street before the[ mainstream media] realizes that calling for civility from both sides is stupid. Wait. Too late .”
Of course, there already were Nazis in the streets of Charlottesville two years ago, when marchers chanted” Jews will not replace us “.
Daou is especially good on the press obsession with” real American” stories, which are actually” a toxic brew of populism, nativism and white dominance packaged by the GOP, distributed by rightwing media, imbibed by the Republican base and regurgitated by the mainstream press …
” The' real American' tale is the thread that runs through virtually every partisan fight in US politics. It maintains that the white working class has been shunned by the Democratic party, patronized by the' liberal media ‘, taunted by Hollywood, stifled by identity politics, stifled by political correctness, and oppressed by big government .”
It is a story full of myths. For instance, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough's assertion that in 2016 Clinton failed to appeal to the working class is starkly contradicted by a single fact:” Clinton won decisively among voters with annual incomes under $50,000.”
Since this is largely a volume about Twitter wars, it's not surprising that many of its most salient points are drawn from tweets. Comedian Andy Richter pointed out that “‘ the forget American' has been interviewed 8,000 days “.
On the other hand, after the Democrat captured the House last November, Oliver Willis wondered:” Where are our heartland diner narratives? Our profiles of surging voters who' upset the status quo' with' maverick politicians ‘? How come voters in blues states that got bluer and purple states that went blue and red districts that flipped aren't getting the Trump voter treatment? It would make one think that gosh, this whole thing about the media being liberal is bullshit, and that the mainstream media caters to Republicans' whims while minimizing the rest of us …”
Correct. As Daou says, the subtext of the mainstream media's focus on ” MAGA” voters is that the opinions of “‘ real Americans'- white working-class small-town Republicans- take precedence over those of other voters, particularly the voters of coloring who make up the Democratic base .” After Trump's sycophantic press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the New York Times rushed” to get the perspective of Trump's diehard rust-belt fans”, who” wondered if election meddling was really so terrible “.
The threats of the internet were especially stark in the last three months of the 2016 campaign, when as Buzzfeed detected,” the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook made more involvement than the top stories from major news outlets .” As former FBI special agent Clint Watts pointed out, that was the moment when the Russians” hacked American intellects “.
As soon as WikiLeaks” began dumping theft Clinton campaign emails online”, Daou writes,” reporters jumped at the chance to extend their 600 -day obsession with Clinton's emails “. Later, a Times investigation even conceded that” every major publication, including the Times” became” a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence .”
That, Daou says,” was a startling admission by the paper of record, one of the rare instances that a major news outlet acknowledged its role in spreading anti-Clinton and pro-Trump propaganda “.
” The Republican party's hypocrisy on Russia- claiming to be patriots and defenders of the flag while surrendering to Putin- is part of their pattern of treating hypocrisy not as a source of shame but as a tool of ideological warfare ,” Daou writes.” The triumvirate of rightwing media, rightwing megadonors, and a rightwing Republican party is an existential menace to the United State of America, undermining the norms, values and principles that define this nation .”
He concludes with a call to arms 😛 TAGEND
For blue Americans in the 21 st century- and for principled patriots in the different regions of the ideological spectrum- the Digital Civil War is about preventing[ a] descent into tyranny by confronting the far-right menace before it's too late.
We won't know whether it's too late until we learn the results of the next presidential election. The battle by Republicans to kill every measure to strengthen the security of the ballot box is just one of many indications that they have abandoned their commitment to democracy.
