Journalism in the Authoritarian Age

Everyone complains about the press. And, you know, that’s fine. The press is supposed to be the Greek chorus--it tells the harsh truths, the ones we cannot acknowledge ourselves because of our own biases and beliefs. And there is an expectation that there won’t be politics mixed into our truth.
Of course, that expectation is a fool’s expectation. People write news stories. And people are biased.

The problem with “political bias” is that “politics” has expanded beyond the big-government vs. small-government scale. Demanding that people being treated as human is considered “political.” This isn’t a new thing. It’s why the statement “black lives matter,” is considered political, instead of just something that any decent human being agrees to. Or why men need to cite having a female relative when issues of sexual assault come up instead of just saying “Hey, women are human beings who don’t deserve that kind of crap.”

I don’t have to tell you what Donald has said about his plans for the press. You know what they are. As bad as things were before, media wise, they’re about to get worse.

This was bad before. But now, it’s going to get worse. Look at how Vladimir Putin treats the press. Look at how things were under Saddam Hussein. I’m not exaggerating. Donald admires these men.

And scarier still, look at how the press capitulated to Donald during the election. Part of it was his white male privilege, of course--can you imagine if President Obama had been divorced three times, or if Hillary Clinton slapped her name on every single building she owned? But part of it was that he made them money. And then the monster became too big for them.

We’ve already seen journalists trying to normalize Donald. “We can’t be biased,” they say. “We can’t look like they were right about us favoring the Democrats.”

Tonight, I watched the PBS Newshour with my family. We watch it nearly every Friday evening, it’s a family tradition. It’s “news,” without marquees or flashy graphics, and normally, it’s comforting. It wasn’t tonight--it was terrifying. Tonight, Judy Woodruff calmly reported on Donald’s cabinet choices, airbrushing the horrific racism of Jeff Sessions-- who prosecuted civil rights activists for registering black voters and got cozy with the KKK. This got followed up with a Hannity and Colmes style panel about another nominee of Donald’s.
The conservative, a crusty looking man from the Foundation to Defend Democracies (you can laugh, I won’t mind,) gushed about the “heartland values,” of Donald’s nominees “He’s from Kansas! Hoorah!” The milquetoast liberal struggled to draw a comparison between the divisiveness of ISIS and divisiveness of Donald’s ideas. He had a point, but in the immortal words of Samantha Bee-
"Caring about that is like caring about the airbags on a car that is currently on fire.”

The problem with Donald is not that he is divisive. It’s that he wants innocent people dead because they exist differently from how he likes them. It’s actually the same problem I have with ISIS.

This is what normalizing fascism looks like.

Originally published on November 20th

When the world ends

So, taking on Donald. It won’t be easy, the man and his flying monkeys control all three branches of government right now. This--the next four years and especially the first two years--is going to suck. I can’t say how badly right now because it’s the day after the election.

Good news, though, decent people of the world! We have a chance to take back a big chunk of the government in 2018. Donald is going to get to appoint one justice right away, because Republicans are racist assholes who wanted to delegitimize our first black president. If we’re lucky, it’s going to be someone like Scalia. If not, it will be worse. But one justice isn’t enough to flip the court entirely. What would be really bad would be another justice retiring or dying, because then, we’ve got a conservative court. And I will have to throw out my ribbon adorned “Bride & Bride” wedding binder, which would be a goddamn shame.

Now, two years after January, we have another election, and it’s a doozy. As my excellent government and politics teacher taught me, the legislative branch drafts and passes laws. Whichever party controls that branch gets to decide which laws get passed (it’s far more complicated but that’s what you need to know for this post.) In 2018, every single seat in Congress goes up for reelection.

Yeah, you heard me right. Every. Single. One. Plus, 38 states are having gubernatorial elections. Now, midterms aren’t sexy. They don’t get countdown clocks on CNN. But with a blue Congress, Donald is severely limited. Also, state governments, local elections--they’re powerful. They can pass laws to protect the civil rights of the populations that Donald is most likely to hurt. Think about North Carolina or Indiana and the recent “bathroom bills.” These laws were passed by Republican governors. Let’s vote those guys out of office.

And...if we have blue governors and congresspeople, the state is more likely to protect the voting rights of minority citizens. That’s a big deal. Disenfranchisement contributed to Donald’s win in a big way, and we need to stop it.

Why do Republicans win? There are a lot of reasons. I can’t list all of them, I don’t have the time. Racism is one reason, and it’s a big one. Racism is in every crack and cranny of the American system, and it’s a big reason why Donald won. Sexism is another, of course. Homophobia. But there’s another reason. Republicans fight dirty. They blow dogwhistles until people’s ears bleed. They have the Koch brothers, a propaganda network with roots in almost every source for information.
Being horrible is easy, it’s being good that takes work. Acknowledging your privilege is work. Listening to others is work. Looking past your own feelings is work. Republicans are the big bowl of stale candy on your end table. You could get up and make yourself a bowl of ice cream, but you’re tired and it’s late and you want something sweet now. And then the candy is actually a fireball filled with dog shit.
Sorry. Can you tell that I’m still freaking out? But here’s the deal: This is our best way out. This is how we stop him. But we have to turn out. We have to canvass and make phone calls and fight like hell to make 2018 be a total landslide. Because if Donald keeps a majority for four years, it makes him more likely to win in 2020. This is a path out of the darkness. Let’s start running down it, as fast as we can.

Originally published on November 9, 2016

Reconstructing the past

In the wake of Donald’s winning of the electoral vote, the Democratic party and leftists in general have been pointing to the problem of focusing on “identity politics.” From Bernie Sanders promising to be an “ally” to Donald in taking on corporate America to the New York Times Review running a front page article about the “end of identity liberalism,” the importance of focusing on the “white working class” is the hip new Left trend. There have been some excellent analysis of why this is the wrong direction for the Democratic party  to go in right now, and I don’t think I can add to this. What I want to talk about is history.

We all learned about the Civil War in American history class. After that unit, usually squeezed in between winter break and finals is the Reconstruction unit. It’s short--part of the decidedly unglamourous gap between the Civil War and the First World War. It’s often misrepresented as a time in which the poor innocent white Southerners were victims of corruption and abuse from carpetbaggers and African Americans. It wasn’t. Gone With The Wind lied to you.

The Reconstruction period was a time in which America came closer to true democracy then it would for decades. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendment gave new rights to African Americans (only men got the right to vote, but my personal suspicion is that things had continued in the direction they were going, women wouldn’t have been far behind.) Black men were elected into government positions. New social programs helped freed slaves get educations and prepared to move the South into a future that didn’t involve owning other human beings (wild, right?) Black Americans and their white progressive allies were on their way to building a future for America that might not have centered around oppression. It wasn’t perfect. I don’t want to romanticize it--but there was hope. Real hope.  So what happened?

Textbooks often present the failure of Reconstruction as the fault of African Americans who just couldn’t learn how to be citizens. But that’s just not the case. Black Americans weren't the problem. Racism was. Southern whites reacted to the abolishment of slavery by beating and murdering African Americans and other Republicans, threatening and disenfranchising African American voters and generally fighting back tooth and nail against any attempts to change the racism that the Southern “traditional way of life” was built on.

And after a decade, white Republicans made a deal with the devil--Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for ending reforms in the South. They wanted to move on from trying to fix the problem of racism. It had been ten years and things were improving slowly. Besides, they didn’t really need African American voters if they could win the white working class in the North and East. It was too much effort.

From there, racism ran rampant in America. People of color--African American, Native American, Asian--were victims of oppression on every possible level, from disenfranchisement to segregation to lynching. Race relations in America reached a low point or “nadir” as historian Rayford Logan calls it. What happened after the Reconstruction era ingrained horrific racism into almost every element of society.

There is a direct parallel from then to now. America is again on the edge of an event that could undo the progress that took years in the making. Once again, our country is on the verge of abandoning any semblance of valuing justice and instead embracing racism. And once again, white progressives have a choice to make. By abandoning “identity politics” and focusing instead on issues like “class” and “the economy,” white progressives are again complicit in violence against people of color. Perhaps it will win a few more votes in the short term--unlikely, considering Clinton’s superior jobs plan in this election didn’t sway the “white working class.” But by saving our own skin, (pun intended) we leave the populations Donald has promised to target the hardest open to attack.

I’d like to take this moment to bust out a rad map.

Credit to Mother Jones.

Democrats succeed because of people of color (especially women of color). They campaigned on a promise to make America a more equal country, promising to be a voice for those facing marginalization and oppression. Not just people of color, but women, LGBT folk, the disabled, religious minorities, and especially people for whom these identities intersect. Abandoning “identity politics” is a betrayal of those who are the most faithful progressives, people who are counting on the Democrats to defend them from a man who promises to hurt them in every possible way.

To elected Democrats and other powerful progressives speaking of compromise, I say this. The lives of the people you promised to protect matter more than budgets and photo opps. They matter more than the “moral high ground” that means trying to “work with” a fascist.

We can’t go back in time and change what happened with Reconstruction. But now is a time that we--white liberal America can do better. White progressives let down African Americans in the 1870s. Now in 2016 we have another chance to show that we can do better.

Originally published on December 2, 2016