The relationship between the Washington press corps and its readers has become as abusive as anything Donald Trump ever drew up. The same is true for the relationship between “Lefty Twitter” and the left.
As usual, it’s a question of business models. You make money by getting clicks. You get clicks by energizing people, by making them angry or scared, preferably both. Straight news doesn’t pay.
That’s why The New York Times, Washington Post, The Hill, Politico, even CNN and MSNBC, have become trolls. If Politico writes a story saying the economy is improving, with numbers attached, no one is going to read it. But if they throw in a “but,” leading with a counter-example – a place where it’s not growing, people who are being left behind – that draws readers. Talk seriously about vaccines and you hear crickets. Write up some anti-vaxxer and its happy days. You’re getting clicks.
It doesn’t hurt that those who’ve worked in Washington over the last 30 years have seen just one pattern, Republicans outmaneuvering Democrats at every turn, using courts, states, regulators, or a few Congressional holdouts, each in their turn, to stifle attempts at reform. The world we live in today, the choice we’ve made of a Second Gilded Age, is the natural outgrowth of this kind of politics and this kind of coverage.
But special ire needs to be reserved here for Lefty Twitter, which has done nothing but emulate the right in their fear and loathing. To read any popular liberal blogger or activist you would think we’re doomed. The Earth is dying, democracy is dead, Trumpism is triumphant, and there’s not thing one anyone can do about it, because the rest of us are all too lazy and self-centered. It’s the readers’ fault. It’s the voters’ fault. It’s the right’s fault or the courts’ fault or Joe Manchin’s fault.
Did anyone ever consider that you’re going about it the wrong way? That it’s your fault?
True, lasting political power grows from the bottom up, not the top down. It doesn’t start with rage. It starts with a desire to serve. The better angels of our nature aren’t angry. All most people want from our politics is a modicum of honesty, a soupcon of seriousness. It shouldn’t be too much to ask.
Is anyone organizing on behalf of that? Is anyone highlighting the thousands of quiet people, civil servants, small town politicians, who are doing the hard work of keeping things together rather than tearing us apart?
Because I don’t see it. Instead, I see a pale imitation of the Right, and a media that no longer gives a shit what happens to their readers, because they’ve got theirs
I’ve been lucky, here in the Kirkwood section of Atlanta. We have a neighborhood that gets together once a month to talk things out. I once ran a wider group, a Neighborhood Planning Unit, organized a half century ago under the late Maynard Jackson to give people a voice. Neighbors here must look one another in the eye, and when you get too angry (as I have because it’s my nature) what happens is no one listens to you. From this have come Stacey Abrams and, more recently, Bee Nguyen, two of the best politicians of their generation.
We need more of this. We need more people talking to each other, face to face, listened to only so long as they remain calm. You can organize a movement from that base, but it can only be from the bottom up.
