My Comments on the News

How Democrats Lost the Plot – And Could Lose Democracy

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Among certain segments of the indigo blob, there’s a pall hanging over the election. No matter what happens today, we may be in the dying days of American democracy as we’ve known it.

At least in 2016 and 2020, Democrats entered the election nervous about the possibility of a Trump win but assured that the polls suggested that, at the very least, he was more likely than not to lose – that surely the American people would ultimately see what a charlatan he was, how antithetical to democracy he was, and reject him. Even when that optimism turned out to be ill-founded in 2016, it seemed to be because the Clinton campaign bought into that optimism too much and became more concerned with running up the score in deep blue states than making sure they’d actually win in the places where it mattered in the electoral college. Joe Biden’s win in 2020 allowed for that optimism to seem vindicated, that America had survived four years of Trump and could now start to heal, to move on from the threat Trump represented to everything America stood for.

There’s little such grounds for optimism in 2024. Where before polls seemed to show a clear Democratic advantage, now they seem to show a toss-up – and given how much the polls underestimated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, if that repeats itself in 2024 it could result in Trump getting a near-mandate, maybe even winning the popular vote. Where models break down the percentage chances of each candidate winning, they’d given Trump a slight edge until after I started writing this post – Nate Silver had him with as high as a 55% chance of winning until Saturday morning, and right now both him and the site he founded have it as a razor-thin race with no advantage even detectable for either side (though the Economist has given Harris as much as a 56% chance of winning). Democrats had some reason for optimism for a Harris victory even before the recent momentum in her favor – motivated voters not captured in polls’ likely voter models, right-wing pollsters “flooding the zone” to make Trump look like a bigger favorite than he is, and nonpartisan pollsters trying too hard to pull the race into a dead heat, on top of Harris having the general vibes (specifically larger crowd sizes) in her favor. But even if Harris were to come out on top, Trump and his supporters would surely cry foul and claim that the “deep state” was manipulating the results in her favor, and we’d get a rerun of the events of January 6, maybe even worse.

Fueling Democratic anxiety more than anything else is the sense that it shouldn’t be this way, that none of Trump’s runs for the White House should have come within a thousand miles of success, that Trump’s terribleness and the superiority of the Democrats are so obvious that the fact that any of the three have been remotely close has tarnished their faith in America. They can point the finger at all sorts of reasons why that’s not the case – Russian interference, America being racist, mainstream media outlets “sanewashing” Trump, social media outlets (especially Elon Musk’s Twitter) putting their thumb on the scale for right-wing propaganda, billionaires pouring money into Trump’s coffers. But even with all of that, if America were a functioning democracy, if democracy were as clearly superior to all other systems and Americans valued it the way my generation was taught they were, and the Democratic Party was even halfway competent, Trump would be swept away in all three of his elections in an electoral landslide of the sort Democrats haven’t benefitted from since Johnson over Goldwater in 1964 – with Trump perhaps capturing Deep South and some other rural states, but Democrats winning every state not completely dominated by the “deplorables” making up his base. The choice that preserves American democracy is not the automatic choice of anyone with the slightest grounding in reality, and that’s something that Democrats have refused to fully wrestle with.

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Diagnosing Democracy, Part II: How the Democrats’ Crisis Explains Democracy’s Crisis

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Note: Despite the title of this post, I’m probably not going to continue with this series; I originally intended for Part II to involve the ongoing back-and-forth over the latest flare-up in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but when I sat down to prepare to write it I realized I was too far removed from some of the minutia of the debate from October and November. I now intend to rework some of what I originally intended to say into a larger project that might not see the light of day until closer to when it’s completed. This post will partly cover some of the same ground as Part I, but not so much so as to keep from justifying making it part of the series. Also note that this post was mostly written by Saturday morning/afternoon, before the shooting at the Trump rally.

Since Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance at last month’s debate, the Democrats have been in a state of simultaneous panic and paralysis. Initially, what few Democrats were willing to go on the record stood by Biden as the party’s candidate, but a steady drumbeat of anonymously sourced stories casting doubt on Biden’s ability to serve as President now, let alone the next four years, culminated last week in actor George Clooney writing an op-ed explaining his experience with Biden at a fundraiser and making the case to replace him. Despite Biden proclaiming that he’s not going anywhere, elected Democrats up to and including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi have intimated that he still has a decision to make. More and more Democrats are convinced that Biden cannot possibly defeat Donald Trump in November if he’s the nominee, and are becoming desperate to nudge him out of the race.

But it’s not clear that they have any better alternatives. Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be both the most natural, straightforward choice to replace Biden and the one least likely to alienate the party’s key constituencies of Blacks, women, and Black women, is deeply unpopular in her own right, tremendously disappointed in her attempt at a presidential run in 2020 to the point of dropping out before any contests were held, and before the debate, was one of the loudest defenders of Biden’s mental acuity, raising concerns that nominating her would simply shift the nexus of controversy from “Biden isn’t mentally fit for the job” to “Harris tried to sell the American public on someone not mentally fit for the job”. (Indeed, if it weren’t for Harris’ baggage renominating Biden might not be so fraught – though by the same token, neither would replacing him with her.) Most other candidates that have been floated – Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer – are fairly milquetoast white-bread Democrats whose national appeal is relatively untested and that might not be able to overcome the extent to which their selection would alienate Blacks, and might still have to answer for the Democrats’ initially sticking with Biden. Any of them would have to overcome the fact that they weren’t selected in a traditional open primary process, regardless of what schemes the Democrats come up with to simulate one.

An attitude I’ve seen on Twitter is that Democratic politicians and celebrities like Clooney and Jon Stewart, and donors like Abigail Disney, are privileged enough to be relatively fine in a second Trump reign, so can afford to take the risk of replacing Biden, but ordinary people can’t. But there is no risk-free option here. Replacing Biden would expose the Democratic Party as weak and present a nominee that doesn’t necessarily have the confidence of the base, but not replacing Biden would not only mean sticking with a candidate that was already an underdog before the debate in large part because of people’s concerns about his age and mental acuity (concerns that now might not be completely surmountable no matter how well Biden does the rest of the way given what’s been reported and where he might be in four years), and hoping against hope that he doesn’t have any more “senior moments” between now and the election that would underscore those concerns (or even devolve to the point that they’d have to invoke the 25th Amendment and effectively run Harris anyway), but send the message that the Democratic Party doesn’t care what the people whose votes they need think about their nominee, that they will take what the party gives them and like it. Sometimes doing nothing is the riskiest path of all.

No matter what the Democrats do, they are staring at the prospect of, more likely than not, losing the election to Donald Trump, possibly even in the popular vote, allowing him to entrench his imperial, fascistic vision of the presidency and the GOP to enact their Project 2025 and Agenda 47 plans, potentially resulting in the last competitive presidential election for the United States as we know it. No matter where you are within the Democratic coalition, so long as you’re in it this is an unfathomable outcome. Democrats have loudly complained that the media is spending too much time on Biden’s age and not enough on Trump’s own mental deficiencies and destructive agenda. The idea that the American people would seemingly vote for fascism over democracy because democracy’s defender is too old seems outrageous.

But if it were to happen, it wouldn’t be because of Biden’s age and mental acuity alone. Rather, those things, and the way the Democrats have handled them, have ultimately underscored what it is that has made Trump so consistently popular in the first place.

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Diagnosing Democracy, Part I: The (Real) Problem with Jon Stewart

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Note: This post was almost entirely written by March 6 and only touched up today, so parts of it may be out of date.

In February, Jon Stewart made his triumphant return to The Daily Show after nine years away, effectively skipping the bulk of the Trump era and leaving most of that time to his successor Trevor Noah while working on other projects, to host Mondays through the election. What transpired reminded many fans of Stewart’s Daily Show of, perhaps, why his original departure may have been well-timed.

For his first show back, Stewart discussed the report from special counsel Robert Hur that cleared Joe Biden of mishandling classified documents upon leaving the vice presidency but characterized him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who struggled to remember facts under questioning, re-igniting concerns over whether Biden is too old to serve four more years as president. Stewart played clips of Donald Trump and his associates claiming not to remember things at their own depositions over the years, but spent the bulk of the segment seemingly reinforcing the concerns over Biden’s age, picking apart a press conference Biden gave where he forcefully responded to the special counsel’s assertions but seemed to struggle afterwards, and responding to Democratic surrogates playing up his “sharpness” and “engagement” in official meetings on talk shows over the weekend by suggesting that, if he’s so sharp in those settings, perhaps they should be captured on camera. By contrast, Trump only received one or two shots on relatively trivial matters over the course of the segment, with no mention of the most concerning development to come from his side over the weekend, his seemingly blackmailing NATO allies with a Russian invasion. Stewart was excoriated by various figures on the left, including Keith Olbermann and even Trump’s estranged niece Mary, for focusing on concerns over Biden’s age instead of the far more existential threat posed by Trump’s return to the White House. Responding to those concerns on his second show back, Stewart twisted the Washington Post‘s Trump-era slogan into “democracy dies in discussion” and spent the rest of the segment facetiously studying Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia and interview with Vladimir Putin to learn how to speak “of course” to power. 

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@GrantWahl’s Blood is on the World’s Hands

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I had set a deadline of November 2022 for me to make enough of my life to move out from my dad’s apartment. Obviously, that didn’t happen. What happened instead was that, last Christmas, we reached an agreement for me to spend over a month with my mom in Seattle from before Thanksgiving until after Christmas, with arrangements for how I was to be supported during that time, which I’m in the midst of now.

Why go to all that trouble? Because I fully intended to boycott the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and that would have to mean getting away from my soccer-crazed dad. 

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At a Time of Constitutional Crisis, A Call for Radical Bipartisan Reform

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Before the electoral college has even voted, we find ourselves on the verge of a constitutional crisis. Over three hundred electors find themselves in the unenviable position of voting for a man who seems to see the Presidency as a personal tyranny, a man with no political experience and little apparent interest in the minutia of governing, who has evidently discarded his pledge to “drain the swamp” and filled many cabinet positions with fellow businessmen and people opposed to the very roles they are to be lifted to, who was only elected because, many people believe and the CIA has seemed to affirm, Russia selectively expedited the leaking of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy while doing nothing public with the information they obtained by hacking the Republican National Committee – yet this is just another thing being viewed through the lens of partisan politics, something the left can cling to as a mitigating factor in Donald Trump’s election yet which Trump’s supporters disclaim the importance of, because of Republicans, according to the same reports, viewing their own power as more important than America’s independence from interference by foreign powers.

Unwilling to come to terms with a Trump presidency, many on the left are now calling on Republican electors to overrule the vote of the people that put them in their position, and the vote of their party in the primary process, to choose a more “moderate” Republican, not even recognizing the undemocratic nature of what they are asking the electors to do, considering the risks associated with a Trump presidency to be worth any measure taken to avert it – in effect, to send a message to Trump’s supporters that even if their anti-establishment champion is elected, the establishment will still be able to overrule their vote and install one of their own as President to protect their prerogatives. The left has little to say about the reaction Trump’s supporters might have to such a turn of events, which might range from widespread rioting on the low end to full-on civil war on the high end. Even as someone who considers a Trump presidency similarly unthinkable, the only thing such a measure has to recommend it is that it would create what might be a once-in-a-lifetime bipartisan consensus to abolish or reform the electoral college, the left because of its effect to overrule the popular vote even when it supports the “losing” candidate by over two million votes, Trump’s supporters because of its members’ ability to overrule the very choice of the people that put them in their position if the powers that be object strenuously enough – but I’m already seeing evidence that if the electors did succeed in keeping Trump from the White House, the left would praise the electoral college to high heaven, forgetting that unless you believe Trump’s claim to have won by an even bigger margin if he had been forced to appeal to the popular vote, the electors’ intervention was only needed because of the electoral college in the first place.

But the electoral college is only one aspect of how we got here. So is the power-hungry Republican party that will take any measure to protect, increase, and perpetuate their own power, disenfranchising those that disagree with them, going along with whatever those that agree with them choose no matter the danger to the republic, and engaging in political brinksmanship to deny even the most necessary actions if Democrats would take the credit for it. So is the unaccountable establishment that consists both of the aforementioned Republicans and of the Democratic Party that many believe went all-out to secure the nomination of Hillary Clinton even in the face of the left’s own populist uprising in support of Bernie Sanders, a candidate who might have proven the anti-Trump forces to be more about Trump himself than the establishment as a whole, and rendered themselves vulnerable to the Trump movement without realizing it until it was too late. Regardless of what happens on Monday, if we are to avert a civil war and truly take power back from the establishment, we need a bipartisan effort to hold both parties accountable and reform our system of government to be properly responsive to the people. True change was never going to come from electing a single president, whether it be Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, or even Barack Obama, but from constant, hard work of activists on all sides to put pressure on people on all levels of government. We need to recognize that when we dumped all of Trump’s supporters into the “basket of deplorables”, or dismissed his opponents (for that seems to be more true than to speak of Hillary’s supporters) as “SJWs” and “cucks” who were deluded by the establishment’s lies, or generally allowed culture-war issues to define the differences between us, we were effectively doing the establishment’s work for them. So long as we remain divided, neither side will really get what they want and will be blinded by their hatred into losing sight of the areas of common ground, all while the establishment continues to profit at the expense of the people.

Our reform effort must begin by recognizing the systemic nature of the problems infecting our government and our political discourse, specifically the two-party system. Until recently, the two-party system protected the establishment’s prerogatives by presenting a mostly unified, centrist platform and finding a few wedge issues to nudge people into voting for one side or the other, both of which would ultimately pursue the same policies outside those wedge issues. There were good reasons for the parties to take that approach, but also good reasons for people to feel disenfranchised. The people have taken greater control over the parties and they have become diametrically opposed as a result, but the two-party system is if anything even more insidious now, as moderates and anyone outside the two great camps have effectively been purged. Yet it took someone with Trump’s charisma and cult of personality for anyone truly anti-establishment to capture a major party’s presidential nomination. Anyone with misgivings about Clinton or Trump were obliged to vote for them, as they had for their respective nominees in every previous election since at least 2004, if for no other reason than the control the winning candidate would have over the future of the Supreme Court. Perhaps if third parties offered a more viable choice than Gary “what’s an Aleppo?” Johnson or Jill “I’m not anti-vax but…” Stein, people with misgivings about both candidates could have rallied around such a candidate, but even then such a candidate would have little to no direct support in Congress, and third parties’ inability to field a viable candidate ultimately stems from the same source. With Congress in gridlock as the two great forces try to stop each other from getting their way, the Presidency is perceived, whether true or not, as being of pivotal importance, and since only one man can be President, the entire direction of the nation for four years turns on this one election – and there are only two directions it can go.

In short, the establishment already has less power than ever, yet the health of the Republic as a whole has suffered more than anything else, because we are trying to work within a system that can’t accommodate the situation we find ourselves in today. The irony is that we might be about to play out one of the exact scenarios the Founding Fathers feared might be the dissolution of the republic, which they tried so hard to prevent in the Constitution, in large part because of that same Constitution’s shortcomings. That’s why on the eve of the election, I issued a call for a constitutional convention to update the Constitution for today’s realities, or at least to form a bipartisan movement to work within the Constitution to uphold its values, to make our government work again, to make it responsible to the people again, to make our system of checks and balances strong again, to make our values real again – because only then will we truly be able to make America great again. I hope people from all sides of the aisle can put aside their differences and join forces to carry out this work, or else there will be nothing to stop our descent into the abyss.

Incentive Auction FAQ

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The broadcast TV incentive auction officially kicked off last week with the deadline for stations to declare their participation in the auction. This triggered a number of pieces about what the auction is, how it works, and what the implications of it are. In that vein, I decided to write my own explainer for anyone wondering what this auction thing is they may have heard about.

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Bruce et al v. Gore and Al Jazeera: Why the sale of Current is undeniably a good thing for any neutral observer

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Imagine my surprise when I checked Twitter last night to find that “Al Gore” was trending, considering I happen to follow him and he hadn’t really tweeted all day. Then imagine my surprise to click it and find the headline:

Al-Jazeera in talks to buy Current TV

“Huh”, I think. “That’s interesting, and makes a bit of sense. It’s not too different from when Al Gore bought the old NWI network in the first place – effectively inheriting existing distribution deals. Al Jazeera has made zero inroads at penetrating the American market, while beIN Sport has been more successful, for certain definitions of “successful” (scroll about halfway down), suggesting their reputation might not necessarily be a deal-breaker given the right circumstances. It’d be interesting to see what sort of a splash Current could make with Al Jazeera’s financial and journalistic resources.”

Then I see the actual tweets:

I wonder how @algore is going to spend all his oil money he received from selling Current?

Is it me or does it seems like prominent climate activists (Matt Damon & Al Gore) seem very happy to take money from oil rich Arab nations.

Inconvenient Truth: Environmentalist Al Gore sold out to oil money, did so just in time to take advantage of tax benefits for the very rich

Al Gore is trending because he just made 100 million dollars from the oil he’s been railing against for the last couple decades.

Needless to say, this pretty much mirrors the reaction of the conservative blogosphere (along with accusing Gore of trying to push a deal through before tax hikes kicked in, ignoring the larger liberal justification for high taxes on the upper classes).

Alright, let’s set the record straight here. Oversimplifying Al Jazeera to “oil money” sells them short quite a bit, and accusing Gore of cashing out without regard for his principles seems to overlook the broader picture. First of all, on a basic and obvious level, Al Jazeera first became a dirty word for Americans with their release of Osama bin Laden’s tapes, so they have a history of running afoul of Republicans, making them and Al Gore good bedfellows. But more broadly, it highlights a sort of journalism it’s impossible to imagine today’s American “journalists” ever pulling off. As much as simply hearing the name (or even the “Al” followed by a word that triggers spell check) can cause some Americans to instinctively retch, Al Jazeera’s record really is top-notch; specifically, it’s clear that Al Jazeera isn’t a lapdog for Arab oil sheiks, given their record of reporting on the Arab Spring and other rebellions in the region, suggesting the prospect of a surprisingly smooth transition for Current, as Gore would himself point out. Given the state of American “journalism” these days, perhaps we could use Al Jazeera to show everyone how it’s really done.

It’s true that Al Jazeera is in fact owned by an Arab oil sheikh on behalf of the ruler of Qatar, but that brings us to the next point: as much as the oil-rich nations of the Gulf get rich off of selling us the fuel we need to power our cars, and as much as OPEC tries to make sure we continue to do so, they’re also well aware the oil river won’t run forever and have invested heavily in developing their countries to be economic powers even beyond their oil production, which news-watchers saw hints of in the Twitter-fueled response to the disputed 2008 Iranian election, and later in the more tech-savvy elements of the Arab Spring. In Qatar’s case in particular, said ruler has presided over, besides the launch of Al Jazeera, the institution of women’s suffrage, legalization of labor unions, and the introduction of a written constitution and Christianity; it’s hard to find another Arab nation quite so Westernized, certainly not one that hasn’t had Americans push “regime change” on them. (They’re still too small and hot to host a World Cup, though.) Admittedly, it has long been the single most polluting nation per capita in the world, but it’s easy to see that dropping faster than most other Arab nations.

It’s also true that Al Jazeera will be shuttering Current’s current (heh) format in favor of more of a straight news channel, bolstering the image of Gore abandoning his principles when someone comes calling with a multi-billion-dollar check. But it’s worth noting that since Gore bought NWI, MSNBC has become the liberal news channel Gore originally hoped to build, rendering Current superfluous; Current essentially lucked into taking up Gore’s original vision when MSNBC fired Keith Olbermann, but it was never going to measure up to MSNBC, certainly not after firing Olbermann itself. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gore had eventually sold Current to someone else for less. If anything, while Al Jazeera’s apparent plans to create another clone of its usual operations are noble, they might well betray a lack of understanding of the American news market, where people would rather hear people complain, preach, and bicker about the news than actually report it. At the very least, I’d strongly urge them to avoid the “Al Jazeera” name, which might well still be a poison pill for most Americans, if not for the name itself then certainly for its “foreign” connotations. (There’s a reason BBC News has a very limited American presence; indeed upon learning of the deal, Time Warner Cable couldn’t drop the channel fast enough.)

Discounting such questions on the wisdom and practicality of the matter, this court finds the prospect of a somewhat widely distributed network run by Al Jazeera to be a cause for unbridled hope for those fearful for the state of journalism on American television, assuming Al Jazeera can properly appeal to the American market. Given this, and given the long-term prospects of Current in its current form considering the rest of the marketplace, the court finds that despite unsavory appearances, there is no reason to believe that Gore’s sale of Current was done without regard to his own stated and personal principles, but rather was done out of genuine appreciation of their vision for the channel, and indeed the court suspects Gore would actually prefer their vision but was pessimistic about its practicality when he originally made noise about a liberal news channel. While he cannot be let completely off the hook for effectively selling to the ruler of one of the dirtiest countries in the world, the court has reason to believe that Gore can justifiably claim that it is not a betrayal of his own cause. This court rules in favor of Al Gore and Al Jazeera, with some reservations, including serious lingering ones regarding the timing of the matter vis-a-vis new tax rules.

What Bob Costas’ halftime commentary should have been

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As seems to so often be the case, whenever a tragedy happens that shakes us to our very core we’re left unable to figure out how we should feel, knowing only that however we feel, someone is going to tell us we’re wrong. Such is the case with the shocking murder-suicide of Jovan Belcher on Saturday, which have left many of us unsure what to make of any of it.

We like to put people into black-and-white categories as a society – we like to have someone to blame and someone to be the victim. We like to fit everything into a nice and neat story. No one would put any blame on the girlfriend who was killed or the young girl who was orphaned; they are both clearly victims. But let’s face it, neither are they the story here. No one even knew who either of them were until they were reported in the aftermath of the tragedy. The reason this has become a national story is because the man who did it was an NFL player.

Certainly it’s hard to sympathize with Jovan Belcher, who took the life of his girlfriend and then himself, leaving his young daughter without any parents and rattling the Kansas City Chiefs organization to its core. It’s tempting to blame him, to turn him into a monster. But ultimately, it’s hard to blame him either; Belcher’s actions were in keeping with suffering from mental illness. Which brings us to the elephant in the room, the question of whether Belcher’s living, playing the particularly physical position of linebacker, had anything to do with his death.

Five and a half years ago, professional wrestler Chris Benoit took the life of his wife – and didn’t spare his son – before hanging himself. His brain was subsequently examined by neurosurgeons at West Virginia University, who compared it to that of “an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient”, and his father attributed his actions to the effects of repeated bumps to the head over the course of his wrestling career. For a league already haunted by the specter of concussions, as the Saints’ Bountygate appeals continue to drag on, to witness such a chillingly similar turn of events should serve as a reminder of the consequences of this sport’s brutality.

The case of Chris Benoit also, perhaps, suggests exactly what we should make of this tragedy. Before his death, Benoit was one of the more beloved figures in wrestling, but that adoration quickly turned to sadness and anger as most of Benoit’s career was all but forgotten and Benoit himself became a symbol of the effects of the culture of wrestling. Jovan Belcher was hardly a superstar, so perhaps it’s telling that we find ourselves conflicted in how to feel about him all the same. Regardless, while it’s too early to know exactly why Belcher did what he did, it’s entirely possible that in a few years, Jovan Belcher could be every bit as much a symbol of the NFL’s concussion problem as Dave Duerson, the former Chicago Bears safety who committed suicide nearly two years ago.

USA Today and the Future of Journalism

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USA Today recently laid off a number of sports columnists as part of a broader restructuring of its sports department – and the vision they’ve set for their sports department going forward may well be a vision of the future for newspapers all over the country.

A leaked memo from publisher Larry Kramer effectively completely redefines USA Today Sports’ mission:

As we recast ourselves into a multi-platform sports organization, it is clear that we must be more aggressive and proactive about how we cover breaking news. While the newspaper remains an important source of news for our sports consumers, we can no longer operate with a print-first mentality. Stories move 24-7 and we need to move at that same rapid pace. The USA TODAY Sports Media Group intends to be the conversation starter, breaking news in Sports faster and in greater depth than anyone else.

It’s been said in the past that the Internet completely obliterates the traditional “news cycle”, giving people access to breaking news instantaneously. This has had its pluses and minuses, foremost among the latter the race to get scoops first potentially coming at the expense of getting them right. USA Today has effectively recognized that they are facing a future in which newspapers look increasingly obsolete, a drain on resources from the web site, and that the new world of the Internet is a far different world than the print world they’re leaving behind. This appears to be at least a first step towards embracing the new rules of the game. USA Today has generally been one of the “little three” of national general sports websites (alongside Sporting News/Fanhouse and NBC, and behind ESPN, CBS, Fox, SI, and Yahoo in some order), and they appear to be taking proactive steps to emerge from that status.

There’s a lesson here for newspapers all over the country looking to recast themselves in the new Internet age. They must effectively become less like newspapers, as they have known the term up to this point, gathering up all the stories they can for a single daily or weekly edition, and more like twenty-four-hour news networks, reporting the news as it happens. Certainly there will be people who just want to get the news in one big dose, but the core of that one big dose will utterly depend on being able to stay on top of all the news the moment it develops.

Understanding the News: Ignoring the Day of Reckoning

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Note: As this was heavily edited down from a post three times the size, I’ll issue another post greatly expanding on this one.

On January 8, 2011, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot US Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the head during a meeting she was holding with constituents near Tucson, Arizona. Although Loughner was a mentally disturbed man who held extreme views on all sides of the political spectrum and paid more attention to conspiracy theories than anything that could be called “news”, the shooting came as a shock to a country deeply divided between left and right. Attention turned to a map made by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections showing candidates in vulnerable districts targeted by crosshairs.

People on both sides called for bipartisanship, civility, and toning down the political discourse, and later that month at the State of the Union Address, congressmen of both houses sat in the chamber regardless of political affiliation, breaking with tradition. Even Keith Olbermann, who arguably was one of the standardbearers of the division of the political discourse on the left, apologized for anything he may have ever said that might have been construed as supporting violence. Later that month, Olbermann’s MSNBC show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, was abruptly cancelled.

Did anything result from all the calls for bipartisanship? Not really. Other than Olbermann, the same figures are the most public representatives of left and right, and I see no evidence any of them have changed their MO. Radio host Laura Ingraham recently expressly rejected another call for unity from President Obama, and another radio host, Mike Malloy, suggested that the Navy SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden should have taken out George W. Bush instead. And I found these incidents from, respectively, Media Matters for America, which had a column calling Obama’s haters “deranged“, and Newsbusters, which called one recent claim of radio host Randi Rhodes “lunacy“. Even Keith Olbermann will restart Countdown on Current TV next month – and it’s worth noting that the breakup with MSNBC may have been in the works ever since Olbermann was suspended the previous November for donating to Democratic congressional candidates.

In my view, the left seemed more self-aware about their sins than the right. While Olbermann fell on his sword, no comparable conservative figure shared the same fate that I know of (with Glenn Beck’s Fox News program only being cancelled in April). While Olbermann apologized for any perceived sins, Palin – from whom one could have drawn a more direct line to the shootings in Tucson – refused to take any responsibility and instead attacked the media for allegedly jumping to blame the right for the attacks. In the end, the left’s reluctance to play the same game as the right only came out as a win for the right – one side pulls the conversation as far right as they want, but the other side is too reluctant to do likewise. I’d like to think it wouldn’t take a conservative figure being shot to shock the right out of their complacency, but I’m not sure if even that would work. But if an assassination attempt can’t bring “red America” and “blue America” together, what can?

Tribalism is a natural result of the human experience. We like to think that we’ve risen above tribalism, but we merely live in bigger tribes today, and smaller sub-tribes among them. One of the most important aspects of any group of people are the moral precepts and core beliefs holding the tribe together. These core principles are at the heart of the tribe’s identity; they allow its members to identify other members of the tribe, beyond those they personally know, and they serve a more practical purpose in keeping the tribe together by creating social controls against those who undermine the rest of the tribe. These controls, and the principles themselves, can have nasty consequences. Anyone who disagrees with a group’s core principles will not remain a member of that group for long.

So it is that our two great political persuasions have purged themselves of heretics and seek complete purity. The other side is pure evil; it is the enemy; to even consider it for a moment is to introduce an impurity. When these core beliefs are held in unanimity, they can be self-reinforcing, and as such they are often deeply held, thought to be self-evident, so now the enemy becomes stupid too, if not outright liars; after all, aren’t our positions so obviously right? At this point, they have become fundamentally religious beliefs, so deeply held that those who hold them cannot make any decisions, cannot even function, if they find themselves forced to throw them out.

In the case of our two great political persuasions, it is thought that the course of action most in accordance with these core beliefs is always in the best interests of America, in every situation and on every issue, regardless of whether or not it contradicts other beliefs they claim to be just as core; to claim otherwise is an absurdity, a heresy. Regardless of what they may claim their principles to be, both parties will sacrifice their principles to support their true clientele. Republicans will always seek the best result for corporations, while I suspect there is some truth to the Republican cariacture of Democrats as not-so-closet socialists.

To make matters worse, the media – Fox News, MSNBC, and major radio companies such as Clear Channel, but all the media to some extent – have gleefully exploited and furthered the political divide. By providing mass outlets for those who would drive each party further into the fringes, they further legitimize such extreme positions and in fact make the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann instantly mainstream. That it is eminently understandable (outrageous positions attract attention and ratings) does not make it any less shameful.

The media are responsible for the divide, and they have a responsibility to put that divide back together. In previous posts I’ve mentioned my frustration with CNN for trying to stand in the middle rather than on both edges, and specifically that letting Jon Stewart shame them into cancelling Crossfire was a mistake. But while that’s still important, I now suspect it’s doomed to failure without more sweeping changes, because the divide is now being driven by forces outside the media, and there’s probably no convincing Fox News to stop furthering the divide.

I don’t know anymore how to really begin healing the divide, or even stopping its growth. It will take a humanization of the enemy – a realization that there are real people who are persuaded by the other side, and they aren’t all misled or delusional – a recognition that we are all Americans who have to live with the people and ideas of the other side; a recognition that politics is not some sort of zero-sum game where the only goal is to “win” but something with real consequences; a sober assessment of our values, what they mean, why they’re desirable, and when they can be too much of a good thing; and above all, it will require a recognition that the partisan gridlock now afflicting Congress – a natural reflection, and microcosm, of the division of the country – is preventing us from moving forward.

I’m not sure if either side really wants to do any of this, and I’m not sure how to get them to – our political persuasions are so entrenched it seems impossible to pull them out of the trenches. But something needs to be done… or else I fear the shots that were fired near Tucson will prove to be the first shots of a new civil war.