Rest. Reflect. Respond. -Part 1
It feels like there are a lot of people rushing to be the first with prescriptions of what we need to do to dig our way out of this giant festering hole in our democracy.
How many of them are trying to figure out what they personally got wrong?
That’s my goal here. Well, that and maybe if I don’t get these ideas out of my head I’m going to melt like that guy in Raiders of the Lost Arch who opened the Arch of the Covenant.
So, do you wanna join me as I try to figure it all out?
Agree. Disagree. But let’s do this together.
I wouldn’t pretend to have the answers. God knows I’ve gotten so many things wrong in my often miscalculated political career. I’ve been in politics and public policy for over a quarter century now. I have some strong opinions on some things, but if there ever was a time to reflect, this is it.
I do know this: we need to take this time to rest in our communities, reflect on what we saw and respond with the largest, most unified coalition that we can imagine.
And, we don’t have long. We need to stop this madness by the next mid-term election and we can’t rely on the other side fumbling the ball.
Our respectful exchange can help us focus on creating a structure in 2025 that will lead us down the best path together, rather than a thousand different influencers giving their individual and contradictory analysis. Eschew internal division, finger pointing and recrimination.
So, what you will see here are some suggestions but also a whole lot of questions that I hope will guide a process, so we are not all over the place. I’m also gonna talk a bit about how I’ve gotten things wrong.
The first sections of the following blog posts are level-setting, at least from my years in politics. The second set of sections is where we get in to the nitty gritty of how we might move forward.
If you are looking for 240 characters and pithy memes, Twitter is still there for you. We’ve done so well with that model of information sharing, after all. For my part, I think our organizing needs to take on a longer format, and I’ve been guilty of letting the social media bubble hold me tightly like a warm blanket on a cold night.
So, grab a glass of wine or tea and settle in.
As I wind down my real estate business, I’m repurposing this website and newsletter for political commentary, historical perspective and catalyzing action. Please sign up for the newsletter here. If I get a positive response, then I may move over to Medium, or some other platform that my deer friends keep pushing me to do.
If so inspired, please share this.
Now, on with the show.
The Tortoise and the Hare
This isn’t the first time that I totally miscalculated the strength of the Republicans. And it is in no way shocking that it was a similar appeal to populist and short-sighted instincts of the public.
In 1994 I was sitting in a dark room at the Democratic National Committee building in Washington DC, with the east coast November gloom outside. I was with my then-boss, Kitty. She was an impressive person who could remember any phone number you told her, had met everybody you could think of in DC, saw Muhammad Ali levitate three inches above the ground, and was balancing eight precariously stacked piles of documents on her desk at any given time.
We didn’t work for the DNC, but they called her in to help that night and she said I could tag along. Together we squinted at an AP wire computer, with ghostly green lettering scrolling on a infinitely black background. I was not sure what I was looking at. But in just one moment she went quiet and said, “Ken, the Republicans just took over Congress.” We were some of the first people in the country to witness the 54-seat swing in the House of Representatives, brought to us by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America.”
We thought what we called the “contract on America” was brutish then. It is a soft white cheese by comparison to the Project 2025 agenda today.
Kitty and I sat in silence, weighted down with the immensity of it all. The feeling of dread pulled on us like a wet wool trench coat. This political shift in congress upset a political reality that had been in place since FDR, and from which the Democrats have never been able to recover.
Three years earlier, when I was an intern for Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, somebody organized a tour of a unassuming little mock TV studio, just across the courtyard from Union Station. There they trained Republican members of Congress how to appear more approachable on the three major networks and the relatively new Cable News Network (CNN). At the time, they had a real problem connecting with audiences because they had not yet learned to use dog whistles as well as they do now. They would say the quiet part out loud and that alienated voters. But they learned.
Of course, now Republicans can say the quiet part out loud because Fox News has conditioned its viewers since 1996 to fear 1,000 different boogymen, as a brilliant way to capture their eyeballs and sell them more products. I’ll never forgive Fox for turning my previously center-right, pro-choice, gun regulation agreeing parents in to talking point-repeating binge watchers.
Fox News founding editor Roger Ailes had pledged during the Nixon impeachments that he would create a “news” source that would prevent any future accountability for any Republican president. As we know now, he succeeded beyond than his wildest dreams.
Democrats were behind the game. Very behind. In the early years Fox built its talk shows in the image of the good versus evil story telling of the then-World Wrestling Federation. They brought liberals and Democrats on to their programs and rigged the game so they could use them as punching bags, to make them look stupid. It was always about showing them as evil. We know this. We’ve seen it ourselves and people over the years who left Fox told us about that secret sauce.
Little did I know, that these early years were really the only opportunity I had to build some suspicion about the Fox machine with my family. To be fair, I didn’t know as much about how government worked in the 1990s as after I started working in it. But I did not have the skills to open a values-based conversation, and avoid it breaking down to an argument.
When MSNBC moved to capture a left-leaning audience during the GW Bush years, they just couldn’t keep up with the growth over at Fox. Two decades of right-wing AM radio prior to Fox’s launch had primed the pump perfectly. Fox had done such a thorough job of blurring the line between straight reporting and right wing commentary “infotainment”. Old school reporters who fought to keep that distinction on MSNBC were eventually drowned out.
And, frankly, did it matter much? Liberals would seek comfort in the “reporting” of Rachel Maddown, Chris Hayes and more recently Jen Psaki. Though I largely agree with them politically, they are just MSNBC’s answer to the Fox infotainment model: tell the audience what they already believe and then sell them whatever the advertisers want.
They are not journalists. We should stop watching them as if they are. Though they may be skilled and experienced people, they are commentators dressed up by their network as journalists. You cannot have served in a political party or an administration and they convince anybody that you are a balanced conveyor of the news. They may have the trust of their tribe, but we’ve all lose through tribalism. I feel we should have fought harder to expect more from our news sources than a copy of the Fox model.
Still, even though they are owned by a huge corporation with its own agenda, MSNBC made liberals feel that they at least had some response to the barrage of half-truths, lies and misdirections (notably on the climate crisis) coming from Fox and AM radio. Liberals sought refuge primarily in MSNBC or the Daily Show, among a few others in the liberal chat-o-sphere.
But the right was already another step ahead. Over the last 10 years, they put money behind a whole list of influencers who, jointly, had tens of millions of loyal followers. These were people who presented the trappings of journalism without the Journalism Code of Ethics and Standards, without editorial oversight, fact checking or retractions. I mean, at least Fox news had editorial oversight, even though it was lax, and the other three items were never taken seriously.
Like Joe Rogan, they didn’t like answering to advertising bosses or editors, and they convinced their audiences that they were more fair than traditional news sources–even though the information they were sharing was often demonstrably false. They were “just asking questions.”
There are easily over 30 right wing influencers on social media, with followings starting at 1 million, and as high as 15 million –each reaching a different niche market that left-leaning cable news or John Stewart, John Oliver or Stephen Colbert can’t reach. Those niche markets include sports-plus-Trump, hunting-plus-Trump, Christians-plus-Trump and probably even vision boarding-plus-Trump.
It was one of the reasons for the rise of the “manosphere”, detailed brilliantly in this Code Switch podcast, which also details the rise of the “black manosphere.” This is an amazing insight in to why so many black men may have voted for Trump. Apply the same formula to Latino men, Asian men, and so on.
Days before the election Joe Rogan unquestioningly listened on as Trump spurted the same set of debunked lies to his 15 million listeners about everything from climate change to telling people that Kamala Harris wanted to turn all illegal immigrants in to immediately-voting Democrats.
People believed it because, despite over 1 billion dollars from the Harris campaign dedicated to ground game, there was not a sufficient way to respond to each of these niche markets.
This leads us to where we are now, and in the next post in the series, I want to talk about the landscape we are fighting in now, and what we liberals contributed to it.
Click here for that.
