We hear a lot of talk about this presidential election being an unprecedented, existential turning point in American history. Some of us honestly think that if Donald Trump is elected president in November, our democracy could crumble before our eyes. I confess I fall into that camp from time to time. But when I pull myself together, I know deep down that this moment is really nothing more than the same ol’ same ol’, albeit on No Doze.
Yes, Joe Biden, a sitting and highly successful president was actually driven out of office yesterday by the timorous leadership of his own party and its cadre of celebrities. And, yes, we really have no idea if madness will grip the Democratic convention next month and see the candidacy of Kamala Harris bite the dust. But as flamboyantly crazy as this all seems, we’ve never been actually very far from it since our beginnings. The Jefferson/Adams struggle that came to a head in 1800 is often portrayed as one of the nastiest and most brutal presidential elections in our history. It might get a get a strong challenge for that honor this year.
The point is that the stakes are always high in our elections. Peoples’ lives, health, financial well being and freedom are always on the line. The ruling parties, “estates” and crazy fringes are always just about to teeter under the pressure of their fatal flaws, as they are right now. The basics never change. Under extreme pressure, every power group reverts to form.
When times get dangerously complicated, Democrats tend to become frenzied and spineless. They cannibalize each other savagely, often leaving their political enemies free to do virtually whatever horrid mischief they can dream up.
Republicans with power chronically overreach. Their self-righteousness gets the better of them. They lose all sense of proportion. They want all the power for themselves and end up offending everyone except those too rich to care. They’ve gone so far this time as to become the party of white-collar criminals, tyrannical judges, sanctimonious theocrats, puritanical bullies, the KKK and ludicrous orators endlessly spouting trickling-down financial drool. They tend to buckle in the end but the carnage they leave behind is staggering.
When the world gets crazy, the Fourth Estate, or the mainstream media, gets busy and makes it crazier, reverting to form by becoming little better than a propaganda mill frothing with highfalutin palaver about journalistic ethics and freedom of the press to ramp up lucrative terrors in their readers.
When observing the power structure go nuts, the Fifth Estate, or the alternative and counterculture media where so many of us squawk, morphs into a mob of serious journalists who no one takes seriously. The armed and crazy members of the fringy Kill-Um-All Estate revert to form and try to shoot everything in sight, as the Last Estate — the Russian, Chinese, North Korean or Iranian spookocracy — gleefully spurs them on.
Every power group prides itself in thinking it knows what the American people want. These days they’re almost always wrong. The Supreme Court apparently thinks Americans want a dictatorial commander in chief, immune from the law, to sit in the Oval Office. The Heritage Foundation, the creator of Project 2025, must believe that Americans are hungry for a dog-eat-dog world, a rabid culture where everyone gets kicked when they’re down, and government refuses to do anything to help them. As for the frantic Democratic leadership, I confess I don’t have a clue about what they’re thinking. Do they really believe their voters are stupid enough to be gulled by political polls months before an election, polls that are almost universally wrong? Maybe they’re so out of touch that they do. They apparently really think that being old is synonymous with incompetence, even after four years of one of the most economically savvy, socially conscientious and environmentally aggressive Democratic administrations in decades, one that’s helped tens of millions of people and is run by an “old person.”
And what about the Fourth Estate? What drives its panic? Or is it not panic at all, but just the tawdry motive of increased readership for profit? Does it really think readers can’t see that their monotonous coverage of Donald Trump’s every idiocy is the very engine that transformed a snake-tongued real estate conman into the most powerful leader in the “free world”? Does it think that readers in New Mexico, for instance, really don’t see that the stately New York Times has become horrifying like the Albuquerque Journal, running blatant editorials in every political “news” story it publishes, like the shameless shill for Trumpism it has become?
Same ol’ same ol’ on steroids. I remember panicked liberal friends of mine in 1968, rattled by the ever-opportunistic mainstream media, solemnly pronouncing over beer and hotdogs that there was no difference between Democrat Hubert Humphrey, one of the most decent men in American politics, and Republican Richard Milhouse Nixon, the ever-tainted McCarthyite Red baiter and Watergate crook. Nixon clobbered Humphrey that year because Humphrey’s own party was so lily-livered and flustered, it couldn’t bring itself to back him with conviction, even against a candidate most Democrats believed was being guided by the devil himself.
Who really believes right now that with President Biden courageously and selflessly ending his campaign and endorsing Vice President Harris that the feckless Democratic party will support her with the all the rigor and gumption she’ll need to be beat a convicted felon that the New York Times, PBS and other “liberal” rags have turned into the most famous man in America?
While I have little faith in the leadership of the Democratic Party, I still believe deeply in the goodness and rationality of the majority of Americans. The question is, can bumbling Democrats somehow get the mainstream media to focus its coverage, and what mental acuity it has left, on someone who isn’t Donald Trump? Can the Democratic leadership organize a winning campaign against the Trumpian juggernaut in less than 75 days? Can the eloquent, intelligent and increasingly forceful Kamala Harris make herself heard above the shrieking roar of the Trumpian circus? We’re going to have to bet on it! There’s just not much more for most of us to do but vote and pray.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Me thinks there’s room in your discussion for inclusion of politics on “TV News”. However, TV News – like the printed page – is becoming less and less influential. For the printed world – the stories are too long – folks have become accustomed to the USA Today format . For the TV news world, flashy graphics of “Breaking News” for a story that is hours (or days) old is hard to follow, especially when the “presenters” (as they’re called on the BBC) don’t know what they’re talking about. That leaves many, many folks who rely on “social media” for their news. To borrow a phrase from a friend – a fellow such as yourself with ink stained fingers – YIKES!
For the first time I disagree with an important part of your piece, though I do agree with your remarks about the 4th Estate. And I know that you are cognizant of your role as a member of that estate even as you wrote this morning’s piece.
The part where you say the president was run out of office, that those who did so or supported that were timorous, and that we Democrats become spineless and cannibalize our own (did you read what Steve Pearce said as reported in the Journal–your points are quite similar to Republican talking points). We are in unprecedented times and unusual elements are converging; reference to events in the 1800s is practically irrelevant. The ability to monopolize power in a tyrannical fashion with rapid, world-wide-reaching implications did not exist in the 1800s. The ability to destroy the planet did not exist. Etc.
Actually, Democrats conducted themselves with unusual (for them) resolve and focus, identified that our President is in obvious physical decline and a deeply flawed candidate up against a bulldozer who got a bizarre lift from an assassination attempt. For the President it is the reality of aging; it is not any moral failing. It was not the Democratic establishment that was asking for him to step down–the last I read 60% of us small fry wanted him to step down. When the enemy is storming the gates, one admits that. Then one tries to minimize weakness, and act with strength forward. For most of us, we were inundated with texts yesterday of relief. A few of my Black women friends texted to say that they were going to sit out the election if it was between Biden and Trump. They will now be voting.
I have criticisms galore of the Democratic party. I am and have been deeply unhappy with it. But in this instance, they and we and Joe Biden are right–he needed to step down. And unlike the Republicans, we questioned the titular head, disagreed with him, and unlike Trump, the President listened to us.
All very true, except that Joe was staring off into the middle distance when he should have been responding to Trump’s lies. He was absolutely unelectable and the down ballot voting was going to get hammered. Poetry and prose is all well and good, but being practical is the ONLY thing that will beat Trump.
Joe Biden did a terrific job as President. His 50 years of public service is remarkable and most appreciated by anyone that believes in our ongoing experiment in Democracy. Kamila Harris is the right person for this challenging time. As a lifelong member of the Democratic Party, I am excited and enthusiastic about the future.