Why Is This Desperately Important Presidential Election So Monumentally Annoying?

The presidential election this year is probably the most important in our history and surely the most foolish. That paradox is creating a politically-induced mass coma among the electorate. It has come close to driving off even the ancient political junkies like me who just can’t bear the blithering bullshit anymore.

A good part of this wretched silliness can be traced to the major media wallowing in the inanities and sleazy schtick of Donald Trump day in and day out for more than eight years. Compared to the maddening monotony of Trumpian headlines every waking second, even the doings of the President of the United States turn out to be page 4 news. But I don’t want to give Trump too much credit, even for this pathetic state of affairs.

Most of the blame can be focused on other whopping failures of intelligence and public service that have led to troubling and dispiriting questions — who can you believe?? Is there any trustworthy information to be had? What does a sensible standard of reliability look like? Is our information all controlled by a micro minority of information manipulators hellbent on killing off competition and drawing to themselves exclusive power by pitching end-of-the-world scenarios like a broken record, night and day, ad nauseum ?

Information monopolies, polling inaccuracy, endless online fundraising, and seemingly dumbed down, idea-free campaigns — these all work in their achingly boring ways to trivialize politics this election season.

I would have thought that in an “information age” like ours there would be a flourishing of stimulating news sources, a competitive richness of differences that the curious and dutiful citizen could explore. I was apparently confusing the news with a wall of breakfast cereals in the grocery store. Our political news market has far less diversity than even the broom and dust pan section. It’s dominated by two or three superstar talking heads, four or five national newspapers, a single wire service and a handful of on-air news outlets that are so slanted they seem to be official organs of political parties rather than champions of independent journalism.

News monopolies mirror the monopolies that rule the internet — like Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, X, and Microsoft. Our “communication system has long been essential to American democracy,” writes Zander Arnao of The Gate, an independent undergraduate publication at the University of Chicago. And it “should be a profoundly democratizing force.” But monopolies “deter competition,” “subvert” diversity and “democracies suffer.” Monopolies tend to turn internet news into something not unlike propaganda, which is by definition free of “competition” and meaningful disagreement. A communication system run by monopolies “ruthlessly” snuffs out competiton, Arnao writes. What’s left is the fiery pablum of the moment.

Public opinion polling, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to suffer from monopolistic purging. In fact, major media presents an avalanche of poll results every day, polls that are treated as sources of fact not as tiny peepholes on preferences and opinions. The accuracy of polls in closely contested elections is notoriously unreliable, especially the farther out they are from the election itself. “The presence of large errors on some variables is a reminder that polling is imperfect,” Pew Research Center says with remarkable restraint.

If a “communication system” isn’t composed of freely competitive and independent news organizations, the prevailing monopolistic powers will publish whatever expands their influence. Nowadays, that’s mostly spurious gossip and ludicrously transparent propaganda. That’s one reason why, perhaps, the media has given us a largely idea-less election, except perhaps for the cursory coverage it gives to Project 2025, the Republican scheme to return America to the down and dirty depression days of 1925. But news followers have a hard time tracking down the actual content of Project 2025, and there’s hardly anything reported about the actual contents of the Democrat and the Republican party platforms.

The final absurdity is political fundraising, which trivializes everything, even the most serious of social issues. Since the election of 2016, raising money online has become like the inescapable drip, drip, drip of Chinese water torture, heard in every nook and cranny of the country. Using disgusting guilt trips that end with an ask, tricky surveys that end with an ask, pleas for commitment that end with an ask, “shocking revelations” that end with an ask, a myriad of sky-is-falling doomsday predictions that all end with an ask, fundraising goes after the each of us dozens upon dozons of times a day. It’s turned email into junk mail most of the time. It’s worse than laughable, it’s boring, ludicrously boring. And, of course, fundraising  algorithms are so crude you could empty your bank account succumbing to every ask and there would never be a thank you, never, never.

How is it possible to remain serious about politics when even one’s own political party treats its faithful as nothing better than idiot marks to be pestered and exploited without mercy? Is there any way to end this degrading foolishness? Maybe New Mexico Democrats at least could turn to one of their own and revive the wise slogan of the Fred Harris’ 1972 presidential campaign, creating a “No more bullshit” committee to help bring a little bit of dignity back to the campaign trail. Why not? Nothing else seems to work.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Photo by Lupus in Saxonia)