On the menu today: Tonight, Joe Biden will give the annual State of the Union Address, and we already know how most partisans will react. Almost all Democrats will gush that Biden delivered the finest address since Winston Churchill, and almost all Republicans will say it was a disastrous, failed effort to hide an abysmally disappointing record. You can also predict how the speech will be perceived by MSNBC and the editorial board of the New York Times, and how it will be greeted by Fox News. This predictable pattern means that Democrats rarely recognize when they’ve screwed up, as they’re always being told they’re doing a good job — or at least a much better job than Republicans could ever do. That “closed circle” of constant positive reinforcement and inaccurate feedback is how Democrats keep convincing themselves that the likes of Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, Beto O’Rourke, Stacey Abrams, etc. are the next great American leader. We’ve got a lot of problems in this country, and a lot of them stem from our tendency to see what we want to see, instead of what is actually there.
Willful Blindness
Yesterday’s Corner post about Vice President Kamala Harris and the “closed circle” of the Democrats and the major U.S. media generated a big reaction. I suspect it had something to do with the closing paragraphs:
Democratic Party officials and like-minded members of the mainstream media have created this closed circle of information, where party officials tell the media how great they are, the media echoes the assessment of how great they are, and Democrats walk around convinced they’re doing terrific. Any negative assessments can be banished by accusations of disloyalty or “helping Republicans” or being unfair.
And this pattern happens over and over again. Joe Biden is not a wise and sage elder statesman. Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo is not the astute and empathetic hero of the pandemic. Lawyer Michael Avenatti is not the shrewd and righteous lawyer who believes in standing up for the little guy. Former Virginia governor Ralph Northam is not a sensitive racial healer. The Lincoln Project is not a team of patriotic and principled campaign operatives putting their country ahead of their former party. Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke are not so astonishingly charming and charismatic that they’re going to turn red states blue.
But Democrats wanted to believe these figures were as great as they said they were, so they all enjoyed long stretches of generous and credulous press coverage. A better media and a better Democratic Party would recognize this recurring pattern and say “Enough!” — and be much more skeptical of the next flavor-of-the-month that comes along.
Yes, Republicans are capable of this phenomenon as well. You don’t have to look too far to find a Trump fan convinced that the former president is spectacularly popular and widely beloved nationwide, when the opposite is the case. The GOP and corners of the conservative media that are too credulous can convince themselves that unappealing candidates are safe bets to win hard-fought elections. There’s often some pollster willing to tell you that the unappealing candidate really can win. Republicans can easily convince themselves that they represent a vast “silent majority” that apparently forgets to show up and vote some years.
But there’s a difference between the power, influence, reach, and impact of the mainstream media and the conservative media, and this difference results in a more “closed circle” among Democrats and their media allies than among Republicans and theirs. You can be a Democrat and never give a moment’s thought to Fox News Channel, talk radio, The Daily Wire, NR, etc. But it is very difficult to be a conservative and never encounter anything that’s being said, thought, discussed, and argued in the New York Times, Washington Post*, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, USA Today, Politico, etc. A good portion of conservative media is contending that the mainstream media is giving an inaccurate or incomplete picture of the news, and a good portion of the mainstream media spends its time “fact checking,” which often turns into it telling you that the implausible, unsourced claim that your Great Aunt Edna shared on Facebook isn’t true.
That means that Republicans usually know what’s being discussed in the mainstream media, whether they care to know it or not. But Democrats don’t encounter conservative media unless they deliberately seek it out, and thus it is largely ignored in their circles. For obvious reasons, conservative media are more likely to notice the flaws of Democratic figures, and yet in the minds of many Democrats, the very fact that something is being reported by conservative media somehow illegitimizes it. It’s only “real” when it comes from, or is verified by, one of their preferred sources.
Almost every news event that comes down the pike gets turned into a, “My guy is better than your guy” fight. The recent spy-balloon incident is a good example. When Americans learned that a Chinese spy balloon had been floating over U.S. airspace and near nuclear-weapons silos, they had good reason to be concerned. They might wonder whether the Biden administration handled this correctly, or whether there was another course of action that could have more effectively mitigated the Chinese effort to spy on us.
Because certain voices cannot accept a narrative in which Joe Biden and his team didn’t handle this correctly, they immediately had to point to the Pentagon’s statement about previous incursions by spy balloons from China. All across social media, you saw Democrats convinced that this was empirical proof that Joe Biden was a tough guy who looked good in those aviator sunglasses, while Trump was an indecisive wimp. “Ah-ha! Trump had failed to respond first, and multiple times at that!” But then on Monday, General Glen D. VanHerck, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command, said that some previous incursions by Chinese spy balloons during the Trump administration were not detected in real time, and the Pentagon learned of them only later. It’s difficult to blame Trump for not responding to balloons that the Pentagon didn’t detect.
The question of what to do about Chinese espionage efforts quickly turned into a debate about whether Biden or Trump was better.
There are a bunch of more useful, non-partisan questions about this incident. Why did those previous incursions by spy balloons not get detected quickly? Just what was China hoping to discover by deploying this balloon? Why did this one behave differently, lingering for longer periods over sensitive sites? Was some faction of the Chinese government deliberately trying to derail Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s summit in Beijing? Is this part of a longstanding pattern of behavior among America’s adversaries, to publicly act like they want to have stable diplomatic relations, while secretly making enormous efforts to discover any vulnerabilities we may have?
But to answer those questions, you need more knowledge, and the clearest answers likely involve some classified information. It’s much easier to just turn the topic into another fight about “My guy is better than your guy.”
In a normal country, most of the media would just prioritize telling you what’s going on and let you come to your own conclusions about it. If you want to make good decisions, you need to see what’s around you clearly, and to base your decisions upon accurate information. This means you must resist the urge to see what you want to see.
Instead, significant portions of our media environment define their mission as telling you, “Here’s what’s going on, and here’s why it shows that Democrats are good and why Republicans are bad.” With that mindset, almost every major Democratic figure gets the benefit of the doubt, and almost every major Republican is portrayed as a villain. Every major Democratic initiative must be a success — Mayor Gavin Newsom has a plan to eliminate homelessness in ten years! — and every major Republican initiative is some draconian, malevolent step that should be compared to The Handmaid’s Tale. (Hey, why are those allegedly callous and tight-fisted GOP state governments in Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina allowing low-income women to remain enrolled in Medicaid for up to one year after childbirth, instead of only the 60 days that federal law requires?)
An endless “My guy is better than your guy” slap-fight is a simplistic and unhelpful way of looking at the world, and these are not simple times. We’re living through history. As Therese Shaheen lays out today, China is simultaneously more aggressive and less stable under Xi Jinping, with lots of ominous indicators of a shrinking population, economic instability, and literal and metaphorical structural weaknesses. Covid showed that when a contagious disease breaks out in a country with a habitually dishonest autocratic regime, the pathogen will be halfway around the world before we get any straight answers.
One way or another, Russia is going to emerge from the invasion of Ukraine forever changed. We’re likely entering something akin to another Cold War; someday, Vladimir Putin will kick the bucket, but his successor isn’t likely to have a dramatically different geopolitical worldview. The Iranian mullahs and their nuclear ambitions haven’t changed, nor has the unpredictable North Korean regime.
Meanwhile, despite claims that we’re living in an age of stagnation, we’re living in an age of rapid technological upheaval: Artificial intelligence. The race to develop quantum computing. Hypersonic missiles. Far-reaching public-surveillance systems with facial-recognition. Drone and anti-drone warfare.
We’ve got big, serious problems to address. Thus, it’s in everyone’s interest to have the full picture, not just a carefully cropped and airbrushed image designed to convince you that one political party contains the good guys and the other contains the bad guys.
In fact, I wonder if there’s an inverse relationship between good government, or at least government that pleases voters, and the amount of coverage that government gets from the national press.
It turns out that, as of January, the most popular governors in America are actually some of the ones you’ve heard the least about, other than the departing Larry Hogan of Maryland and Jim Justice of West Virginia, who’s thinking about running for Senate against Joe Manchin. Republicans Phil Scott of Vermont, Mark Gordon of Wyoming, Bill Lee of Tennessee, Doug Burgum of North Dakota, and Kay Ivey of Alabama, and Democrats Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Ned Lamont of Connecticut all enjoy job-approval ratings of 60 percent or higher and disapproval ratings of 35 percent or lower.
People in those states seem awfully happy with how they’re being governed, and those governors make national news very, very rarely. Maybe there’s a lesson in that.
*As readers probably remember, I now write a column for the Post, which means that publication instantly transformed from part of that “liberal media” that we’re always complaining about to one of the finest institutions in American journalism.
ADDENDUM: It is indeed disturbing that two radicals, including a self-described neo-Nazi, were plotting to attack the power grid around Baltimore. As I noted back in December:
Just because it may seem like the Justice Department reflexively blames white nationalists and violent anti-government extremists for acts of terrorism doesn’t mean that white nationalists and violent anti-government extremists don’t exist, or that they don’t aim to harm as many people as possible.
But keep in mind, sometimes it just turns out to be dumb thieves.