Kamala Harris often says “It doesn’t have to be this way” when referring to the kind of future her opponent represents for the country. The question that immediately arises, but goes unasked and unanswered, is how it got “this way” in the first place. While the current political/social climate in the United States may seem to have sprung up rather suddenly as a result of Donald Trump’s style of campaigning and leadership, this gives him far too much credit. The stage was set for Trump over decades, with a series of events that has provoked a slow but inexorable deterioration of respect for and faith in two bedrock institutions of American political life: the news media and the government itself.
American political culture suffered a major blow with the Watergate scandal. Yet, despite that event’s trauma to the nation, at that time there was a genuine reverence for the office of the Presidency, and perhaps even more so for the media. Consider the success of the book All The President’s Men and its movie version, which made journalists heroes for uncovering the scandal. Newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post were respected and seen as a vital part of the system, as was the evening television news.
American children were raised to be proud of the nation’s constitutional democracy, the division of government powers designed to maintain fairness and “checks and balances”, and perhaps above all the seemingly inviolable separation of church and state. It was this last, fundamental aspect of our nation’s governing model that was the first to fall.
The 1980s saw the rise of Jerry Fallwell’s group, the Moral Majority, which represented the first rupture in the principle of strictly secular government. There had never before been an overtly religious group that explicitly linked its agenda to a specific political party. Nevertheless, they were thoroughly embraced by the Republican party. The Moral Majority itself faded away with the end of the Reagan presidency; however, the wall between church and state was permanently ruptured.
Within a few years, the presidency of Bill Clinton, the so-called “man from Hope”, became the scene of the next major breach of public trust. The Republican Congress, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, produced a document known as the “Contract With America”. This document was the first to take up and promote the idea that government itself was the real problem in America. Until then the dominant theme in American politics was that government was meant to be the solution, the entity responsible for addressing issues that affected all Americans, the main lever for correcting injustices and steering the country in the right direction. Gingrich, et al laid waste to that notion, assaulting the idea that government could be trusted – unless it was in the hands of certain people.
The Clinton presidency also witnessed the destruction of another pillar of US politics – respect and reverence for the office of the President. The sordid attacks on Clinton’s business dealings, associates and his very character, epitomized by the voluminous Starr Report about the president’s philandering with a young female intern, shattered the veneer of reverence for the office.
The election for Clinton’s successor led to another fundamental element of US political life being thrown into doubt, this time the electoral system itself. The controversy over the outcome of the 2000 vote, the scene of (paid, organized) protesters storming an election office in Florida, and the eventual awarding of the election to George W. Bush by the US Supreme Court drove a stake through the heart of the public’s trust in what may be our most important institution of all: the vote. Gore may have conceded the election peacefully, but the idea that the presidency had not been decided by the clear “will of the people” but rather by lawyers and courts poisoned the well of public trust – again, permanently.
Bush’s war in Iraq certainly drove a wedge between Americans (if you were against the war then you didn’t “support the troops”, or worse, you were “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”). However, it was John McCain’s presidential campaign that took a sledgehammer to that wedge, deepening the divide in a new and destructive way. His slogan, “Country First”, ran counter to the years of American intervention in foreign affairs around the world, not to mention the notion of the US as a “shining beacon” on the hilltop, a model of democracy and inclusion for the world to admire and emulate. But it was his choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate that pushed the nation’s divide into uncharted territory.
Sarah Palin was the first to promote the notion that there were “real Americans”, and conversely, everyone else, who were by inference not true Americans. Furthermore, the image she powerfully and successfully projected was of a very specific type of person – people who looked and thought like her and her family. Aggressively pro-gun (recall her shooting wolves with a high-powered rifle from a helicopter), pro-Christian and anti-science/fact, Palin introduced a new model for US politicians that was on one hand wholly superficial, and on the other profoundly divisive. Palin’s rhetoric set the stage for legitimizing the wholesale dismissal of large segments of the nation’s population as somehow being other, less deserving, and even threatening.
At the same time, the candidacy of Barack Obama produced another major breach in our political culture. The so-called “birther” movement, which questioned the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate – and therefore his status as a real American, was the first time a presidential candidate was attacked on the basis of his race. Here it must be acknowledged that even John F. Kennedy was questioned for being Catholic (another sign of how much things have changed in the decades since), and Mike Dukakis’ Greek heritage was a topic during his campaign, the challenging of Obama’s citizenship and American-ness went far beyond those incidents. It is also necessary to recall one of the major forces behind this nativist attack – Donald Trump.
The early months of the Obama presidency produced another watershed moment in the decay of America’s trust in its institutions: the so-called “Tea Party” movement (TEA was an acronym for Taxed Enough Already). The Tea Party presented itself as a spontaneous popular reaction to the oppressive fiscal policies of the new Democratic president. This was essentially uncritically accepted by the media and the public, despite the fact that the movement was nothing of the sort. In fact, it was a well-planned and well-funded coalition of politicians, and the taxation policies they were allegedly so upset over were actually those of Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush. It was literally impossible for Obama to have had any effect on taxation policy in the first three months of his presidency, but this did not seem to matter. Think back for a moment to the Contract With America. The Tea Party’s immediate impact demonstrated that the idea that government, in particular in the “wrong hands”, was the problem had embedded itself in American culture.
Thus, as the presidential campaign of 2016 got underway, much of America’s faith and trust in its government and institutions had been badly undermined.
During the decades of this decay, the news media in America experienced a similar and likewise unprecedented fracture. Americans of a certain age can still remember names like Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Bob Woodward and others. The nation trusted them to deliver the news intelligently, fairly, and to the extent possible, accurately. Before the 1980s and the introduction of Fox News, one never suspected the news media of having any partisan bias. Fox News willfully changed that forever.
Over the years the depth of this division has only grown. The “left” in America chose to follow suit, and in particular the emergence of MSNBC as an overtly partisan news network finished what Fox started. It is no exaggeration to say that there are now two wholly distinct and opposed information ecosystems in the US, presenting extremely divergent views and representations of reality.
Thus another pillar of American political culture, confidence in a professional and objective press, was laid to waste.
This brings us to the campaign of 2016 and the subsequent presidency of Donald Trump. Trump capitalized on this deep division in news coverage with his relentless use of the term “fake news” to attack any and all coverage he didn’t like or agree with. The effect has been devastating. With news coverage of events presenting fundamentally contradictory (and, it must be said, at times blatantly false) narratives, fact has degenerated into a question of opinion and belief. Americans’ media consumption patterns show that many now only believe who and what they want to believe. There are no facts, no objective truth anymore in much of today’s media ecosystem – again, by design.
So, when Kamala Harris says “it doesn’t have to be this way”, it must be said that she is avoiding acknowledging the reality in the United States. It is this way, and it took decades to get here. There is no unity on the horizon for America, because that sense of common identity has been systematically destroyed. The damage that has been done to public sentiment about American political and media institutions is generational, embedded and has become rooted in Americans’ sense of their personal identities.
Perhaps this is the greatest damage of all. Once upon a time, despite our differences, we were all Americans, and we could all be proud of what our nation and its institutions stood for. Now, we can only hope that our neighbors won’t come after us in a violent rage because we look, love, worship – or worst of all, vote – differently than they do.
And that’s the way it is.
Cover image: Photo by Ömürden Cengiz on Unsplash.com
L’articolo And That’s The Way It Is: the Ruin of American Political Culture proviene da ytali..
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