Also, not to belabor the grimly obvious, but in addition to all of the deep structural stuff… we elected Donald Trump — Donald Fucking Trump — president of the United States of America.
As the joke goes, you can design buildings, you can feed kids, you can write award winning novels, but if you fuck just one horse… you’re not Joe the Architect, you’re not Joe the Philanthropist, you’re not Joe the Novelist. You’re Joe the Horsefucker. Forever.
Every treaty we negotiate, every alliance we try to shore up, every political stance we now take as a country, externally or internally, now has this priced in for the rest of our lives: we elected a racist game show host with an entourage of grifters, thugs and mafiosos President. And we might well do it again.
I think this overlooks that Bush Jr was guilty of causing a lot of disruption too. It's more America fucked a horse, the world agreed to forgive and forget, then they fucked another barnyard animal
So in the one hand yes. On the other hand… if you squinted, Bush could look like an honest mistake from the outside. He was the scion of a family with a generations long tradition of public service. He was the popular governor of a large state. And he ran on a platform that was essentially “Clintonism but with lower taxes and conservative judicial appointments.” That he then turned out to be the worst president in contemporary history (very much including Trump) was entirely a side-effect of the seismic distraction of 9/11.
Whereas Trump was Trump from beginning to end. He campaigned as a corrupt maniac, he governed like a corrupt maniac, and he attempted a coup like a corrupt maniac. So we’re a country that elects obviously corrupt maniacs now.
Also, you could argue to the outside world that Bush was elected while losing the popular vote and had to file lawsuits, etc., it was a complicated fluke, and barely won in '04 despite being a "war-time" president. With Trump, it's not a fluke anymore.
Yeah. I think the fact that GWB got the Republican Party used to the idea that they could win the presidency without a majority of the popular vote is one of the most underrated bad things about his presidency. And of course there was Roger Stone, the Zelig of political ratfuckery, right in the middle of it.
I know we all mean well with this common take, but I'm gonna frame comments like this for future reference.
Trump is, and was, far more seismically worse a leader, president, and phenomenon than Bush. He's simply in another category.
It's basically the difference between electing a "war criminal" and simply a literal criminal. To many right now, there is no difference; they're both horses to fuck.
Whether he becomes president again or no, history will mark how wrong that interpretation is, with an exclamation point. (Even Matt has that interpretation right now, at least with regard to foreign policy. He'll change his mind, begrudgingly.)
He damned near gave Biden cover, at least within the Blob, to end one, even!
I firmly think the only reason the generals didn't actually just ignore the withdrawal order is because there was no way to re-exert control over Afghanistan without at least 30X the troops they had to hand after Trump's drawdown.
Trump single-handedly made it far more likely that we will fight a war with Iran in the near-future, by ripping up the nuclear deal with them and replacing it with nothing. It will be basically impossible to not be at loggerheads with that country over its nuclear program indefinitely, solely due to Trump.
Moreover, he made it clear that America cannot be trusted to keep its agreements in general, and made it much more likely that diplomacy will fail to avert future conflicts. As Matt mentioned, this is not a bell you can unring. It will cost us incalculable sums for likely decades.
He would have almost certainly withdrawn the US from NATO, formally or informally, giving Russia tacit approval to carve up parts of eastern Europe, had he won a second term. He also made it privately clear that China should take over Taiwan, and that he would prefer the US not try to deter them or stand in their way.
Some think that kind of policy is "anti-war". It certainly is anti-stability. To each their own, I guess.
But yes, you're right--he did not start a war, while he was in office. Neither did he repeal Obamacare. I suppose I should thank him for both, but I won't.
I largely agree with all of this, just… if we’re comparing Trump and GWB’s legacies, I’m disinclined to give the _possible_ ramifications of Trump’s choices equal weight with the certainty of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted in Iraq.
Any disastrous effects of Trump's presidency will be indirect and long-term.
Whereas Bush's disasters were immediate and directly due to his actions while in office.
I don't think you can separate the two from a historical perspective; the appetite for a candidate like Trump only came about because of Bush's manifest failures.
The failures of the 2040's and 50's, assuming they occur, are likely to share a lot of parents, whereas the failures of the 2000's had only one.
Yeah, history is much more contingent than we like to think.
“What would Trump have done if 9/11 had happened on his watch?” is I think actually not so obvious a counter-factual as one might think now: circa 2001 Trump was still publicly identified as a democrat (albeit a pretty bloodthirsty pro-cop one) and if he’d run as a Perot-style spoiler in 2000 it would probably have been on a very different platform and with a very different brain trust than what eventually coalesced around him 16 years later. The basic facts of his impulsivity and incompetence would still be there of course but lacking the ghost of “Team B” in the form of Dick Cheney whispering into his ear about Iraq, I suspect he would have found an entirely different set of bedsheets to beshit.
This is fair, but the I think the more relevant comparison is the 2016 version of Trump (i.e. fully addled game show host Trump) being president on 9/11, or a similar event happening in September 2017. I agree with Henry that Trump’s response would have been an order of magnitude worse than Bush.
The lasting impact to the journalism profession from the Trump years is another bell that cannot be un-rung. Seeing journalists abandon professional ethics, openly advocate for dropping neutrality in reporting, lead the Resistance™ and uncritically accept every outlandish claim against Trump as fact has forever changed the standing of the press in the public's mind.
Taibbi and Greenwald are exceptions, and are writing about journalism's failures during the Trump years. But they are now completely independent from any mainstream publication, and routinely smeared as "Trumpers", fascists or racists (the go-to insults of the progressive left). I don't think their critiques will be heeded and we will have lost a valuable institution for generations.
The Taibbi/Greenwald arc may also be acting as a corrective to the journalistic derangement of late.
I've been reading both of them for as long as they've been writing, so I followed them to Substack. At first, they delivered potent critiques of *journalism* in the same contrarian style as their early writings on the nascent financial crisis and overreaction to 9/11—i.e., their wheelhouses. At the same time, I got so sick of the NY Times injecting social justice messages into every, single story, no matter the topic, that I quit reading it. (Mostly because it violates my rule of not consuming things that make me feel bad.) They were clearly trying to turn themselves into a digital media platform by chasing monthly active user / subscriber metrics and they made a bet that their audience wanted fodder to steer a conversation about literally any topic towards social justice at cocktail parties.
Now, however, Taibbi and Greenwald are 75% unreadable because Substack has pushed them into that same model. Their comments sections were quickly overrun with Trump supporters who mistook their criticism of modern journalism as lib-owning because activist journalism so often manifested as mis-reporting about Trump. Instead of impugning journalism, they pivoted to reporting on specific media outlets, as though CNN and MSNBC were prestigious news organizations that had fallen from grace and Rachael Maddow were Walter Cronkite. (But they are making a good living catering to a specific niche that no longer includes me, so good on them.)
Meanwhile, the Washington Post (which I did not stop reading) seems to have gotten the message and separated straight news from social justice messaging. And when I do happen across a NY Times story, the same thing seems to be happening there. They are both now getting into the newsletter business, which is a great way to quarantine partisan/ideological journalism-opinion. It seems like somehow the Atlantic was the big winner revenue-wise, since they are now poaching everyone from everywhere—I guess because their writing never pretended to be straight journalism and their stories average out to 'centrist', so maybe that is a model that works now too?
I fully agree that a great many journalists shit the bed during the Trump presidency and that way too many journalists spent/d way too much time on Twitter. But I can also see a future where The Media learns from the exodus to Substack, etc., and actually comes out the other end better equipped to do journalism in a world where reality and truth have become completely malleable.
It won't be long until right-wing media spirals into a deranged conspiracy too convoluted for outsiders to decipher—just look at FOX News post-Trump—which will leave plenty of space for mainstream reporting to make a comeback. Most people just want to keep up with current events via factual reporting, so there is still plenty of money to be made off a (newly-earned) reputation for straight news.
I could see something of a comeback if Fox loses the plot enough that it's no longer just background drone in every diner between Portland and Philadelphia.
Christ knows that for all we despise OANN and Newsmax, they don't actually have much clout.
Facebook is worse by far in terms of eyeballs and driving people's actual thinking.
What, exactly, is it about Taibbi and Greenwald that supposedly makes them “serious journalists” to conservatives, aside from that they piss the left off without being conservative?
I honestly don’t get it. Excepting some good early work, both have effectively abandoned journalism for a pseudo-intellectual, one-trick-pony form of grifting meant to fearmonger about one or two pet issues as a wedge to prop up “independent journalism” revenues.
The “mainstream” media’s obscene pro-cosmopolitan, pro-out group, almost anti-western liberalism stances are annoying to me as well.
But those two are just in the game to separate people from money as quickly as possible; any clear-headed assessment should point that way.
I read both of them occasionally. I follow them on Twitter. But they are my sort of counters to other media. If they come up with some story, I take it into consideration, but then I go and see what other people have to say about it. I do agree that they do come across as insufferable sometimes. Especially Greenwald.
Read Taibbi's writing about the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. Read Greenwald on the increase of the security state in the US, post 9/11. Both of them have their "biases", but they are not partisans. They approach stories with the intention of telling the truth, even if provocatively presented (especially true for Taibbi, who described Goldman Sachs as a "great vampire squid").
But they were not, and are not, partisans. Partisans modify their messaging in support of, or in opposition to, a particular political party. Partisans obfuscate, omit facts, spin dishonestly, employ hyperbole and abandon objectivity in pursuit of a political outcome. That is fine for partisans, as we all understand their role. But when journalists became partisans, the profession suffered. And it continues to suffer.
They are total partisans, it just so happens to be that they are partisan in favor of basically anything that "moderate democrats" aren't, whether that be Sanders, Trump, or Putin. Being wildly biased against a faction of a party is not any nobler than being biased against a whole party.
Greenwald pretty much attacks *all* Democrats these days, doesn't he? Are there any he writes positively about? He hates the party of FDR because he hates contemporary American liberalism. I think it really is that simple.
My interpretation of where he's coming from is a little bit more charitable (or maybe not, depending on your perspective). I think he starts with the premise that the United States - not any particular political faction but the United States as an entity - is the world's great malefactor, and that the only solution is to weaken and ultimately incapacitate it. He's anti-anti-Trump not because he thinks Trump is good, but because he knows Trump is bad. Trumpism is self-destructive for the United States, but the United States is bad, so Trumpism is good. The GOP is now more-or-less uniformly the party of Trump, so they are also bad for the United States - but the United States is bad, which makes the GOP good.
To spell this out a little more, the United States has been as successful and powerful as it is not because of the areas where we've had partisan disagreement, but because of the areas we've had broad consensus, continuity, and stability - our self-conception as a force for good, our celebration of liberal democracy, our emphasis (albeit spotty and at times hypocritical) on freedom and human rights, the inviolability of our Union, the non-newsworthy side of our foreign policy establishment (which includes but is not limited to the "blob" that Matt and others so often criticize), etc. Trump not only makes a mockery of all of these ideals with his actions, but he explicitly rejects them with his words. His vision of the world - which the GOP in general now shares - is a multipolar one without international cooperation or institutions where it's every country for itself, and where no country claims to be anything more than a selfish power-grabber, like Europe in the 1800s. The United States might still be the most powerful country in this world, but it would be far less powerful than it is today, so that's good. Trump also exacerbates internal divisions in the United States, which obviously weakens our ability to project our influence abroad - see the Iran example we discussed above - so that's good as well. (The dream outcome would be for the United States to be induced into breaking up into smaller countries like the USSR did, though I don't know if anyone actually considers that to be realistic anytime in the foreseeable future.)
In contrast, today it's mostly mainstream Democrats like Biden who are trying to uphold and restore the old consensus values. That means that Democrats are trying to keep the United States strong on the world stage, which means that Democrats are bad.
Respectfully, my comment was about journalism writ large, not Taibbi and Greenwald specifically. I don't really care much for, or about, either one of them.
My critique was about the abandonment of journalistic ethics and standards during the Trump years. The partisan comment was in support of this critique, not in response to anything you wrote specifically.
As noted, I don’t think your critique is terribly misplaced, though I think your diagnosis of the reasons behind it is incomplete.
The period of politics we’re entering today reminds me greatly of the “pointlessly partisan” politics of the Gilded Age, and journalism is coming to match.
There’s nothing to be done for it but wait and watch; the post-war “objective observer” consensus is hibernating while we figure out how to resurrect it for the digital age.
Actually, media failure is one more point suggesting 2016 was more important. For the last 4 days leading up to the election, literally every word above the fold on P1 of the *New York Times* was negative coverage of Clinton's email scandal. Rightwing special pleading aside, the true story of media failure for some time has been their bending over backwards to try to make an unbalanced political environment look balanced. That has continued, but the fact that Clinton's emails got more coverage than *all policy issues combined* in 2016 was the summit of that mountain.
Conservative persecution complex strikes again! Trump routinely calls the press the Enemy of the People, openly admits he lies routinely, and the problem is the press didn't show him *enough* deference.
Does it upset you that journalists displayed bias against the Nazis or Imperial Japan in histories of World War 2?
Binya, your comment might be the type of reflexive nonsense you're accusing John from FL of here. Where did John say anything about deference? Where did he say the press shouldn't criticize Trump? Where or when, anywhere in any comment, did John say he's a Trump supporter? It read like you're missing the whole point, which was the press let objectivity suffer and biases and blindspots to grow during the Trump years, which tarnished their credibility.
My view is that the two primary failures of US media are failing to communicate that: 1) the Republican policy agenda is at odds with what Americans want and 2) it is increasingly actively attempting to subvert American democracy.
The media has failures in its criticism of Trump. But I think to highlight that, when the other failures are so much serious, is wrong. It is also actively harmful. The constant criticism of journalists is contributing to their failure to accurately communicate to Americans what is happening in their government.
What he was trying to highlight was a credibility problem. A lack of credibility makes every kind of reporting more likely to be a failure because of distrust. And accurate criticism tends to be constructive criticism.
Personally my opinion of the current state of journalism took a nosedive shortly after buying a NYTs subscription. Their coverage of the summer of George Floyd and Covid were unbelievable biased. It makes it harder to trust their reporting on any other issue.
And number #1 is simply not true enough to stand without criticism. There's plenty of deep blue states where Dems can pass any law they want. Those states don't look like Swedens or Denmarks.
I think the two of you are talking past one another to an extent because you're both conflating "partisanship" with "ideological leaning".
I do think Binya is correct to say that the "mainstream" media in the US bends over backwards to avoid even the whiff of "partisanship," even at the expense of an unending attempt to pose (or create when needed) a balanced narrative between the two parties.
At the same time, ideologically, the majority of the decisionmakers and senior staff and the *vast* majority of junior staff come from a relatively narrow slice of the country with very narrow, undiverse ideological leanings. The best way I can think to describe it is *mindlessly*, reflexively cosmopolitan, in the shallowest, most self-hating manner possible.
I'll take, for instance, coverage of immigration under both Trump and Biden; the reflexive position held by almost all staff at major papers and non-Fox cable news networks has been that *any* enforcement measures taken against illegal immigration are fundamentally illegitimate, even immoral.
It often bleeds into their coverage and editorial choices, which is just damning, but even if it didn't, let's not delude ourselves into John and Jane Q Public don't know these people's positions. They all have Twitter, and John and Jane have Facebook, filled with screenshots of Twitter posts.
The press has hit on the idea of ramping up ideological content to drive revenue and maintain relevance in a digital age, but without the attendant partisanship. That latter is still a hold-over from the golden post-war era of media as a public good... it'll die soon enough.
"My view is that the two primary failures of US media are failing to communicate that: 1) the Republican policy agenda is at odds with what Americans want and 2) it is increasingly actively attempting to subvert American democracy."
I think both of these are substantively wrong for the media that John from FL is criticizing.*
1) As has been much discussed by Matt and others, there is very little Republican policy agenda right now which makes them actually more appealing to the broader public which is generally small c conservative toward change.
2) The NYT, WaPo, etc. all have reported repeatedly on Republican attempts to subvert democracy. Sometimes to the detriment of the message in that they often call everything a wolf instead of just the ones that are actually dangerous.
*None of this applies to most of the right wing media which rarely if ever complains about Republican issues other than to say they are not extreme enough.
1. Do you think the American public fundamentally has too low of an opinion of Trump due to media failures? Because that's what really matters, irrespective of some journalists getting Russia-gate wrong. I think the reality is exactly the opposite. To me, if a true sense of his sheer corruption, incompetence, lawlessness, and penchant for violence were understood, he'd be lucky to be a free man, let alone be the probable favourite for the 2024 election at this point.
2. I think what you've written is just wrong.
a) Large majorities of Americans support policies like lower drug prices and higher taxes on the wealthy. Most Democrats support and vote for these. Few, if any, Republicans do. That's why they are not enacted.
b) I agree there has been coverage of Republican election subversion. I think we'll have to agree to disagree whether it's been sufficient to the scale of the problem.
1) My opinion of Trump is so low that its hard for me to view anyone having a more positive view of him as being rationale. Knowing that, I try to compensate and perhaps I'm over compensating here. I still think that you can't look at any major media institution in America that is not explicitly right wing and think they haven't been anti Trump (even if for good reasons as well as bad!) over the last 4-5 years.
2) Both parties have issues where they hold majority support in the public. Saying the other party opposes those policies and thus they are against what the American public wants is both accurate and misleading at the same time.
The Dems are attempting to raise the cap on the SALT tax right as we speak, and the way they're trying to lower drug prices is controversial at best. And I lived in for a couple decades where the Dems were as much the party of NIMBY as the Rs were. Meanwhile people are moving to Florida, Texas and Georgia for economic opportunities and housing. So which party is doing what on those two issues is not always so clear cut.
No disagreement. I think this actually supports my critique that journalists who abandoned their ethics and professional standards did lasting harm to the profession, needlessly.
No doubt in my mind Trump would have loved to shoot a bunch of journalists, imprison opposition figures, and suspend elections. But he doesn’t actually have the brainpower, charisma, or means.
The way I understand the current situation is as one of America’s periodic ideological realignments, made more painful snd more fraught by social media’s newfound ability to let us look at our fellow citizens’ most private thoughts all day long.
Left alone, it’ll resolve itself in time as new coalitions shake out and new norms are forged.
My fears are twofold:
More prosaically, that one party, most likely the GOP, doesn’t leave it alone and decides instead to try to smash everything rather than changing in the way required to accommodate a new political spectrum.
Secondly, that the new political spectrum is markedly Latin American in makeup, with similar outcomes to Latin America 1930-1980. (Horse is already paste but gotta keep beating)
I should add to the social media bit: “and our tradition media overlords’ desperate attempts to maintain clout and profits by nutpicking the worst of those thoughts to air nightly.”
I mean, if we're diving into all this, one of the things that people who compare Trump to fascists don't point out is that he certainly didn't seem to have any ambition to lead wars of annexation, and indeed wasn't even particularly into the anti-terrorist or "humanitarian" wars that his predecessors engaged in.
While you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Mussolini (to paraphrase dril), Italy defeated Ethiopia in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War by any reasonable metric, although a guerrilla war continued in the hinterlands into 1941 when the British invaded and liberated the country.
I regret adding Taibbi and Greenwald to my comment. I didn't realize how polarizing they are. I took away from my main point, which just proves I am not cut out to be a good journalist!
I’m always amazed by what particular subject people get riled up about in my long ass comments. I’ll write something and think damn this is going to make people mad. Then they glom onto something else
I feel like you're really discounting Greenwald's Brazil corruption reporting. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say his single source broke that damn wide open.
It wasn’t until non-biased reporting about how Trump abandon the Kurds in Iraq and Syria that I really turned hard-core against him. Honestly, all those Russia gate articles tended to make me give them the benefit of the doubt. And then as the story broke down and you learned more and more, it really made me not trust the media. The plucky young journalist who pisses everybody off just does not exist anymore.
This is going to continue to be a problem for Democrats, because it got to a point where even the accurate stories are doubted. I wonder if there’s a direct line to be drawn between some of the medias performance during the Trump years and people not believing the severity of Covid and/or the safety of vaccines.
It was my understanding that the Russiagate stuff was mostly proven true (some of the more scandalous stuff from the Steele Dossier like the pee tape aside, which we'll never really know the truth of), Manafort and Stone taking the fall (and Mueller's extreme deference to the Executive and self-imposed narrow investigation focus) gave Trump sufficient legal insulation in the final report. But the overall outline: that the Russian government worked with members of the Trump campaign's inner circle to time releases of damaging information on Clinton to deflect negative attention away from Trump, as well as sewing chaos across social media to his benefit, was proven true by both the Mueller Report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Bill Barr getting to put out his summary of the Mueller Report first (complete exoneration*) means that the Right acts like it was all a big hoax, and Leftists ignore it because it also says that they were played for suckers by Putin, so only the cringe liberals that nobody likes still treats it like it was a thing.
*Except for all those people in Trump's innermost circle who went to jail over it.
What are you doing here is taking the dose year, and then basically saying that all the stuff the media went out of their way to sensationalize and use was Falls, but this part was true, the part the media wasn’t hammering. The media doesn’t win credibility by being partly right and partly wrong. They have to be absolutely right. There was under reporting about how the original basis of the dossier air came from the Clinton campaign. Now we looking discover that the main source was some guy that has admitted to the FBI he lied to Steele. You honestly can’t see how the whole thing adds to the presses credibility when it comes to politics?
Two things are true: that Trump was up to no good with the Russians in ways that were at odds with our democracy, and that the media went overboard in its reporting on it (I'll never forget Maddow's wall to wall Mueller reporting -- gah)
With all my problems with the media on this story, I'll never forgive the main culprit -- Trump -- with what he was doing to our democracy, on this and thousands of other things.
Exactly my sentiments Marc. Media bias comes in several ways.
1. Outright lies. Which are rare.
2. Getting misled by sources, and checking them because of bias.
3. Minimizing the opposite side of an argument. This is fairly comment.
4. Reporting on rumors, which is technically accurate but amplifies those rumors.
5. Selective editorial decisions about what to report on.
6. Leaving out facts that might be relevant.
7. Prioritizing what you report on.
8. Highlighting certain facts up at the top of an article, and then adding in another one at the bottom of the article where people are less likely to read them.
9. Choice of headlines
10. Mixing percentages, failing to disaggregate, using whole numbers without context
Like I said before. The Russia gate thing didn’t turn me hard-core against Trump, because there was never enough factual basis for it. It was always rumors.
What did turn me off was the hard documented thing. Especially the Kurds. Later Covid. A lot of how he just made unforced errors.
The media's inability to deal with Trump in a way that was consistent with journalistic practices and standards was due in part to the revolutionary nature of Trump's personality and performance. Nothing they reported on had the effect of holding him to account. His thousands of lies, duly reported on? No difference, He and his administration's scandals, following each other in desensitizing order? No difference.
I think in the end, the media -- knowing it couldn't educate the nation as a whole -- went into its shell (or its bubble) and aimed its reporting at comforting those who were already totally in the anti-Trump camp.
(But despite my criticism here, to my dying day I'll defend the media for not helping the Trumpites pump up that October surprise Hunter Biden story. These subverters of American democracy didn't deserve the benefit of the doubt on this one.)
This is utter nonsense. The media reported what there was to report, and if anything erred far too much on the side of "things are unclear" when the lede should have been "even in the best case scenario the Trump campaign and Russia were definitely working together to influence a US election." Moreover, the source of the "dossier" only matters if you accept the conspiratorial right's version of events where it was the start of the investigation. That is patently untrue as the Mueller report makes clear; no part of the investigation was solely or even mainly informed by it.
Russia influenced our elections. The Trump campaign accepted their help and communicated with them to help them do it. That's incredible. As to the press, their failure is that they failed to say that to the public clearly enough.
Man you guys get mad over this shit. I have no desire to debate a non-swing voter. I’m guessing you’re a straight party ticket guy. Registered Democrat. There’s probably not a single position the Democrats have that you disagree with. So your view of things is always going to be through that lens. It’s boring. Have a great day.
Impressive textbook Ad Hominem there. "If the speaker is someone I perceive as a Democrat, I will literally ignore every single fact, claim and argument inside." Good way to make sure that epistemic bubble stays closed.
But here's some communication Trump himself literally admitted was accurate:
"This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump" -Email to Don Jr., June 3, 2016
"if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer" -Jr's response.
Really all you have to know, even though there's a mountain more.
What parts do you think the media was sensationalizing, and were wrong about? From my perspective, however much they sensationalized it, they got the shape of the story correct: the Russian government hacked the Clinton campaign and the DNC and they coordinated the release of damaging information they recovered from that operation with the coordination of senior Trump campaign officials using Wikileaks as an intermediary, and ran a disinformation campaign on social media, to damage the Clinton campaign and boost the Trump campaign.
The Steele Dossier is a separate thing about how people jump to conclusions. If Steele wrote a report saying "my sources tell me that (X) happened", and then later the media says "the Steele Dossier alleges (X) happened", and the reader takes away "X happened", then that's not necessarily a failing of the media so much as it is a failing of the reader. It means X might have happened, or might not have happened, but further investigation needs to be done to prove it.
Secondly, the origin of the Steele Dossier was from the Jeb Bush campaign trying to get dirt on Trump during the primary. When the Jeb campaign stopped paying for it because Trump was looking like he was going to clinch the nomination, Clinton took over paying for it to use it for the general.
We might get to the truth on the pee tape. Danchenko was indicted and the case links him to Dolan. It's possible it comes out that this was all made up.
I think that the combination of reporting that was not very careful along with many journalists’ lack of humility really made a lot of people skeptical of the media. The coverage of the lab leak theory is a good example of this phenomenon but this sort of stuff keeps happening. At some point it makes sense to be skeptical of the media
The media did a thing that I think of as the “180 degrees from Trump” fallacy. Whatever Trump said, they ran with something 180 degrees from it, entirely opposite, rather than find a truth at a 20 degree or 90 degree remove from what Trump said.
Lab leak was a great example. When something has truly been debunked, it doesn’t take me long to find a thorough, satisfying debunking online. “Fact checking” sites reported that lab leak had been debunked. There was no real debunking, obviously, but “we don’t really know” doesn’t fully refute Trump. Everyone decided that 180 degrees from Trump was a greater priority than wrestling with facts and evidence.
What I learned since 2016: if your view of the world or important issues is in any way a reaction to Trump, for or against, you are unreliable. When working to discover what is or is not true, leave Trump out of your investigative process, keep him out of your mind altogether.
The timeline of GOP hostility to the covid vaccine does not seem to support that idea. When trump/pence were talking up the soon to be released vaccines in October, there was no conservative pushback (that I saw anyway). It was only Trump lost that conservatives turned on the covid vaccine.
Agree with much of what you say about the media - it did not acquit itself well by post WW2 standards, but maybe market forces have made those expectations obsolete and we just haven't come to terms with it yet. Maybe Fox was ahead of the curve and the rest are catching up.
But I disagree about Greenwald - he's like the punk rocker of journalism. Sometimes he makes good music but his attitude is always one of negativity, cynicism, self-righteousness from a posture of nonresponsibility for coming up with a realistic, workable alternative, etc. Can't stand him.
The journalist polarization comes from the readers and the nature of the internet. Not political elites. Look at the comments you are getting in a community that tries to be moderate.
We are awash in information. Everyone is armed to the teeth with facts that support their view. Sam Harris recently made this point in why he doesn’t have Bret Weinstein on his show to discuss vaccines. There are too many studies from Singapore or Israel, or wherever. A finding here or there to refute or put into context. Sense making is tough with little data it may be tougher with too much data. Trying to rise above the motivated reasoning is nearly impossible. Collective reasoning with people we like (this is important) but disagree with is our best chance of getting to higher levels of truth. It’s hard.
Also think about Facebook in this counterfactual. How much of the media hate for Facebook is really about the fact that FB helped Trump win in 2016? I mean, journalists would still hate FB because they saw colleagues get laid off in the 2014 "pivot to video," but I think we would see no more articles decrying FB in the NYT or WaPo than we would see about, say Uber.
It's hard to know how important 2020 was, obviously there's a lot of the Biden administration to play out. But, equally, looking at the conduct of the Trump administration post-election with the grown ups all gone, I would not underestimate the potential damage of a Trump 2nd term. (Hopefully we won't find out).
But, I think 2000 was the real "most important election of our lifetime", the difference on Climate and Iraq was big.
I have often thought that election, and the Bush V. Gore decision, was something of an inflection point in US history. Prior to that we were in the afternoon sunshine of the post-Cold War Clinton boom, when our biggest national traumas were oral sex and the OJ trial. Within ten months of the Supreme Court's appointment of W. Bush as president, 911 happened. And we were off to the races of national decline.
I genuinely believe that the more fucked up politics gets, 2000 will become more and more elevated as Millennials age and turn into a sort of "1963 counterfactual," in the same way that a segment of Boomers are obsessed with the idea of JFK living and keeping the country out of the Vietnam War. Doesn't matter that an Al Gore Presidency doesn't fundamentally alter the politics of climate change at the time. It just will take on a bigger meaning about what could have been.
The reason I think Gore does matter for Climate is not that I think he would have passed something big, it's that a modest amount of progress starting in 2001 could have an outsized impact by 2021, especially technological development.
It's odd to me that you seem to think of this only in climate terms. Or maybe more accurately, seem to think those of us who think 2000 was Waterloo think of it that way. I certainly don't...that's not even near the top of the list. The big ticket items are:
2. We certainly don't go to Iraq.
3. We probably just do something comparatively minor in Afganistan, a la first Gulf War.
4. We maybe, just maybe don't do any of that because 9/11 doesn't happen.
5. If 9/11 does happen, Gore instead of Bush gets the most incredible rally-round-the-flag effect since WWII and ushers in huge congressional majorities, which enable transformative things that are hard to pinpoint.
6. The judiciary is utterly transformed.
7. Entitlements are shored up the old fashioned way by adjusting tax rates, rather than put on the privatization chopping block.
You may have noticed that I left off #1. That's because it deserves special discussion. The *real* reason 2000 was Waterloo is that it was the moment US democracy died. A lot of people think the attempted coup of 2020 was that moment, and others say it's still on life support awaiting execution via the structural one-party system enabled by gerrymandering, voter suppression, replacement of local election officials, and outright state-legislative-supremecy just ignoring election results. All those people are wrong; it's been a dead man walking for quite some time.
In Bush v Gore The Supreme Court Five issued a simply lawless decision and just said "we're putting our guy in there" and that was the ballgame. They were so open about it that they wrote in the opinion that it should never be considered as precedent for anything. It was pure power of partisanship, with no respect whatsoever for constitution or democratic legitimacy. From that moment it all rolls downhill. Sarah Palin's "real America", REDMAP, scorched-earth fillibusters, slow-rolling all federal judicial nominations, deciding it's OK to work with Russia to subvert an election, the 2020 coup, and the current assault on democracy all flow from that same wellspring of nihilistic power. The republic has been dead for 21 years; most of us just haven't noticed.
I think Vietnam as a generational event looms large over the Boomer psyche. I think while 9-11 is a signature event for Millennials, like the assassination of JFK was for Boomers, the invasion of Iraq is far less impactful. I think the lack of a draft is significant.
I think all of the points you make are very reasonable for the long term impacts of a point of departure from the 2000 election. I just don't think they have much cultural meaning to aging Millennials by 2040 or 2050.
An average Millennial around the age of 60 in 2050. Sure, if US democracy is in shambles, you can make a very good point about the 2000 election. More likely Trump will be seen as the point of departure by most people. But to the extent that Millennials will be looking at the world impacted by climate change, and I believe many will be doing so with regret and concern, their narrative of what could have been will be to elevate the importance of Al Gore.
I see your point much more clearly now, thanks. I had failed to foreground your comparison to the 1963 counterfactual. I find that a pretty reasonable supposition; certainly my way of thinking about these things is far, far from a typical Millennial's, though I am (barely) part of the group. I doubt many Millennials will be thinking much of anything about any of these moments in a few decades, but then I doubt a very large fraction of Boomers are thinking about the parallel example so that's fair. So yeah, works for me.
Still...glad you gave me an excuse to expound on why *I* think 2000 was when the train came off the tracks.
If the Republic is dead at the moment, I hate to think of what you thought of every election conducted before probably 1940, and most of the ones after?
Not saying everything's fine, but systems of governance have more inertia and are generally more durable than the Doom-ist crowd likes to believe.
We're not yet in "toss election results without consequence" territory.
We came within a gnat's hair of it last time, and now they're taking a hammer to the election machinery. If the GOP wins 47% of the national vote next year, they'll take the House and probably the Senate. If Biden beats Trump in 2024 with the same margins as 2020, Trump will be the next President. Please don't be the frog in slowly heating water.
In December 2000 I was completely calm about the situation. I realized what had happened, but felt the institutions were more important than the outcome and applauded Gore for gracefully bowing out. So I'm not a "doomer" as you put it. But what has happened since then has been a fast march to a one-party fake democracy. Dems win more votes, and GOP wins the elections. If you think what they're doing at the state level won't accelerate that you're nuts. If they get 47% of the nationwide vote next year they'll take the House by a substantial margin and probably the Senate too. If Biden doesn't completely blow out Trump in 2024 they'll install the latter. After that....sorry, game over.
May you rot in hell for all eternity. At least your ego will be there to keep you company.
Think of all the discourse and other crap over the past few years that would we would not have been subject to had someone's ego not made him think that press conference was OK. Had someone's ego than not forced him to send that letter 10 days before the election.
According to internal polls from both campaigns, HRC was going to win by about 6 nationally.
Let's not forget the reason he was in charge of that investigation: Loretta Lynch (Obama's AG) recused herself out of the appearance of impropriety because of her friendship with Bill Clinton (the infamous tarmac scene), leaving Comey to take over. The people who had a problem with this kind of impropriety had no problem with Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr acting as Trump's personal henchmen.
He continued to do this (Hagel, Gates) as a way to seem bi-partisan, but it was too late. He thought he would get credit for it, and earlier Presidents probably would have, but the game was gone at that point.
"A weird fact about Obama is that he’s regarded as a huge failure by progressive elites"
I have spent less time around DC progressive elites than MY has, but I have spent poop-loads of time around liberal college faculty (am one, married one, drank beers with hundreds), and MY's quote above does not reflect how Obama is regarded in my peer group. I think the vast majority of us would describe Obama as the greatest president of our lifetimes.
Allow me to use a sports metaphor: If I were the kind of person who spent all of my time talking to NBA analytics people, I might think that smart basketball fans think that Russell Westbrook was a huge failure. But if I took a step back and asked serious basketball fans, basically none of them would describe Westbrook as a huge failure. And if I asked the right questions of the analytics people, I could probably get most of them to say that while Westbrook's counting stats look way better than his analytics do, he is still a great NBA player.
I think MY may be spending too much time talking to the liberal policy equivalent of NBA analytics people and using that to represent what most liberals think.
I can kind of see his point. During the primary, there was a long period of time where it seemed like everyone was trying to run away from Obama, or talk about "that wasn't enough".
Then Super Tuesday happened, reality intervened, and people started realizing that the Democratic primary electorate wasn't nearly as far to the left as they had pushed themselves to believe.
Failure seems to strong. It needs to be qualified. Maybe ... failure to meet expectations. That's more my sense but I also had huge expectations. Still even over 10 years later the lack of any criminal prosecution for the banking crisis stings. I just can't shake that. He sold out to Wall St. interests. I wanted my pound of flesh.
Echoing your comments about my real world progressive academic bubble*: Obama was/is awesome! Overwhelming majority seem to personally and professionally admire the guy. I have heard the (positive) Reagan comparison multiple times.
*Don't know many in the humanities departments, but know lots in the metro area. Shrugs...
I agree with you, but note Matt didn't say "rank and file Democrats" or even "progressives" generally. He said "progressive elites" which I think might have been better phrased "elite progressive activists" but is still reasonably on-target. So I agree with both of you.
He's not talking about "what most liberals think" - the sentence you quote notes that Obama "is beloved by rank-and-file Democrats" - he's talking about the liberal policy equivalent of NBA analytics people.
Westbrook is extremely talented and someone who plays with admirable tenacity, but he fails to elevate the teams he plays for. It's in that sense that he's a "huge failure."
I like your analysis, but would pivot it slightly. I think the analytics people like Matt might look at what happened and see details about what happened with the country and the Democratic party itself. But non analytic activists look at Obama and see that the country responded to his presidency not by electing the Democratic version of Bush Sr, but instead elected the Republican version of Jerry Springer (? is there a better Democratic analogue?).
Regarding Hillary Clinton, I don't think anyone of sound mind thought it impossible she could lose.
Look, we all have a friend here or there who secretly admires Trump's viciousness and powerlust. We all of us, even fans, saw Clinton as a distrustful, mediocre politician, albeit with an inspiring resume and roster of achievements. She drove all of us bonkers with her scripted, hesitant manner, political poison in a narcissistic era.
BUT. . . fact remains, had she won, she would have been the first woman president, and the first woman to be the most powerful human on Earth since Catherine the Great, or maybe ever.
That prospect, and temptation, was what led Democrat elites to stick by her, more than anything. More than antipathy for Bernie, or disdain for Biden. Speaking only for myself, and people in my orbit at the time.
Thanks for your post, which was actually insightful and quite courageous. I hadn't been able to express my support for Clinton at the time in as eloquent terms as you have.
Feel like we almost can't overstate how bad the Iran stuff is, especially as it mostly flies under our radar. It's..... it's so bad. Iran is now on a pretty direct path to get a nuclear weapon, I've seen arms control experts compare its current trajectory to where North Korea was just prior to getting the bomb. Obama successfully pulled them off that path, but Cotton and other Republican Party crazies told them (Cotton wrote the mullahs a letter!) that there was no point in abiding by the agreement as a future R President would just revoke it. Now Biden is trying to negotiate another arms agreement with them, and Cotton & Cruz & the other crazies are directly telling Iran again- in writing- 'don't bother agreeing to anything, Republicans will revoke the deal immediately in the future'.
Iran should not have a nuclear weapon, and no matter how bad you think their government is- that's an argument for them *not getting one*. If they do successfully test one, the US would have to at a minimum conduct extreme bombardment to destroy it- thus starting yet another Middle Eastern war. With the US thus distracted, I'm pretty sure China would invade Taiwan posthaste, and who knows what Russia would be up to in Eastern Europe. This is where the hawkish wing of the GOP is leading us, directly to World War 3
As I see it, having nukes is in Iran's best interest - full stop. They have a much stronger strategic position relative to the US, the Saudi's, etc. once they do and given the blinding obviousness of that, I don't see how anything we do either through the Obama agreement or through Trump sanctions does anything besides slow things down a bit.
One of the under appreciated lessons of Iraq is that it would have never been invaded if it actually had nukes. You can invade to try and stop a country from getting them, but once they actually have the weapons the MAD principle kicks in and changes the dynamics enormously.
The thing that gets me is that one of the arguments for invading Iraq was that it would convince Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program because they would know that the US would not tolerate any nuclear proliferation. I always thought that was a bizarre idea — if the US has your country on its axis of evil list, the most obvious way to prevent an invasion is becoming a nuclear power.
I think if you could really dig into the psychology of hardcore Iraq war proponents and get past their evasions, you'd find that none of them actually cared about nuclear nonproliferation per se. Their root motivation was a belief that whoever has the biggest balls wins in the long run, and nothing else really matters next to that.
Agreed. If anything, the Iraq War has pretty much proven that every two-bit dictator out there needs to lay hands on a credible deterrent if ever on the US's shit list. I'm sure Tehran, Pyongyang, and Islamabad will be happy to oblige before the decade is out.
Why setting that precedent was considered a good idea at the time... is beyond me.
"...every two-bit dictator out there needs to lay hands on a credible deterrent if ever on the US's shit list. I'm sure Tehran, Pyongyang, and Islamabad will be happy to oblige before the decade is out."
I disagree for two reasons:
1) All nuclear powers want the club to very small, because it then gives them outsized influence and because every country that gains them increases the risk that some country will have them used against them. Iran might be allies with Hezbollah, but do they really want them to have nukes outside of Tehran's control - I doubt it.
2) Another side effect from 9/11 was that it reinforced MAD to the world. The US was hit !relatively! lightly compared to what other countries have suffered or what a WMD would do and we lost our minds - invaded two+ countries, spent a fortune in money and political capitol trying to track down and destroy who did it. It took 20 years before our blood lust ran out and Biden pulled us out of Afghanistan. I could see Iran (or other countries) wanting nuclear weapons as a deterrent to the US, but should anything they develop and sell ever be used against the US, its likely we would include them in a nuclear response because we've demonstrated very clearly we actually are that crazy.
I have no expertise of any kind in this area, but I'm not sure weapon production is enough to achieve MAD. They would also need some kind of serious delivery system, the ability to protect their production and storage sites, and a secure supply of fissile material.
Let's say they create one secretly and are well into producing a second by the time US/Israel/Saudi intelligence services find out. Their ability to deploy that first nuke and finish producing the second doesn't seem that high even if just Israel alone responds.
Even if they produce, say, a dozen warheads, they would probably be able to deploy to a local battlefield but unlikely to Tel Aviv and almost certainly not to the US, whom they would need to be able to hit for MAD to kick in.
No strategic expert either, but IMO its really more of a timing perspective. If the US were to invade, then Iran can use the threat of a nuke to deter. Could they destroy the entirety of the US like Russia or China - probably not. Can they pose a serious threat to having a boat sail into NY, San Francisco, Houston, etc. harbors and set off a couple of nukes - yes. The latter would be sufficiently destructive that it completely changes the US risk relative to intervention.
"If they do successfully test one, the US would have to at a minimum conduct extreme bombardment to destroy it- thus starting yet another Middle Eastern war."
That would be a colossally stupid mistake on the part of the United States. A nuclear Iran is not our problem, unless we make it one by not being able to quit our obsession with the Middle East region even though it has long since lost its strategic importance to the US.
I agree with much of this, except, I don't think it's at all likely, much less a given ("the US would have to...") America would attack a confirmed nuclear power, which Iran would at that point be. Maybe Israel would. Iran can't be any worse than North Korea, and we didn't attack them.
We'd have to be crazy to attack Iran anyway, nukes or no nukes. Just as it would have been crazy to attack pre-nuke NK. Bill Clinton actually considered it for a second in 1994, but he realized it would have been a catastrophe.
Well, amend that to I think it's likely the US would do a preemptive attack. Maybe Iran isn't any worse than North Korea, but the US national security apparatus/blob is much more hostile to Iran. And I'd imagine a nuclear-armed Iran would start making hostile, threatening statements to Israel pretty fast.
The US might peremptorily attack when they think Iran is close, or after a nuclear test but before they're actually able to put it on a missile. Not saying I support it! But I think it's definitely something that could happen....
I agree that it's highly unlikely the US attacks a confirmed nuclear Iran. But what I wonder is what a future timeline in which Iran develops nuclear weapons, and US begins to hedge it's agenda in the Middle East accordingly, looks like versus a baseline in which the US stops caring so much about Middle East oil, and begins to back down its commitments in the Middle East accordingly.
What *conceivable* world do we live in that it's necessary to destroy Iran if it has a working nuclear weapon?
Fucking *North Korea*, run by batshit insane fiat by increasingly untethered-from-reality fat guys, has nukes that range most of the CONUS and we haven't felt the need to kill 20 million people to sort that out.
In an ideal world, I'd strongly prefer for the Islamic Republic not to have nukes, but for entirely different reasons. Iran getting the bomb is an entirely manageable problem for Israel, and basically nobody else. There is no earthly reason that we should conduct "extreme bombardment" of _anybody_ just to prevent the Israelis from having to ever consider anything other than a maximally belligerent foreign policy.
The problem with a nuclear Iran is that it makes the rest of the world strongly invested in _preserving_ the current Iranian government, on the grounds that the only thing worse than a nuclear Iran is a nuclear failed state in a protracted civil war a la Libya or Syria. (And it would be much, much worse.)
But we have probably shat that bed permanently at this point.
One uncomfortable thought I've been having lately, is, to a substantial degree Condi Rice and the Bush people were right not to buy in too heavily to the narrative (apparently being pushed by a lot of senior foreign policy Democrats) circa 2001 that terrorism had overtaken malevolent state actors as the most potent national security threat facing America. After 911 there was plenty of sneering Monday morning quarterbacking about the Bush team's antiquated world view. But turns out they (of course!) were right: ragtag murderers in far away caves and madrassas obviously were never the threat that a resurgent Russia or rising China would or could become.
That administration's mistake, of course, was not doing proper due diligence with respect to the Al Qaeda organization, and, failing that, its tragically inept response to said group's spectacular win in September, 2001. Indeed, in retrospect, had they allowed their original instincts to guide them, the Bush people might have correctly realized that massive overreaction to Islamist terrorism would have diverted critical attention and resources away from actual existential threats (namely, the nuclear armed governments headquartered in Moscow and Beijing), thereby gravely weakening the country with the passage of time.
>>ragtag murderers in far away caves and madrassas obviously were never the threat that a resurgent Russia or rising China would or could become.<<
The serendipity of the 9/11 attack(*) was that it nicely filled the gap in our requirement for an existential threat between the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s and the rise of China in the past few years.
Compared to global terrorism, the fracas in the Balkans were just a paltry placeholder and far too little to sustain the national security state for very long.
(*) NB: 9/11 was terrible. As Janet in The Good Place would say, however, "Not an existential threat."
I suspect the Democratic Party as a whole all wishes they could have taken back the 2016 nomination contest and redone it. Joe Biden is the obvious replacement for Clinton, but hardly the only one. Sherrod Brown could have won, Deval Patrick too, there are others. I suspect the Party had and has far less respect for Biden than he deserves (hence why they didn’t back him).
I think the more important lesson is the Democrats are a big tent coalition in every sense, and need to expand their coalition not shrink it. The political choices made since 2014 have all served to shrink the appeal of Democrats while alienating the largest swath of the American electorate. The assumption a changing country would naturally benefit liberals was wrong; and it’s not clear to me they can reverse course.
There are some real issues with the viability of a party that is based on 'everybody that's not a white man'. 1) It's a diverse coalition that will always want to go in a thousand directions. 2) You need to win the votes of some white men to actually get to 50% in a lot of these races.
You didn't mention RBG, but one big question mark in this counter-factual is whether she retires before 2018 or not. Since the Dems lose the senate in 2018 and the WH in 2020, the Republicans still get to appoint a 5th (more conservative than Kennedy) justice if she still refuses to strategically retire.
One possibility is that the insanity of not retiring in 2017 is even more obvious than in 2013 and this leads both RBG and Breyer to do the right thing. But it's a pretty huge question either way.
The fact the Breyer is apparently really and truly going to wait until Mitch McConnell is Senate Majority Leader again before dying is the single most concise indictment of the legal/judicial arm of the Democratic Party that I can imagine.
I think this ignores the fact that there would have been zero stimulus under a Biden administration with a McConnell Senate, and we would currently be entering a second Great Depression as Republicans happily took power for the next two decades. At least now the economy is good
A bad midterm for the Democrats in 2018 does likely help cement further GOP control at the state level, producing more gerrymandering. We'd see worse maps in Virginia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, to be sure.
But a GOP victory in 2020 does still induce a midterm effect for 2022, even if the GOP gets to draw the lines, and does help in the Senate. We'd almost certainly see races like Virginia go Democratic this year.
Even if there's a Trumpism without the Trump figure in the White House in Matt's scenario, you have to consider just how bad the 2020s would be in the counterfactual. We'd have a better Supreme Court. As Matt argues better foreign relations. A better outlook on politics among Democratic operatives. No January 6th.
Is the fact that the GOP is passing a massive tax cut in 2021 instead of 2017/2018 a big problem when comparing the counterfactuals? And Covid response/economic crisis.
I don’t think people appreciate how Democrats are 1 bad election away from making the Senate unwinnable for a generation (similar to what 1958 was for the Republicans). That election would’ve been 2018 under a Clinton presidency. It might be 2024 depending on how events play out.
I would never make a prediction that a chamber is unwinnable for twenty years.
I think it's very possible that 2024 sees the GOP get dangerously close to 60 votes in the Senate. But I wouldn't predict that Democrats are shut out for twenty years. 2044 is a long, long way away.
Maybe. I trust when you say that you mean he couldn't get the nomination. Anyone with a "D" or "R" next to their name stands a pretty decent shot at winning the White House these days (that is, if they're the nominee).
If anyone is ever foolish enough to choose his as their vice president, they'd better hire a poison taster though. I think that's the only way he could become president.
This raises the question of if less stimulus in a Biden 2020 with Covid risks a second Great Depression that Republicans cannot get out of in 2021 and beyond.
Except with a competent president we probably start acting on COVID a few weeks earlier. Sparing NYC the worst of it and allowing us not to totally shut down/live with it. Also with a reasonable Republican running you'd likely have better Republican vaccine uptake. Outside of the US COVID really helped the incumbent.
This is an interesting point. Even though other countries had less stimulus. I suppose the question is how little stimulus would McConnell allow in alt-2020, and how else could the Federal Reserve act independently.
Very interesting piece, but I don't think Bernie would have won. I didn't think it in 2016, and after spending most of the pandemic era in rural Michigan, my opinion on this is stronger. The former president is a cult of personality, and there are a lot of people, in non-coastal areas at least, who buy what he's selling.
I would like to think that O'Malley would have won--he is my kind of official, competent and workmanlike--but on that I'm not sure. Same with Biden, though I have more confidence on that. Both would, I think, have attracted significant support from actual conservatives/moderates who might not have supported Hillary for a variety of reasons.
I’m also skeptical that Bernie could’ve won Pennsylvania. Central and wester PA has a lot of voters whose families came to the US from Eastern Europe relatively recently and “socialism” is not something they’re going to vote for.
I agree! I think of those parts of PA as essentially midwestern. My father grew up in Detroit in a heavily Eastern European neighborhood and as an adult had friends from similar neighborhoods in and around Pittsburgh.
I think the biggest alternate history of 2016 is that Marco Rubio wins the Republican nomination. This would happen if Trump doesn’t run, or if the other candidates besides Trump and Cruz drop out before Super Tuesday.*
If that happens, Rubio probably wins an even more decisive victory over the unpopular Hillary Clinton. The GOP wins the senate seats in Nevada and New Hampshire, giving them more of a cushion. 2018 is still tough for them since Repeal & Replace probably succeeds, but the map is good enough for them to expand their senate majority.
Then Covid happens, and I believe Rubio would’ve been much more popular than Trump on this. He would’ve avoided Trump’s insane denial of the severity of the problem while criticizing some of the excesses of blue state governors. He would’ve easily won reelection under these circumstances.
In this alternate timeline the Republicans have over 55 Senators, a House majority, a durable Supreme Court majority and control over redistricting. They are led by a popular president whose just led the country through its greatest crisis since World War II. The party has integrated some elements of Trumpism but is still attached to Ryanism.
That’s an interesting world!
*I actually think if Rubio doesn’t get shredded by Chris Christie at that one debate he probably comes in second during the New Hampshire primary and Kasich drops out.
Yeah, that's my recollection. The media had tried various efforts at saying how well he had done in earlier debates as well, and there was a thing about he was third in Iowa, then going to be second in NH, and then . . . Christie ate him alive.
From a politics perspective, this might be right. But 100,000+ dead Iraqis would probably argue that the 2000 election was more consequential from a real world policy perspective. We also wouldn't have exited the Kyoto Protocol, which would probably be more impactful given that time matters so much on Climate Change.
Except there's basically no objective reason to think Gore would have been any more likely to actually prevent 9/11 than Bush other than, "GOP sux; Dems rule!" (I agree that Gore would have made better choices post-9/11.)
Except there is an argument that the Bush administration did not take threats of terrorism seriously pre-9/11. That is the objective reason to make a case that Gore could be marginally more likely. I think it's reasonable for the argument to be "Gore taking threats more seriously increases the odds of stopping 9-11 to 3% (arbitrarily low number)."
Gore may have been willing to take it more seriously, but the "bin Laden determined to strike" memo and other US intelligence from the Summer 2000 time period, AFAIA, didn't give any specifically actionable information that anyone has ever identified to be able to say what Gore could have actually done differently to stop the attacks. To put it another way, I'm sure FDR took the possibility of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 extremely seriously, but that didn't stop it from happening. If someone can't say what concrete actions could have been done differently so as to change the outcome, it's just wanking about how awesome your preferred historical actor is.
Yeah this. When I frame the effects of SCOTUS not stealing the 2000 election (below somewhere, probably), I say the important thing is we would never have gone to Iraq, and probably would have done much less in Afganistan (simplest example, accepted the surrender the Taliban offered in 2002); I figure there's a *slight possibility* that 9/11 never happens under a Gore administration, but the nuts and bolts of anti-terrorism are just too fine-grained to really think that's more likely than not.
The sick thing is that if you only cared about Democratic Party fortunes, you'd rather have 9/11 happen and Gore pursue a reasoned response vs. it not happening at all. The fact that I can see that's sick is what separates the parties today.
Right. If you're playing the most important election of our lifetime parlor game, of course you have to make an arbitrary cutoff somewhere, since every election is contingent on those before. But for people eligible to vote in 2000 and older, the 2000 election has to win, hands down.
Well "in our lifetime" is the arbitrary cutoff, imprecise as that may be. Matt being about my age I didn't have to think about it; we start with Reagan. But it probably doesn't change for several elections prior.
I guess you could make a case for Eagle Claw success leading to a second Carter term, but it's awfully tenuous and the results are unclear. Does that really put the rightwing takeover of the GOP back in the bottle? Before that, what, Nixon doesn't break all the laws but still wins in 1972 and runs the term out? That doesn't seem that different, honestly. Before that you have JFK not being assassinated, but I'm a big detractor on that one; seems to me his presidency was on shaky ground already and his death put LBJ on unearned solid footing, leading to Great Society etc. so the effects are just superunknown, to paraphrase Soundgarden.
Maybe more to the point, we don't care as much about the pre-Reagan counterfactuals because politics wasn't broken. Consider Kennedy vs. Nixon in 1960...are we gonna say something would have been *that* different? When the parties aren't ideologically defined, and most of the real stuff happens among an amorphous elite behind closed doors....who cares who's in the chair? We're reaching for these counterfactuals because we are so completely hosed now, staring down the barrel of a structural one-party system where elections reliably have more Democratic voters but Republicans hold all the power. That didn't really get spinning before 2000, and you can't go past Reagan to even see its roots.
I guess there are some folks still alive who could have been there for the "Man in the High Tower" counterfactual where FDR is assassinated and the Germans build the "Heisenberg Device" instead. But I don't think that's terribly plausible even with the assassination. And having Ted Kennedy beat Nixon in 1972 in "For All Mankind" was fun, but not that useful to the story. Mighta been useful to the healthcare system though...
No idea if Gore would have prevented 9/11 but assuming no, everything that happened afterwards is reason enough to rank 2000 as the most important. And there's also the election itself and the self-inflicted loss of legitimacy to the Supreme Court as a result.
I think it's possible that Gore would have prevented it. We know that Bush was warned about the possibility yet didn't do anything special to try to prevent it. I think Gore would have tried, just as Clinton tried to go after AQ after Kenya/Tanzania. And trying is at least half the battle.
Also, not to belabor the grimly obvious, but in addition to all of the deep structural stuff… we elected Donald Trump — Donald Fucking Trump — president of the United States of America.
As the joke goes, you can design buildings, you can feed kids, you can write award winning novels, but if you fuck just one horse… you’re not Joe the Architect, you’re not Joe the Philanthropist, you’re not Joe the Novelist. You’re Joe the Horsefucker. Forever.
Every treaty we negotiate, every alliance we try to shore up, every political stance we now take as a country, externally or internally, now has this priced in for the rest of our lives: we elected a racist game show host with an entourage of grifters, thugs and mafiosos President. And we might well do it again.
I think this overlooks that Bush Jr was guilty of causing a lot of disruption too. It's more America fucked a horse, the world agreed to forgive and forget, then they fucked another barnyard animal
So in the one hand yes. On the other hand… if you squinted, Bush could look like an honest mistake from the outside. He was the scion of a family with a generations long tradition of public service. He was the popular governor of a large state. And he ran on a platform that was essentially “Clintonism but with lower taxes and conservative judicial appointments.” That he then turned out to be the worst president in contemporary history (very much including Trump) was entirely a side-effect of the seismic distraction of 9/11.
Whereas Trump was Trump from beginning to end. He campaigned as a corrupt maniac, he governed like a corrupt maniac, and he attempted a coup like a corrupt maniac. So we’re a country that elects obviously corrupt maniacs now.
Also, you could argue to the outside world that Bush was elected while losing the popular vote and had to file lawsuits, etc., it was a complicated fluke, and barely won in '04 despite being a "war-time" president. With Trump, it's not a fluke anymore.
Yeah. I think the fact that GWB got the Republican Party used to the idea that they could win the presidency without a majority of the popular vote is one of the most underrated bad things about his presidency. And of course there was Roger Stone, the Zelig of political ratfuckery, right in the middle of it.
Seismic DISRUPTION, thank you ever so much autocorrect.
It kinda was a seismic distraction.
I know we all mean well with this common take, but I'm gonna frame comments like this for future reference.
Trump is, and was, far more seismically worse a leader, president, and phenomenon than Bush. He's simply in another category.
It's basically the difference between electing a "war criminal" and simply a literal criminal. To many right now, there is no difference; they're both horses to fuck.
Whether he becomes president again or no, history will mark how wrong that interpretation is, with an exclamation point. (Even Matt has that interpretation right now, at least with regard to foreign policy. He'll change his mind, begrudgingly.)
Counterpoint: Trump managed, somehow and against reasonable expectations, to not start a war with anyone while in office.
He damned near gave Biden cover, at least within the Blob, to end one, even!
I firmly think the only reason the generals didn't actually just ignore the withdrawal order is because there was no way to re-exert control over Afghanistan without at least 30X the troops they had to hand after Trump's drawdown.
I'm going to have to say this misses the point.
Trump single-handedly made it far more likely that we will fight a war with Iran in the near-future, by ripping up the nuclear deal with them and replacing it with nothing. It will be basically impossible to not be at loggerheads with that country over its nuclear program indefinitely, solely due to Trump.
Moreover, he made it clear that America cannot be trusted to keep its agreements in general, and made it much more likely that diplomacy will fail to avert future conflicts. As Matt mentioned, this is not a bell you can unring. It will cost us incalculable sums for likely decades.
He would have almost certainly withdrawn the US from NATO, formally or informally, giving Russia tacit approval to carve up parts of eastern Europe, had he won a second term. He also made it privately clear that China should take over Taiwan, and that he would prefer the US not try to deter them or stand in their way.
Some think that kind of policy is "anti-war". It certainly is anti-stability. To each their own, I guess.
But yes, you're right--he did not start a war, while he was in office. Neither did he repeal Obamacare. I suppose I should thank him for both, but I won't.
As the saying goes, I have my reasons.
I largely agree with all of this, just… if we’re comparing Trump and GWB’s legacies, I’m disinclined to give the _possible_ ramifications of Trump’s choices equal weight with the certainty of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted in Iraq.
This is being charitable, IMO.
Any disastrous effects of Trump's presidency will be indirect and long-term.
Whereas Bush's disasters were immediate and directly due to his actions while in office.
I don't think you can separate the two from a historical perspective; the appetite for a candidate like Trump only came about because of Bush's manifest failures.
The failures of the 2040's and 50's, assuming they occur, are likely to share a lot of parents, whereas the failures of the 2000's had only one.
Eh, Bush was more like fucking a very unattractive human... possibly even like fucking a serial killer... than like fucking a horse.
Yeah, history is much more contingent than we like to think.
“What would Trump have done if 9/11 had happened on his watch?” is I think actually not so obvious a counter-factual as one might think now: circa 2001 Trump was still publicly identified as a democrat (albeit a pretty bloodthirsty pro-cop one) and if he’d run as a Perot-style spoiler in 2000 it would probably have been on a very different platform and with a very different brain trust than what eventually coalesced around him 16 years later. The basic facts of his impulsivity and incompetence would still be there of course but lacking the ghost of “Team B” in the form of Dick Cheney whispering into his ear about Iraq, I suspect he would have found an entirely different set of bedsheets to beshit.
This is fair, but the I think the more relevant comparison is the 2016 version of Trump (i.e. fully addled game show host Trump) being president on 9/11, or a similar event happening in September 2017. I agree with Henry that Trump’s response would have been an order of magnitude worse than Bush.
The lasting impact to the journalism profession from the Trump years is another bell that cannot be un-rung. Seeing journalists abandon professional ethics, openly advocate for dropping neutrality in reporting, lead the Resistance™ and uncritically accept every outlandish claim against Trump as fact has forever changed the standing of the press in the public's mind.
Taibbi and Greenwald are exceptions, and are writing about journalism's failures during the Trump years. But they are now completely independent from any mainstream publication, and routinely smeared as "Trumpers", fascists or racists (the go-to insults of the progressive left). I don't think their critiques will be heeded and we will have lost a valuable institution for generations.
The Taibbi/Greenwald arc may also be acting as a corrective to the journalistic derangement of late.
I've been reading both of them for as long as they've been writing, so I followed them to Substack. At first, they delivered potent critiques of *journalism* in the same contrarian style as their early writings on the nascent financial crisis and overreaction to 9/11—i.e., their wheelhouses. At the same time, I got so sick of the NY Times injecting social justice messages into every, single story, no matter the topic, that I quit reading it. (Mostly because it violates my rule of not consuming things that make me feel bad.) They were clearly trying to turn themselves into a digital media platform by chasing monthly active user / subscriber metrics and they made a bet that their audience wanted fodder to steer a conversation about literally any topic towards social justice at cocktail parties.
Now, however, Taibbi and Greenwald are 75% unreadable because Substack has pushed them into that same model. Their comments sections were quickly overrun with Trump supporters who mistook their criticism of modern journalism as lib-owning because activist journalism so often manifested as mis-reporting about Trump. Instead of impugning journalism, they pivoted to reporting on specific media outlets, as though CNN and MSNBC were prestigious news organizations that had fallen from grace and Rachael Maddow were Walter Cronkite. (But they are making a good living catering to a specific niche that no longer includes me, so good on them.)
Meanwhile, the Washington Post (which I did not stop reading) seems to have gotten the message and separated straight news from social justice messaging. And when I do happen across a NY Times story, the same thing seems to be happening there. They are both now getting into the newsletter business, which is a great way to quarantine partisan/ideological journalism-opinion. It seems like somehow the Atlantic was the big winner revenue-wise, since they are now poaching everyone from everywhere—I guess because their writing never pretended to be straight journalism and their stories average out to 'centrist', so maybe that is a model that works now too?
I fully agree that a great many journalists shit the bed during the Trump presidency and that way too many journalists spent/d way too much time on Twitter. But I can also see a future where The Media learns from the exodus to Substack, etc., and actually comes out the other end better equipped to do journalism in a world where reality and truth have become completely malleable.
It won't be long until right-wing media spirals into a deranged conspiracy too convoluted for outsiders to decipher—just look at FOX News post-Trump—which will leave plenty of space for mainstream reporting to make a comeback. Most people just want to keep up with current events via factual reporting, so there is still plenty of money to be made off a (newly-earned) reputation for straight news.
I really hope this is all how it turns out
I could see something of a comeback if Fox loses the plot enough that it's no longer just background drone in every diner between Portland and Philadelphia.
Christ knows that for all we despise OANN and Newsmax, they don't actually have much clout.
Facebook is worse by far in terms of eyeballs and driving people's actual thinking.
What, exactly, is it about Taibbi and Greenwald that supposedly makes them “serious journalists” to conservatives, aside from that they piss the left off without being conservative?
I honestly don’t get it. Excepting some good early work, both have effectively abandoned journalism for a pseudo-intellectual, one-trick-pony form of grifting meant to fearmonger about one or two pet issues as a wedge to prop up “independent journalism” revenues.
The “mainstream” media’s obscene pro-cosmopolitan, pro-out group, almost anti-western liberalism stances are annoying to me as well.
But those two are just in the game to separate people from money as quickly as possible; any clear-headed assessment should point that way.
I read both of them occasionally. I follow them on Twitter. But they are my sort of counters to other media. If they come up with some story, I take it into consideration, but then I go and see what other people have to say about it. I do agree that they do come across as insufferable sometimes. Especially Greenwald.
Read Taibbi's writing about the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. Read Greenwald on the increase of the security state in the US, post 9/11. Both of them have their "biases", but they are not partisans. They approach stories with the intention of telling the truth, even if provocatively presented (especially true for Taibbi, who described Goldman Sachs as a "great vampire squid").
But they were not, and are not, partisans. Partisans modify their messaging in support of, or in opposition to, a particular political party. Partisans obfuscate, omit facts, spin dishonestly, employ hyperbole and abandon objectivity in pursuit of a political outcome. That is fine for partisans, as we all understand their role. But when journalists became partisans, the profession suffered. And it continues to suffer.
They are total partisans, it just so happens to be that they are partisan in favor of basically anything that "moderate democrats" aren't, whether that be Sanders, Trump, or Putin. Being wildly biased against a faction of a party is not any nobler than being biased against a whole party.
Greenwald pretty much attacks *all* Democrats these days, doesn't he? Are there any he writes positively about? He hates the party of FDR because he hates contemporary American liberalism. I think it really is that simple.
My interpretation of where he's coming from is a little bit more charitable (or maybe not, depending on your perspective). I think he starts with the premise that the United States - not any particular political faction but the United States as an entity - is the world's great malefactor, and that the only solution is to weaken and ultimately incapacitate it. He's anti-anti-Trump not because he thinks Trump is good, but because he knows Trump is bad. Trumpism is self-destructive for the United States, but the United States is bad, so Trumpism is good. The GOP is now more-or-less uniformly the party of Trump, so they are also bad for the United States - but the United States is bad, which makes the GOP good.
To spell this out a little more, the United States has been as successful and powerful as it is not because of the areas where we've had partisan disagreement, but because of the areas we've had broad consensus, continuity, and stability - our self-conception as a force for good, our celebration of liberal democracy, our emphasis (albeit spotty and at times hypocritical) on freedom and human rights, the inviolability of our Union, the non-newsworthy side of our foreign policy establishment (which includes but is not limited to the "blob" that Matt and others so often criticize), etc. Trump not only makes a mockery of all of these ideals with his actions, but he explicitly rejects them with his words. His vision of the world - which the GOP in general now shares - is a multipolar one without international cooperation or institutions where it's every country for itself, and where no country claims to be anything more than a selfish power-grabber, like Europe in the 1800s. The United States might still be the most powerful country in this world, but it would be far less powerful than it is today, so that's good. Trump also exacerbates internal divisions in the United States, which obviously weakens our ability to project our influence abroad - see the Iran example we discussed above - so that's good as well. (The dream outcome would be for the United States to be induced into breaking up into smaller countries like the USSR did, though I don't know if anyone actually considers that to be realistic anytime in the foreseeable future.)
In contrast, today it's mostly mainstream Democrats like Biden who are trying to uphold and restore the old consensus values. That means that Democrats are trying to keep the United States strong on the world stage, which means that Democrats are bad.
No, they're not Republican partisans. They are, oh what was Lenin's useful term for this type . . . ah "useful idiots."
I didn’t make any claims about partisanship and specifically exempted their earlier work. But that’s not who they are today, nor what they do.
I’m guilty of doing this as well, so don’t take this the wrong way… please at least read what you’re replying to, not skim it.
Respectfully, my comment was about journalism writ large, not Taibbi and Greenwald specifically. I don't really care much for, or about, either one of them.
My critique was about the abandonment of journalistic ethics and standards during the Trump years. The partisan comment was in support of this critique, not in response to anything you wrote specifically.
Gotcha.
As noted, I don’t think your critique is terribly misplaced, though I think your diagnosis of the reasons behind it is incomplete.
The period of politics we’re entering today reminds me greatly of the “pointlessly partisan” politics of the Gilded Age, and journalism is coming to match.
There’s nothing to be done for it but wait and watch; the post-war “objective observer” consensus is hibernating while we figure out how to resurrect it for the digital age.
Greenwald has become a Fox News sycophant. It’s crazy to me that he’s the same guy that I liked reading in the days of the blogosphere.
Actually, media failure is one more point suggesting 2016 was more important. For the last 4 days leading up to the election, literally every word above the fold on P1 of the *New York Times* was negative coverage of Clinton's email scandal. Rightwing special pleading aside, the true story of media failure for some time has been their bending over backwards to try to make an unbalanced political environment look balanced. That has continued, but the fact that Clinton's emails got more coverage than *all policy issues combined* in 2016 was the summit of that mountain.
Conservative persecution complex strikes again! Trump routinely calls the press the Enemy of the People, openly admits he lies routinely, and the problem is the press didn't show him *enough* deference.
Does it upset you that journalists displayed bias against the Nazis or Imperial Japan in histories of World War 2?
Binya, your comment might be the type of reflexive nonsense you're accusing John from FL of here. Where did John say anything about deference? Where did he say the press shouldn't criticize Trump? Where or when, anywhere in any comment, did John say he's a Trump supporter? It read like you're missing the whole point, which was the press let objectivity suffer and biases and blindspots to grow during the Trump years, which tarnished their credibility.
Slowboring has a whole article with a related point of view: https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-wrong-with-the-media
My view is that the two primary failures of US media are failing to communicate that: 1) the Republican policy agenda is at odds with what Americans want and 2) it is increasingly actively attempting to subvert American democracy.
The media has failures in its criticism of Trump. But I think to highlight that, when the other failures are so much serious, is wrong. It is also actively harmful. The constant criticism of journalists is contributing to their failure to accurately communicate to Americans what is happening in their government.
What he was trying to highlight was a credibility problem. A lack of credibility makes every kind of reporting more likely to be a failure because of distrust. And accurate criticism tends to be constructive criticism.
Personally my opinion of the current state of journalism took a nosedive shortly after buying a NYTs subscription. Their coverage of the summer of George Floyd and Covid were unbelievable biased. It makes it harder to trust their reporting on any other issue.
And number #1 is simply not true enough to stand without criticism. There's plenty of deep blue states where Dems can pass any law they want. Those states don't look like Swedens or Denmarks.
I think the two of you are talking past one another to an extent because you're both conflating "partisanship" with "ideological leaning".
I do think Binya is correct to say that the "mainstream" media in the US bends over backwards to avoid even the whiff of "partisanship," even at the expense of an unending attempt to pose (or create when needed) a balanced narrative between the two parties.
At the same time, ideologically, the majority of the decisionmakers and senior staff and the *vast* majority of junior staff come from a relatively narrow slice of the country with very narrow, undiverse ideological leanings. The best way I can think to describe it is *mindlessly*, reflexively cosmopolitan, in the shallowest, most self-hating manner possible.
I'll take, for instance, coverage of immigration under both Trump and Biden; the reflexive position held by almost all staff at major papers and non-Fox cable news networks has been that *any* enforcement measures taken against illegal immigration are fundamentally illegitimate, even immoral.
It often bleeds into their coverage and editorial choices, which is just damning, but even if it didn't, let's not delude ourselves into John and Jane Q Public don't know these people's positions. They all have Twitter, and John and Jane have Facebook, filled with screenshots of Twitter posts.
The press has hit on the idea of ramping up ideological content to drive revenue and maintain relevance in a digital age, but without the attendant partisanship. That latter is still a hold-over from the golden post-war era of media as a public good... it'll die soon enough.
But their credibility is already shot to hell.
"My view is that the two primary failures of US media are failing to communicate that: 1) the Republican policy agenda is at odds with what Americans want and 2) it is increasingly actively attempting to subvert American democracy."
I think both of these are substantively wrong for the media that John from FL is criticizing.*
1) As has been much discussed by Matt and others, there is very little Republican policy agenda right now which makes them actually more appealing to the broader public which is generally small c conservative toward change.
2) The NYT, WaPo, etc. all have reported repeatedly on Republican attempts to subvert democracy. Sometimes to the detriment of the message in that they often call everything a wolf instead of just the ones that are actually dangerous.
*None of this applies to most of the right wing media which rarely if ever complains about Republican issues other than to say they are not extreme enough.
1. Do you think the American public fundamentally has too low of an opinion of Trump due to media failures? Because that's what really matters, irrespective of some journalists getting Russia-gate wrong. I think the reality is exactly the opposite. To me, if a true sense of his sheer corruption, incompetence, lawlessness, and penchant for violence were understood, he'd be lucky to be a free man, let alone be the probable favourite for the 2024 election at this point.
2. I think what you've written is just wrong.
a) Large majorities of Americans support policies like lower drug prices and higher taxes on the wealthy. Most Democrats support and vote for these. Few, if any, Republicans do. That's why they are not enacted.
b) I agree there has been coverage of Republican election subversion. I think we'll have to agree to disagree whether it's been sufficient to the scale of the problem.
1) My opinion of Trump is so low that its hard for me to view anyone having a more positive view of him as being rationale. Knowing that, I try to compensate and perhaps I'm over compensating here. I still think that you can't look at any major media institution in America that is not explicitly right wing and think they haven't been anti Trump (even if for good reasons as well as bad!) over the last 4-5 years.
2) Both parties have issues where they hold majority support in the public. Saying the other party opposes those policies and thus they are against what the American public wants is both accurate and misleading at the same time.
The Dems are attempting to raise the cap on the SALT tax right as we speak, and the way they're trying to lower drug prices is controversial at best. And I lived in for a couple decades where the Dems were as much the party of NIMBY as the Rs were. Meanwhile people are moving to Florida, Texas and Georgia for economic opportunities and housing. So which party is doing what on those two issues is not always so clear cut.
That you compare Donald Trump to Nazis or Imperial Japan during WW2 is ... insightful, though probably not as you intended.
Yes, Taibbi and Greenwald are now suffering from "conservative persecution complex", as they are well-known for their conservative views.
If we’re making fascist analogies, Trump is a cheap, sweatshop-made version of Orban, who is in turn a third-rate “Rent-A-Mussolini” impersonator.
No disagreement. I think this actually supports my critique that journalists who abandoned their ethics and professional standards did lasting harm to the profession, needlessly.
Likewise, no disagreement.
No doubt in my mind Trump would have loved to shoot a bunch of journalists, imprison opposition figures, and suspend elections. But he doesn’t actually have the brainpower, charisma, or means.
The way I understand the current situation is as one of America’s periodic ideological realignments, made more painful snd more fraught by social media’s newfound ability to let us look at our fellow citizens’ most private thoughts all day long.
Left alone, it’ll resolve itself in time as new coalitions shake out and new norms are forged.
My fears are twofold:
More prosaically, that one party, most likely the GOP, doesn’t leave it alone and decides instead to try to smash everything rather than changing in the way required to accommodate a new political spectrum.
Secondly, that the new political spectrum is markedly Latin American in makeup, with similar outcomes to Latin America 1930-1980. (Horse is already paste but gotta keep beating)
I should add to the social media bit: “and our tradition media overlords’ desperate attempts to maintain clout and profits by nutpicking the worst of those thoughts to air nightly.”
Leave Geraldo Rivera out of this.
I mean, if we're diving into all this, one of the things that people who compare Trump to fascists don't point out is that he certainly didn't seem to have any ambition to lead wars of annexation, and indeed wasn't even particularly into the anti-terrorist or "humanitarian" wars that his predecessors engaged in.
He tried to take Greenland!
While you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Mussolini (to paraphrase dril), Italy defeated Ethiopia in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War by any reasonable metric, although a guerrilla war continued in the hinterlands into 1941 when the British invaded and liberated the country.
Neither Taibbi nor Greenwald have done actual reporting for years. They’re media critics, not journalists.
I regret adding Taibbi and Greenwald to my comment. I didn't realize how polarizing they are. I took away from my main point, which just proves I am not cut out to be a good journalist!
I’m always amazed by what particular subject people get riled up about in my long ass comments. I’ll write something and think damn this is going to make people mad. Then they glom onto something else
I feel like you're really discounting Greenwald's Brazil corruption reporting. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say his single source broke that damn wide open.
It wasn’t until non-biased reporting about how Trump abandon the Kurds in Iraq and Syria that I really turned hard-core against him. Honestly, all those Russia gate articles tended to make me give them the benefit of the doubt. And then as the story broke down and you learned more and more, it really made me not trust the media. The plucky young journalist who pisses everybody off just does not exist anymore.
This is going to continue to be a problem for Democrats, because it got to a point where even the accurate stories are doubted. I wonder if there’s a direct line to be drawn between some of the medias performance during the Trump years and people not believing the severity of Covid and/or the safety of vaccines.
It was my understanding that the Russiagate stuff was mostly proven true (some of the more scandalous stuff from the Steele Dossier like the pee tape aside, which we'll never really know the truth of), Manafort and Stone taking the fall (and Mueller's extreme deference to the Executive and self-imposed narrow investigation focus) gave Trump sufficient legal insulation in the final report. But the overall outline: that the Russian government worked with members of the Trump campaign's inner circle to time releases of damaging information on Clinton to deflect negative attention away from Trump, as well as sewing chaos across social media to his benefit, was proven true by both the Mueller Report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Bill Barr getting to put out his summary of the Mueller Report first (complete exoneration*) means that the Right acts like it was all a big hoax, and Leftists ignore it because it also says that they were played for suckers by Putin, so only the cringe liberals that nobody likes still treats it like it was a thing.
*Except for all those people in Trump's innermost circle who went to jail over it.
What are you doing here is taking the dose year, and then basically saying that all the stuff the media went out of their way to sensationalize and use was Falls, but this part was true, the part the media wasn’t hammering. The media doesn’t win credibility by being partly right and partly wrong. They have to be absolutely right. There was under reporting about how the original basis of the dossier air came from the Clinton campaign. Now we looking discover that the main source was some guy that has admitted to the FBI he lied to Steele. You honestly can’t see how the whole thing adds to the presses credibility when it comes to politics?
Two things are true: that Trump was up to no good with the Russians in ways that were at odds with our democracy, and that the media went overboard in its reporting on it (I'll never forget Maddow's wall to wall Mueller reporting -- gah)
With all my problems with the media on this story, I'll never forgive the main culprit -- Trump -- with what he was doing to our democracy, on this and thousands of other things.
Exactly my sentiments Marc. Media bias comes in several ways.
1. Outright lies. Which are rare.
2. Getting misled by sources, and checking them because of bias.
3. Minimizing the opposite side of an argument. This is fairly comment.
4. Reporting on rumors, which is technically accurate but amplifies those rumors.
5. Selective editorial decisions about what to report on.
6. Leaving out facts that might be relevant.
7. Prioritizing what you report on.
8. Highlighting certain facts up at the top of an article, and then adding in another one at the bottom of the article where people are less likely to read them.
9. Choice of headlines
10. Mixing percentages, failing to disaggregate, using whole numbers without context
Like I said before. The Russia gate thing didn’t turn me hard-core against Trump, because there was never enough factual basis for it. It was always rumors.
What did turn me off was the hard documented thing. Especially the Kurds. Later Covid. A lot of how he just made unforced errors.
Well said.
The media's inability to deal with Trump in a way that was consistent with journalistic practices and standards was due in part to the revolutionary nature of Trump's personality and performance. Nothing they reported on had the effect of holding him to account. His thousands of lies, duly reported on? No difference, He and his administration's scandals, following each other in desensitizing order? No difference.
I think in the end, the media -- knowing it couldn't educate the nation as a whole -- went into its shell (or its bubble) and aimed its reporting at comforting those who were already totally in the anti-Trump camp.
(But despite my criticism here, to my dying day I'll defend the media for not helping the Trumpites pump up that October surprise Hunter Biden story. These subverters of American democracy didn't deserve the benefit of the doubt on this one.)
This is utter nonsense. The media reported what there was to report, and if anything erred far too much on the side of "things are unclear" when the lede should have been "even in the best case scenario the Trump campaign and Russia were definitely working together to influence a US election." Moreover, the source of the "dossier" only matters if you accept the conspiratorial right's version of events where it was the start of the investigation. That is patently untrue as the Mueller report makes clear; no part of the investigation was solely or even mainly informed by it.
Russia influenced our elections. The Trump campaign accepted their help and communicated with them to help them do it. That's incredible. As to the press, their failure is that they failed to say that to the public clearly enough.
Man you guys get mad over this shit. I have no desire to debate a non-swing voter. I’m guessing you’re a straight party ticket guy. Registered Democrat. There’s probably not a single position the Democrats have that you disagree with. So your view of things is always going to be through that lens. It’s boring. Have a great day.
Impressive textbook Ad Hominem there. "If the speaker is someone I perceive as a Democrat, I will literally ignore every single fact, claim and argument inside." Good way to make sure that epistemic bubble stays closed.
But here's some communication Trump himself literally admitted was accurate:
"This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump" -Email to Don Jr., June 3, 2016
"if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer" -Jr's response.
Really all you have to know, even though there's a mountain more.
Yes, the subversion of our democracy by a malignant foreign dictator is something we get mad over. Silly us.
What parts do you think the media was sensationalizing, and were wrong about? From my perspective, however much they sensationalized it, they got the shape of the story correct: the Russian government hacked the Clinton campaign and the DNC and they coordinated the release of damaging information they recovered from that operation with the coordination of senior Trump campaign officials using Wikileaks as an intermediary, and ran a disinformation campaign on social media, to damage the Clinton campaign and boost the Trump campaign.
The Steele Dossier is a separate thing about how people jump to conclusions. If Steele wrote a report saying "my sources tell me that (X) happened", and then later the media says "the Steele Dossier alleges (X) happened", and the reader takes away "X happened", then that's not necessarily a failing of the media so much as it is a failing of the reader. It means X might have happened, or might not have happened, but further investigation needs to be done to prove it.
Secondly, the origin of the Steele Dossier was from the Jeb Bush campaign trying to get dirt on Trump during the primary. When the Jeb campaign stopped paying for it because Trump was looking like he was going to clinch the nomination, Clinton took over paying for it to use it for the general.
We might get to the truth on the pee tape. Danchenko was indicted and the case links him to Dolan. It's possible it comes out that this was all made up.
I think that the combination of reporting that was not very careful along with many journalists’ lack of humility really made a lot of people skeptical of the media. The coverage of the lab leak theory is a good example of this phenomenon but this sort of stuff keeps happening. At some point it makes sense to be skeptical of the media
The media did a thing that I think of as the “180 degrees from Trump” fallacy. Whatever Trump said, they ran with something 180 degrees from it, entirely opposite, rather than find a truth at a 20 degree or 90 degree remove from what Trump said.
Lab leak was a great example. When something has truly been debunked, it doesn’t take me long to find a thorough, satisfying debunking online. “Fact checking” sites reported that lab leak had been debunked. There was no real debunking, obviously, but “we don’t really know” doesn’t fully refute Trump. Everyone decided that 180 degrees from Trump was a greater priority than wrestling with facts and evidence.
What I learned since 2016: if your view of the world or important issues is in any way a reaction to Trump, for or against, you are unreliable. When working to discover what is or is not true, leave Trump out of your investigative process, keep him out of your mind altogether.
Yes to that last. Direct fucking line.
The timeline of GOP hostility to the covid vaccine does not seem to support that idea. When trump/pence were talking up the soon to be released vaccines in October, there was no conservative pushback (that I saw anyway). It was only Trump lost that conservatives turned on the covid vaccine.
But their distrust of the media gave them added reason.
Agree with much of what you say about the media - it did not acquit itself well by post WW2 standards, but maybe market forces have made those expectations obsolete and we just haven't come to terms with it yet. Maybe Fox was ahead of the curve and the rest are catching up.
But I disagree about Greenwald - he's like the punk rocker of journalism. Sometimes he makes good music but his attitude is always one of negativity, cynicism, self-righteousness from a posture of nonresponsibility for coming up with a realistic, workable alternative, etc. Can't stand him.
Perfect analogy
The journalist polarization comes from the readers and the nature of the internet. Not political elites. Look at the comments you are getting in a community that tries to be moderate.
We are awash in information. Everyone is armed to the teeth with facts that support their view. Sam Harris recently made this point in why he doesn’t have Bret Weinstein on his show to discuss vaccines. There are too many studies from Singapore or Israel, or wherever. A finding here or there to refute or put into context. Sense making is tough with little data it may be tougher with too much data. Trying to rise above the motivated reasoning is nearly impossible. Collective reasoning with people we like (this is important) but disagree with is our best chance of getting to higher levels of truth. It’s hard.
Also think about Facebook in this counterfactual. How much of the media hate for Facebook is really about the fact that FB helped Trump win in 2016? I mean, journalists would still hate FB because they saw colleagues get laid off in the 2014 "pivot to video," but I think we would see no more articles decrying FB in the NYT or WaPo than we would see about, say Uber.
It's hard to know how important 2020 was, obviously there's a lot of the Biden administration to play out. But, equally, looking at the conduct of the Trump administration post-election with the grown ups all gone, I would not underestimate the potential damage of a Trump 2nd term. (Hopefully we won't find out).
But, I think 2000 was the real "most important election of our lifetime", the difference on Climate and Iraq was big.
I have often thought that election, and the Bush V. Gore decision, was something of an inflection point in US history. Prior to that we were in the afternoon sunshine of the post-Cold War Clinton boom, when our biggest national traumas were oral sex and the OJ trial. Within ten months of the Supreme Court's appointment of W. Bush as president, 911 happened. And we were off to the races of national decline.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc?
the end of our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity. :(
I genuinely believe that the more fucked up politics gets, 2000 will become more and more elevated as Millennials age and turn into a sort of "1963 counterfactual," in the same way that a segment of Boomers are obsessed with the idea of JFK living and keeping the country out of the Vietnam War. Doesn't matter that an Al Gore Presidency doesn't fundamentally alter the politics of climate change at the time. It just will take on a bigger meaning about what could have been.
The reason I think Gore does matter for Climate is not that I think he would have passed something big, it's that a modest amount of progress starting in 2001 could have an outsized impact by 2021, especially technological development.
And if Al Gore is defeated by John McCain in 2004, I think we'd seen small, but starting off earlier, bipartisan progress on climate.
My argument for McCain in 2004 is a fourth Democratic term seems very unlikely, even if Gore is the incumbent with a reasonable economy.
It's odd to me that you seem to think of this only in climate terms. Or maybe more accurately, seem to think those of us who think 2000 was Waterloo think of it that way. I certainly don't...that's not even near the top of the list. The big ticket items are:
2. We certainly don't go to Iraq.
3. We probably just do something comparatively minor in Afganistan, a la first Gulf War.
4. We maybe, just maybe don't do any of that because 9/11 doesn't happen.
5. If 9/11 does happen, Gore instead of Bush gets the most incredible rally-round-the-flag effect since WWII and ushers in huge congressional majorities, which enable transformative things that are hard to pinpoint.
6. The judiciary is utterly transformed.
7. Entitlements are shored up the old fashioned way by adjusting tax rates, rather than put on the privatization chopping block.
You may have noticed that I left off #1. That's because it deserves special discussion. The *real* reason 2000 was Waterloo is that it was the moment US democracy died. A lot of people think the attempted coup of 2020 was that moment, and others say it's still on life support awaiting execution via the structural one-party system enabled by gerrymandering, voter suppression, replacement of local election officials, and outright state-legislative-supremecy just ignoring election results. All those people are wrong; it's been a dead man walking for quite some time.
In Bush v Gore The Supreme Court Five issued a simply lawless decision and just said "we're putting our guy in there" and that was the ballgame. They were so open about it that they wrote in the opinion that it should never be considered as precedent for anything. It was pure power of partisanship, with no respect whatsoever for constitution or democratic legitimacy. From that moment it all rolls downhill. Sarah Palin's "real America", REDMAP, scorched-earth fillibusters, slow-rolling all federal judicial nominations, deciding it's OK to work with Russia to subvert an election, the 2020 coup, and the current assault on democracy all flow from that same wellspring of nihilistic power. The republic has been dead for 21 years; most of us just haven't noticed.
I would say ...
I think Vietnam as a generational event looms large over the Boomer psyche. I think while 9-11 is a signature event for Millennials, like the assassination of JFK was for Boomers, the invasion of Iraq is far less impactful. I think the lack of a draft is significant.
I think all of the points you make are very reasonable for the long term impacts of a point of departure from the 2000 election. I just don't think they have much cultural meaning to aging Millennials by 2040 or 2050.
An average Millennial around the age of 60 in 2050. Sure, if US democracy is in shambles, you can make a very good point about the 2000 election. More likely Trump will be seen as the point of departure by most people. But to the extent that Millennials will be looking at the world impacted by climate change, and I believe many will be doing so with regret and concern, their narrative of what could have been will be to elevate the importance of Al Gore.
It's more a cultural observation.
I see your point much more clearly now, thanks. I had failed to foreground your comparison to the 1963 counterfactual. I find that a pretty reasonable supposition; certainly my way of thinking about these things is far, far from a typical Millennial's, though I am (barely) part of the group. I doubt many Millennials will be thinking much of anything about any of these moments in a few decades, but then I doubt a very large fraction of Boomers are thinking about the parallel example so that's fair. So yeah, works for me.
Still...glad you gave me an excuse to expound on why *I* think 2000 was when the train came off the tracks.
Doomers gonna doom, yo.
If the Republic is dead at the moment, I hate to think of what you thought of every election conducted before probably 1940, and most of the ones after?
Not saying everything's fine, but systems of governance have more inertia and are generally more durable than the Doom-ist crowd likes to believe.
We're not yet in "toss election results without consequence" territory.
We came within a gnat's hair of it last time, and now they're taking a hammer to the election machinery. If the GOP wins 47% of the national vote next year, they'll take the House and probably the Senate. If Biden beats Trump in 2024 with the same margins as 2020, Trump will be the next President. Please don't be the frog in slowly heating water.
In December 2000 I was completely calm about the situation. I realized what had happened, but felt the institutions were more important than the outcome and applauded Gore for gracefully bowing out. So I'm not a "doomer" as you put it. But what has happened since then has been a fast march to a one-party fake democracy. Dems win more votes, and GOP wins the elections. If you think what they're doing at the state level won't accelerate that you're nuts. If they get 47% of the nationwide vote next year they'll take the House by a substantial margin and probably the Senate too. If Biden doesn't completely blow out Trump in 2024 they'll install the latter. After that....sorry, game over.
Thank you, James "The Ego" Comey.
May you rot in hell for all eternity. At least your ego will be there to keep you company.
Think of all the discourse and other crap over the past few years that would we would not have been subject to had someone's ego not made him think that press conference was OK. Had someone's ego than not forced him to send that letter 10 days before the election.
According to internal polls from both campaigns, HRC was going to win by about 6 nationally.
That would have been enough.
Let's not forget the reason he was in charge of that investigation: Loretta Lynch (Obama's AG) recused herself out of the appearance of impropriety because of her friendship with Bill Clinton (the infamous tarmac scene), leaving Comey to take over. The people who had a problem with this kind of impropriety had no problem with Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr acting as Trump's personal henchmen.
A thousand hearts on this comment.
No matter his reasons, I'm so glad Trump fired his sorry ass.
Who appointed him?
Obama. Is that relevant to what I said?
To me it is. It was a massive (and frankly, foreseeable) own goal to put a Republican in that position.
Fun fact: every FBI Director to date has been a Republican.
He continued to do this (Hagel, Gates) as a way to seem bi-partisan, but it was too late. He thought he would get credit for it, and earlier Presidents probably would have, but the game was gone at that point.
"A weird fact about Obama is that he’s regarded as a huge failure by progressive elites"
I have spent less time around DC progressive elites than MY has, but I have spent poop-loads of time around liberal college faculty (am one, married one, drank beers with hundreds), and MY's quote above does not reflect how Obama is regarded in my peer group. I think the vast majority of us would describe Obama as the greatest president of our lifetimes.
Allow me to use a sports metaphor: If I were the kind of person who spent all of my time talking to NBA analytics people, I might think that smart basketball fans think that Russell Westbrook was a huge failure. But if I took a step back and asked serious basketball fans, basically none of them would describe Westbrook as a huge failure. And if I asked the right questions of the analytics people, I could probably get most of them to say that while Westbrook's counting stats look way better than his analytics do, he is still a great NBA player.
I think MY may be spending too much time talking to the liberal policy equivalent of NBA analytics people and using that to represent what most liberals think.
I can kind of see his point. During the primary, there was a long period of time where it seemed like everyone was trying to run away from Obama, or talk about "that wasn't enough".
Then Super Tuesday happened, reality intervened, and people started realizing that the Democratic primary electorate wasn't nearly as far to the left as they had pushed themselves to believe.
Failure seems to strong. It needs to be qualified. Maybe ... failure to meet expectations. That's more my sense but I also had huge expectations. Still even over 10 years later the lack of any criminal prosecution for the banking crisis stings. I just can't shake that. He sold out to Wall St. interests. I wanted my pound of flesh.
He'd have been able to make himself an American Caesar within a single term if he had just shot the fucking bankers.
Not a good idea, but he could have done it.
Echoing your comments about my real world progressive academic bubble*: Obama was/is awesome! Overwhelming majority seem to personally and professionally admire the guy. I have heard the (positive) Reagan comparison multiple times.
*Don't know many in the humanities departments, but know lots in the metro area. Shrugs...
I agree with you, but note Matt didn't say "rank and file Democrats" or even "progressives" generally. He said "progressive elites" which I think might have been better phrased "elite progressive activists" but is still reasonably on-target. So I agree with both of you.
He's not talking about "what most liberals think" - the sentence you quote notes that Obama "is beloved by rank-and-file Democrats" - he's talking about the liberal policy equivalent of NBA analytics people.
Westbrook is extremely talented and someone who plays with admirable tenacity, but he fails to elevate the teams he plays for. It's in that sense that he's a "huge failure."
I like your analysis, but would pivot it slightly. I think the analytics people like Matt might look at what happened and see details about what happened with the country and the Democratic party itself. But non analytic activists look at Obama and see that the country responded to his presidency not by electing the Democratic version of Bush Sr, but instead elected the Republican version of Jerry Springer (? is there a better Democratic analogue?).
I don’t run in progressive circles, but from what I read on Twitter your take seems correct.
Regarding Hillary Clinton, I don't think anyone of sound mind thought it impossible she could lose.
Look, we all have a friend here or there who secretly admires Trump's viciousness and powerlust. We all of us, even fans, saw Clinton as a distrustful, mediocre politician, albeit with an inspiring resume and roster of achievements. She drove all of us bonkers with her scripted, hesitant manner, political poison in a narcissistic era.
BUT. . . fact remains, had she won, she would have been the first woman president, and the first woman to be the most powerful human on Earth since Catherine the Great, or maybe ever.
That prospect, and temptation, was what led Democrat elites to stick by her, more than anything. More than antipathy for Bernie, or disdain for Biden. Speaking only for myself, and people in my orbit at the time.
What were her achievements?
Thanks for your post, which was actually insightful and quite courageous. I hadn't been able to express my support for Clinton at the time in as eloquent terms as you have.
Feel like we almost can't overstate how bad the Iran stuff is, especially as it mostly flies under our radar. It's..... it's so bad. Iran is now on a pretty direct path to get a nuclear weapon, I've seen arms control experts compare its current trajectory to where North Korea was just prior to getting the bomb. Obama successfully pulled them off that path, but Cotton and other Republican Party crazies told them (Cotton wrote the mullahs a letter!) that there was no point in abiding by the agreement as a future R President would just revoke it. Now Biden is trying to negotiate another arms agreement with them, and Cotton & Cruz & the other crazies are directly telling Iran again- in writing- 'don't bother agreeing to anything, Republicans will revoke the deal immediately in the future'.
Iran should not have a nuclear weapon, and no matter how bad you think their government is- that's an argument for them *not getting one*. If they do successfully test one, the US would have to at a minimum conduct extreme bombardment to destroy it- thus starting yet another Middle Eastern war. With the US thus distracted, I'm pretty sure China would invade Taiwan posthaste, and who knows what Russia would be up to in Eastern Europe. This is where the hawkish wing of the GOP is leading us, directly to World War 3
As I see it, having nukes is in Iran's best interest - full stop. They have a much stronger strategic position relative to the US, the Saudi's, etc. once they do and given the blinding obviousness of that, I don't see how anything we do either through the Obama agreement or through Trump sanctions does anything besides slow things down a bit.
One of the under appreciated lessons of Iraq is that it would have never been invaded if it actually had nukes. You can invade to try and stop a country from getting them, but once they actually have the weapons the MAD principle kicks in and changes the dynamics enormously.
The thing that gets me is that one of the arguments for invading Iraq was that it would convince Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program because they would know that the US would not tolerate any nuclear proliferation. I always thought that was a bizarre idea — if the US has your country on its axis of evil list, the most obvious way to prevent an invasion is becoming a nuclear power.
I think if you could really dig into the psychology of hardcore Iraq war proponents and get past their evasions, you'd find that none of them actually cared about nuclear nonproliferation per se. Their root motivation was a belief that whoever has the biggest balls wins in the long run, and nothing else really matters next to that.
Agreed. If anything, the Iraq War has pretty much proven that every two-bit dictator out there needs to lay hands on a credible deterrent if ever on the US's shit list. I'm sure Tehran, Pyongyang, and Islamabad will be happy to oblige before the decade is out.
Why setting that precedent was considered a good idea at the time... is beyond me.
"...every two-bit dictator out there needs to lay hands on a credible deterrent if ever on the US's shit list. I'm sure Tehran, Pyongyang, and Islamabad will be happy to oblige before the decade is out."
I disagree for two reasons:
1) All nuclear powers want the club to very small, because it then gives them outsized influence and because every country that gains them increases the risk that some country will have them used against them. Iran might be allies with Hezbollah, but do they really want them to have nukes outside of Tehran's control - I doubt it.
2) Another side effect from 9/11 was that it reinforced MAD to the world. The US was hit !relatively! lightly compared to what other countries have suffered or what a WMD would do and we lost our minds - invaded two+ countries, spent a fortune in money and political capitol trying to track down and destroy who did it. It took 20 years before our blood lust ran out and Biden pulled us out of Afghanistan. I could see Iran (or other countries) wanting nuclear weapons as a deterrent to the US, but should anything they develop and sell ever be used against the US, its likely we would include them in a nuclear response because we've demonstrated very clearly we actually are that crazy.
I have no expertise of any kind in this area, but I'm not sure weapon production is enough to achieve MAD. They would also need some kind of serious delivery system, the ability to protect their production and storage sites, and a secure supply of fissile material.
Let's say they create one secretly and are well into producing a second by the time US/Israel/Saudi intelligence services find out. Their ability to deploy that first nuke and finish producing the second doesn't seem that high even if just Israel alone responds.
Even if they produce, say, a dozen warheads, they would probably be able to deploy to a local battlefield but unlikely to Tel Aviv and almost certainly not to the US, whom they would need to be able to hit for MAD to kick in.
No strategic expert either, but IMO its really more of a timing perspective. If the US were to invade, then Iran can use the threat of a nuke to deter. Could they destroy the entirety of the US like Russia or China - probably not. Can they pose a serious threat to having a boat sail into NY, San Francisco, Houston, etc. harbors and set off a couple of nukes - yes. The latter would be sufficiently destructive that it completely changes the US risk relative to intervention.
"If they do successfully test one, the US would have to at a minimum conduct extreme bombardment to destroy it- thus starting yet another Middle Eastern war."
That would be a colossally stupid mistake on the part of the United States. A nuclear Iran is not our problem, unless we make it one by not being able to quit our obsession with the Middle East region even though it has long since lost its strategic importance to the US.
I agree with much of this, except, I don't think it's at all likely, much less a given ("the US would have to...") America would attack a confirmed nuclear power, which Iran would at that point be. Maybe Israel would. Iran can't be any worse than North Korea, and we didn't attack them.
We'd have to be crazy to attack Iran anyway, nukes or no nukes. Just as it would have been crazy to attack pre-nuke NK. Bill Clinton actually considered it for a second in 1994, but he realized it would have been a catastrophe.
Well, amend that to I think it's likely the US would do a preemptive attack. Maybe Iran isn't any worse than North Korea, but the US national security apparatus/blob is much more hostile to Iran. And I'd imagine a nuclear-armed Iran would start making hostile, threatening statements to Israel pretty fast.
The US might peremptorily attack when they think Iran is close, or after a nuclear test but before they're actually able to put it on a missile. Not saying I support it! But I think it's definitely something that could happen....
I agree that it's highly unlikely the US attacks a confirmed nuclear Iran. But what I wonder is what a future timeline in which Iran develops nuclear weapons, and US begins to hedge it's agenda in the Middle East accordingly, looks like versus a baseline in which the US stops caring so much about Middle East oil, and begins to back down its commitments in the Middle East accordingly.
What *conceivable* world do we live in that it's necessary to destroy Iran if it has a working nuclear weapon?
Fucking *North Korea*, run by batshit insane fiat by increasingly untethered-from-reality fat guys, has nukes that range most of the CONUS and we haven't felt the need to kill 20 million people to sort that out.
Because it's just not a big damned deal.
In an ideal world, I'd strongly prefer for the Islamic Republic not to have nukes, but for entirely different reasons. Iran getting the bomb is an entirely manageable problem for Israel, and basically nobody else. There is no earthly reason that we should conduct "extreme bombardment" of _anybody_ just to prevent the Israelis from having to ever consider anything other than a maximally belligerent foreign policy.
The problem with a nuclear Iran is that it makes the rest of the world strongly invested in _preserving_ the current Iranian government, on the grounds that the only thing worse than a nuclear Iran is a nuclear failed state in a protracted civil war a la Libya or Syria. (And it would be much, much worse.)
But we have probably shat that bed permanently at this point.
One uncomfortable thought I've been having lately, is, to a substantial degree Condi Rice and the Bush people were right not to buy in too heavily to the narrative (apparently being pushed by a lot of senior foreign policy Democrats) circa 2001 that terrorism had overtaken malevolent state actors as the most potent national security threat facing America. After 911 there was plenty of sneering Monday morning quarterbacking about the Bush team's antiquated world view. But turns out they (of course!) were right: ragtag murderers in far away caves and madrassas obviously were never the threat that a resurgent Russia or rising China would or could become.
That administration's mistake, of course, was not doing proper due diligence with respect to the Al Qaeda organization, and, failing that, its tragically inept response to said group's spectacular win in September, 2001. Indeed, in retrospect, had they allowed their original instincts to guide them, the Bush people might have correctly realized that massive overreaction to Islamist terrorism would have diverted critical attention and resources away from actual existential threats (namely, the nuclear armed governments headquartered in Moscow and Beijing), thereby gravely weakening the country with the passage of time.
>>ragtag murderers in far away caves and madrassas obviously were never the threat that a resurgent Russia or rising China would or could become.<<
The serendipity of the 9/11 attack(*) was that it nicely filled the gap in our requirement for an existential threat between the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s and the rise of China in the past few years.
Compared to global terrorism, the fracas in the Balkans were just a paltry placeholder and far too little to sustain the national security state for very long.
(*) NB: 9/11 was terrible. As Janet in The Good Place would say, however, "Not an existential threat."
I suspect the Democratic Party as a whole all wishes they could have taken back the 2016 nomination contest and redone it. Joe Biden is the obvious replacement for Clinton, but hardly the only one. Sherrod Brown could have won, Deval Patrick too, there are others. I suspect the Party had and has far less respect for Biden than he deserves (hence why they didn’t back him).
I think the more important lesson is the Democrats are a big tent coalition in every sense, and need to expand their coalition not shrink it. The political choices made since 2014 have all served to shrink the appeal of Democrats while alienating the largest swath of the American electorate. The assumption a changing country would naturally benefit liberals was wrong; and it’s not clear to me they can reverse course.
There are some real issues with the viability of a party that is based on 'everybody that's not a white man'. 1) It's a diverse coalition that will always want to go in a thousand directions. 2) You need to win the votes of some white men to actually get to 50% in a lot of these races.
Agreed
That this post isn't about President Mario Cuomo, 1993-2001, is anti-Italian discrimination.
You didn't mention RBG, but one big question mark in this counter-factual is whether she retires before 2018 or not. Since the Dems lose the senate in 2018 and the WH in 2020, the Republicans still get to appoint a 5th (more conservative than Kennedy) justice if she still refuses to strategically retire.
One possibility is that the insanity of not retiring in 2017 is even more obvious than in 2013 and this leads both RBG and Breyer to do the right thing. But it's a pretty huge question either way.
The fact the Breyer is apparently really and truly going to wait until Mitch McConnell is Senate Majority Leader again before dying is the single most concise indictment of the legal/judicial arm of the Democratic Party that I can imagine.
I think this ignores the fact that there would have been zero stimulus under a Biden administration with a McConnell Senate, and we would currently be entering a second Great Depression as Republicans happily took power for the next two decades. At least now the economy is good
That’s why in some respects Trump winning in 2016 is the only scenario where the Democrats have any shot at political power in the 2020’s.
A bad midterm for the Democrats in 2018 does likely help cement further GOP control at the state level, producing more gerrymandering. We'd see worse maps in Virginia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, to be sure.
But a GOP victory in 2020 does still induce a midterm effect for 2022, even if the GOP gets to draw the lines, and does help in the Senate. We'd almost certainly see races like Virginia go Democratic this year.
Even if there's a Trumpism without the Trump figure in the White House in Matt's scenario, you have to consider just how bad the 2020s would be in the counterfactual. We'd have a better Supreme Court. As Matt argues better foreign relations. A better outlook on politics among Democratic operatives. No January 6th.
Is the fact that the GOP is passing a massive tax cut in 2021 instead of 2017/2018 a big problem when comparing the counterfactuals? And Covid response/economic crisis.
I don’t think people appreciate how Democrats are 1 bad election away from making the Senate unwinnable for a generation (similar to what 1958 was for the Republicans). That election would’ve been 2018 under a Clinton presidency. It might be 2024 depending on how events play out.
I would never make a prediction that a chamber is unwinnable for twenty years.
I think it's very possible that 2024 sees the GOP get dangerously close to 60 votes in the Senate. But I wouldn't predict that Democrats are shut out for twenty years. 2044 is a long, long way away.
Agreed.
Predictions are really hard. Especially about the future.
And at least now Tom Cotton's not president.
One thing I don't worry about is Tom Cotton EVER being elected president. He's as charismatic as a mouthful of cotton.
Maybe. I trust when you say that you mean he couldn't get the nomination. Anyone with a "D" or "R" next to their name stands a pretty decent shot at winning the White House these days (that is, if they're the nominee).
If anyone is ever foolish enough to choose his as their vice president, they'd better hire a poison taster though. I think that's the only way he could become president.
This raises the question of if less stimulus in a Biden 2020 with Covid risks a second Great Depression that Republicans cannot get out of in 2021 and beyond.
Except with a competent president we probably start acting on COVID a few weeks earlier. Sparing NYC the worst of it and allowing us not to totally shut down/live with it. Also with a reasonable Republican running you'd likely have better Republican vaccine uptake. Outside of the US COVID really helped the incumbent.
This is an interesting point. Even though other countries had less stimulus. I suppose the question is how little stimulus would McConnell allow in alt-2020, and how else could the Federal Reserve act independently.
Very interesting piece, but I don't think Bernie would have won. I didn't think it in 2016, and after spending most of the pandemic era in rural Michigan, my opinion on this is stronger. The former president is a cult of personality, and there are a lot of people, in non-coastal areas at least, who buy what he's selling.
I would like to think that O'Malley would have won--he is my kind of official, competent and workmanlike--but on that I'm not sure. Same with Biden, though I have more confidence on that. Both would, I think, have attracted significant support from actual conservatives/moderates who might not have supported Hillary for a variety of reasons.
I’m also skeptical that Bernie could’ve won Pennsylvania. Central and wester PA has a lot of voters whose families came to the US from Eastern Europe relatively recently and “socialism” is not something they’re going to vote for.
I agree! I think of those parts of PA as essentially midwestern. My father grew up in Detroit in a heavily Eastern European neighborhood and as an adult had friends from similar neighborhoods in and around Pittsburgh.
I think the biggest alternate history of 2016 is that Marco Rubio wins the Republican nomination. This would happen if Trump doesn’t run, or if the other candidates besides Trump and Cruz drop out before Super Tuesday.*
If that happens, Rubio probably wins an even more decisive victory over the unpopular Hillary Clinton. The GOP wins the senate seats in Nevada and New Hampshire, giving them more of a cushion. 2018 is still tough for them since Repeal & Replace probably succeeds, but the map is good enough for them to expand their senate majority.
Then Covid happens, and I believe Rubio would’ve been much more popular than Trump on this. He would’ve avoided Trump’s insane denial of the severity of the problem while criticizing some of the excesses of blue state governors. He would’ve easily won reelection under these circumstances.
In this alternate timeline the Republicans have over 55 Senators, a House majority, a durable Supreme Court majority and control over redistricting. They are led by a popular president whose just led the country through its greatest crisis since World War II. The party has integrated some elements of Trumpism but is still attached to Ryanism.
That’s an interesting world!
*I actually think if Rubio doesn’t get shredded by Chris Christie at that one debate he probably comes in second during the New Hampshire primary and Kasich drops out.
Before the New Hampshire debacle Rubio was rising in the polls. That killed his momentum, which is decisive in party primaries
Yeah, that's my recollection. The media had tried various efforts at saying how well he had done in earlier debates as well, and there was a thing about he was third in Iowa, then going to be second in NH, and then . . . Christie ate him alive.
Rand Paul? The dweeb cosplay libertarian?
Rubio was the classic case of a guy who looks good on paper.
But the brighter the light on him, the more he shriveled.
With or without Christie, hard to see him ever winning the nomination.
From a politics perspective, this might be right. But 100,000+ dead Iraqis would probably argue that the 2000 election was more consequential from a real world policy perspective. We also wouldn't have exited the Kyoto Protocol, which would probably be more impactful given that time matters so much on Climate Change.
Not 2000, where a competent Gore administration would have prevented 9/11?
Except there's basically no objective reason to think Gore would have been any more likely to actually prevent 9/11 than Bush other than, "GOP sux; Dems rule!" (I agree that Gore would have made better choices post-9/11.)
Except there is an argument that the Bush administration did not take threats of terrorism seriously pre-9/11. That is the objective reason to make a case that Gore could be marginally more likely. I think it's reasonable for the argument to be "Gore taking threats more seriously increases the odds of stopping 9-11 to 3% (arbitrarily low number)."
Gore may have been willing to take it more seriously, but the "bin Laden determined to strike" memo and other US intelligence from the Summer 2000 time period, AFAIA, didn't give any specifically actionable information that anyone has ever identified to be able to say what Gore could have actually done differently to stop the attacks. To put it another way, I'm sure FDR took the possibility of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 extremely seriously, but that didn't stop it from happening. If someone can't say what concrete actions could have been done differently so as to change the outcome, it's just wanking about how awesome your preferred historical actor is.
Yeah this. When I frame the effects of SCOTUS not stealing the 2000 election (below somewhere, probably), I say the important thing is we would never have gone to Iraq, and probably would have done much less in Afganistan (simplest example, accepted the surrender the Taliban offered in 2002); I figure there's a *slight possibility* that 9/11 never happens under a Gore administration, but the nuts and bolts of anti-terrorism are just too fine-grained to really think that's more likely than not.
The sick thing is that if you only cared about Democratic Party fortunes, you'd rather have 9/11 happen and Gore pursue a reasoned response vs. it not happening at all. The fact that I can see that's sick is what separates the parties today.
Right. If you're playing the most important election of our lifetime parlor game, of course you have to make an arbitrary cutoff somewhere, since every election is contingent on those before. But for people eligible to vote in 2000 and older, the 2000 election has to win, hands down.
Well "in our lifetime" is the arbitrary cutoff, imprecise as that may be. Matt being about my age I didn't have to think about it; we start with Reagan. But it probably doesn't change for several elections prior.
I guess you could make a case for Eagle Claw success leading to a second Carter term, but it's awfully tenuous and the results are unclear. Does that really put the rightwing takeover of the GOP back in the bottle? Before that, what, Nixon doesn't break all the laws but still wins in 1972 and runs the term out? That doesn't seem that different, honestly. Before that you have JFK not being assassinated, but I'm a big detractor on that one; seems to me his presidency was on shaky ground already and his death put LBJ on unearned solid footing, leading to Great Society etc. so the effects are just superunknown, to paraphrase Soundgarden.
Maybe more to the point, we don't care as much about the pre-Reagan counterfactuals because politics wasn't broken. Consider Kennedy vs. Nixon in 1960...are we gonna say something would have been *that* different? When the parties aren't ideologically defined, and most of the real stuff happens among an amorphous elite behind closed doors....who cares who's in the chair? We're reaching for these counterfactuals because we are so completely hosed now, staring down the barrel of a structural one-party system where elections reliably have more Democratic voters but Republicans hold all the power. That didn't really get spinning before 2000, and you can't go past Reagan to even see its roots.
I guess there are some folks still alive who could have been there for the "Man in the High Tower" counterfactual where FDR is assassinated and the Germans build the "Heisenberg Device" instead. But I don't think that's terribly plausible even with the assassination. And having Ted Kennedy beat Nixon in 1972 in "For All Mankind" was fun, but not that useful to the story. Mighta been useful to the healthcare system though...
Gore wouldn't have prevented 9/11 but at least we wouldn't have invaded Iraq.
No idea if Gore would have prevented 9/11 but assuming no, everything that happened afterwards is reason enough to rank 2000 as the most important. And there's also the election itself and the self-inflicted loss of legitimacy to the Supreme Court as a result.
I think it's possible that Gore would have prevented it. We know that Bush was warned about the possibility yet didn't do anything special to try to prevent it. I think Gore would have tried, just as Clinton tried to go after AQ after Kenya/Tanzania. And trying is at least half the battle.