For many of us, the hardest thing about losing the 2024 presidential election was the bitter injustice that the American people could look at the most manifestly terrible, openly criminal president in US history—one who had already demonstrated his unfitness in office to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dead, kidnapping of children as a matter of state policy, wanton kleptocracy, and a violent attempt to overturn an election, a man who ran a batshit crazy re-election campaign openly promising retribution and dictatorship—and return him to the White House anyway.

Is our country really that ill?

On that count, amid all the think-pieces that have come out in the wake of the election, the one that has given me the most clarity was from Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic. In the piece, called “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?”, he argues convincingly that the heart of the problem is the massive right wing propaganda machine that has assumed dominance in most of this country.

Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Tomasky goes on to say that it is now obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media.

It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place.

Too true. (In fact, the very terms no longer apply. When we say “mainstream media,” most people imagine The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, the broadcast networks et al. But really, in terms of sheer numbers and reach, it is Fox and the rest of the right wing mediasphere that is the MSM.)

Tomasky asked Matt Gertz of Media Matters the hypothetical question: “If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris?”

“You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.” Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the op-ed page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

I found Tomasky’s piece weirdly comforting—maybe the first thing that had that effect on me since Trump’s win—if only because it offers some explanation for the otherwise inexplicable hysteria that caused a majority of American voters to choose the worst imaginable candidate. In fact, if you accept his thesis (and I do), it’s almost inevitable. If you bathe a people in that kind of relentless propaganda—with technology never before available to previous demagogues—OF COURSE this will be the result.

That analysis also helps us understand that, in order to defeat this neo-fascist movement, the one essential and non-negotiable subtask that we have is to change public perception and take control of that narrative.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE

If one digs into the great theoreticians of war, from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz, a steady theme emerges: it is perception, not the actual facts on the ground, that are determinative.

As I wrote in my book Resisting the Right, ultimately, all political conflict is psychological, which by extension means that perception is everything, which by extension means that communication is the weaponry of choice and the “information space”—to use the fashionable term—is the arena.

Just prior to the election, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last wrote of how the punditocracy had spent eight or nine years grappling with Trump’s ascent to power despite the will of the majority. But his victory in 2024—via a plurality, and expanding his numbers from 2016 and 2020—exploded (or at least altered) that whole premise. Unlike previous elections, this time “a significant percentage of our fellow citizens wanted him, and all his works, and all his empty promises…..If 47 percent of the country wants fascism, then eventually it will get fascism. You can’t simply dissolve the people and elect another.”

But why do they want fascism?

Also before the election, Last had another piece in The Bulwark in which he noted that, by any objective reading, the Democrats governed very successfully over the past four years. “Biden took office with a pandemic raging and people dying by the thousands every day. He beat COVID, oversaw a soft-landing from the post-pandemic shocks, and passed a lot of popular, bipartisan legislation.” Last compares the Biden presidency to that of Bush 41: “A successful enterprise that was well regarded by history.” But there’s one big difference:

George H.W. Bush lost to a next-generation political talent while enduring a mild recession. And Biden would have seen his hand-picked successor—herself a next-gen talent—lose to a bloated, doddering felon in the middle of a steady economic expansion.

It’s one thing to lose with Jimmy Carter in 1980 and have to rethink your party’s approach to governing. It’s another thing to do everything people want—pass popular legislation, have a good economy, and win the most votes—and still lose.

The chief difference between now and 1992, let alone 1980, is the capture of American media by the aforementioned propaganda empire. By controlling the flow and shape of information, the right wing controls the national discourse—that is Orwell 101. John Dean famously said that if there had been Fox News during Watergate, Nixon would never have been forced to resign, and it’s all but impossible to disagree.

You know the term “low information voter”? A new study by the organization Data for Progress showed that people who paid “a great deal” of attention to political news voted for Kamala +6, while those who paid “none at all” went +19 for Trump. That ignorance has been weaponized by the right. (As has been widely reported, many people who consume only Fox News and its ilk never even heard of things like the House Committee on January 6^th.)

As if to prove the point, The New York Times recently published a survey of 14 demographically diverse Trump voters, asking why they voted the way they did. Those respondents said they voted for Trump because he’s smart, because he’s good with money, because he handled healthcare really well, and because of all the great things he accomplished in his four years, as opposed to the nothing that was accomplished during Biden‘s.

(Pause to reattach top of skull.)

These are not subjective differences of opinion to which their holders are entitled: these are insane beliefs in demonstrable falsehoods, akin to the flatness of the Earth. The only plausible reasons that so many people hold them is that they have been inundated with lies, which they have internalized.

Now, if you’re predisposed to back the GOP, you may say: “OK, King’s Necktie, lemme get this straight. You’re saying that the only reason all these voters supported Trump is because they’re stupid? Or tricked? Talk about elitist and condescending! And you wonder why they hate you!”

Nice try, but I know how to spot a trap. What I am saying is that much of America has been bathing in relentless right wing indoctrination—positively marinating in it. Psychologists and psychiatrists will tell you that even the strongest soul is not immune to that. (Hence the perniciousness of social media.) That’s precisely what Stockholm syndrome is all about.

As for the implications, on BlueSky (find me there at @robertsedwards.bsky.social), the comment from The Times’ own Jamelle Bouie said it all:

“We’re cooked.”

And the right wing chokehold on news in this country is but one part of the problem. The obliteration of objective reality in the Trump era—probably its most lasting and damaging legacy—is another, one that goes hand in hand with the former. But both those phenomena are exacerbated by the left’s incompetence at conveying our own message.

Richard Dresser, creator of the podcast “It Happened Here” starring Edie Falco, Tony Shalhoub, and John Turturro, based on his novel, told me: “Given that generally accepted objective truth is, if not dead then on life support, whoever tells the better story wins. Republicans tell a simple, straightforward story that sticks. Democrats do not. Therein lies the challenge.”

Changing the minds of our fellow Americans is therefore the pressure point at which we must aim, and central to any kind of pro-democracy movement we hope to mount. We will not be able to win future elections until we are able to convey a compelling, direct, and honest story to the American people about what progressivism can do for them and what Trumpism will not. That is a tall order when the right wing has such a lock on the media diet of most Americans. It would be challenge enough even if reactionaries weren’t also willing and eager to lie their asses off when the facts inconveniently don’t support their desired goals. (The ultimate example: trickle down economics.) Progressives are at a further disadvantage in arguing for nuanced policies, as opposed to simplistic, reptile brain ones. That is why there’s no left-wing talk radio, at least not the commercially successful kind. The very nature of progressive dialogue—open, inquisitive, fact-based—is antithetical to the form, which thrives on pro wrestling––style mockery and rewards facile bumper sticker sloganeering.

So we are in an asymmetrical struggle to say the least. Yes, it’s hard when you’re up against liars and demagogues pushing a simplistic message that is flatout disinformation, with a massive propaganda machine to promote it, and a large swath of the public that readily accepts it. But that’s the fight we’re in. Short of surrender, what is the alternative?

RATIONALITY AND RATIONALIZATION

One thing we keep hearing in Blue America is that things are gonna get so bad that Trump voters will soon rue their votes. Maybe. I’ll confess to clinging to the comforting idea of “buyer’s remorse” myself. It only makes sense, right?

When the economy implodes and prices go up not down due to an insane trade policy, when our allies flee from us, when we watch Ukraine obliterated and Gaza turned into a sheet of glass, when we see ICE hauling families and small children away and putting them in concentration camps, when children begin to die from routine diseases because they’re no longer required to be vaccinated, when our air and water get dirtier, when the climate emergency accelerates beyond the point of no return, when dissent is suppressed, when trans people are attacked and brutalized and denied medical care, when there is a nationwide abortion ban and women regularly die because doctors are afraid to treat them, when voting rights are restricted even further, when Trump pardons all the January 6 insurrectionists, when he summarily shuts down all the criminal and civil cases in which he’s been charged and even convicted, when the rich get richer, when the very worst imaginable people continue to be chosen for the most important, sensitive, and powerful jobs in public life….will the American people wake up and say, “Uh, this isn’t what we wanted.”

You’d think they would.

Even though he has continued to beat the odds and demagogue his way to wildly unjust success, Trump is far from invincible. (He’s vincible, as Flight of the Conchords would say.) As George Packer recently wrote in The Atlantic, Trump’s movement is “more fragile than it now seems,” and it’s “quite possible that, approaching 80, Trump will find himself once more among the least popular presidents in the country’s history.”

But to exploit those vulnerabilities, we have to seize control of the narrative. If not, the right wing will just take all that bad shit that should rightly be blamed on Trump and his army of flying monkeys and turn it back on us. Inflation still bad in October 2028? It’s Biden’s fault! (Or maybe Trump just pulls out his Sharpie and tells people inflation isn’t high at all, even though they can see it with their own eyes.) Little children screaming for their mothers in concentration camps? They brought it on themselves! Terrorist attacks in New York and Washington while Tulsi Gabbard routes US intelligence directly to the Kremlin? Wokeness made us weak!

You see how this works?

Trump is already laying the groundwork to lower expectations and deflect blame. For example, after claiming over and over on the campaign trail that he would magically end inflation, he is now warning that he might not be able to do so, telling Time Magazine, “I’d like to bring (prices) down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”

Oh, OK–never mind then.

Will all the trauma that we are about to endure—economically, environmentally, internationally, morally—cause voters to turn on the people who brought this avalanche of shit down upon us? In a rational world, of course it would. Thermostatics argues that the fickle electorate always wants to “throw the bums out,” and that phenomenon should be even more operative on our behalf after four more years of the kakistocracy. But clearly we are not living in a rational world or we wouldn’t be in this fine Laurel & Hardy-like mess in the first place. And there’s no reason to be confident that even this epic shitshow will break the spell.

When things inevitably go to hell in next two years—and make no mistake, they will—it is by no means a sure thing the American people will hold the correct people culpable. In fact, no less a seer than the recently retired Paul Krugman and his Nobel Prize predicts massive shock once Trump’s policies go into effect and the American people realize how badly they’ve been scammed….but not necessarily a subsequent turning on Trump by his voters. Because that mutiny by Trump voters hinges on a (very) late-dawning awareness that he’s a con man and that they got screwed.

To that end, in a scathing and incisive essay for the online newsletter The Editorial Board, John Stoehr asks why we expect so much from the very same people who were benighted enough to buy Trump’s lies in the first place?

So let me get this straight.  People who can’t or won’t understand tariffs are going to deduce all by themselves that tariffs are the reason they’re now paying three and four times more for their sneakers, T-shirts and video-game consoles? People who voted against their own economic interests are going to figure out on their own what exactly those interests are, but only after they’ve been screwed over by the president they voted for?

Why should we place our democratic faith, and the future of the republic, in their hands?  It’s not like Trump had an agenda to bring down the cost of living. All he said was “Make America Great Again.” Deport “illegals.” Suppress transgender rights. Beat down weak and marginalized folks. Voilà! 

To paraphrase Mark Twain, it would be easier to continue scamming these people than convince them that they’ve been scammed. And the scamming will continue.

Here we go back to the power of propaganda. Stoehr notes that the “right wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, prevented these voters from knowing what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had done for the economy, inflation, wages and the GDP, but especially for the material interests of the white working class.”

Biden and Harris literally ditched 40 years of supply-side consensus in favor of growing the economy, as Biden liked to say, from the bottom up and middle out. But no one who watches Fox or listens to Joe Rogan or reads The Daily Wire or sees YouTube ads for gold bullion knows any of that. 

This same rightwing media apparatus, which has only grown larger since 2020, is going to prevent Trump voters from knowing who’s responsible for price hikes, job losses and soaring interest rates that will be directly attributable to deportations, tariffs and other insane policies. If there’s someone to blame, it won’t be Donald Trump. It will be RINOs or “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialists” or immigrants. These people believe mothers “abort” babies after they’re born or if they don’t believe it, they don’t mind people who say so. They believe a student goes to school as a girl and comes back as a boy or if they don’t believe it, they don’t mind people who say so. Even if we give them the maximum benefit of the doubt, and treat them more like children than adults, are we going to trust them to realize Trump is bad for them?

And even if Trump voters turn against Trump, thus creating an opportunity for the Democrats to win them over, are they going to recognize what the Democrats are offering in terms of economic policy given the hold the rightwing media apparatus has on them and given their past record of voting against their own economic interests?

(Stoehr also notes that, atop the complicity of the media, Team Trump will undoubtedly cook the numbers on jobs, inflation, consumer spending, and all other forms of government data in its own administration. Do you think for a New York minute that it will not?)

As if that were not bad enough, Stoehr also points out that the right wing media—which is to say, the MSM—has a force multiplier in the allegedly respectable Washington press corps, which “habitually launders Trump’s talking points and, as we have seen, appeases him by either self-censoring or acting as if already under threat of investigation or prosecution by his administration.”

A galling case in point, one of many from which to choose. Speaking to Kristin Welker on “Meet the Press” last week, Trump said that the members of the House January 6th committee should be jailed, and The Washington Post’s response was to report: “it is exceedingly abnormal for the leader of a democracy to express a desire to see political opponents jailed.”

Yes, and it was also rather unusual for the leader of a Central European country to conduct live fire training across the border in Poland.

When a president-elect casually suggests the most hamhanded, dead giveaway move from page one of the authoritarian handbook and the press just shrugs, should we be surprised that the general public doesn’t think it’s a big deal? When the Washington Post added “Democracy dies in darkness” to its masthead, I didn’t realize they were bragging about it as they unscrewed the lightbulb.

TEA PARTY 2.0

So faced with the right wing PSYOPS juggernaut and an electorate largely drunk on its Kool-Aid, how can we make our case?

For starters, we have to get past our belief in legacy media and come to grips with the fact that The New York Times, CNN, The Atlantic, etc do not drive public opinion in the age of TikTok and Joe Rogan. Even if everyone you know still consumes those storied periodicals, they are like a joke out of a Woody Allen movie. It’s shocking that the Republicans—the party of old people and (let’s just say it) dumb people—are more adept in the new media world than we are, but they clearly are.

In a piece for The Bulwark from 2022 called “How Democrats Can Win the Information War,”the apostate Republican Ron Filipkowski argues that we can’t rely on legacy media to counter viral propaganda and disinformation, since “the traditional media is constitutionally incapable of being a counter to the alternative ecosystem the right –wing has constructed. Our media is structured to report facts about the way the world functions in a liberal society, not act as a counterweight to an else-worlds propaganda machine.”

“Democrats should take the fight directly to the right on their own platforms,” he writes, bemoaning the fact that the left has not already taken up this approach. “Either Democrats fail to recognize what is happening, don’t understand it, or think that a handful of PACs and White House press conferences are sufficient to deal with it. Either way, they’re wrong. The DNC’s ‘War Room’ looks like a Victorian tea party compared to what Republicans do on a daily basis.”

We could also take a page out of our foes’ very own handbook. In a piece for The New Republic called “Liberals Have Much to Learn From MAGA,” Ana Marie Cox argues that “what the Democrats need to do is ape the tactics and the artifice that bring the extremist right to power.” In her bold proposal, we should stop being beholden to a feckless centrism and so afraid of our own policy platform, and instead co-opt the right’s “tone of outrage.”

These guys are so angry about what they see in the world, and they’re not only not afraid to say so, they present righting these fancied wrongs as justice! In a world where the status quo seems to be rigged against ordinary people, voters seem drawn to those willing to spar and shake things up—they may not always literally agree with what’s being said, but they admire what looks to them like the courage necessary to smash a rigged system. 

In that same magazine, Michael Tomasky recently wrote eloquently about relying less on outrage and more on practical solutions. But to my ears, that isn’t the kind of outrage Cox means—the tedious outrage that “Donald Trump is horrible.” We all know that, and most of America obviously doesn’t care. Cox is talking about weaponized, righteous outrage that can be used against MAGA Nation, which is accustomed to having that tool all to itself.

Democrats should ape this fighting spirit, and flip the script on the reactionaries. What do you mean I can’t say “BIPOC” anymore, bro? Are you policing my language? Hey, pal, you’re coming after MY RIGHT to take care of my children as I see best? What’s next? You gonna try to stop me from sending my kids to the same public schools my parents sent me to? WTF, my dude, ARE YOU SAYING YOU WANT MY CHILDREN TO DROWN IN A RISING OCEAN? As you might surmise, I think emphasizing the tried and true “What about the children?” really helps. But I’d also emphasize the need to attack the GOP at the precise points they present as their strongest.

Similarly, in The Nation, Waleed Shahid criticizes the Democrats’ reluctance to embrace populist appeals, a failure that “allowed their opponents to seize the public’s attention.”

Trump’s simple, emotionally charged narrative about fixing the economy, winding down foreign wars, restoring order, and protecting “traditional” American values may have been filled with bigotry and lies. But it commanded the public discourse, pushing the Biden-Harris administration off center stage.

If we can’t craft an equally compelling vision, we don’t deserve to win.

Cox writes that “Democrats need fierce, loud, righteous occupiers of the public square, asserting and celebrating our values. People who will go to school board and city council meetings—and run for seats on them, elections where with such low turnout just a small expenditure could make a huge difference.”

She also writes of another strategy that, she says pungently, “the left can lift from those MAGA assholes”:

Never stop accusing them of being out of step from the mainstream. Never stop calling them weird. Never stop reminding the public of the out-of-touch billionaires Trump is bringing to Washington to rule over us. And never stop pointing out the harms done by this gang’s policies—and by the rulings of their pet Supreme Court.

There is a red and a blue America; blue America is a better place to live. There is an “us” and a “them.” Democrats need to get in the conflict and be an opposition party again.

Again, one might argue that we have been loudly pointing this shit out for eight years and much of America doesn’t give a damn. But some of those attacks do find their target. I would submit that simply pointing out that Donald Trump is a bad person has proven pretty ineffective….but pointing out how he and his cronies are ripping you off might find more purchase.

Changing the narrative isn’t just talk, of course: it helps to actually do shit, especially at the local level. As Stoehr writes, the Biden White House did plenty, from the IRA to CHIPs and beyond. But did you hear about it? Half the Republican electorate thinks the GOP delivered those goods, because the same GOP congressmembers who voted against that legislation shamelessly went back to their districts and claimed credit for the benefits those new bills delivered.

We ought to be able to make that case, and without too much trouble, because we are actually doing things that the public wants, while the Republicans are not. In a blind taste test ahead of the election, voters overwhelmingly preferred the Harris/Walz agenda to that of Trump/Vance, when they didn’t know whose program was whose. But the public is not getting the word. Cox again:

Here’s a dirty little secret: Very few MAGA policy prescriptions are genuinely popular. Some of them—banning in vitro fertilization and contraception—are quite unpopular! They are now on the table because a bunch of once-obscure right-wing activists worked around the margins of our politics to build institutional consent for their ideas and, most significantly, build a federal judiciary willing to countenance some of the wilder notions being kicked around the conservative think tank industrial complex. All the while, as these pieces on the chessboard were being aligned, more mainstream Republicans lied about their willingness to stand up to the extremists in their midst. (Looking at you, Susan Collins!) 

The right wing media is the unreliable narrator to end all unreliable narrators. But the one advantage we have over the liars and cheats on the other side is that the story we are telling is actually true, and does not require PT Barnum-grade perfidy and spin.

“I believe that many of the people who have been turned by lies can be won back with irrefutable truth,” Filipkowski writes, “but the truth has to be put right in front of them, meeting them where they are.”

I am less convinced than he that MAGA Nation will listen to reason, and a lie famously goes round the world while the truth is still lacing up its Nikes and making sure the bows are neat. But we must try. The price of failure will be enormous.

TICK TOCK

The midterms are less than two years away, which is both good news and bad. Good in that the clock is already ticking—fast—on Trump’s attempt to install a permanent right wing autocracy with his family at the head, forever. The bad news is that the clock is ticking—fast—for us too. We have less than 23 months to change the story that Americans currently believe about the two parties, and who is the best steward of the public good. If we do not, we will not be able to stymie the right wing, nor win back either house of Congress, nor have a prayer of retaking the Oval Office in ‘28.

John Stoehr one last time: “The world never changed for the better because a majority wanted it to. It changed because a righteous minority demanded it.” And that demand begins with telling a compelling story.

So maybe there comes a time when America comes to its senses and recognizes the patently obvious. But not so long as the right wing has a death grip on the media, and on the broader story that we as a people tell ourselves about who we are and the state of the country in which we live, and not so long as we do a poor job of offering a compelling counter-narrative.  

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Illustration: Pancho Leiner

Image sources: Eva Almqvist via Getty Images; Justin Sullivan / Getty Images