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You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle

Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media

As a historian who also writes about the present, there are certain
well-worn grooves in the way elections get written about by pundits and
political journalists from which I instinctively recoil. The obsession
with polling, for one. Polls have value when approached with due
humility, though you wonder how politicians and the public managed to
make do without them before their modern invention in the 1930s
. But given how often
pollsters blow their most confident-and

**consequential**-calls, their work is as likely to be of use to
historians as object lessons in hubris as for the objective data they
mean to provide.

Pollsters themselves are often the more useful data to study, especially
when their models encode mistaken presumptions frozen in place from the
past. In 1980, for instance, Ronald Reagan's landslide was preceded by
a near-universal consensus that the election was tied. The pollster who
called it correctly, Lou Harris, was the only one who thought to factor
into his models a variable that hadn't been accounted for in previous
elections, because it did not yet really exist: the Christian right.

Polling is systematically biased in just that way: toward variables that
were evident in the

**last**election, which may or may not be salient for

**this**election. And the more polls dominate discussions of campaigns
and elections, the more they crowd out intellectual energy that could be
devoted to figuring out those salient, deeper, structural changes
conditioning political reality: the kind of knowledge that doesn't
obediently stand still to be counted, totted up, and reduced to a single
number.

Another

**waaaaay**too well-worn journalistic groove is prediction
.
I have probably read thousands of newspaper opinion column
prognostications going back to the 1950s. Their track record is too
embarrassing for me to take the exercise seriously, let alone practice
it myself. Like bad polls, pundits' predictions are most useful

****when they are wrong. They provide an invaluable record of the
unspoken collective assumptions of America's journalistic elite, one
of the most hierarchical, conformist groups of people you'll ever run
across. Unfortunately, they help shape our world nearly as much, and
sometimes more, than the politicians they comment about. So their
collective mistakes land

**hard**.

Just how hierarchical are they? How conformist? Well, one reason Timothy
Crouse was able to write the most illuminating book about political
journalism ever, The Boys on the Bus

(1973), was because he was a playwright, who recognized what he was
observing among campaign journalists as a collection of highly
ritualized scripts. Like the time, after a contentious candidate debate,
when members of the traveling press corps crowded around the man
referred to as their "dean," the Associated Press's Walter Mears, as
he hacked away at his typewriter. One asked, "Walter, what's our
lead?" The rest awaited his answer on tenterhooks. They needed him to
tell them what they had just seen.

And how ritualized? Consider one of elite journalism's most deeply
worn grooves: the morning-after declarations, should any Democrat win a
presidential election, that the Republican politics of demagogic
hate-mongering has shown itself dead and buried for all
time-forgetting how predictably it

**returns**in each new election, often in an increasingly vicious form.

In 1964: When the author of the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson,
defeated a Republican who voted against the Civil Rights Act, Barry
Goldwater, one of the most distinguished liberal newspaper editors in
the South , Sam Ragan of the
Raleigh

**News & Observer**, pronounced that all future American elections would
be decided "on issues other than civil rights." His essay
quoted the

**Los Angeles Times**' Washington bureau chief, who affirmed that
conventional wisdom by observing that henceforth, whichever party takes
the Black vote would be no more predictable than who would win
"freckle-faced redheads and one-armed shortstops."

In 1976: When Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, Washington's most
respected public-opinion expert, Everett Carll Ladd, said that the GOP
was "in a weaker position than any major party of the U.S. since the
Civil War," because it had turned itself into an "institution for
conservative believers." He wrote that in a magazine article published
in 1977. It came out in book form
-poor guy-the
week of the opening klaxon of the Reagan Revolution: the 1978
congressional elections, when a passel of New Right Republicans and
conservative Democrats upset many of the longest-serving and beloved
liberals in Washington.

In 2008: That year, I published a book called Nixonland
,
an account of Nixon's brand of demagogic hate-mongering and the
resistance to it in the 1960s as a crucible of our own contemporary
political divisions. A Clinton White House adviser, Howard Wolfson,
auditioning as a centrist pundit in

**The New Republic**, wrote
of how
Obama's imminent victory over a pol who "calls Senator Obama a
socialist, trots out a plumber to stoke class and cultural resentments,
and employs his Vice-President to question Obama's patriotism by
linking him to terrorists" proved that "Nixonland is dead."

[link removed]

And in 2012, when Michael Lind wrote

of Barack Obama's re-election victory, "No doubt some Reaganite
conservatives will continue to fight the old battles, like the Japanese
soldiers who hid on Pacific islands for decades, fighting a war that had
long before been lost ... Any competitive Republican Party in the future
will be to the left of today's Republican Party, on both social and
economic issues."

This particular bias is rooted into elite punditry's deepest, most
dangerous groove of all: a canyon, if you will. On one side of the
yawning gulf is the perennial fantasy that America is a nation
fundamentally united and at peace with itself, "moderate," "centrist,"
where exceptions are epiphenomena entirely alien to settled American
"norms."

On the other side of the gulf is, well, reality
.

The media habits that make it so hard to

**grasp**that reality-that made Trump and his merry band of
insurrectionists such a surprise to us-are perhaps as systematic as
any foisted upon the public by state media in authoritarian nations. A
little more innocent than, say,

**Pravda**, however, because one wellspring of this stubborn fantasy,
and why audiences are so receptive to it, is simple psychology. To
acknowledge the alternative is to stare into a terrifying abyss: the
realization that America has

**never**not been part of the way to something like a civil war
.

But suddenly, in 2024, no one can avoid acknowledging that abyss
anymore. And that leaves journalism in a genuine crisis.

Generations of this incumbent, consensus-besotted journalism have
produced the very conceptual tools, metaphors, habits, and technologies
that we understand

**as**political journalism. But these tools are thoroughly inadequate to
understanding what politics now

**is**.

According to polls (which, yes, have their uses, in moderation),
something around half of likely voters would like to see as our next
president a man who thinks of the law as an extension of his superior
will, who talks about race like a Nazi, wants to put journalistic
organizations whose coverage he doesn't like in the dock for "treason
,"
and who promises that anyone violating standards of good order as he
defines them-shoplifters, for instance-will be summarily shot dead
by officers of the state who serve only at his pleasure. A fascist, in
other words. We find ourselves on the brink of an astonishing watershed,
in this 2024 presidential year: a live possibility that government of
the people, by the people, and for the people could conceivably perish
from these United States, and ordinary people-you, me-may have to
make the kind of moral choices about resistance that mid-20th-century
existentialist philosophers once wrote about
.
That's the case if Trump wins. But it's just as likely, or even more
likely, if he loses, then

**claims** he wins. That's one prediction I feel comfortable with.

Journalistically, this crisis could not strike more deeply. The

****tools we have for making sense of how politicians seek to accumulate
power focus on the whys and wherefores of attracting

**votes**. But the Republican Party and its associated institutions of
movement conservatism, at least since George and Jeb Bush stole the 2000
election in Florida, has been ratcheting remorselessly toward an
understanding of the accumulation of political power, to which they
believe themselves ineluctably entitled as the only truly legitimate
Americans, as a question of

**will**-up to and including the projection of will by the force of
arms.

Ain't no poll predicting who soccer moms will vote for in November
that can make much headway in understanding that.

Thus the challenge I have set for myself with this column: to
conceptualize and practice journalism adequate to this extraordinary
state of affairs.

I should say, the challenge I set for

**ourselves**: This project must be plural, or nothing at all. Email me
ideas, complaints, corrections, criticisms-and suggested role models,
for there are plenty of
heroic
ones to
discover
out
there ; have
always
been
plenty of
heroic
ones
out
there
-at [email protected]
.

A political journalism adequate to this moment must throw so many of our
received notions about how politics works into question. For one thing,
it has to treat the dissemination of conventional but structurally
distorting journalistic narratives as a

**crucial**

**part of the story of how we got to this point**.

[link removed]

For instance, the way mainstream American political journalism has built
in a structural

**bias**toward Republicans. If one side in a two-sided fight is
perfectly willing to lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate without remorse
in order to win, and journalists, as a matter of genre convention, must
"balance" the ledger between "both sides," in the interest of
"fairness," that is systematically unfair to the side less willing to
lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate. Journalism that feels compelled to
adjudge both "sides" as equally vicious, when they are anything but,
works like one of those booster seats you give a toddler in a restaurant
so that they can sit eye to eye with the grown-ups. It is a systematic
distortion of reality built into mainstream political journalism's
very operating system.

A recent example was one of NBC News's articles

in response to Donald Trump's new turn of phrase in describing
immigration. It was headlined: "Trump Sparks Republican Backlash After
Saying Immigrants Are 'Poisoning the Blood' of the U.S."

It took exceptional ingenuity for someone at NBC to figure out how to
wrench one side's embrace of race science into the consensus frame,
where "both sides" "agree" that major presidential candidates should not
imitate Nazis. That frame squeezes out any understanding of how
Trump's provocations rest along a

**continuum**of Republican demonization of immigrants going back decades
("Build the dang fence," as John McCain put it in 2010), and that most
Republicans nonetheless support Trump (or candidates who say much the
same things) down the line.

Pravda stuff, in its way. Imagine the headache for historians of the
United States a hundred years from now, if there is a United States a
hundred years from now, seeking to disentangle from journalism like that
what the Republican Party of 2024 is actually like.

There is, simultaneously, another force that functions systematically
within our deranged political present to render genuine understanding of
encroaching authoritarianism so much more difficult. It is the
opposition political party's complex and baffling allergy to genuinely

**opposing**.

These traditions include Democratic "counterprogramming": actions
actively signaling contempt for the party's core non-elite and
anti-elitist base of support. That's a term of art from the Clinton
years, but it has its origins as far back as the early 1950s, when Adlai
Stevenson Sister Souljah'ed a meeting with party liberals

by announcing himself opposed to Truman's goal of a national health
care program, derided federal funding of public housing, and came out in
favor of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act.

Another Democratic tradition associates political surrender with moral
nobility. Al Gore, for example, had wanted to concede on Election Night
2000, based merely on network projections that had Bush up by 4,600
votes in Florida-and not even wait for the actual initial count, which
ending up having Bush ahead by only a few hundred.

A third Democratic tradition imagines that reactionary rage can be sated
with technocratic compromise. Like the response

from Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, a Jew, to Donald Trump's
incessant avowals that what Schumer and his party are really after is
poisoning

**true**America's purity of essence: "What Donald Trump said and did
was despicable, but we

**do** have a problem at the border and Democrats know we have to solve
that problem, but in keeping with our principles."

Or like what Bill Clinton said

upon signing into law Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: "After I
sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a political issue."
Leaving office, he told a reporter, "I really believed that if we passed
welfare reform we could diminish at least a lot of the overt racial
stereotypes that I thought were paralyzing American politics."

This is the infernal triangle that structures American politics.

In one corner, a party consistently ratcheting toward authoritarianism,
refusing as a matter of bedrock principle-otherwise they are
"Republicans in Name Only"-to compromise with adversaries they frame
as ineluctably evil

****and seek literally to destroy.

****

In the second corner, a party that says that, in a political culture
where there is not enough compromise, the self-evident solution is to

**offer more compromise**-because those guys' extremist fever,
surely, is soon to break ...

And in the third corner, those agenda-setting elite political
journalists, who frame the Democrats as one of the "sides" in a tragic

**folie à deux** destroying a nation otherwise united and at peace with
itself because both sides stubbornly ... refuse to compromise.

And here we are.

All three sides of the triangle must be broken in order to preserve our
republic,

**whichever** candidate happens to get the most votes in the 2024
Electoral College. I have no prediction on offer about whether, or how,
that can happen. All I know is that we have no choice but to try.

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

Follow Rick Perlstein on Twitter ,
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