A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Wokeness Problem Pales Alongside the GOP's War on Democracy

Though Times editorialists absurdly assert otherwise.

I don't know how many times I can say this, but here goes: Left-wing
cancel culture is a real problem
,
especially in academia, and within progressive journalism and nonprofit
organizations. The appropriately "woke" positions on race, gender,
and lately, Israel, remain in constant motion and it can be a struggle
just to keep up. A young person's misjudgment can threaten an entire
career. Even so, it is an ant compared to the elephant of the Republican
campaign to shut down all critical discourse at the same time it
destroys our democracy
.

Elite media institutions, led, unarguably, by The New York Times, have
been almost comically obsessed with the former threat, while failing to
pay anything like sufficient attention to the threat posed by the
latter. (This is to say nothing of the challenges facing the sorts of
institutions of higher learning that its writers and editors did not
attend, but most American students do.) We don't know why this is so.
It strikes me as likely, however, that it's a product of decades of
right-wing "working the refs"-which, Google reminds me, I
testified about to a panel led by Bernie Sanders and John Conyers in May
2005
.
The Times is the most important "ref" in the entire global media.
Now, with the egregiously inappropriate "bothsidesism" of this
editorial
,
it can answer conservative and corporate critics of the paper's
alleged liberalism/wokeism by saying, "See, we bash liberals, too."

Another likely motivation lies in the realm of the psychological.
Leftists and liberals deemed to be insufficiently woke (like, sometimes,
yours truly) find few things more annoying in life than attacks
emanating from their political left. They believe these folks should
"get real" and embrace whatever compromises that one has, over time,
felt oneself compelled to embrace. "Woke" left charges often arrive
accompanied by a combination of unearned moral superiority and smug
condescension that would piss off the Dalai Lama. But the failure to
distinguish between these genuine annoyances and Republicans'
anti-democratic campaign to replace American democracy with what looks
more and more every day like a homegrown version of fascism is itself a
danger to democracy. What's more, it's an excuse for right-wingers
to keep up their focus on the perils of wokeism. All they have to say is
"Even the liberal New York Times editorial page agrees ..."

Fortunately, I need not go on, as The Washington Post's Philip Bump
has already done a fine job of dismantling the Times' "odd bit of
partisan both-sidesing, conflating the left's engagement in criticism
with the right's leveraging the law to control speech
."
Want more? Dan Froomkin has it here
,
and so does Thomas Zimmer here
, and
Will Bunch here
,
Ken White here
, and
Sebastian Stockman here
. Also, The
Onion
...

Finally, one supposes that it must be mere coincidence that the Times
almost simultaneously agreed to stop restricting technology workers who
oversee interns from expressing support for a union, settling a case
brought by the NLRB
.

Since Russia's Ukraine invasion began, I've seen significant
punditocracy attention paid to the writings of Hannah Arendt. The
Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan did so here
,
as did The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum, here
.
I share their belief in her relevance, but as I argued over
and over
during
the Trump presidency, Arendt's warnings apply to the present-day U.S.
as well. Below, I pull together some of the examples I employed in my
2020 book Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
,
which, amusingly, Ms. Sullivan discovered after a two-year absence on
her office desk, together with some really old fudge
.

As Arendt observed
,
"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you
believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer
... And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its
mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its
capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do
what you please."

In her 1967 essay "Truth and Politics
,"
Hannah Arendt described "a consistent and total substitution of lies
for factual truth" as the means by which fascist dictators can
undermine our ability to "take our bearings in the real world"-a
necessary precondition for the replacement of a democratic system with a
totalitarian one. This systematic use of lying as propaganda, as Arendt
observed in 1951's The Origins of Totalitarianism (on page 382 of the
1973 re-edition from Harvest Books) discourages people from even seeking
truthfulness. "Under such conditions, one could make people believe
the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day
they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take
refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to
them, they would protest that they had known all along that the
statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior
tactical cleverness."

The embrace of Trump's tactic of the bald-faced lie among contemporary
Republicans is consistent with what Arendt argued [in Origins, p. 474
but see also Paul Mason, "Reading Arendt Is Not Enough"] to be the
necessary conditions for the creation of "the ideal subject of a
totalitarian state"; that is, the person "for whom the distinction
between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the
distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought)
no longer exist."

For more on Hannah Arendt's thought and its relevance to America
today, see Samantha Rose Hill's fine short book on her thought

and some of the terrific essays published over the decades in The New
York Review of Books
,
especially those by Alan Ryan, Alfred Kazin, Seyla Benhabib, Amos Elon,
Tony Judt, and of course Arendt herself (especially those linked above).
For the threat of fascism posed by Trump, the Republican Party, and
those media entities that demonstrate their fealty to both, see this
interview with Jason Stanley
,
author of the fine book How Fascism Works
,
which also draws on Arendt's arguments.

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Gallup just released a new poll on the American public's attitudes
toward Israel and the Palestinians
.
What is most remarkable about the poll is the fact that while
Americans-especially Democrats-have grown more sympathetic to the
plight of the Palestinians, and more critical of Israel's negotiating
posture, their strong support for Israel itself remains remarkably
stable since the poll began asking 21 years ago. A person who gets most
of his or her news from Twitter or other social media would probably not
be aware of this.

The people who should be paying the most attention, however, are BDS
supporters. I've seen a number of pieces lamenting the fact that the
world has snapped to attention regarding boycotts of the Russians, but
continues to ignore-or in many cases, attempts to outlaw-the boycott
of Israel (originally launched in 2004 and 2005). (Here

is one from The Nation.) BDS supporters, however, are proving awfully
reluctant to draw the obvious conclusion from the success of the former
and the failure of the latter. It's not that they need to try harder,
it's that they have an ineffective-to-the-point-of-counterproductive
strategy. (I wrote a long essay on the failures of BDS for Democracy

in 2018.) The fact is simply that Americans are eager to boycott the
Russians but have no interest in boycotting Israel. It's been 17
years, after all, and so far, no universities, no major national unions,
no major U.S. corporations, no local governments, not even any food
co-ops

of which I'm aware have joined in. The possibility of an endorsement
by the Middle East Studies Association

does not exactly make up for all that.

Anyway, for people who genuinely care about the fate of those
Palestinians living in exile ,
or under occupation in the West Bank (in part, thanks to the corruption
of the Palestinian Authority
), or in the
"open-air prison
" in Gaza (in
significant measure, thanks to Hamas
), or under intense legal
discrimination inside Israel
,
what is needed, before there can be a transformation within either U.S.
or, more importantly, Israeli policy, is a Palestinian perestroika,
accompanied by a reassessment of its failed political strategy.

Finally, a mere 55 days after virtually every other important
international news source did so, The New York Times has finally alerted
its readers to the fact of Amnesty International's report on
"apartheid" in Israel. Here
is a
Twitter thread tracing the Times' own explanation for this, and some
of the implications of this decision.

Eric's Trash TV Reviews

People often ask me, "Eric, what do you think about trash TV, and
specifically which shows do you watch?"

* The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Tragically downhill since the brilliant
pilot. Terrible fourth season; Susie is the most annoying character
ever, but the last episode, heavy with Lenny Bruce, was surprisingly
good.

* Billions: Has become embarrassing to have on.

* Emily in Paris: Like an endless colonoscopy.

* Pam & Tommy: Even worse, if possible.

* Inventing Anna: Weirdly excellent, perhaps the best trash TV since the
now trash classic Gossip Girl (the original, obvi).

But then many of those same people say, "But Eric, what about really
good non-trashy shows?" I respond:

* My Brilliant Friend

* Shtisel

* Call My Agent!

* Station Eleven

* Succession

* The Afterparty

* Archer

* The Morning Show

* Valley of Tears

* and (obvi) Curb Your Enthusiasm

"And what about OK shows if you just want to watch something?"

* Dickinson

* Losing Alice

* Somebody Somewhere

* Upload

* Normal People

* Single Drunk Female

* Srugim

"Any golden oldies?"

* Freaks and Geeks

* The Mindy Project

* The League

* Party Down

* The Thick of It

* and of course, The Office

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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