“Kids are attacking old people on the bus! Teenagers wilding churchgoing ladies for no reason! People are being pushed off the tracks on the New York subway! America is coming apart and these people want to defund the police!”
On Fox News, the Z-list midday presenter is gabbing away at the camera as vision cuts to the attack in question — phone video of a middle-aged Black lady being kicked and shoved off a bus in Washington DC by a bunch of kids she had told to stop cussin’.
Over the next four hours — we have the thing running non-stop at the Quality Inn Riverfront in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where we have established the US affairs desk — different shows will feature the same footage four times. “America is being mugged by crime!” Sean Hannity yells, as it comes round again. Crime wave? There’s only one crime!
Fox is running big on crime ahead of the US midterms. It has other videos, of kids rush-looting a convenience store in Philadelphia, of someone being pushed off a platform in the New York subway, but the church lady is the favourite, now running into day three.
This is real get-out-the-base stuff, aimed at its elderly white viewers and few others. It’s got a few more extra features than your old fashioned law and order campaign, since the focus on crime can be connected to the “defund the police” push of Black Lives Matter — an organisation to which Joe Biden has given some very limited praise.
Inconveniently, it also has the support of reality. Crime may be down overall by the statistics, but a certain type of random street crime — unplanned, disorganised, haphazardly violent — is up, a product of the general coming-apart of everything here.
Coming apart? Are things coming apart? Certainly seems to be on the right-wing news channels, of which Fox is now firmly towards the centre. Newsmax and Blaze Media have none of Fox’s qualms about going with the full “stop the steal” movement.
The hard right channels have gone full culture war and conspiracy: plenty of public bathrooms and book-burning stuff, and Joe Biden and the Democrats have allegedly deliberately killed US energy independence in order to weaken the country so that it will have to submit to a one-world government, all as part of the “Great Replacement”. Here, millions of illegal immigrants will so flood the US that white, non-Latino people are an ever-smaller minority, not only killing the ruling American ethnos but providing the Democrats with a permanent majority. Democrats’ defence of abortion on-demand up to full term is part of this nefarious plot, encouraging good white girls to trash their babies.
Trouble is, there’s enough truth in some of this to give conspirators stuff to rub together. The Democrats have long had a brute force demographic strategy, based on maximising the proportion of Black and Latino voters — as well as Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans who vote Democrat about 2:1 — though are less keen on the Caucasian extinction, most Democrats being snow-white themselves. With the Democrats also losing on the economic issue, this election may see the lowest white, working-class Democrat vote to date.
Coming apart? Well yes, if you watch CNN or MSNBC too, which are running strong on the Democrats’ favoured themes: the election of pro-Trump 2020 election deniers, and the Republicans’ push to ban abortion nationally. This is even less hysterical than Fox, by which I mean absolutely rock-solid, literal.
On the Republican side, election deniers managed to replace traditional Republicans in the primaries in several key states. Given that everything gets directly elected in US states, from governor to dog catcher, this would mean the potential upvote of several full slates of people who might — might? Will! — refuse to certify the 2024 presidential election results if Trump or Ron DeSantis or Kanye West happen to lose.
Democrats are now panicking again after a few weeks of calm because the polls are turning against them. Having been in the doldrums for months up to June this year and facing a catastrophic wipeout, they were risen up miraculously by the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v Wade and allowed numerous states to bring in gruesome anti-abortion laws.
Further initiatives by Biden such as student loan forgiveness and the pardoning of federal prisoners jailed for marijuana possession helped bring in groups broad and narrow (dropout stoners careless with their weed). Then Congress passed the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, albeit in an eviscerated form. This contained many cost-of-living measures such as prescription cost ceilings, which the Dems presumed would further buttress their lead. With abortion and the right to choose as the linchpin, they began to dream again of holding the House (they currently have a five-seat majority) and winning the Senate.
That is now looking dodgy. So what went wrong?
Well, inflation is raging again. The prices are crazy here in a country where cheap gas and cheap soda are seen as God-given rights. Rents are going through the roof. The base interest rate is 6%. The deep cause is ever-increasing profit share. People are being gouged for every spare penny. It’s everywhere.
The yet-deeper cause is cartelisation and price-fixing. But the size of the stimulus package has contributed to the most recent spike — or people believe it has — and the sheer inability of the government to correct for it has got people blaming them for their wages being diluted and their savings being steadily eaten up.
The Republicans have no real answers to the problem and so rely on a nebulous idea of growth through, guess what, higher rate tax cuts. Indeed, a few weeks ago they were lauding Liz Truss’s “borrow to cut tax rates” plan as truly visionary. Having gone quiet about that now, they have nothing left to say.
But they don’t need to say anything. The disquiet is building.
Biden said in a speech last week that the numbers were now running against the Democrats, but that they will come back before polling day, and that early voting showed a strong turn up of the sort of people who vote Democrat. Well, it will need to be a big lift to give them the result they want.
They have a five-seat majority in the House. The House has 435 seats, but only about 75 of them are in any way competitive. Really it’s about 30 or so seats, and that seems too many to hold the Republicans to less than five net gains. Should they lose the House, the new Speaker will be Kevin McCarthy, a professional politician who has signed on for pretty much all of the Trump-steal-conspiracy stuff, is opposed to the US’ lavish “support” for running a proxy war in Ukraine (good), but only because he loves Putin so very much (bad). He will unleash chaos if he controls the House, from switching off the January 6 putsch investigations, to starting his own of Biden and his failson Hunter.
In the Senate there are a half dozen races, some of which shouldn’t have been close. Here in Pennsylvania, ageing, stroke-injured, grey-goatteed hoodie-hipster John Fetterman is running for the Democrats against TV doctor Mehmet Oz. In Georgia, footballer Herschel Walker is running for the Republicans on a strong anti-abortion ticket, despite having allegedly paid for at least one himself.
In Arizona, the 70s-TV-show named Blake Masters has been running on an explicit “stop the steal” ticket. Democrat holds in Nevada and Washington are also in play. The Democrats can’t lose any net Senate seats (Pennsylvania would be a win; they may also pick up one in Wisconsin) — with de facto independent Democrat Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema it is already difficult enough to get anything through.
Of the governors’ races, the most important by far is Arizona, where former TV news presenter Kari Lake is running full-tilt against the media she came from; a Trump-style troll campaign with a distinctively bitchy flavour, as an alternative to Trump’s air de arsehole style. She has said she’ll accept the election as valid if she wins. The most important of the many ballot measures is Kentucky number two which, like the defeated Kansas measure in July, would put a state ban on abortion in the state’s constitution.
If the pro-Trump candidates get up in the Senate, and Lake in Arizona, and amendment two in Kentucky, well, Gilead hath cometh.
Out in the real America? Well a half-hour of stroll through Harrisburg, all colonial row houses and portentous post-war civic buildings, a church disgorging a huge congregation in Sunday best, suggested that it was all a beat-up.
But another half-hour into the place’s half-dead downtown cancelled that suggestion — filled as it was with the largely harmless and sad homeless, what they call “sketchy” types. Half the restaurants were closed down, half the few shops empty, and in those that were open a sullen mood prevails.
This has been noticeable throughout, from the airport onwards. The cheery bouncy America is largely gone, save for places where it’s an affected, contrasting style. And the TV ads of course, where everyone is hypomanic and most of the products being spruiked are “second” anti-depressants to add to the ones you’re already taking.
Everywhere else there’s a numbed, mild hostility, an unmistakeable change from, say, a decade ago. The dream has died, you work simply to reproduce yourself, and no one has any simple answer about how anyone, or the country, will get out of that.
The Uber drivers, the convenience store clerks, the hotel receptionists are scathing about all politicians, and the refrain is the same: the everyday corruption, the unchanging realities, the conveyer belt from politics to business.
The nation is being mugged by reality over and over again. Will it respond by retreating deeper into fantasy — the dream of a republic, and what may prove its final one?
Yeah, America has its fair share of serious social and economic problems, but if it seems that things are “coming apart” now, just wait to see what happens if Republicans win back both houses in the mid-terms and Trump (or one of his clones like Ron DeSantis) takes over the White House in 2024.
Trumpism is a lethal virus that kills the truth with outrageous lies, and destroys the brain cells of followers to such an extent that they regard him as some sort of infallible god, an all-powerful being who will eliminate the so-called “deep state” that supposedly controls their lives. That is the alternate reality where poor, deluded people are only too ready to draw inspiration from the deranged raving of a narcissistic, amoral charlatan whose only interests are money and power.
Diving into that Fox-fuelled universe will signal a seismic shift to an autocratic regime and create an administration that no other country will be able to trust.
But isn’t Trumpism a symptom of the disease rather than the disease itself?
That disease, among many others which wiped out most of the inhabitants before they even smelled a European, arrived on the Mayflower – fundamentalist bigotry.
Since 1620 it has turned into the virulent pathogen the world has ever known.
It is the disease. Wish I could recollect where I read this but manufacturing division is a state capture strategy, as is only listen to what I say as all other opinions are fake news. A Guardian article traced the origin of dedicated anti-liberal propaganda to Russian Oligarchs and the motivation behind it in the US is likely the same since liberals oppose a ruling elite and as well as this serving to manufacture division. Trump’s tactics are also straight out of Putin’s propaganda play book. They sell ‘I would rather be Russian than Democrat’ T=shirts in the US and was reported that some Republicans now openly support Putin as obviously did Trump when he called the invasion of Ukraine a genius move.
At play imo is Serfs v Lords, Lords by definition are autocrats and want to dismantle democracy so that their will only prevails imo.
During Trump’s Texas rally on Nov 22nd he said… “In order to make our Country successful, safe, and glorious again, I will probably have to do it again.”
MEGA MAGA?
Is America ready for Trump rallies and 2024?
Sadly humans are basically sheep. What that then requires is good leadership. All it took was one bad leader, in this case Trump, to turn everything very dark
I’m pretty sure it took a succession of bad leaders; you think Nixon could’ve got away with acting like Trump?
for those of us who ever wondered what it was like to live through the fall of the Roman Empire … well, now we know
but at least at the time of the fall of Roman Empire, the planet wasn’t facing an existential crisis where functioning and rational governments were required to stave off the self-made disaster
the 1% will install their puppets and we will all suffer and our children will die
Not all ‘our children will die’ – those who survive will have more resilient, adaptable offspring.
Europeans has been devolving since the Industrial Revolution and the repeal of the Corn Laws – all that damned cheap food.
Some might say that all humanity has been doing so since the last retreat of Ymir’s children, the glaciers, allowed an especially unpleasant subspecies to surplant the perfectly evolved and highly adapted Neanderthal.
Not all ‘our children will die’ – those who survive will have more resilient, adaptable offspring.
Europeans has been devolving since the Industrial Revolution and the repeal of the Corn Laws – all that damned cheap food.
Some might say that all humanity has been doing so since the last retreat of Ymir’s children, the glaciers, allowed our especially unpleasant ancestors to supplant the perfectly evolved, and highly adapted, Neanderthal.
So why were the two posts above Awaitinged for Approval?
I assume that the ‘awaiting approval’ status is automatic based on the appearance of particular words or phrases. I suspect ‘die’ in your post..
No, that’s not it – because my post was then accepted. Dunno..
I give up – no idea what the mod problem is but two tries is three too many to be worth the candle.
The Romans didn’t have nukes…
Their technology sufficed for Cato’s constant demand – Carthage, the rival Other, was destroyed and the earth salted.
The centre cannot hold
…….if ‘gas’ prices climb……..apparently.
Is there a centre left, I mean does the centre still exist.
Ronald Reagan killed it
A B-grade actor at that.
If you where working class and living in some of those southern states,you would either be on drugs or alcohol,sometimes both,and politics would be the last thing you would have on their mind. So if you have lost your class solidarity,Fox & other news would be your diet. Some data to show USA social problems ,in 1960s the elite 89 % had two parents in households , working class where 85% today the elite has 80 while working class has 35 % make of that you may,but it gives you a look at problems those working class families have just to live let alone involve yourself in politics
You mean the bible belt, the unmarried mother’s belt, the unemployed belt, the crime belt, the racist belt the drug belt and the conspiracy belt.
Don’t forget cancer alley, the rust belt and belt around the fentanyl addict’s arm.
It’s a long belt.
I have Foxtel, I only watch the sport.
You would have to tie me to the chair to watch Skynews channels.
I also think the Democrats will hold on, with an increase of seats in the House and the Senate.
This may be the biggest turn out of voters for a mid-term election ever.
the fact that you confidently predict a Democrat victory after announcing you only follow sports does not fill one with confidence
Guy, I follow American politics very closely.
Biden will be ok. Trust me.
A wonderfully American style statement!
Michael Moore is of the same view and he some runs on the board as far as divining the mood of the midwest electorate. The abortion rights issue is going to hurt the GOP “fer sher” but the influx of stop-the-steal types into election official positions in the Red States will be a factor. Not difficult to see lots of court challenges either way.
Here is Moore’s Dems’ll Do It rationalisation –
There are 6 million more women in the US than men. Talk about outnumbered!
There are more women who vote than men — 63% of eligible women vote. Only 59% of eligible men vote.
And when women vote, 56% of them vote for the Democrat over the 38% that vote Republican.
He seems to have forgotten, or ignored, the fact that in 2016 more than 52% of white, college educated (?sic!?) women voted for Trump.
Quoting the Orange One’s support in 2016?
That is less relevant to any estimation of the likely vote at the 2022 midterms than how they voted in 2020 after they had seen him in action for 4 years.
Years of The Apprentice had conned a significant portion of the US public into mistaking Trump for an effective and savvy leader. In any case, he is not on the ballot this time.
Some of Trump’s vote in 2016 would have been a rejection of Hillary – a much demonised, pant suit wearing, feminist, pro-choice, lawyer who had been lining her pockets currying favour with Wall Street – the same guys who had trashed the economy and led millions of Americans to lose their jobs and their homes. Clearly, the very well known figure of Biden turned that around for the Dems in 2020.
Biden could / should die before then.
They could use the Veep for spare parts, just not her brain which is even less functional than SloJo’s.
Polarization, tribalism, contempt – that’s been a rising tide, probably since before Newt, but it’s threatening to engulf the democratic system, as countless articles have suggested. And you’re part of it, with your name-calling. So tempting, isn’t it?
TonyP,
Well than he only has eighteen more days left to live.
The Democrats will win.
The Dems may well win but Americans lose.
As long as Pelosi goes…..
She will die in office, I don’t see California changing for the better.
How so? Trump gave 75% of tax cuts to highest 20% of earners. Republicans want to kill the Affordable Care Act no matter it leaves millions with no health care – their 3’rd Supreme Ct case to do this just failed thankfully. Much of gross economic inequality is due to union and worker protection bashing and while the US economy is also in trouble most of the world would be grateful to have their gas/petrol prices.
Nothing instills dread like the phrase “trust me”.
To be fair she only said she doesn’t watch Fox ‘News’, which seems incredibly sensible
Have you been reading Michael Moore’s prognostications? He says the same with his claim to fame being that he successfully tipped the tangerine toupee to win in 2016, counter to what the pundits were saying.