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15 DAYS UNTIL JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS TAKE THE OATH OF OFFICE
Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—Why the GOP Will Remain a Threat to Democracy, Even After Trump Is Gone. Buoyed by right-wing media, they have become merchants of doubt, determined to rob truth of its power:
More than fifteen years ago, comedian Stephen Colbert introduced a new word into our vocabulary: truthiness. In 2006, Merrian-Webster Dictionary made it the word of the year, defining it as “a truthful or seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true.”
Demonstrating the notion that comedians like Colbert often play the role of prophets in our culture, Lou Dobbs recently asked why it has been so hard to find proof of the election fraud “everyone knows exists.” Those of us in the reality-based world might ask how everyone knows that election fraud exists if there has been no proof. Similarly, in a video by Seth Holehouse titled “The Plot to Steal America,” the former creative director of Epoch Times claims that, even as mainstream media tells us that the presidential race is over, “in your gut, you know something’s just not right.” You’d be hard-pressed to find a better example of truthiness.
What Colbert noticed back in 2005 was that the Republican Party was breaking away from facts and evidence, increasingly relying on what people feel “in their gut.” By 2016, Mark Turnbull of Cambridge Analytica was telling prospective political clients that “it’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts because actually it’s all about emotion.”
That is how we reached the point where 39 percent of Americans believe that the 2020 election was rigged, even as Dobbs admits that there has been no proof. Demonstrating how all of this works in the Trump era, conservative political analyst Yuval Levin outlined two types of populism: corrosive and constructive. [...]
Levin is making the case that Republicans should govern as constructive populists with real policy proposals. In other words, he’s suggesting that Republican politicians actually lead by doing the job they were elected to do. But as David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, pointed out more than 10 years ago, that would go against the wishes of the real leaders of the GOP—right-wing television/radio personalities—whose business model relies on the rage induced by corrosive populism. [...]
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
“The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.” ~~Paul Wellstone, "The Case for Commitment."
At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—We Won the Debates:
I'll get the declaration of winners out of the way first: the Democratic voters won tonight.
All four of our candidates were very strong. They all came across as likable. They are extremely sharp, incredibly well-informed and thoughtful. They have visions for how and where they would lead the country, and the role of America in the world. They want to challenge the American people by appealing to the sense of the common good.
They didn't attack government and demean its potential for positive change. They showed that they can all inspire Americans to strive for a better future for all of us. There couldn't be a more stark contrast between our tremendous field and the horrible Republican field than the back-to-back debates that just aired on ABC.
Our candidates also conducted themselves like responsible adults. They showed respect to each other, and in doing so showed greater respect for the viewers and the voters. Unlike the Republicans, who were mean and nasty to each other, the Democrats were almost unfailingly calm, they didn't take nasty tones with each other, they complimented each other, and they didn't interrupt. There was only one moment of significant crosstalk, when all four were trying to interrupt, but they were trying to interrupt ABC's host Charles Gibson, to reject the premise of one of his questions.