Everyone knows the famous joke about 9/11 and the limits of “too soon” for comedy.
The famous joke now is that since 2016, the envelope of comedy was outrun by reality — it was impossible to come up with new jokes satirizing current events, because they’d become so bizarre. Even after 6 years, it still hasn’t gotten old to most people.
But I don’t think anyone’s ever asked when reality started catching up to comedy. My submission, to my own question, is “Obama’s first election in 2008”.
Think about it. Before November 2008, politics wasn’t great, but it proceeded along familiar storylines. The Democrats were taking back power after a boondoggle in Iraq. Both presidential candidates shortly suspended their campaigns amid a national economic emergency — can you imagine them doing that today? Mainstream Republicans — not just John McCain, who was still a “maverick” at the time — felt absolutely zero fear in pushing back against their base.
I’m not drawing any causal conclusion. There’s no mechanism by which Obama made things worse; even the backlash to his Blackness can’t fully explain every wierd bounce the football of history has taken in the past 14 years. I’m just saying that pretty much every major event after Obama was elected has inched us one step closer to the bizarro world we’re living through today.Last Friday, the Bulwark brought up Ross Douthat’s wierd little pre-emptive blame game about Who’s Really Driving Us Towards Civil War.
What struck me is that the real source of the right’s abuser-ly “you made us do this” attitude is even more insidious than one might first imagine: it’s themselves!
Look, “both sides” do crazy things on their fringes. “Both sides” have fringe websites that feed them info about what the other fringe is up to. But only one side has erected a massive propaganda machine to point a firehose of news about the other’s crazies directly at their own rank-and-file.
I’m not the first to point out the existence of the machine, nor the firehose. But I’ve only seen commentators use this as proof of Democrats’ structural mediasphere disadvantages. I’ve never seen anyone explicitly connect this to the YMUDT attitude.
The standard retort would be that the right only started its propaganda machine because they’d been boxed out of the mainstream. Without getting too deep into that dumb argument1, the plain truth remains that the very first thing they set out to pioneer while building that machine, was the firehose.
This speaks to how giddily eager they were to do this to themselves. No one “made” them do anything.
But then again, partisanship is a hell of a drug. Good luck convincing them they’re doing this to themselves, right? It’s just yet another proof point in our growing canon here on how Narratives Have A Way Of Making Their Own Reality.I wonder if Trump’s growing competition with DeSantis is preliminary evidence that he’s finally jumped the shark with his own base.
Also, that Monday Bulwark episode has a great quote about the left’s punditocracy: “a diverse group of people who voted for Elizabeth Warren”.
Yep. Guilty as fucking charged.I Can’t Help This Hot Take: I’m glad that the voting rights push failed. Voter suppression isn’t effective, it’s just annoying. And removing the annoyances was never going to actually save democracy.
But I’m also disheartened by this whole episode. Every day we go without doing things like passing the ECA reform, every day we let the Democratic Party stay distracted by dumb takes on democracy reform, that’s another opportunity we’ve given the GOP to get closer to managing a successful coup.
Although: (1) the mainstream right had a dominant role in the MSM well into the 2000s, long after they’d spawned their machine, and (2) the original reason cultural elites began turning against the right was because of its witch-hunt against them in the 1950s.