MAGA Analysis from Greenwald substack

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

I think it’s important to pin down the lies they think they recognize. What exactly do they think they’ve been told that isn’t true? Are they the same lies we see? .

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Its a duopoly, right? Two corporate-capitalist parties.

The Rightwingers see the Lies from the Duplicats (CNN, MSNBC, NPR etc)

Do you think only half of the duopoly is doing the lying?

w
v

And yet as we know there is a difference between the right-wing version and the moderate/liberal/centrist version of the 2 pro corporate parties. It’s not a negligible difference (though of course from a left perspective the the centrist/liberal media leaves too much out).

So righties often see lies where in fact the “liberal” ie. centrist media is actually decently reliable. And they don’t see lies where the right wing political establishment and media ARE lying.

I just don’t see righties as having cracked the code of liberal/centrist discourse and seen through it all in ways that are sympatico with a leftist critique of the same discourse.

Race came up and it’s crucial. (Right discourse at its core is a tacit white supremecist discourse, not always openly bigoted but deeply deluded about race and blind to its own supremicist tendencies). But it’s not just race. Look at economics. How many disaffected, unhappy, suffering righties see through “trickle down theory”? Any? Ever? Anywhere?

Covid discussions have highlighted this. Other places I’ve been in debates about this. One of my key points was always that covid exposed the deep seated inequities in the socio-economics of the American medical establishment. (The racial and ethnic and class differences in death rates was a stark reminder of this.) Whenever I said that, with obvious righites, I might as well have been speaking an extraterrestial language. They didn’t even oppose it, they just flat had no idea how to discuss it. It was all “but this one goes to 11” type discussion. I got some “socialism is worse” stuff and that was about it.

…

Important qualifications for the above.

1. There is a huge difference (of course) between Op Ed pieces and “regular news,” in both print and electronic media. But even there, CNN and MSNBC have long made room for partisan Republicans, including ex-Trump officials, and the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) typically bring in more Republicans than Dems for their political talk shows. And the Dems they do bring in tend to be centrists to center-right.

The NYT and the WaPO give Op Ed slots to a host of conservatives. There is no corresponding openness on Fox and its right-wing brethren. Right off the bat, the right has advantages when it comes to media partisanship, and they’re huge.

2. MSNBC is owned by a very conservative corporation, and it hired a conservative program chief. He hired all kinds of deeply conservative hosts, like Joe Scarborough (three hours in the morning) and Nicolle Wallace (two hours in the afternoon), and they tend to have on all kinds of deeply conservative guests. It’s not “carrying Dems’ water” when Republicans there tell the truth about Trump and decry the changes in their party. They still try to push pro-GOP narratives when they can, but those usually center on some golden past that never was, when Reagan balanced the budget, defeated the Soviet Union single-handedly, refused to lie about the Cherry Tree, etc. etc. . . . If MSNBC really were just an arm of the Democratic Party, why would it give so much time to Republicans, including its former chair, Michael Steele — among dozens and dozens of others?

Signed, Billy_T, heretic leftist.

Zooey wrote:

They see that the establishment is working to thwart their ambitions, and destabilize their livelihoods. But they don’t accurately understand what forces are at work in that reality, what their objectives are, and how and why they do what they are doing. They think it’s a bunch of dumbass liberals trying to take the fruits of their labor and give it to various undeserving minorities out of some misplaced morality. They see clearly that the establishment is not working to help them and protect them. They’ve just completely misdiagnosed the causes.

I am extremely interested in this critique from the right. Part of the problem for people who are frustrated with the establishment that almost literally “takes the fruits of their labor” is that this is a challenging problem to understand. Wendell Berry actually refers to parts of Trump America as being a colony that is exploited by the big cities and other farm writers talk about how these people are too busy working and fighting a losing financial battle to diagnose the root causes of their problems.

I didn’t see anything in the article from the original post that even comes close to addressing that perspective, so I got bored with that article. But I think it is interesting to look at the American farmers who supported Trump and, in many cases, still do.

I watch very little cable news or MSM, but I don’t think regular folks in the midwest who grow our food do have their problems covered by the big news orgs. Their troubles are ignored for the most part.

Here’s a quick and hopefully relevant passage from a book from a sheep farmer in England’s Lake District and his neighbors who are frustrated with the “establishment,” which may or may not be true of American farmers & Trump-supporters:

Then comes the voice of another man–who I don’t know–sitting in an old armchair in the corner. He says everything is being driven by money, the greed of big business and a few farmers who push for more and more and undermine the rest. We are bloody fools, he says, we just end up chasing each other down to the bottom. If we make money with a hundred cows, we want another fifty to make more, and, if we are losing money, we want another fifty to get out of the hole. Either way, it is always more, more. David’s son turns to me and says, ‘it just isn’t fun anymore.’

These men were always fairly conservative with a small ‘c.’ I know because I listed to them when they were younger and I was a child. But something changed. There was always sense in what they had to say. Now there is radicalism too. And they are right although I am shocked that they see it the same way I do. I thought I had grown away from them, but the truth is we have all grown away from the same bad ideas. We are all grasping to understand what has happened and how we might climb out of it. Then, because we are all a little suspicious of such serious political talk, we spontaneously get up to go for pudding, and shuffle into the kitchen like penguins in a queue. And then we sit and eat, thinking of other things to talk about, like the football.