The Infernal Triangle: The Independent Media Hustle

The book I’m working on now is about how the last 25 years of American politics brought our democratic republic to the brink of collapse. It apportions one-third of the blame to the failings of elite political journalism. One way I make the case is by pointing to two movements that arose in the opening months of Barack Obama’s presidency, and describing how both were reported in The New York Times.

The first was covered at a volume that betokens obsession. It was called the Tea Party. The Times told its story largely in the way its leaders wished: as a spontaneous outpouring of nonpartisan anger from ordinary Middle Americans at the alleged fiscal irresponsibility of the Obama administration.

The second movement was formed from the dregs of the 1990s militia movement. It sought to recruit active-duty military and police to thwart the Obama administration’s alleged plan, as founder Stewart Rhodes described it in his original manifesto, to “go house-to-house to disarm the American people … with orders to shoot all resisters.” These were the Oath Keepers, whom the Times only ever mentioned in a single news story, in passing, busy as they were sanding down the Tea Party to fit it into the both-sides “polarization” narrative that defines mainstream American political journalism.

It was a pretty striking example of how a supposed Newspaper of Record actively renders it impossible for ordinary news consumers to form an accurate picture of what was going on in front of their noses. In actual fact, the second group was a veritable auxiliary of the first. Rhodes grew it by making pitches for new members from rostrums at Tea Party rallies.

Lucky for us, there was another publication where a historian can go back and pluck real-time evidence of that Tea Party/Oath Keeper alliance from those years. If you are interested in how the American right went insane, TalkingPointsMemo.com is your actual publication of record, compiling a bountiful archive of the ways “extremism” and “mainstream” merged in the history of the Republican Party from the dawn of President George W. Bush to the present. It was born, in 2000, at a time of new vessels and styles of writing about American politics. It could have become a model for the rest of the news media. It did not.

I explained this interpretation of mine to TPM’s founder and proprietor and asked what he thought. Josh Marshall, it turns out, has a modest streak.

“I’m not sure I would say it myself. But I would largely agree with it.”

THE FIRST THING IT TOOK WAS GETTING everything wrong. When Marshall was getting his feet wet in journalism in the 1990s, he recalled, he found himself interested “in the wacky back-bench House Republican types.” He heard back, “That stuff is kind of fun to make fun of, but that’s not really politics. Politics is this stuff.”

“This stuff” was the give-and-take behind closed doors out of which actual legislation gets made, or the public quest to persuade the “median voter.” Flamethrowers like TPM favorite Steve King, elected to Congress in 2002 after sponsoring a bill in the state Senate to make English Iowa’s official language, were a sideshow compared to the grown-ups in the Republican Party, the people making those deals, like John Boehner. Barack Obama thought that, too.

“And I never thought this was true,” Marshall said. “The Trump thing didn’t surprise us, because that is the Republican Party. I think I wrote something a month into the race that he was going to be the nominee.” That was a time when the most respectable liberal and centrist analysts were knowingly plumbing the most refined precincts of political science to reassure us that such a thing was inconceivable.

The second thing it took was descending down from the empyrean heights of respectability, where the Gray Lady lives. It turned him off. “I kind of like a tabloid approach to the news,” he said.

I ask what kind of models he had in mind. He giggled. “Probably in some way, almost the New York Post, as weird as it sounds … the mid-century urban tabloid that is crusading. That you could do that, and also be really serious about policy, and also take the details very seriously: I’ve always been wedded to the idea that you could do those two things at the same time.”

Not necessarily ideologically crusading, he hastened to add—which brought the discussion to an awkward precipice.

Marshall started his journalism career in the late 1990s here, at The American Prospect, which by my lights was doing for policy journalism something similar to what Marshall has done in covering the right, providing a model that should have influenced the mainstream, but did not. Specifically, it explained why the Clinton-Gore “Third Way” turn from the social democratic New Deal traditions of the Democratic Party could neither deliver the broadly shared prosperity its advocates promised, nor provide a sustainable model for winning elections.

Marshall had just quit a history Ph.D. program at Brown to start his journalism career, showed great promise, and was sent down from TAP’s headquarters in Boston to become its first Washington editor in 1999. Except, oops: As he recollected in a 2007 profile, “I really liked Clinton and Gore.”

Then: Unpleasantness followed, and a parting of ways.

Now: “I’m happy giving mea culpas.”

The way he recalls how that debate went down makes for an exceptionally useful lesson in why the neoliberal moment in the Democratic Party once made sense to so many thoughtful folks. It seemed like a kind of political magic. “The very smart Clintonian people were saying, ‘Let’s really rev the market economy, let it distribute everything very efficiently, and then we’ll win elections and we will come in after the fact and put in a little redistribution—and we won’t even call it ‘redistribution.’” Coming out of the political reversals of the Reagan era, the electorate seemed to be saying they had had enough of that. It just seemed to make so much sense.

But what “was certainly lost on me, and fundamentally lost on them,” Marshall continues, was political economy: “If you rev the economy that hard, the people who benefit the most are not going to let you win the elections that let you fix everything after the fact.”

I pointed out an irony: that technocratic liberalism could create a more economically just society if only greedy capitalists would let them sounds a lot like what Polish Marxist economist Michał Kalecki predicted in a classic 1943 essay. Keynesianism could—and did—create full employment, but at its first sign of vulnerability the powers would—and did—swoop in to defeat it, because they didn’t like the confidence and power it gave their employees. The “‘captains of industry’ would be anxious to ‘teach them a lesson,’” Kalecki predicted; the risk of inflation would spook “small and big rentiers”; “a powerful alliance is likely to be formed between big business and rentier interests, and they would probably find more than one economist to declare that the situation was manifestly unsound.”

His prediction proved devastatingly correct. This pattern was repeated in the late 1970s going into Reagan, in the late 1990s going into George W. Bush—and at the time of this writing, in Biden’s near-full employment economy, delivering the likes of Jamie Dimon into the arms of Donald Trump.

I’m explaining this for those of you who don’t know Kalecki. Josh does, and giggles at the irony, which will return later in the interview: On the socialist left these days, he’s considered an enemy, and here he is, intoning, “And that gets you into obvious stuff about unions …”

Call it the dialectic. Thesis: Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson et al. spent the 1990s teaching us the depredations of neoliberalism. Antithesis: The guy on the wrong side of that argument is fired, going on to document a different but equally crucial part of what left-liberals need to know. Thesis: We still get to learn about the depredations of neoliberalism from the Prospect, and we get to read TPM, its proprietor now born again on matters of political economy as a social democrat, his team still methodically grinding out scoops about a Republican Party inexorably preparing itself for Trump.

WITHIN TWO YEARS, MARSHALL EVEN almost became famous, claiming—Josh winces a little when the word comes out of my mouth—what became known as “the internet’s first scalp.”

It was December 2002. Strom Thurmond, the racist 1948 “Dixiecrat” candidate for president, turned 100 years old, and was astonishingly still a senator. At the birthday party, Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), then the Senate minority leader, declared, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

The outrage was reported on ABC Radio, to little notice. Marshall, however, kept pushing the story day after day, finding new little tidbits to keep the controversy going, which kept snowballing until Lott yielded to pressure to resign from the Republican leadership.

The timing was significant. In the run-up to the 2002 election, Republicans exploited 9/11 in the most cynical way possible. Democrats proposed a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. For months, Republicans hootingly derided this as big-government madness. Then, after polls showed the public against them, they turned on a dime, insisting that Democrats were blocking the public will by preferring to give DHS staffers the same civil service protections as all public employees. An ad that helped defeat Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who had lost three of his limbs fighting in Vietnam, flashed the faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as a voice-over intoned, “As America faces terrorists and extremist dictators … Max Cleland has voted against the president’s vital homeland security efforts 11 times!”

They got away with it. The Republicans took over the Senate; had he not resigned from the leadership, Lott would have become majority leader. This was a time when it seemed like Republicans could get away with anything—even selling an insane war based on lies. The 2002 elections were when pundits started talking about the possibility of a “permanent Republican majority.” The desolation Democrats felt was overwhelming. It’s the first thing Marshall brought up when I asked him about his memory of the event. “I have always been very focused on what I see as the morale of the good guys. That you need to keep people’s morale up. That they believe that their exertions matter, have hope for what they’re trying to do. Part of me just wanted to get the good guys feeling they weren’t knocked out of the ring.”

If the timing was significant, so was the method. It spoke to what was so exciting, back then, about blogs as a new medium for political journalism. “A story has a 24-hour audition to see if it has legs, and if it doesn’t get picked up, that’s it,” Marshall explained. ABC News’s radio outlet reported the story, no other outlets picked it up, and it died. Marshall, and others in the “blogosphere” who both pressured the mainstream media and sustained the kind of reporting far more wedded to what citizens in a democracy should know, showed, quite simply, that they could do it better.

MARSHALL WENT ON TO SET ANOTHER rarely honored example for the rest of the media: building a public-spirit journalism platform that could sustain itself for decades, from a one-person blog, to one with some help from volunteer interns, to hiring its first dedicated reporters around 2007, to the full-fledged if skeletal news organization it is now. All models for serious journalism are exceedingly vulnerable these days, both for-profit and nonprofit. (Like what we do here at TAP? Donate, donate, donate—please!) I asked how TPM was able to do it, and why its success hasn’t found more imitators. The tale I heard was sufficiently labyrinthine that the second part answered itself. It would require another full column to do it justice. I cannot but share one aspect of it, however. It speaks profoundly to the question longtime readers know keeps me awake at night more than any other: See the first sentence of this essay.

I meandered around some of my own theories where the broken “both sides” paradigm came from (I mentioned the Cold War), and how it persists even as it renders it nearly impossible for ordinary news consumers to form an accurate picture of political reality. I remarked, offhand, that my (Marxist) friend John Ganz, after years spent spelunking in the journalism of the early 1990s, surprised me by noting that it was better then.

Josh surprised me, too, with his response—and maybe surprised himself a little bit.

“You guys are talking about superstructure. What we think as the ‘both sides’ thing is an artifact of the economic structure.” He nerds out with a Kalecki callback. “I’m the Marxist! I’m talking about the base.”

Why might things have been better in the 1990s? “Because what the Internet did is create a new D.C.-based national political journalism space—the Politicos, the Axioses, The Hill, blah blah blah. All of that is funded by a subset of the national corporate lobbying budget. You advertise in Politico, you sponsor Politico’s events, because you need to talk to the people who run the state from Washington D.C., who don’t give a fuck if you are a political obsessive in Kentucky. ‘I need to be talking to the staffers who write the legislation on Capitol Hill.’… And so your publication can’t be left, or even right, in the sense that they see it. You’ve got to be nonpartisan and centrist. Whether or not the cocky 35-year-old political reporter who’s a dick on Twitter understands where his both-sides thing comes from—that’s where it comes from.”

Ouch. That’s pretty bleak. But it sure does explain a lot. So did the funny story he closed with, about the jujitsu by which he managed to keep the lights on by taking advantage of that very system, while still leaning into what was most scandalous about it in TPM’s reporting. He would approach the Pfizers of the world and say, “Yeah, our audience is left-wing, or whatever. But where are your problems going to come from? … Your future problems will emerge from, you know, kind of, what affluent, educated progressive people start figuring out what they don’t like about what you’re doing. So, whatever your latest line is, you should actually be talking to these people!”

I laughed. He laughed.

“Pfizer, Toyota, Boeing! You’re giving $50 million to the both-sides complex. Give us $100,000. And that’s how we actually grew the business to the size that it is now, over a decade.”

Then, though, that advertising market collapsed, and it was on to something else: their current subscription-based business model.

So: To make money coming up with journalism that meets our moment, explains the racism, takes on the fascists, transcends the ossified genre conventions of mainstream media, builds and keeps an audience, you have to thread needle after needle. Outdo Rube Goldberg. Slalom like Mikaela Shiffrin. Sell like Professor Harold Hill.

“It’s not easy,” I suggest.

Long pause from Josh.

“It’s not easy.”

Me: “But you’re stable, and have a future.”

Longer pause.

“You have to be very committed.”

It’s Project 2025 Summer here at The Infernal Triangle! I’m studying the whole thing for a series of columns. If you want to share your expertise on one of the federal departments the Heritage Foundation wants to weaponize or gut, contact me at infernaltriangle@prospect.org.