You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle

As a historian who also writes about the present, there are certain well-worn grooves in the way elections get written about by pundits and political journalists from which I instinctively recoil. The obsession with polling, for one. Polls have value when approached with due humility, though you wonder how politicians and the public managed to make do without them before their modern invention in the 1930s. But given how often pollsters blow their most confident—and consequential—calls, their work is as likely to be of use to historians as object lessons in hubris as for the objective data they mean to provide.

Pollsters themselves are often the more useful data to study, especially when their models encode mistaken presumptions frozen in place from the past. In 1980, for instance, Ronald Reagan’s landslide was preceded by a near-universal consensus that the election was tied. The pollster who called it correctly, Lou Harris, was the only one who thought to factor into his models a variable that hadn’t been accounted for in previous elections, because it did not yet really exist: the Christian right.

Polling is systematically biased in just that way: toward variables that were evident in the last election, which may or may not be salient for this election. And the more polls dominate discussions of campaigns and elections, the more they crowd out intellectual energy that could be devoted to figuring out those salient, deeper, structural changes conditioning political reality: the kind of knowledge that doesn’t obediently stand still to be counted, totted up, and reduced to a single number.

Another waaaaay too well-worn journalistic groove is prediction. I have probably read thousands of newspaper opinion column prognostications going back to the 1950s. Their track record is too embarrassing for me to take the exercise seriously, let alone practice it myself. Like bad polls, pundits’ predictions are most useful when they are wrong. They provide an invaluable record of the unspoken collective assumptions of America’s journalistic elite, one of the most hierarchical, conformist groups of people you’ll ever run across. Unfortunately, they help shape our world nearly as much, and sometimes more, than the politicians they comment about. So their collective mistakes land hard.

Just how hierarchical are they? How conformist? Well, one reason Timothy Crouse was able to write the most illuminating book about political journalism ever, The Boys on the Bus (1973), was because he was a playwright, who recognized what he was observing among campaign journalists as a collection of highly ritualized scripts. Like the time, after a contentious candidate debate, when members of the traveling press corps crowded around the man referred to as their “dean,” the Associated Press’s Walter Mears, as he hacked away at his typewriter. One asked, “Walter, what’s our lead?” The rest awaited his answer on tenterhooks. They needed him to tell them what they had just seen.

And how ritualized? Consider one of elite journalism’s most deeply worn grooves: the morning-after declarations, should any Democrat win a presidential election, that the Republican politics of demagogic hate-mongering has shown itself dead and buried for all time—forgetting how predictably it returns in each new election, often in an increasingly vicious form.

In 1964: When the author of the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson, defeated a Republican who voted against the Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater, one of the most distinguished liberal newspaper editors in the South, Sam Ragan of the Raleigh News & Observer, pronounced that all future American elections would be decided “on issues other than civil rights.” His essay quoted the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau chief, who affirmed that conventional wisdom by observing that henceforth, whichever party takes the Black vote would be no more predictable than who would win “freckle-faced redheads and one-armed shortstops.”

In 1976: When Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, Washington’s most respected public-opinion expert, Everett Carll Ladd, said that the GOP was “in a weaker position than any major party of the U.S. since the Civil War,” because it had turned itself into an “institution for conservative believers.” He wrote that in a magazine article published in 1977. It came out in book form—poor guy—the week of the opening klaxon of the Reagan Revolution: the 1978 congressional elections, when a passel of New Right Republicans and conservative Democrats upset many of the longest-serving and beloved liberals in Washington.

In 2008: That year, I published a book called Nixonland, an account of Nixon’s brand of demagogic hate-mongering and the resistance to it in the 1960s as a crucible of our own contemporary political divisions. A Clinton White House adviser, Howard Wolfson, auditioning as a centrist pundit in The New Republic, wrote of how Obama’s imminent victory over a pol who “calls Senator Obama a socialist, trots out a plumber to stoke class and cultural resentments, and employs his Vice-President to question Obama’s patriotism by linking him to terrorists” proved that “Nixonland is dead.”

And in 2012, when Michael Lind wrote of Barack Obama’s re-election victory, “No doubt some Reaganite conservatives will continue to fight the old battles, like the Japanese soldiers who hid on Pacific islands for decades, fighting a war that had long before been lost … Any competitive Republican Party in the future will be to the left of today’s Republican Party, on both social and economic issues.”

This particular bias is rooted into elite punditry’s deepest, most dangerous groove of all: a canyon, if you will. On one side of the yawning gulf is the perennial fantasy that America is a nation fundamentally united and at peace with itself, “moderate,” “centrist,” where exceptions are epiphenomena entirely alien to settled American “norms.”

On the other side of the gulf is, well, reality.

The media habits that make it so hard to grasp that reality—that made Trump and his merry band of insurrectionists such a surprise to us—are perhaps as systematic as any foisted upon the public by state media in authoritarian nations. A little more innocent than, say, Pravda, however, because one wellspring of this stubborn fantasy, and why audiences are so receptive to it, is simple psychology. To acknowledge the alternative is to stare into a terrifying abyss: the realization that America has never not been part of the way to something like a civil war.

But suddenly, in 2024, no one can avoid acknowledging that abyss anymore. And that leaves journalism in a genuine crisis.

Generations of this incumbent, consensus-besotted journalism have produced the very conceptual tools, metaphors, habits, and technologies that we understand as political journalism. But these tools are thoroughly inadequate to understanding what politics now is.

According to polls (which, yes, have their uses, in moderation), something around half of likely voters would like to see as our next president a man who thinks of the law as an extension of his superior will, who talks about race like a Nazi, wants to put journalistic organizations whose coverage he doesn’t like in the dock for “treason,” and who promises that anyone violating standards of good order as he defines them—shoplifters, for instance—will be summarily shot dead by officers of the state who serve only at his pleasure. A fascist, in other words. We find ourselves on the brink of an astonishing watershed, in this 2024 presidential year: a live possibility that government of the people, by the people, and for the people could conceivably perish from these United States, and ordinary people—you, me—may have to make the kind of moral choices about resistance that mid-20th-century existentialist philosophers once wrote about. That’s the case if Trump wins. But it’s just as likely, or even more likely, if he loses, then claims he wins. That’s one prediction I feel comfortable with.

Journalistically, this crisis could not strike more deeply. The tools we have for making sense of how politicians seek to accumulate power focus on the whys and wherefores of attracting votes. But the Republican Party and its associated institutions of movement conservatism, at least since George and Jeb Bush stole the 2000 election in Florida, has been ratcheting remorselessly toward an understanding of the accumulation of political power, to which they believe themselves ineluctably entitled as the only truly legitimate Americans, as a question of will—up to and including the projection of will by the force of arms.

Ain’t no poll predicting who soccer moms will vote for in November that can make much headway in understanding that.

Thus the challenge I have set for myself with this column: to conceptualize and practice journalism adequate to this extraordinary state of affairs.

I should say, the challenge I set for ourselves: This project must be plural, or nothing at all. Email me ideas, complaints, corrections, criticisms—and suggested role models, for there are plenty of heroic ones to discover out there; have always been plenty of heroic ones out there—at infernaltriangle@prospect.org.

A political journalism adequate to this moment must throw so many of our received notions about how politics works into question. For one thing, it has to treat the dissemination of conventional but structurally distorting journalistic narratives as a crucial part of the story of how we got to this point.

For instance, the way mainstream American political journalism has built in a structural bias toward Republicans. If one side in a two-sided fight is perfectly willing to lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate without remorse in order to win, and journalists, as a matter of genre convention, must “balance” the ledger between “both sides,” in the interest of “fairness,” that is systematically unfair to the side less willing to lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate. Journalism that feels compelled to adjudge both “sides” as equally vicious, when they are anything but, works like one of those booster seats you give a toddler in a restaurant so that they can sit eye to eye with the grown-ups. It is a systematic distortion of reality built into mainstream political journalism’s very operating system.

A recent example was one of NBC News’s articles in response to Donald Trump’s new turn of phrase in describing immigration. It was headlined: “Trump Sparks Republican Backlash After Saying Immigrants Are ‘Poisoning the Blood’ of the U.S.”

It took exceptional ingenuity for someone at NBC to figure out how to wrench one side’s embrace of race science into the consensus frame, where “both sides” “agree” that major presidential candidates should not imitate Nazis. That frame squeezes out any understanding of how Trump’s provocations rest along a continuum of Republican demonization of immigrants going back decades (“Build the dang fence,” as John McCain put it in 2010), and that most Republicans nonetheless support Trump (or candidates who say much the same things) down the line.

Pravda stuff, in its way. Imagine the headache for historians of the United States a hundred years from now, if there is a United States a hundred years from now, seeking to disentangle from journalism like that what the Republican Party of 2024 is actually like.

There is, simultaneously, another force that functions systematically within our deranged political present to render genuine understanding of encroaching authoritarianism so much more difficult. It is the opposition political party’s complex and baffling allergy to genuinely opposing.

These traditions include Democratic “counterprogramming”: actions actively signaling contempt for the party’s core non-elite and anti-elitist base of support. That’s a term of art from the Clinton years, but it has its origins as far back as the early 1950s, when Adlai Stevenson Sister Souljah’ed a meeting with party liberals by announcing himself opposed to Truman’s goal of a national health care program, derided federal funding of public housing, and came out in favor of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act.

Another Democratic tradition associates political surrender with moral nobility. Al Gore, for example, had wanted to concede on Election Night 2000, based merely on network projections that had Bush up by 4,600 votes in Florida—and not even wait for the actual initial count, which ending up having Bush ahead by only a few hundred.

A third Democratic tradition imagines that reactionary rage can be sated with technocratic compromise. Like the response from Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, a Jew, to Donald Trump’s incessant avowals that what Schumer and his party are really after is poisoning true America’s purity of essence: “What Donald Trump said and did was despicable, but we do have a problem at the border and Democrats know we have to solve that problem, but in keeping with our principles.”

Or like what Bill Clinton said upon signing into law Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: “After I sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a political issue.” Leaving office, he told a reporter, “I really believed that if we passed welfare reform we could diminish at least a lot of the overt racial stereotypes that I thought were paralyzing American politics.”

This is the infernal triangle that structures American politics.

In one corner, a party consistently ratcheting toward authoritarianism, refusing as a matter of bedrock principle—otherwise they are “Republicans in Name Only”—to compromise with adversaries they frame as ineluctably evil and seek literally to destroy.

In the second corner, a party that says that, in a political culture where there is not enough compromise, the self-evident solution is to offer more compromise—because those guys’ extremist fever, surely, is soon to break …

And in the third corner, those agenda-setting elite political journalists, who frame the Democrats as one of the “sides” in a tragic folie à deux destroying a nation otherwise united and at peace with itself because both sides stubbornly … refuse to compromise.

And here we are.

All three sides of the triangle must be broken in order to preserve our republic, whichever candidate happens to get the most votes in the 2024 Electoral College. I have no prediction on offer about whether, or how, that can happen. All I know is that we have no choice but to try.