Analysis: U. S. election dangers, as explained to Europeans • Tennessee Lookout – Tennessee Lookout
Photo illustration by John Partipilo.
I’ve had the good fortune to teach in both London and Prague, and to have presented research in Lisbon and Istanbul, and I recently tried to explain our national politics to some baffled Europeans, with the following result.
As we enter the heart of the U. S. election season, I understand how it can seem confusing and bizarre. Even the most informed European rightly can and should be baffled by American procedures and a system that can yield so alarmingly unqualified a major presidential candidate as Donald Trump.
I offer a few clues and perspectives that may help add to understanding, stemming from my credentials: I speak to points about the U. S. media as a professor of journalism and media and I’ve studied American media for more than 40 years. I’ve also been a radio reporter and host, a television news producer, and a newspaper columnist. On the political side, my name has been on a public ballot ten times, and I’ve won eight of those contests.
I’ll approach these matters as a series of three questions.
Trump is a political gadfly with a thin skin and no self-control. He nearly squandered the large inheritance from his father when he was saved by the reality television program The Apprentice. He fits the idea many people have about what a rich guy is: brash, crude, and taking no guff from anyone.
His political inexperience when he entered the race for president in 2015 was no concern. He didn’t understand governance or public policy but it didn’t matter. He and his supporters in the Republican Party reconfigured it into the Trump Party, an inchoate rage party. Lingering traditionalist Republicans thought they could ride the tiger, and found themselves swallowed by it.
Trump devotees overwhelmingly are white, male, rural, call themselves conservative and Evangelical Christians — even if the actual things they are told to favor often may be at odds with those labels.
There is a long tradition in American politics of pitting poor white people against poor Black people. Power brokers and their lackeys craft works to obscure the more meaningful divide, the wealthy and their corporations squeezing and exploiting everyone else.
Who better to lead the downtrodden to vote against their own interests than a narcissist and habitual liar like Donald Trump? He stumbled into this grift, but now exploits the crowds for cash needed to pay for his mounting legal bills.
The Trump voter for years has been conditioned (by talk radio and Fox News) to think of all discourse on a left-right scale, and all politics as merely about sides — them as hard-working true Americans (read that also as white patriarchy) versus an influx of lazy, dark moochers. In this formulation, American exceptionalism takes the form of a stern father harshly teaching our own to behave, but caring only for America, walling ourselves off and leaving the rest of the world to wallow in their benighted inferiority, unblessed by God.
Continuing this bizarre construction, the enemy other side may be led by globalists or a group of over-educated smarty pants — the people who in their high schools went on to college, read books, have passports, travel, bring up foreign notions, insist on logic and evidence, and correct them on social media. Few things delight a Trumpian cultist more than using name calling or third-hand anecdotes to “own the libs.”
Not as much as we may hope because of both scope and timidity. For many years those of us who study media asked about people’s major source of news. We assumed they had one, but now we realize many Americans have none. Television and later “the internet” were the default answers for the news-illiterate.
An entire generation has grown up learning about news indirectly, through linked items shared via social media, often comic clips making fun of the news. Some of their older relatives have fallen into this trap, too. In such an environment, it’s easy for a platform algorithm to feed you only material that fits your preconceived notions, and thus a mediated knowledge bubble is born.
Trump cultists live in extreme mediated bubbles, and often the information that rattles around them is inaccurate, misleading, or even outright disinformation. The problem is exacerbated by the fact Trump supporters strongly distrust traditional and established news media.
For several decades right-wing entities have pushed a lie that “the media” is liberal. Their claims largely are anecdotal; solid research shows they don’t hold up to close inspection. The claims, however, are bellowed incessantly and serves as a way of “working the refs,” often effectively moving editors, producers, and interview bookers to go easy on right-wing extremists and nudge the range of debate in their direction.
Fox News, launched with a slogan of fair and balanced, was never either. The entire charade implied and fed a narrative that other options were flawed and wrong. It’s a shame to see serious news organizations do rhetorical soft-pedaling about Trump lies and other verbal backflips to try to retain right-wing readers, viewers, and listeners they’ve long lost and can’t regain.
For many other American news entities, especially local TV news, their preoccupation with puffery largely has saved them from criticism but also made them irrelevant to public policy. One also should note that while content has expanded, many news outlets have reduced the number of reporters in the field gathering stories. We are left with an abundance of news processing and news chattering, but precious little news investigation. Superficiality is drowning substance.
U.S. political practices definitely have some quirks. A large-population progressive state like California has two U. S. Senators, but so does a small-population conservative state like Wyoming. U. S. House members vary by state population, but the representation process can be perverted by gerrymandering.
Both Democrats and Republicans seek advantage by how district lines are drawn, but the Republicans have excelled at it recently, packing many Democrats into one district, or cracking Democratic-leaning cities so their residents are outvoted by Republican-heavy suburbs. For example, in Tennessee the Memphis area is packed, and now yields our only Democratic congressional seat. Nashville was cracked apart and put in three different congressional districts, effectively making a Democratic seat disappear.
Republicans targeted state legislature seats in years preceding census-driven redistricting and thus were in charge when lines were drawn. This means they can and do hold onto seats and even gain some, even as their share of votes stagnates or even declines. These same Republican-led legislatures see their base voters aging and their policies offending women, minorities, and young people. So, Republican lawmakers have responded by making voting more difficult, especially for minorities and young people. Needless additional voter identification forms are imposed. Early voting places and hours are curtailed, voting locations in minority districts have insufficient resources, leading to long lines and polls on college campuses are closed.
On the presidential level, the great fear is the Electoral College, a creaky constitutional remnant partially created to satisfy slave-holding states. It delivered the presidency to Trump in late 2016, despite Hillary Clinton winning millions more votes. Third-party protest votes in swing states gave us the nightmare that was the Trump presidency, lowering esteem for the U.S. around the globe.
It remains possible that the U. S. could stumble into a repeat combination of errors: disinformation, third-party skimming, and false equivalency in news coverage. Some newsrooms continue to skip lightly over President Joe Biden’s substantial record to concentrate on his age. Those same newsrooms may endeavor to normalize the Trump alternative — an old, authoritarian who faces dozens of criminal charges in four jurisdictions, some drawn from his failed plots to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.
Thus, vigilance will be needed between now and November, and possibly beyond. Trumpism only will die out with a smashing election defeat, punishment for law breakers, and the rebuilding of democratic safeguards.
Do not take solace or alarm in any current polling. Public opinion measurement so easily can miss the point in a world of rapidly changing technology and an unfocused electorate. President Joe Biden is running for re-election against each respondent’s view of perfection. American democracy, the NATO alliance, and a safer world depend on Biden securing victory.
by Mark Harmon, Tennessee Lookout
April 1, 2024
by Mark Harmon, Tennessee Lookout
April 1, 2024
I’ve had the good fortune to teach in both London and Prague, and to have presented research in Lisbon and Istanbul, and I recently tried to explain our national politics to some baffled Europeans, with the following result.
As we enter the heart of the U. S. election season, I understand how it can seem confusing and bizarre. Even the most informed European rightly can and should be baffled by American procedures and a system that can yield so alarmingly unqualified a major presidential candidate as Donald Trump.
I offer a few clues and perspectives that may help add to understanding, stemming from my credentials: I speak to points about the U. S. media as a professor of journalism and media and I’ve studied American media for more than 40 years. I’ve also been a radio reporter and host, a television news producer, and a newspaper columnist. On the political side, my name has been on a public ballot ten times, and I’ve won eight of those contests.
I’ll approach these matters as a series of three questions.
Trump is a political gadfly with a thin skin and no self-control. He nearly squandered the large inheritance from his father when he was saved by the reality television program The Apprentice. He fits the idea many people have about what a rich guy is: brash, crude, and taking no guff from anyone.
His political inexperience when he entered the race for president in 2015 was no concern. He didn’t understand governance or public policy but it didn’t matter. He and his supporters in the Republican Party reconfigured it into the Trump Party, an inchoate rage party. Lingering traditionalist Republicans thought they could ride the tiger, and found themselves swallowed by it.
Trump devotees overwhelmingly are white, male, rural, call themselves conservative and Evangelical Christians — even if the actual things they are told to favor often may be at odds with those labels.
There is a long tradition in American politics of pitting poor white people against poor Black people. Power brokers and their lackeys craft works to obscure the more meaningful divide, the wealthy and their corporations squeezing and exploiting everyone else.
Who better to lead the downtrodden to vote against their own interests than a narcissist and habitual liar like Donald Trump? He stumbled into this grift, but now exploits the crowds for cash needed to pay for his mounting legal bills.
The Trump voter for years has been conditioned (by talk radio and Fox News) to think of all discourse on a left-right scale, and all politics as merely about sides — them as hard-working true Americans (read that also as white patriarchy) versus an influx of lazy, dark moochers. In this formulation, American exceptionalism takes the form of a stern father harshly teaching our own to behave, but caring only for America, walling ourselves off and leaving the rest of the world to wallow in their benighted inferiority, unblessed by God.
Continuing this bizarre construction, the enemy other side may be led by globalists or a group of over-educated smarty pants — the people who in their high schools went on to college, read books, have passports, travel, bring up foreign notions, insist on logic and evidence, and correct them on social media. Few things delight a Trumpian cultist more than using name calling or third-hand anecdotes to “own the libs.”
Not as much as we may hope because of both scope and timidity. For many years those of us who study media asked about people’s major source of news. We assumed they had one, but now we realize many Americans have none. Television and later “the internet” were the default answers for the news-illiterate.
An entire generation has grown up learning about news indirectly, through linked items shared via social media, often comic clips making fun of the news. Some of their older relatives have fallen into this trap, too. In such an environment, it’s easy for a platform algorithm to feed you only material that fits your preconceived notions, and thus a mediated knowledge bubble is born.
Trump cultists live in extreme mediated bubbles, and often the information that rattles around them is inaccurate, misleading, or even outright disinformation. The problem is exacerbated by the fact Trump supporters strongly distrust traditional and established news media.
For several decades right-wing entities have pushed a lie that “the media” is liberal. Their claims largely are anecdotal; solid research shows they don’t hold up to close inspection. The claims, however, are bellowed incessantly and serves as a way of “working the refs,” often effectively moving editors, producers, and interview bookers to go easy on right-wing extremists and nudge the range of debate in their direction.
Fox News, launched with a slogan of fair and balanced, was never either. The entire charade implied and fed a narrative that other options were flawed and wrong. It’s a shame to see serious news organizations do rhetorical soft-pedaling about Trump lies and other verbal backflips to try to retain right-wing readers, viewers, and listeners they’ve long lost and can’t regain.
For many other American news entities, especially local TV news, their preoccupation with puffery largely has saved them from criticism but also made them irrelevant to public policy. One also should note that while content has expanded, many news outlets have reduced the number of reporters in the field gathering stories. We are left with an abundance of news processing and news chattering, but precious little news investigation. Superficiality is drowning substance.
U.S. political practices definitely have some quirks. A large-population progressive state like California has two U. S. Senators, but so does a small-population conservative state like Wyoming. U. S. House members vary by state population, but the representation process can be perverted by gerrymandering.
Both Democrats and Republicans seek advantage by how district lines are drawn, but the Republicans have excelled at it recently, packing many Democrats into one district, or cracking Democratic-leaning cities so their residents are outvoted by Republican-heavy suburbs. For example, in Tennessee the Memphis area is packed, and now yields our only Democratic congressional seat. Nashville was cracked apart and put in three different congressional districts, effectively making a Democratic seat disappear.
Republicans targeted state legislature seats in years preceding census-driven redistricting and thus were in charge when lines were drawn. This means they can and do hold onto seats and even gain some, even as their share of votes stagnates or even declines. These same Republican-led legislatures see their base voters aging and their policies offending women, minorities, and young people. So, Republican lawmakers have responded by making voting more difficult, especially for minorities and young people. Needless additional voter identification forms are imposed. Early voting places and hours are curtailed, voting locations in minority districts have insufficient resources, leading to long lines and polls on college campuses are closed.
On the presidential level, the great fear is the Electoral College, a creaky constitutional remnant partially created to satisfy slave-holding states. It delivered the presidency to Trump in late 2016, despite Hillary Clinton winning millions more votes. Third-party protest votes in swing states gave us the nightmare that was the Trump presidency, lowering esteem for the U.S. around the globe.
It remains possible that the U. S. could stumble into a repeat combination of errors: disinformation, third-party skimming, and false equivalency in news coverage. Some newsrooms continue to skip lightly over President Joe Biden’s substantial record to concentrate on his age. Those same newsrooms may endeavor to normalize the Trump alternative — an old, authoritarian who faces dozens of criminal charges in four jurisdictions, some drawn from his failed plots to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.
Thus, vigilance will be needed between now and November, and possibly beyond. Trumpism only will die out with a smashing election defeat, punishment for law breakers, and the rebuilding of democratic safeguards.
Do not take solace or alarm in any current polling. Public opinion measurement so easily can miss the point in a world of rapidly changing technology and an unfocused electorate. President Joe Biden is running for re-election against each respondent’s view of perfection. American democracy, the NATO alliance, and a safer world depend on Biden securing victory.
Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.
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Mark Harmon is a professor of journalism and media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
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Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website.