The Blind Spot

How A Partisan Class Turns into a Despotic Cabal

Aug 30, 2024

Googling ‘partisan’ brings up almost exclusively photos of folks with Trump signs, and CPAC, and Mitch McConnell, etc. What better illustration could I provide of the constant and unacknowledged partisan bias within the media and Google? It’s not that this is bad for Republicans; ultimately this kind of unbalanced focus and partisan distortion will render our media less efficacious, and our agencies less responsive, and our leaders less honest. If you believe that Nancy Pelosi cares about the things she claims to care about I suggest you explore her record. These are not people who should be left unattended.

The legacy media are struggling with honesty and balance-or, rather, they left those milestones behind more than two decades ago-and have lost nearly all of their mainstream (unaffiliated) credibility (see below-pay special attention to the ‘independent’ trust line). It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the corporate media is no longer fit for purpose, and this makes corruption easier and authoritarian...

…moves less risky. It emboldens institutions and their agents, giving the powerful more room for maneuver and latitude for deceit. It is a very small step from state governments dedicated to ‘equity’ and ‘gender identity’ policies to administrations which use those causes and labels to conceal their own malfeasance and viciousness. Without a functioning media who’s going to uncover the crimes and deceits of politicians? If you’re a conservative newspaper your reporting will be dismissed as conspiracy theories (or immediately and credulously believed, which is better but not much). If you’re a tech platform you will weight the scales to favor ‘your’ side (Democrats), regardless of the truth. Find me one example of such a thing happenings in favor of Republicans… because I can give dozens of examples which tilted Leftward (examples at the bottom). If you’re a Democrat/progressive institution (which-let’s be honest-90% of our institutions now are, as the Democrat party represents a social caste and its priorities and privileges more than its old umbrella of jostling interest groups) you might not report the allegations at all-or you won’t be digging for them, because you’ll be endlessly laser-focused on the errors and crimes of conservative politicians. If our media ecosystem was roughly balanced this might even out and provide some kind of uneasy equilibrium but it’s not: 90% of media outlets, colleges, government agencies, and financial organizations are (collectively) clear supporters of Kamala Harris (which supporters will be simplified under the blanket terms ‘Democrats’ in this essay). 90% of the educated and powerful people in our country have decided to mostly ignore and sanction the behaviors and motivations of the bulk of their peers and co-socialites, deciding instead to focus on an entirely different class of people and the policies and politicians they favor. THIS is how a class becomes an aristocracy, and how an administration becomes a cabal. This is how a systemic blind spot becomes civic catastrophe.

Consider this hypothetical: 3 weeks before the election several D.C. reporters discover documents which seem to clearly indicate that Kamala Harris and heads of state in Germany and Great Britain and Ukraine embezzled money and created schemes to illegally influence their elections. Would the reporters publish? Would their editors let them? Would the media cover it with the alacrity and thoroughness such a story would deserve? Would Harris’s party do anything? Would the sitting executive be suitably restrained by the competing powers… as Richard Nixon was in the 1970’s?

The voters would react however they would. My concern is for the institutions of power. How many powerful people have already decided that Trump would certainly be worse than Harris (a definite and unfalsifiable attitude) and, therefore, ‘democracy’ would be served by manipulation and lies and gaslighting and corruption?

I’m not going to explore whether those beliefs (Trump < Harris) have merit here. My claim is that a myopic view on one party or one candidate or one policy position gives the actors elsewhere along the political spectrum enormous leeway for manipulation and despotic movement. If 90% of the media is strongly biased toward the Democrats, and have decided to focus most of their skepticism and hostility on the Republicans, what happens to the Democrat party? Does it flourish and grow, healthy and balanced? Or does it do what power ALWAYS does with this kind of blind spot, and quickly become disingenuous and twisted… before becoming evil? It may be a historical irony for 22nd-century historians that the partisans most concerned with the growth of ‘fascism’ ended up nurturing its tendencies in their own ranks, by refusing to hold their leaders and communicators to a standard of ethics or effectiveness. There will always be another party with which to contend. That shouldn’t tempt us into turning a blind eye or a tolerant gaze upon crimes and lies. I fear that this is beginning to happen in the United States.

What if there ARE electoral crimes and mass fraud in November? Do you trust hyper-progressive ‘journalists’ to (briefly) leave Twitter in order to dig into it? Do you trust a Democrat-dominated media apparatus to report this fairly or an incumbent party administration to cede enough power to let investigations happen? Or would Democrat senators and cabinet members lie and dissemble? Would journalists hide the truth? Would the justice system function? If it did not it would the end of our democracy. Any concern with democracy must acknowledge that both parties are power-seeking creations and must be restrained, and that all politicians are suspect. If every Democrat in the U.S. decided to solely devote their energy to electing Kamala Harris and protecting democracy against a second Trump administration at all costs it would ruin our country by empowering a competing national organization (which certainly contains liars and sadists and psychopaths) immense latitude to do whatever it willed, behind the scenes. If you believe that any political party will maintain its competence and its virtue under those conditions all I can say in reply is: the founders of our nation and the authors of our Constitutions did not believe this, and they were surely much better students of history than you.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart.
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Of course, BOTH parties have this tendency, and all humans are fallible… but only one party dominates the cultural and financial and intellectual institutions of our country. We already saw what the immediate partisan response was to grave (and public, impossible to conceal) missteps committed by Trump on Jan. 6th, 2020. The immediate aftermath was somewhat encouraging. As the memory and the shock of that event faded the Republicans closed ranks, of course, and it’s an event that occasions a kind of awkward defensiveness now. But our government? Our government sprang into action and began hunting down and incarcerating participants. It is simply a fact that Americans are routinely released without bail (sometimes without charges!) for carjacking (or child abuse, or cutting up murder victims, or fighting police, etc.) but entering the Capitol building amidst a crowd on the wrong day has earned citizens years in prison. THAT is my point: when Jan. 6th becomes symbolic of political evil… the people using Jan. 6 to distract the voters or exploit the system will quickly become the true monsters. A republic demands constant vigilance, and a vigilance which only encompasses half the country (the less powerful half) is worse than none. That vigilance quickly morphs into mere distraction and scapegoating. Our politicians are not stupid people, and they do not lack ambition.

Trump is far more popular than he has any right to be. The fact that the DEMOCRAT PARTY CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT is struggling to win the support of 50% of Americans after four years in power and (supposedly) no recession or major wars is one of those facts that might seem mundane to us now, after weeks of bizarre and dishonest reporting… but it is truly outrageous. How has Trump managed to gain so much goodwill, after all of his sins and mediocrities? Or: how have the Democrats aroused so much disgust and apathy in the past four years?

I want to speculate that if those institutions which are dominated by Democrats had spent the past four years listening to Trump voters (and their own) and trying to govern well Trump would be scraping 30%… rather than 47%. Instead, they have continued to deliberately misunderstand and misrepresent huge chunks of this country: committed Christians, legal Hispanic immigrants living in the Southern border region, working-class men (of any color), small business owners, veterans. Such people mostly do not really care about the party or the platform in the White House. They care about good government and a healthy economy and a responsive and fair public administration. By focusing across the aisle the Democrats have ignored these concerns and separated themselves further from voters less privileged than they. By continuing to do so they perpetuate a vicious cycle of institutional capture, policy free-fall, and what must be a growing body of corruption and lies within our government.

How do I know? Every government tends in this direction, unless restrained by norms and institutions. The idea that only Republicans (or Democrats) at the national level can be evil or corrupt or Machiavellian is obviously wrong. What happens when most of our leaders and thinkers decide focus exclusively on the ‘other’-to view civic duty and public responsibility through a dark lens of partisanship so distorted that it obscures most of the world?

I guess we’ll find out.