What’s Going On?
I’ve never been more saddened and ashamed of an election result than I was two weeks ago. It didn’t make any sense to me how someone, let alone millions of people, could support such a candidate. We heard explanations from all sides about how nobody saw this coming and how this actually ended up happening. We’ve seen analysis blaming Fox News, liberal millennials, the democratic party, the KKK, the Alt-Right and many more. But I posit that we ALL need to take a look in the mirror and see what’s really happening in our communities, country and world. We need to take a look back into history and see that the assumptions that we make about human nature itself are flawed and even toxic to a way forward from this calamitous election. Finally, I think we missed an opportunity. Yes, Fox News and other corporate media is to blame. Yes the democrats are to blame. Yes our arrogance and comfort are to be blamed, but ultimately I will argue that this is an inevitable result of history and culture coming together.
If it wasn’t the star of the Apprentice in this recent election it would’ve been another. Populism is quickly gaining ground, capitalism’s failings are being felt through democracy all over the world, but what is the solution?
I would propose that the solution is instilling a true sense of compassion, empathy, justice and love in all of us. We’ve missed that. Our society is shamefully individualistic and there are those that propose more of that is the solution, but that would actually only separate us more. We can’t be a “United” States when we are all our own mini-state. We are no longer “united” in any true sense of the word and I propose that our separation of society into political parties, economics, sports, arts, sciences and other entities indeed is what is killing our society. We need to foster an appreciation for being human and what that means. Our culture today divides us into nationalities, races, religions and other labels that only make it too easy to vilify one of these groups that ironically do the same in return.
We have a President-Elect who offers fear. He offers who is to be blamed for the problems that many in this land face, when the fact of the matter is we need a collective and critical look in the mirror in order to solve the collective cultural problem that engulfs our world today. I will give many explanations and culprits, and even a few proposals... but ultimately we need to figure out what we want this world to be.
So how did this happen? How could he possibly have been elected in the United States? Here we go…
Part 1 > The System
Culprit #1 - Everyone’s favorite guilty party > The Media
Don’t blame the poor journalists. I feel bad for them, I really do. It’s not their fault, it really isn’t. I’m giving the benefit of the doubt here to most journalists that they are stuck within a system of profit and not actual news delivery for public good. The fact that the media has massive corporate ownership whose main interest is making a profit is the major problem. In and of itself, making a profit isn’t bad, but it certainly is when there is a larger responsibility to deliver critical and relevant news to the public. So long as the media has its corporate owners they will deliver only “news” and programs that will generate viewership, thus profit. Therefore, if you follow the logic of the system, the journalists who are supposed to be the experts on challenging power and delivering fact based analysis to inform the public will only be allowed to air “news reports” that will obtain viewers. This has been calamitous as people no longer choose which analysis of the facts to watch or inform them, but now the facts themselves are up for debate. Facts are no longer facts and analysis is too predictable. Breaking News flashes across the screen constantly and when a pop star puts on too much weight or gets a tattoo on their neck a panel of 4 “experts” is put together to discuss whether or not this was a good choice.
The media will undoubtedly fail if they are corporate owned and if the newscasts are 24/7. There is not always breaking news. But so long as they need viewers they will manufacture “news” to be watched. It has gotten to the point where many have their own preferred cable news networks, not based upon the analysis, but the distortion of the facts. There’s no doubt that Fox News has made this into an art and succeeded. Study after study shows that Fox News watchers are actually less informed than people who don’t watch any news!
This study conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University from 2012 actually reveals that you would know more about the domestic policy if did nothing rather than watched Fox News. Unsurprisingly, NPR and the Sunday morning programs created the most informed, but Sunday morning show ratings are sadly much lower than nightly news programs on Fox.
When it came to foreign policy Fox didn’t do any better. The lefty version of Fox, MSNBC now actually joined Fox as having their viewers less educated than those who didn’t watch any news. Here, the Daily Show was actually in 2nd place behind NPR.
NPR was recently rated as the 2nd most trusted news source in the USA according to Pew, but only 53% of respondents had ever heard of it. All 3 major corporate owned outlets (CNN, MSNBC and Fox) were heard of by well over 90% of respondents. A television version of NPR could be greatly advantageous to the public good, but it’s much easier to get funding donations for a radio channel than a national news network. And thus the rub, those that can make money and do, actually make our national discussion worse.
Solutions?
So what do we do? There seems to be no public outrage or political will to change anything in the media. Any action has to be taken very carefully in the order to protect freedom of the press, but there are many ideas and solutions that could be useful.
First, limiting corporate ownership of media is one option that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has done. The problem is that their “regulations” have been more catering to the corporate ownership than actually limiting massive corporations from owning media outlets all over the country. Fewer than 1% of the renewal petitions for licensing are not immediately granted. The FCC, an independent government agency, has sadly become a bit of a rubber stamp of former board members of corporations involved in the media market. In 1980, 90% of media were owned by 50 different companies, today that number has shrunk to 6. There are only 6 companies that own 90% of the media outlets in this country. Those 6 massive companies are Comcast, Disney, Fox, Time Warner, CBS and Viacom. There is virtually nothing aired on television that is not owned by one of these 6 massive conglomerates. This dramatically limits the “marketplace of ideas” and replaces that with the pure profit motivation. Therefore, the History Channel in no way reflects actual history that a proper historian would teach, but reality television that has no relation to the teaching and learning of history now dominates the station with “Ice Road Truckers” and show of the like. Breaking up these 6 and having the FCC make more stringent restrictions on media ownership would go a long way, but wouldn’t in itself be enough.
An even better solution would be to ban advertising during news programming. Therefore you could take away the profit motive behind airing the news. This would be a difficult task, because you’d have to define “news programming” and you’d have a freedom of speech issue, but good quality news programming is so critical to a functioning Republic that it is worth “limiting” advertising speech during news programming for at least certain times during the evening when people watch news.
Two other worthwhile potential solutions could be mandatory media education classes in schools and exploring the possibility of an American version of the BBC, in other words a publicly funded news channel dedicated to serving the public interest.
Culprit #2 - The Democratic Party
“Why are the democrats so bumfuzzled?” - Danny Kincannon
“If liberals are so fuckin’ smart, why do they lose so goddamn always?” - Will McAvoy
In all honesty I am not a big fan of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Don’t get me wrong, she would be an infinitely better choice for President than the President-Elect, but she should not have been nominated by the democrats in the first place. There were so many better candidates, but it always seemed inevitable that she was going to win. Why was this? A candidate like Elizabeth Warren or the obvious alternative from the campaign, Bernie Sanders, would’ve appealed to many of the white, non-college educated voters that voted for the President-Elect. The data is still inconclusive, but it doesn't appear most of them voted for Trump because they loved him or because he was racist, but because he seemed to speak to their experience of life in 21st century America. Most assuredly, Secretary Clinton did not. She was a flawed candidate, people simply do not like her. Fair or unfair, and I think it’s mostly unfair, she should not have been nominated. But the arrogance of the Democratic National Committee at thinking she’d roll to victory is now biting them, the entire country and world in the butt. Many saw this coming, why didn’t the DNC? Oh yea, don’t forget all those corporate donors that propped up her campaign when many of us were feeling the Bern. Oh, what might have been?
Part 2: “You can’t eat freedom”
Culprit #3 > Rugged Individualism/Ayn Rand/Libertarianism
“The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.” - Kaiser Sose
Herbert Hoover consistently ranks in the bottom 10 of historians “Worst Presidents of all time.” One of his major tenets was known as “rugged individualism” and it is a cancer that still plagues our society.
Life is a team sport. We need support and help from those around us and to instead isolate ourselves within a society and make it every person for themselves will inevitably destroy a society. People will start to live in a more and more competitive world and contrary to popular belief it hasn’t always been that way. Competition is not the natural way of life. Cooperation is. Human beings have lived on this planet for 200,000 years mostly as hunters and gatherers and in that sort of culture cooperation is key to survival. Competition in those days would have led to our early extinction. Yet a belief persists that it is human nature that we are self interested and competitive. I would argue that it only appears that way because we live in a culture that brings out the worst in all of us. Our culture that is based upon consumption and materialism offers us many social ills that our hunter and gatherer ancestors would have never imagined. Let’s be clear, this IS NOT HUMAN NATURE, it is a product of the society which we have created over the past 10,000 years since the Agricultural Revolution and has only intensified since the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century and the current Technological Revolution that we are living through.
The embrace of rugged individualism as a “good” thing is what has really corrupted our society. Once we begin to think that evil things actually don’t exist, or worse, that they are not in fact evil, our society has reached the edge of the cliff. This is the point we’ve reached with so many in the millennial generation embracing Libertarianism. I understand the pull of it, I really do. However, it will only pull us further apart as a society and will not create any sense of unity as we each work only for our own interests.
Culprit #4 > Corporatism & Free Trade
The President Elect greatly appealed to folks in former industrial cities and regions. These were mostly non-college educated whites whose families had typically worked in the regional or local industry. However, as the neo-liberal idea of free trade and deregulation grew momentum since the late 1970’s this particular group of former industrial workers have been particularly vulnerable to the “new world economy.” These ideas gathered even more momentum with the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the eventual collapse of the USSR. Even communist China jumped on board with this new version of capitalism that in essence greatly benefitted the massive international corporations and those already with capital and eviscerated the workers in the industrial world.
Free Trade, like most things, isn’t bad in and of itself. As with most things it is how the agreement is structured. The ideas behind free trade are simple: 1.) A country can’t produce everything it wants or needs, so it needs to trade. 2.) If a country has an advantage in producing a certain product, they should focus there and sell it to the world. Granted, that is oversimplified, but that is the basis of the argument from economists like David Ricardo. However, Ricardo was also clear that you can’t restrict the mobility of workers if you’re not going to restrict the mobility of jobs and capital.
Free trade deals such as NAFTA, CAFTA and the proposed TPP allow jobs and capital to move freely, but the modern day borders we have restrict the mobility of the worker. Problem #1 is that the worker benefits much less than the capital (corporation). Yes, some poor countries do get better more higher paying jobs, but this is not nearly a unanimous positive effect. Culture is eroded and replaced by the aforementioned competitive individualism and typically the workers taking the newly created jobs have no protections that workers in industrialized countries enjoy. This is the main reason that moving jobs to China, Mexico or Bangladesh is so cheap, because their workers typically have no protections or benefits that a worker in the USA or the UK may enjoy. Therefore, unions are weakened in the industrialized nations and there are typically no workers unions (at least not nearly as strong) in the developing countries that absorb these jobs.
Ok, deep breath. Here’s how this has led to the President-Elect. Former industrial towns and regions in this country are struggling to a significantly large degree. No jobs replaced the jobs that were lost. People were forced to leave their roots and move or turn to worse paying jobs and rely on government benefits. In many communities drug abuse and addiction has skyrocketed and crime has risen. In short, the people in these communities have been the victims of free trade over the past 30-40 years. Their quality of life has clearly declined there seems to be no hope in places like Erie, Flint, Youngstown, Detroit, or Grand Rapids.
In what seemingly was a last-ditch effort these forgotten people of the modern Corporatist economy have turned (understandably) towards populism, and as Donald Trump was the only one speaking to their issues (see Dems, you should have nominated Sanders) they turned not to racism and xenophobia, but any last hope of “making America great again.”
Sure, the privileged college educated individual might rightly respond, “When was this time that American was so great?” I’m sure different people supporting the President-Elect would answer different ways, but essentially they’re looking for that time when they could live a comfortable middle class life where their children would get similar opportunities that they had. However, as those jobs were outsourced in the name of economic freedom and growth they have realized that you indeed can’t eat freedom. Secretary Clinton didn’t offer much hope to those who were hopeless. In fact, none of the other Republican nominees did either. A group that the privileged have over-looked (for the record Bernie Sanders never did) swayed the election hoping beyond hope for some hope.
Conclusion
There are many more culprits including our education system, the rise of social media and the new en vogue denial of science on both ends of the spectrum; however, these four culprits are some of the main reasons that I see that explain the rise and election of the President-Elect. In my view, we need wholesale change in our culture. People need to work less and love more. We need to actively work to create equality, not more competition between our world’s citizens. We need to rethink the idea of the state and how it divides our world. Most importantly, we need to correctly identify the biggest problems in our world and actively act to solve them. Most of us are too busy to do such a thing, but we can’t let the immediate drown out the important.
