I can already hear people writing columns saying Trump "won" the Iranian Crisis even though he lowered US standing in the world, endangered millions of people, destabilized an entire region, and hundreds of innocent people were needlessly killed.
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Part of the reason we've reached this point of madness is because politics was turned into a game. America decided it could play a game where it interfered in literally everything and betray its espoused principles as long as it led to "wins."
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Of course, the countries the US interfered in were almost exclusively home to people of color, which US leaders saw as being incapable of governing themselves as they saw self-governance as a strictly anglo-saxon/caucasian trait.
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Around the world the US installed dictators who destroyed the rights of their people and aided them as long as they helped US corporations and never worked with Russians. That was the game, and a win was a win.
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Of course, by consistently interfering in other regions and areas, the US actually endangered its own people as well. There was always blowback for that interference, including in Iran, where we orchestrated a coup using measures eerily similar to what Russia is doing now 5/
The game we played in the Cold War also seeped into coverage of politics. Suddenly the media became obsessed with how the game was played. They covered politics like sport because they understood there was propaganda and rhetoric involved as opposed to truth and plans. 6/
For anyone who wants to understand our media and modern politics more, go and look up professional wrestling. Look at "kayfabe," "work," and "shoot." It's an artificial reality where people are as concerned about the decisions that lead to the fiction as they are the fiction 7/
The movement to covering politics as a game or sport largely coalesced in the 1980's with Reagan. Many shifted in reporting hard news to functioning like paparazzi or Hollywood reporters reporting rumors, personal interest stories, internal deliberations. 8/
What we have now is a punditry and media class that sees politics as a game within a game. Instead of covering politicians and whether their ideas or plans would help, they cover whether they're working in convincing people, creating an artificial state of play. 9/
Unfortunately, artificial states of play create artificiality. We've seen time and again in America that burgeoning media turns politicians into warped versions of themselves, often caricatured fictions that behave as if written for TV or print. We see a lot of that now. 10/
The end result of this type of coverage was always going to be Donald Trump. We were always going to end up with a loud buffoon who lied openly and had no idea what he was doing, because that's how politics was being covered and how it was moving for years. 11/
Finally, we get to a point where a loud buffoon like Trump, who has no idea what he's doing, can do things like escalate a possible world war and the media, programmed to look for strategy, starts gifting him competence. And that's only going to continue the dangerous cycle. 12/
The truth is that politics isn't sport and it isn't game. It's supposed to be how a society moves forward and improves. As long as we treat as a soap opera meant to entertain we're always sprinting down a dark path where the people's business isn't done and we're endangered 13/13
