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13 May, 5 tweets, 1 min read
Possibly an extremely obvious observation but: Notwithstanding enduring gripes about both-sides journalism, it’s striking how firmly mainstream media has refused to adopt a he-said-she-said neutrality frame for the 2020 election even as the GOP firms up its Trump commitments.
This is in keeping w: what were clearly consciously made Trump-era choices by outlets to resist the balance-over-accuracy trap on various stories involving brazen Trump lies. It’s a good thing! But it really is different from the pre-Trump pattern re big political controversies.
Obviously this only deepens the gulf of trust (forged by right-wing activists and elites) between conservative voters and mainstream journalism, and the solidifies the GOP’s epistemic closure.
But it also feeds into a broader story in which the GOP appears to be setting down various conditions for potential election malfeasance in 2024 that would have to occur in truly brazen fashion, devoid of any patina of legitimacy external to the party and its agents.
Political fights often used to unfold under conditions of uncertainty and murky facts, fostered in part by partisan efforts to work the MSM refs. Reflecting the intensifying system crisis, that kind of murkiness is falling away, and a much rawer form of conflict emerging. /end

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More from @sam_rosenfeld

Sam Rosenfeld Profile picture
3 Nov 20
Election day treacle:

We’re looking at turnout rates unseen either in 60 yrs or a century. Under daunting circumstances, millions have mobilized in new and old ways. The work people have put in has been staggering. And if you zoom out to take in the whole Trump presidency…
…you see an ongoing historic civic flourishing in politics. The Women’s March & rolling demonstrations in 2017. The organizing behind the record-setting 2018 midterms. The emergence of the socialist left in electoral and Dem programmatic politics. The BLM protests this summer…
These are distinct efforts with varying goals and plenty of robust conflict between and amongst them. But they’re also all the broadly progressive work of Americans exercising old civic muscles to build a better country. It’s inspiring and I’m very grateful.
Read 5 tweets
Sam Rosenfeld Profile picture
18 Sep 20
1. A typically great piece that also links to this recent deep-dive by @dylanmatt on the poli sci literature on canvassing and gotv: vox.com/21366036/canva…
2. One piece of background context to pieces like these is that a cohort of young progressive data people, of whom @davidshor is a leading example, have for a few years now been promulgating the notion that door-knocking is a lib indulgence and inefficient vote-getter.
3. Their arguments had begun to influence the thinking of journalists in their orbit but hadn't quite coalesced as a new public-facing #Take to counter the narrative of an Obama-'08-birthed renaissance of Dem field ops. Then God decided to launch a natural experiment via Covid.
Read 7 tweets
Sam Rosenfeld Profile picture
23 Jul 20
I'm just a simple country professor but it seems to me that both sides of Letter Discourse have reached consensus that "free speech" & abstract procedural principles are red herrings here--boundaries of socially (rather than legally) acceptable opinion will ALWAYS be drawn…(1/6)
…and the real debate is just the substantive one re where those boundaries should fall. But having conceded that, both sides largely stick to arguments in the abstract! It's what trips TCW up w/ Chotiner--but it frankly can also come off as a dodge on the anti-Letter side. (2/6)
The key to the David Shor case is that, by the accounts I've seen, pressure to fire him came from clients & Civis colleagues who shared the *sincere* & earnest belief that his Wasow tweets were racist. This sincere view also led to his expulsion from a political listserve. (3/6 )
Read 6 tweets
Sam Rosenfeld Profile picture
1 Sep 19
I’m trying to enjoy my sabbatical this semester but Dan Crenshaw keeps forcing me to relive the one set of Intro to American Politics discussions that invariably gets me genuinely and unprofessionally aggravated.
As a sidenote, part of the multidimensional aggravating-ness of these discussions is that these people aren't even mounting this (horrible) defense on behalf of the right institution.
The EC does give a somewhat disproportionate voice to small state residents, but by far the most significant driver of distortion and of pop-vote/EC mismatches is the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes everywhere except for ME and NE.
Read 7 tweets
Sam Rosenfeld Profile picture
17 Jan 19
.@daschloz and my op-ed (nytimes.com/2019/01/15/opi…) appeared in the NYT along w/ this incisive @DouthatNYT piece (nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opi…). Both concern drawing cordons sanitaires. Douthat (avoiding false equivalences) tackles both left & right, while we only discuss the latter.
That prompts me to offer a claim about a deep asymmetry in democratic politics: Though the dangers of extremism and the value of parties as temporizers are common to all political persuasions, they are not shared equally among them.
Since con parties tend to both represent dominant social groups AND ally w/ econ elites who may have reason to fear majoritarian politics, their susceptibility to extremist influence shld usually pose more potent, system-destabilizing threats (ethnonationalism, authoritarianism).
Read 4 tweets
Sam Rosenfeld Profile picture
10 Sep 18
1. Re @RuleandRuin’s grumpy piece on the historiography of conservatism (politico.com/magazine/story…), @TomSugrue offers the full-throated defense of the discipline’s honor: . I have a more specific point, undeniably motivated by some “presentist” concerns.
2. Does the rise-of-the-right lit really “take the extreme right as representative of conservatism,” as Kabaservice charges? This work, first motivated by dissatisfaction w/ how postwar libs like Bell & Hofstadter pathologized the right, if anything went too far the other way.
3. It had a tendency to internalize too much of the movement’s own self-mythology, in which a Buckleyite mainstream decisively drew boundaries and kept the ship steering down the fusionist true path.
Read 18 tweets

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