These are shocking numbers. Whether or not it’s possible to sustain democracy under the circumstances of the current information environment is one of the key questions of our era - and I’m afraid we need to acknowledge that there’s a very real chance the answer might be no.
Crucially, let’s not mistake these numbers as proof of “brainwashing”. There are limits to the rightwing propaganda machine’s power if it tries to go against the underlying anxieties that are animating conservatives. But it’s highly effective in amplifying those anxieties.
The “brainwashing” approach cannot explain why, for instance, Fox News failed in 2013 to get conservatives onboard with immigration reform. After a few weeks of trying, severe pushback from the base had them going back to demonizing any kind of immigration compromise.
And remember: Initially, Fox News was not all in on Trump either - but the base wanted him, and so they pushed him. That might be the most instructive example of the dynamics between media machine and base.
Yes, the rightwing propaganda machine is extremely powerful and causes tremendous harm. It keeps the conservative base in a constant state of frenzy and panic, elevating every real and imagined challenge to white conservative dominance to the status of an existential threat.
But the relationship between rightwing media (and the reactionary plutocrats financing it) and the base is not adequately captured by the idea of “brainwashing.” I think it needs to be conceptualized more in terms of channeling, crystallizing, and amplifying.
A necessary condition for the rightwing propaganda’s success is that it is deployed in an environment in which people are primed to believe it, that it channels and crystallizes certain ideological core claims and beliefs, builds on them, reinforces - but does not create! - them.

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More from @tzimmer_history

19 Sep
Every “Western” society harbors far-right extremists like Greene who dream of committing acts of fascist violence. That’s not a new development. But the fact that the Republican Party embraces and elevates her constitutes an acute danger to democracy.
If what’s on display here were just the extremist nonsense of a fringe figure, it’d be best to simply ignore it. This, however, isn’t just Greene’s extremism - it is increasingly that of the Republican Party itself.
How do we know that Greene isn’t just a crazy outlier? Because the Republican Party doesn’t treat her like one. Neither her extremist views nor her open embrace of this kind of violence-affirming, fascist symbolism gets her in trouble with her GOP colleagues.
Read 10 tweets
11 Sep
The conservative reaction to the soft vaccine mandate boils down to: “So what if I might be spreading a highly contagious virus that’s killed hundreds of thousands and is devastating everybody’s lives - leave me alone!” The idea that we should all just accept that is bizarre.
We as a society accepted it for far too long, and paid far too high a price for it. It’s been obvious for many months that will have to vaccinate our way out of this pandemic, that we won’t get from a pandemic to an endemic situation unless people get vaccinated. Let’s do it!
America has prioritized the anxieties of an increasingly radicalized minority for far too long - in that way, our public health crisis and our democracy crisis have been closely intertwined, and we need to tackle both.

A more detailed version of that argument in this thread:
Read 4 tweets
10 Sep
“So is this really how it’s going to be?“ @ThePlumLineGS asks in this crucial piece, as GOP candidates are openly casting any potential election losses as illegitimate. The answer, sadly, has to be yes – because this is what the Republican Party has become. Some thoughts: 1/
It is tempting to describe the Republican candidates in @ThePlumLineGS’s piece as fringe outliers: as either deranged Trumpists or as cynical opportunists who simply want to emulate Trump’s approach in an attempt to charm the Trumpian base. But there is more going on here. 2/
Remember that undermining the legitimacy of democratic elections in such blatant fashion does not get these people in trouble within the Republican Party. Why is that? Because many Republican officials and at least half of Republican voters share the underlying ideology. 3/
Read 15 tweets
9 Sep
The thing about these “the cancel mob is coming” pieces is that they simply don’t hold up as empirical analysis. They are extremely interesting, however, as evidence of a pervasive reluctance among elites to accept changing standards of what is / is not acceptable behavior.
I wish someone with a big platform would be honest and self-critical enough to say: “Look, I really benefited from the traditional culture of elite impunity, and I liked the fact that I could say and do pretty much whatever I wanted without facing legal or cultural sanction.”
We could potentially have a more productive discussion about individual perceptions of political and cultural change and what to make of these elite anxieties considering that the power structures that have traditionally defined American life have unfortunately held up fine.
Read 6 tweets
6 Sep
It’s American.

This is such a crucial point - and the same reason why I remain skeptical about the way the term “fascism” is sometimes used to describe Trumpism. It often comes with certain aberrationist implications, separating Trump from the continuum of American history.
There are many good reasons to see Trumpism as a specifically American, twenty-first-century version of fascism. But the term should be used to emphasize fascist traditions and tendencies on the American Right, not to whitewash whatever came before Trump’s rise.
The comparison to Europe’s interwar period can be enlightening if it generates questions about the history of the Far Right in America - but not if it is invoked to mark Trumpism as an aberration, something Un-American, something foreign for which there is no U.S. comparison.
Read 5 tweets
6 Sep
The claim that there was no “self-censorship” in academia until the “illiberal left” came and destroyed “free speech” is not worthy of serious discussion. Speech has always been (self-) regulated, everywhere, and the debate has always been over who gets to define the regulations.
Speech is never completely unrestricted, and shouldn’t be - there are always agreed upon limits. Who gets to make the restrictions and who needs to comply, who has to pay a price for violating the norms and who gets to be immune from critique by pleading “free speech.”
These are conflicts over who gets to determine what is and what is not acceptable in a society or in sub-systems of society, like academia. What irks people like Friedersdorf is that those who traditionally got to define those limits face more scrutiny today than they used to.
Read 5 tweets

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