Last week, Politico ran a headline. Once upon a time, it would have been tempting to attach some superlative to said headline, such as “astonishing,” “remarkable,” or “crazy.” Now such headlines are commonplace and illustrative of the information warfare that defines American politics. Anyway, here it is:
One of the biggest political problems in America is the complete disconnect between what passes for “conventional wisdom” inside the beltway and how most Americans’ perception of reality affects how they vote. Roughly half the country identifies as politically conservative, and beyond that, there are supermajorities involving good chunks of the Democrat party that think that elite opinion has gone too far left on several key issues.
And yet, nearly all discussions that take place context of our “media-run state” basically start from the premise that radicalism on the right is a clear and present threat to the republic, whereas radicalism on the left is never threatening to prosperity and our way of life. Rather, it’s just a messaging problem, where the establishment left must be given broad latitude to say whatever it needs to say to get elected and stave off the absurdly broad category of candidates labeled dangerous right-wing extremists. And it doesn’t matter if what is said is fundamentally dishonest because the threat justifies the deception.
This is why an army of fact-checkers, misinformation experts, censors, and journalists — and good luck telling the difference between those four ostensible vocations, as they are frequently rolled into one
