Democracy dies in false equivalence

The increasing hysteria over the Michigan Senate race is becoming a singular media obsession that, as Brian Beutler observes, should be all too familiar at this point:

To the extent that journalists do view it as their role to inform the citizenry, this includes more than just ensuring that what they report is true. It also includes conveying information in a manner that fosters accurate impressions about similarities and differences between the parties. The text and presentation of political news coverage (column inches, air time, headlines, tone, etc) should leave regular and casual consumers with a correct sense of things. Which candidate or party is the more ethical? The more extreme? The more substantive? The more honest? Etc.

The canonical failure here came in 2016, when the legacy media’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails created the false impression that, between her and Donald Trump, she was most corrupt. More scandal plagued. Less trustworthy. It almost certainly cost her the election. It may yet cost us constitutional democracy.

The singular obsession with El-Sayed and Piker is the same thing. In isolation, a reasonable point of scrutiny, just as Clinton’s emails were fair game. Nobody honest would argue the media has some obligation to ignore these questions altogether in order to create the “correct” impression: Do the things Piker has said suggest he’s an antisemite? Should someone who wants to be a senator align with someone so controversial? Someone who, whatever you think of them, holds fairly extreme views?

In totality, though, what they’ve done is create a false impression: that there’s only one Senate candidate in either party who has an association so troubling that every other candidate in his party should have to answer for it. That the El-Sayed/Piker relationship is so aberrant, the midterm should be, at least in part, a referendum on it.

Sorry, it’s bullshit.

I won’t recite the whole litany, because it would run hundreds if not thousands of words. But the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia has employed multiple white supremacists. The Republican Senate candidate in Texas is himself a fraud, impeached by his own party for corruption, bribery, and abuse of power. There are scores of white supremacists and neo-Nazis working in the Trump administration, including in the White House, many of them unnamed, because the press corps has decided this isn’t terribly interesting. The fanatical right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, whose standards aren’t so high that he didn’t spend years working for Viktor Orban, recently reported with alarm that perhaps 30 to 40 percent of young Republican staffers in Washington are groypers. The president’s most loyal sidekick (not Natalie, the other one) is a vile bigot. Here she is just yesterday calling four prominent Democratic women and a sitting Supreme Court justice, “ghetto, entitled, race-obsessed, destructive black BITCHES.” And the rest of the Republican surrogate class is teeming with fascists, conspiracy theorists, people on the take from foreign governments.

It’s a sewer. What do Mike Rogers and the rest of this cycle’s Republican candidate class think of these associations? It’s unclear they’ll be asked, let alone hounded.

I don’t need mainstream media elites to call the GOP elite a sewer. But I do expect them to make this contrast clear to voters. They are currently inverting reality, at least at the level of first impression.

One could add here that Elon Musk, an open white supremacist, owns a prominent social media site, was for several weeks the second most powerful person in the Trump administration, and is once again giving hundreds of millions of dollars to and on behalf of Republicans this election cycle. Are Republican candidates like Mike Rogers being constantly hounded to defend the content of Musk’s many offensive Tweets from this year? Obviously they are not.

As Paul observed back when everything fell apart, since the coverage of the 2016 election was an is completely indefensible on the merits, the usual move is to simply dodge the question by pointing out that Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate who ran an imperfect campaign, a true yet also completely immaterial point. Similarly, if you want to argue that the cost-benefit analysis of making multiple campaign appearances with an edgelord Mao-curious Twitch streamer in a state Trump carried twice doesn’t pencil out, I am inclined to agree with you. As Brian says, it’s fine to make this a story. What is not defensible is to make it the story, and to discuss it in isolation of the many Republican extremists in position of much greater influence and authority than Hasan Piker. And it’s critical for Democrats to understand what the shot is here.