I suppose one of the things that frustrated me a bit about Margaret Sullivan’s memoir is that even though she is quite critical of American journalism, I’m not sure she entirely acknowledges the particular character of political journalism, where the reporters are so closely attached to communities of commentary and advocacy and share the hubris of a lot of commenters that they are the referees of American politics, that they can call the fouls and enforce the rules.
It’s not that this would be a violation of objectivity or fairness if so. I’m with Sullivan on that point: the invocation of ‘objectivity’ is one of the most noxious habits of postwar American journalism. It shields reporters and editors from having to acknowledge that they see politics in a particular way and that they are attached to particular kinds of centrism or moderation that are envisioned as reasonable, unideological, above the fray, and without any fixed interests. The real issue is that the invocation of objectivity in this mode keeps reporters from seeing just how ineffective they are as referees, and how much the hubris involved in taking on that role hampers their understanding of the historical arc of American political life and the possible future directions of that arc.
The traditional insistence that the newsroom was the newsroom and the business side was the business side, for example, meant that American journalists have never had to fully assess whether in fact they are in professional terms committed to democratic norms. Their owners might not need to be, might not actually be. Their industry might do just as well in a more autocratic or oligarchic environment. If journalists are, it might not be out of self-interest, but instead because that is what they believe in. You can’t act from belief, from a foundational value, if you won’t let yourself be seen standing on that foundation, and if you won’t openly derive what you perceive about the world from that vantage point.
So take, for example, the way that Kevin McCarthy’s so far fruitless effort to become Speaker of the House is being covered. There’s some amusement (and I’m enjoying watching McCarthy struggle as much as the next guy) and some vague attempt at historical perspective by pointing to the last time this happened, in 1923, to Frederick Gillett. The last time before that was in the mid-19th Century.
But the reporters are mostly also treating the 20 or so far-right Representatives blocking McCarthy as ludicrous extremists who will plainly be outlasted and eventually will knuckle under to the party’s mainstream. Ludicrous they may be, but what is happening right now is precisely what tends to happen when there are close margins in elections and legislatures: the power of small fractional groups and movements increases, and they tend to get what they want if they stay united and stubborn and remain patiently intent on their goals. If what they want is dramatic concessions to their fringe objectives, they may well get it. (Roosevelt’s Bull Moose followers got quite a bit out of Gillett’s Republicans back in 1923 despite the mainstream of the 1920s GOP being quite uninterested in progressive reforms.)
Remember when the mainstream commenters and political reporters all expected that George W. Bush would govern from the middle precisely because his victory in 2000 was so narrow? There was a lot of talk about the lack of a mandate and so on. That’s referee talk, an attempt to conjure out of thin air a kind of virtuous republicanism that stays in the judicious center and values consensus. That talk failed then, it has failed persistently, it is failing now.
The Republican Party is now divided. There is a majority faction that is still attached to three major objectives in governmental terms.
Obstruct Democrats if they have executive, legislative or judicial power at any point, and be so good at obstructing Democrats that they enact Republican-preferred policies on the grounds that their own preferences will be even more difficult to pursue, thereby transferring all the risk of making policy to the Democrats while also making sure that nothing happens that Republican elites cannot abide.
Seize the judiciary as the ultimate obstructionist weapon.
Pay off Republican political clients with campaign funds, patronage jobs, contracts, access, etc.
For the most part, the majority faction doesn’t need to hold majority power to accomplish any of these goals. In fact, arguably, holding the Presidency and the House are liabilities in pursuing successful obstructionism. The Senate is important to judicial seizure, but that has been accomplished—and in being accomplished, the Republicans have shown that they can act effectively in the Senate even from a minority position.
Seems like an unassailably strong position, right? That’s what the referees think, too: that the Republican Party should just stick with the obstructionism, which works pretty well in strategic terms. Maybe they also think that someday a crisis will come that somehow tempts the obstructionists back into bipartisan commitments to solving American problems. Most of the would-be referees see themselves that way. That’s how a lot of them talked themselves into supporting the war in Iraq and suppressing negative news that would make it look bad: they were being loyal to America, being bipartisan.
What the referees don’t fully see is that the 20 or so Representatives blocking McCarthy have profoundly moved on from obstructionism to wanting to actually govern. Not as a faction in a democracy, but as the only power there is or could be. And it is the success of obstructionism that has made that a powerful and possible objective rather than a trivial, amusing extremism. It’s not just those 20, really. It’s state legislatures, it’s governors, it’s zoning boards, it’s school boards. And it’s the Supreme Court.
The referees, like many of us in the American majority, sighed in relief when aggressive election deniers lost their races in 2022. But many lost narrowly: this was not a mass repudiation, not a rebuke by a confident American majority seeking to restore a moderate consensus. The American minority that voted for deniers voted for much more than that. They voted to seize power. They’re done with obstructionism, with playing defense, with moving Overton windows inch by inch.
The only way McCarthy doesn’t end up conceding something of value to that consequentially new direction is by seeking Democratic votes instead. The referees are sure that’s impossible, and they’re right. I’m not sure they know why it’s impossible, though. It’s because the House Republicans are mostly beholden to voters who want to seize power. Most of the Representatives don’t want to because they’re sitting pretty as it stands, and they know enough to know what happens if their fractional rivals get their way. A stable obstructionism that deflects responsibility gives way to a tumultuous chaos where the Republican Party’s deliberate commitment to that chaos will be discernible.
A dirty game where stable forms of cheating are the norm is hard to referee. It takes being naive—or on the take yourself—to pretend that the rules are in force. A game where one side is trying to extinguish the game itself is one where any referee has to shake off the pretense that they’re neutral arbiters who are just calling balls and strikes. Doing so means not just re-evaluating how to cover the present, but re-interpreting how we got there. The people who want to end the game have been working towards that goal for a long time. They are not a sudden response to changing circumstance. It is only that changing circumstances—including a narrow election—have provided an environment where their goals are imaginable. The United States escaped a coup in 2020 by narrow margins, but no one of consequence has paid any price for that attempt.
Once upon a time, mainstream observers used to warn of the future consequences should democratic publics come to fundamentally mistrust government and major civil institutions. I’m not sure that most observers of that kind ever processed that what they predicted came to pass, and it’s just as bad as they warned. We live in that future. We are now seeing another perennial prediction pass into reality, which is that a lack of consequences for trying to overthrow an entire political order would encourage more attempts to overthrow it, that weakness and appeasement in the face of aggression encourages more aggression. The referees tell themselves that they’re not part of that problem, only observers of it. They are, once again, incorrect.
Image credit: Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash
I think this is pretty strongly mistaken, in a way that is surprising from you. In particular, it isn't right to say that the 20 holdouts want to govern. None of the Republicans in the House have any governing ambitions, partly because the Senate and Presidency make that impossible right now, but more so because they don't have any ideas about Federal policy that they want to enact. But that's _more_ true of the rebels; what they want is the sham investigations and TV hits that McCarthy is planning on, but in a personalized and independent way, rather than as a unified party as McCarthy offers.
Ok, that was righteous, Tim. The referees used to have referees (maybe) in editors and the public, but lately—not so much.