The News: Short Ripostes
Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe
Considering how often I’ve found myself making similar points since I started actively blogging almost twenty years ago, a riposte is a repost. But here goes.
The New York Times reports that the United States has a far worse death rate from covid-19 than other wealthy countries. The story repeats two points over and over again: because the US vaccination rate is lower and the US rate of booster shots, especially for people over 65, is lower. This story doesn’t read like an inverted pyramid, it reads like a closed circle. Right near the end, a slightly new point enters the picture, which is “well, why are Americans less likely to get vaccinated?” and some quick points about distrust of government get trotted out. Read the article again and again and what you won’t see is any discussion at all of whether the US has had worse outcomes not just because of vaccination but because it has a far worse health system than any other wealthy country. The most expensive health care system in the world bar none, prior to March 2020, and the one with the worst outcomes among wealthy countries by almost every measure you could devise. It absolutely boggles my mind that you could publish an article of that length and not even entertain this as a contributing factor both as a reason why many Americans distrust medical advice (because they rightly perceive medical advice as a major source of financial precarity without the results to justify those risks) and why Americans who get sick from covid-19 might have worse outcomes—because they’re in poor-quality, minimally-regulated elder care facilities or they’re going to emergency rooms that have been stripped to the bone by just-in-time managerialism.
Let’s dunk on the New York Times some more. Just to show how stubborn a certain kind of horse-race political journalism is—often in line with the kind of political analysis being bought and sold within the world of think-tanks, campaign advising and punditry—that even when it’s plain that the rules of political conduct have fundamentally changed, the tropes that structure the conventional analysis hardly move at all. So today we’ve got a story about the “political peril” that Republicans supposedly face if they take “an aggressive approach” to Biden’s Supreme Court nominee. Apparently Democrats might use an aggressive approach as “fodder” to “deepen the wedge” between African-Americans and the GOP in the next election. Considering that the wedge in question is about as deep as the Grand Canyon, I don’t exactly think that’s scaring the GOP’s strategists much. But who knows? Oh my god, Susan Collins might vote for Biden’s nominee if she gets a little too distressed by too much overt racism. Oh noes there goes the ballgame for the GOP, it’s all over, one or two Republicans confirming a Democratic Supreme Court nominee. I mean, there goes their grand strategy to win the 13th Congressional District in California and the 3rd District in Pennsylvania--Berkeley and West Philly were just within reach.
There’s a reason for this immobility and it’s neither sloth nor stubbornness. It’s a reflection of the extent to which political reportage in most major US dailies (the dwindling number that remain) is neither investigatory nor descriptive. It doesn’t look deeply into how politics really works nor does it say plainly what’s going on at the level of trends and events. What’s going on is that most political analysts in the US—journalists, pundits, some political scientists—see themselves as courtly advisors, the sages to the king and princes. They don’t write about what is happening, they write about the politics they want to see happen. For the last thirty years—and especially the last six—they’ve been trying to write into existence what they think ought to be the way party politics should work, to provide a narrative to people in power that will shape what they do. Since they’re writing about how politicians allegedly think—and asking them the kind of prompted questions that will always reliably produce a phony performance that confirms the phony premise of the analysis—they can never be shown to be precisely wrong on the details. Senator Kevin Cramer did say “there is a lot of value in lowering the temperature”, after all. Not fake news! That this has absolutely no resemblance to what the GOP is doing nationwide or in any state nor to what the sources of the GOP’s actual electoral power really are at the moment? Well, that wouldn’t be objective reporting to talk about that, would it?
Everybody’s already dumped on the Washington Post’s puff piece on Leon Cooperman, the billionaire who just wants us to like him and appreciate that he worked for his money. Not the least because as Dave Denison pointed out in 2020, he gets this kind of coverage on a regular basis from journalists who generally neglect to point out how many times this story has been told about Cooperman already. The thing is after reading the latest piece, I can truthfully say that if Cooperman appeared in front of me right now and he was willing to sit and listen to me for a spell without yammering out the story for the four thousandth time about his pluck and hard work and all that, I’d say: ok, fine, you are a nice enough man and you didn’t inherit your money from a wealthy daddy like Elon Musk or Donald Trump and then pretend otherwise. I don’t hate you as a person. I don’t want you penniless. Here, I’ll shake your hand and we’ll have a nice dinner of lamb chops from Costco. But, hey, Leon, as long as I’ve got you here, I do want to say that you appear to be just a little bit stupid in an astonishing way, considering how many times you’ve told this story. Maybe it’s because your journalistic interlocutors never really push back on you. The thing is that the life you’ve lived, if you think it’s something like the American Dream, cannot be lived in the way you lived it any more. It’s all there in black and white in the story. You went to college at a price that’s no longer available. You came of age in a country with much higher marginal tax rates that funneled money back into a robust system of social support and public investment. (And yet even then some people were very rich, go figure.) You became wealthy in a country where if you weren’t wealthy, you still had reasonable odds of being comfortably middle-class. The fact that we’ve gone from that to a world where a tiny (always getting smaller) number of people own almost everything is not an accident and it’s not an inevitability. You have played your part in that happening, even as you act as if you’re just a bystander. You seem to know some of these things and yet they don’t seem to fully register with you. “Sure, we could have higher marginal tax rates but not 70%, holy shit that has never been, well not since 1981, ok! We can’t consider it until you stop talking crazy like that!” This is like Scrooge saying “Look, I see what you’re getting at, Ghost of Christmas Future, and golly I would really like to make sure that I’m not friendless like that, but I really need you to acknowledge that I work hard and that I have some friends now and that billionaires are humans too before I wake up and send a turkey from Costco over to Bob Cratchit (and hey, Ghost, you know that Bob could be a billionaire too if only he’d work a bit harder and maybe stop having so many kids).” When you can see enough of the truth to recognize things need to change, stop insisting that the price of your support is that we all have to affirm (repeatedly) that you’re a nice guy and a regular joe.
Apparently there are some nice middle-class white women who really think Andrew Cuomo was mistreated. How many? Who knows? There’s some online and at least a few of them are real and can be interviewed. I’m just going to wager that the tone of this story is pretty different from the way the New York Times and other dailies covered voters who still liked Marion Barry or Rod Blagojevich or James Traficant. I’m also thinking that the tone of the story is very different from those covering Americans who comprehensively disbelieve what’s been reported or documented about conservative politicians and public figures. I’d also be willing to wager that you could write the same story with about as much factual validity about any disgraced politician, any public figure accused of sexual misconduct, or for that matter even most convicted criminals whose crimes had great notoriety, and I don’t mean that cynically—it’s an interesting point. (Notoriously, for example, there were a number of women who took a strong sympathetic interest in Ted Bundy during his trial and after his conviction and there have been more such since Bundy’s death.) But it’s never enough to just say “such people exist”. They always do. The meaning of the story (and thus the justification for publishing it in the newspaper) requires both a deeper dialogue with the people who are claiming this affinity for the downfallen and despised and a deeper investigation of its implications, which are different depending on who is feeling it and what they’re drawn to in the disgraced person.
Image credit: "Sports Parade Alexander Rodchenko Fencing USSR CCCP Soviet" by russian_constructivism is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0