Men who never clean up after themselves
5 pieces of media for reflection and action
Like a lot of people, I’ve been consuming a ton of media over the last week, while also spending as much time as possible outside before the Dark Wet sets in here in the Pacific Northwest.
Let’s begin with a bit of fresh air…
Back to work: I’ve seen endless blame for Harris’s loss. While analysis is essential, pinning the return of MAGA on one detail is fruitless. It’s akin to an argument I’ve made about wellness influencers for years: they often flatten the complexities of biology to single factors for etiologies, as if illness is only created due to one factor. Sure, sometimes it is, but often it’s a set of factors. The same holds true in politics.
The biggest single-factor issue: Democrats didn’t speak to the working class. Michael Hobbes pointed out an important detail on Bluesky:
People writing the "Democrats abandoned the working class takes" know that Harris's campaign website is still up, right? kamalaharris.com/issues/
He included this screenshot from Harris’s site:
Look at all of those elitist plans!
Harris brought all of these issues up during her speeches as well. Those moments were rarely clipped for social media or discussed in depth by the media, however, which leads to an insightful analysis by investigate reporter Miranda Green, who offers this important insight on Threads (read the full thread for context):
Green’s rundown focuses on the conservative takeover of local news, which has been occurring for decades. If your news diet mostly occurs online, you might not realize the impact of local news, which still greatly affects voter mindset across the country.
My career began working as a stringer for The Home News and Star Ledger while in college in the nineties. Shortly after graduating in 1997, I worked as a news reporter for the Monroe Sentinel, followed by a stint as an entertainment writer for Time Off, part of the Princeton Packet newspapers.
These are the exact types of publications that conservative organizations have intentionally purchased: low circulation, low print quality, highly informative to citizens who like reliability in their driveway. Yet that reliability comes at a cost, namely organizations with ultra-conservative, often Christian nationalist themes taking over what purports to be unbiased news.
It’s not the only factor, of course, but it’s a big factor that Green’s thread dutifully unpacks—especially these networks’ relationships to the oil and gas industries.
Another piece of analysis careening across my social networks is the idea that the left needs its own Joe Rogan. The podcaster had an outsized media influence on this election, interviewing Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk within a week of Election Day, ending with Rogan endorsing Trump the night before.
Anand Giridharadas addressed the idea of a lefty Rogan by pointing out “an underappreciated difference between platform and posture.” He disentangles standing for something and the manner in which you stand, which can be two different things. The confusion between them can throw us off-guard.
We all have that friend who believes all the right and beautiful and just things, but wouldn’t help you in a pinch. We all also have that friend or relative or neighbor who believes awful things but would be the first person to offer to help us move.
The challenge is in perception. Harris’s platform, as stated above, was about the middle class, but due to multivariate reasons (part of which Green details), Democrats were framed as elitist throughout the campaign.
Meanwhile, Giridharadas notes, MAGA, by definition, is about closing things up—the border; women’s rights—yet was supercharged by the notion they were fighting for free speech. That perception helped them achieve the idea that they were meeting people where they’re at, even if in reality the opposite holds true.
Whereas Green focuses on local media, Giridharadas goes broad:
But what turbocharges these differences in stance is a gigantic media ecology on the right that functions as a voter radicalization funnel. Meeting people where they are means that you pull people into that funnel at its very wide end. As they enter, they are merely annoyed by things around them — upset about inflation, frustrated at not being able to own a home, feeling destabilized by the rising status of women and people of color, unsure of their role. And the funnel — consisting of traditional media, newer media like podcasts and video talk shows, social media, and YouTube content — slowly pulls them from annoyance with questions toward ever more radical and pungent certitude. It doesn’t require them to be at the pointy end of the funnel at the beginning. The point of the funnel is to pull in everyone.
And so he advises the pro-democracy movement to start funneling people in.
This idea came up in Jon Stewart’s interview with historian Heather Cox Richardson as well.
Near the end, Stewart comes clean: journalists need to embrace their activist roles. It’s one thing to both sides a policy issue. It’s another to pretend that the guy who said he’s going to create an authoritarian nation hasn’t just been given the green light to do so.
Headlines in the weeks leading up to this election, and the pundit talking heads since Election Day, have played centrist so hard that they fail to realize how far, and how quickly, the goalposts are moving right.
That’s been the case for generations, since the New Deal, since the sixties-era push that brought us Civil Rights and feminism. We’re at a precipice where some of those advances have been rolled back; more are in the process of being further rolled back. And so we must play Sisyphus once again.
The most powerful piece I’ve read this past week comes from the irreplaceable Rebecca Solnit. Out of all the media I shared, this is a must-read, both in terms of—to riff on Giridharadas—meaning and delivery.
They appear to be deeply damaged people and they have come to damage everything else, including the climate; human rights, especially women’s rights, trans rights and immigrants’ rights; and the US economy. The rest of us and the rest of the world will be the cleanup crew because men like this never clean up after themselves.