In 2024, We Must Focus on What Matters
It's Not Bibles or Talking Heads
We live an age where our public editors are Google, Meta, TikTok, and what’s left of the mainstream media. Their algorithms have spent years priming our frontal lobes for neverending fight-or-flight responses. We’re angry or we’re scared. We don’t respond, we react. In that narrow space between the two, too many of us have lost the ability to decide for ourselves what matters. Or we’ve allowed those decisions to be made for us by the meticulous curation of our information sources.
The energy and dedication with which we once tended a beautiful garden has jumped the airgap into the digital world. Most of us now wander hedge mazes of our own creation: We turn left or right, encounter deadends before coming back to where we began. This digital labyrinth we’ve created can seem safe and secure; allowing us to cheer what we love and lash out at what we hate, but in the padded room we call our digital lives.
Residing in these self-serving dwellings can blind us from seeing what really matters. In the fight for American democracy, we must spend more time looking up and speaking out than we do repeating the same frustration as 500,000 other people. It’s what movements like MAGA count on: Disorienation, discouragement, and disengagement are their main weapons.
A couple of examples.
When NBC News decided to hire defenestrated former RNC Chair Ronna (Romney) McDaniel as an election analyst, social media (me included) lit up with anger, confusion, and derision. Why did they put an election denier on the payroll? That’s NBC’s problem and will be hashed out in dozens of angry meetings, emails, and memos, most of which will ultimately become public.
NBC’s decision, while ridiculous, was not novel for our ‘mainstream’ media outlets. CBS hired Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former chief of staff. CNN features haircuts who tow the Trumpist-line, even if weakly. The broader issue isn’t McDaniel’s hiring, but what it means when a free and indpenendent press trades truth for ‘objectivity.’
You know who doesn’t care about Ronna’s hiring and firing?
Almost everyone not in the Acela Corridor or glued to our social media feeds all day. It’s just more noise from a group of people too disconnected from the rest of the country. The anger is easy. The hot takes flow like lava from an angry volcano, rushing into the political waters and disappearing in a cloud of steam.
And no one cares.
Likewise, all the hail and fury about Donald Trump selling Bibles doesn’t matter a wit to most Americans; Republicans, Democrats, or Independents. Trump being a huckster isn’t new news, he’s Baby Billy with orange hair. Trump not hocking crap, would (for him) be aberrant behavior. Like so many of the evangelical leaders who support him, Trump has to find another reason to keep the flock’s wallets open. Now that they won’t give money to his campaign, he has to fleece them some other way.
None of this is a surprise. Nor should we treat it as such. If Trump sells something, many, many people will buy it. It won’t affect one iota whether he wins or loses in November. For those that love him, they’ll buy the book Trump has never read. For those that hate him, it’s just one more reason. For those who haven’t decided, they’re not surprised, and Lee Greenwood Bibles, though creepy and weird, won’t be determanitive.
Instead, let’s focus on the things that can and will push non-Trump Republicans and independents away from him this fall.
While Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, the primary process pointed out alot of electoral weakness. When a functional incumbent and clear leader of a political party (and movement) is losing 20-35% of primary* voters, the party isn’t consolidated behind its standard bearer. As I’ve written previously, Trump’s campaign is in a lot of trouble across a broad front and his anger toward Nikki Haley supporters will compound his difficulties in coming months.
As Jake Lahut and Sam Brody reported in their Daily Beast story “Trump Has A Big Problem with GOP Voters:”
“What you’ve seen since then is Trump has done next to nothing to earn their vote, so there’s still a lot of hostility among the people we’ve been talking to about Trump’s lack of outreach,” said Robert Schwartz, who is running a PAC focused on persuading Haley voters to support Biden.
If Trump’s hostility isn’t enough, we should highlight the GOP’s insanity and inanity on immigration, an issue Republicans report they take seriously. First, we know that Trump personally scuttled a tough border bill that had bipartisan Congressional support and President Joe Biden was ready to sign. Democrat [insert name] ran on this issue specifically in the special election to replace goonie-bird George Santos and trounced his Republican opponent.
Earlier this week, Michigan Republican (look them up!) Matt Maddock posted pictures of ‘illegal immigrants’ getting off a plane and onto a bus in Detroit. He sputtered vitriol about ‘100,000’s of illegals are pouring into our country.’
Just one problem: They weren’t immigrants (illegal or otherwise) but the Gonzaga men’s basketball team arriving for their next game in the NCAA tournament. Do we have problems on the southern border? We do. Is Matt Maddock a kook? He is. We need to highlight the likes of Maddock and others that are fundamentally unserious and incompentent.
He doesn’t care about securing the border. He’s desperate for the dopamine rush his insanity induces. Persuadable Republican voters should be shown this stuff and asked whether or not they want to be party to it. My guess is the answer is “No.”
Last week in Alabama, Democrat basing her campaign on abortion rights and her state’s outlawing of IVF. It was a swing district, yes, but in a southern ruby like Alabama, making reproductive rights the centerpiece of a campaign would normally send you home. Lands’ victory should not be seen as a total repudiation of the Dobbs decision, though Republicans are suffering mightily for it.
Instead, we should communicate to moderate Republican men and women that Dobbs puts the government in their bedrooms. For a party that once held individual liberty as the highest of its principles, Dobbs and the subsequent state laws it spawned, have created a strikepoint within the GOP coalition.
We’ve already seen individual rights campaigns win abortion fights in states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio. These are not swing states. They’re conservative, but enough old-line Republican voters don’t like the idea of the government or unelected judges (!) making decisions for their wives or more impactfully, for their daughters.
In states across the country with 100% abortion bans, we’ve already seen and heard the stories of women having to flee to avoid carrying a non-viable pregnancy to term or because an ecotopic pregnancy would be a death sentence. The state of Idaho passed a law prohibiting pregnant women from leaving the state to receive an abortion. Sounds downright Soviet.
If we’re trying to convince our Republican and independent neighbors to stay away from Trump this fall, sometimes we need to show them straight up crazy. For example, in Tennessee last week, the Republican-controlled state senate passed a bill outlawing ‘chemtrails.’ What are chemtrails might you ask? You know the steam that you see coming from commercial jets flying at high altitudes (due to hot exhuast condensing moisture in the atmosphere,) well conspiracy theory nuts are convinced the government is releasing stuff into the air to control us.
Tennessee Republicans, always on the case, have passed a bill to make sure Joe Biden and his High Roundtable of Bill Gates and the Illuminati aren’t pushing stuff into our bodies with their sneaky airplanes. This is Alex Jones-type stuff, folks.
If issues, values, and principles don’t work, send your Republican friends on down to Knoxville for a while. That should do it.
Whew. Reset.
Do Donald Trump and his MAGA horde represent anything otherwise normal Americans believe? Incompetence, insanity, and corruption are no way to run the most powerful country humanity has ever known, and we’re standing on the knife’s edge.
If you want to be angry about the machinations of pundits, politicians, and media types in Washington, DC, please have at it. The fight for America, though, is taking place not in Washington, but in Waukesha, Mesa, and Macomb. Let’s get out of our mazes and out into the world for a while. We’ll all be better for it.
News and Notes:
Check out my latest podcast interview with Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, the authors of White Rural Rage. We discuss why rural America is so angry, why their anger is a threat to democracy, and the meaning behind all those pick-up truck commercials. This is the first of a two-part series on The Frontlines of Democracy.
Link to their terrific book here.
Right on Reed! Donald should be building coalitions. Instead he's pushing away anyone who sees through his Big Con. He only wants blind loyal MAGAs. Which is about 10% of the adult population. Still, the election rides on a few hundred thousand votes in 6 states. Those are the humans who can be attracted to the honorable guy. Rather than the sex offender, business fraud, traitor guy.
I pray the DNC and the Biden Campaign are reaching out to Christy and Bush and Haley and Cheney and Kinzinger and all the other anti-Donald Rs. If we envision them all on stage with Biden, giving him their full endorsement, just before the voting starts in October, perhaps, just maybe, please lord, this will manifest in reality.
What I’d like to see is the women of Texas throwing out Ted Cruz and all the republicans who voted for their punishing abortion bill.
Where are they? Don’t they care? Don’t their husbands, fathers, brothers care?
Organize or join an organization, register voters, knock on doors and throw out every single republican.
Or don’t complain.