Tuning out the news

Lili Loofbourow articulates an inchoate sensation that I’ve been having as well, but hadn’t been able to identify. She notes the massive decline in cable news ratings, which since the election are down 53% at Fox, 56% at MSNBC, and a startling 73% at CNN. Now some decline in a post-election year is to be expected, but this seems like something more. (Print and Internet media have also seen sharp although not as severe drops).

The optimistic take on all this — championed by several commenters on this blog — is that this is just getting back to a more normal relationship to the news, in which people aren’t doomscrolling every insane Trump tweet, is a big positive in and of itself. Loofbourow makes the plausible argument that a longing for this state of affairs played a crucial role in getting Joe Biden — anodyne, boring, eminently non-exciting Joe Biden — elected president.

However, there’s something else going on as well: People, especially on the left, (I always want to put scare quotes around “the left” in these contexts, given that in America today “the left” largely means people committed to such bourgeois concepts as representative democracy and mildly progressive levels of taxation) are tuning out from the news because, Loofbourow argues, political engagement seems increasingly pointless in a system in which essentially no consequences are visited on the very people who are destroying it:

Even the attempted insurrection—arguably one of the more interesting things to have happened in America recently—is, narratively speaking, hard to talk about now. What else is there to say when the situation is plain and dire? One party effectively supports the insurrectionists and the president who inspired them. That party is working to disenfranchise voters and to pass legislation that would enable various states to overturn electoral results. The other party is trying and failing to do much about it. And so we tune out those attempts. I asked my editor to confirm my sense that people aren’t really reading about Jan. 6 anymore, at least on Slate.com—she did. But shouldn’t people want to know as much as they can about the insurrection to overthrow the American electoral process and keep Trump in power—and what’s being done about it?

To those who have tuned out, the question is naïve. No, people don’t want to know anymore. People already know too much, and the knowledge hasn’t profited them. They know about all the harms that were done to American institutions and American democracy while Trump was president. They also know what the much-ballyhooed Mueller report—each development of which many of them followed attentively—achieved: nothing. Why would the Jan. 6 commission would be any different? This is what happens when the “news” is that a nation’s entire system of accountability is broken: Even the consequences that do get meted out start to feel weightless. Maybe the “QAnon shaman” goes to prison for four years (certainly some of the insurrectionists should). But everyone understands at this point that the actual instigators—including the ex-president and members of Congress who worked with and informed the rioters—are immune to consequences. So why read about it? . . .

I don’t know what the opposite of radicalization is in this specific context. I hope I’m wrong to suspect that it’s well under way within a population that was once extremely motivated to follow political news and fight for progress. But the problem is that it feels like it’s happening. And as we’ve seen, sometimes the feeling is enough to create the narrative, which then becomes the reality.

I think there’s a lot to this. People wanted to get back to “normal,” but normal now turns out to be that liberal democracy is being strangled slowly, day by day, while the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress fight an essentially ameliorative rearguard action with the barbarians at the gate, while still making plenty of mouth noises about how it would be so nice if we could invite them in for a nice cup of tea because after all don’t we all want what’s best for America?

There’s no easy solution to this, but it would be a good thing to recognize that temporarily keeping Trump or one of his loathsome epigoni out of the White House is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for staving off what is very clearly still a long term slide into ethno-nationalist authoritarianism.

I get it: people are exhausted, they just want to see what’s new on Netflix or watch the Big Game this weekend. Nobody likes to be reminded that oh yeah by the way a Balrog just showed up so it doesn’t matter that you’re already weary.

But hoping the Balrog just goes away or better yet turns out to be a nice guy is not a plan: it’s pure denial.

. . . Exhibit A.