Trumpism, the rejection of democracy, and the media

It couldn’t be more obvious that Donald Trump won’t concede defeat in November’s election, no matter how large the margin might be, because he’s said, over and over again, that he won’t concede unless he loses an “honest election,” and any election he loses is in his mind dishonest, because he supposedly lost, which is impossible by definition, because he’s not a loser, unlike his opponents. By the way the American public understands this perfectly well, as the overwhelming majority, including more than half of Trump’s own supporters, are of the opinion — it’s not really an opinion, it’s just a fact — that Trump won’t accept the results of the coming election if he loses.

Not long ago such a public position by a presidential candidate — or really a candidate for any electoral office in this country — would have been treated by the media as automatically disqualifying. There really couldn’t be a more basic rule of democratic political systems than that legitimate participants have to accept defeat when they lose.

Here again is another situation where the media’s responsibility in the rise of Trumpism is complicated, and difficult to sort out. Even the role of the right wing media — Fox and friends — is complex. Fox reported the 2020 election results like a legitimate news outlet, and lost lots of viewers as a result. The Murdoch clan then decided to switch over to Stop the Steal advocacy, and ended up having to settle one lawsuit with a libeled voting machine company for nearly $800 million, while another such suit continues to churn toward trial.

As for the role of the non-fascist media, their role is even more complex. What do you do when the former rules — losing candidates have to accept defeat — are no longer accepted not only by a particular presidential candidate, but by his entire party, when that party is one of the two actually existing parties in the American political system? That’s the situation, and to this point the answer seems to be something like:

(1) Report in a straightforward manner, over and over again, that Trump’s claims about the 2020 election are false, that he did lose, that there was no significant fraud, and that his attempt to reverse the results of an election he lost via a post-election conspiracy was illegal.*

(2) Nevertheless, don’t treat the facts in (1), which again the legacy media do continue to treat as un-contestable facts, as in any way disqualifying in regard to the legitimacy of Trump’s subsequent presidential candidacy.

This creates an overarching media narrative that is, to coin a phrase, really weird. Trump is an illegitimate candidate in regard to all previous standards of democratic legitimacy, but he has to be treated as legitimate anyway, because the alternative is to treat one of the nation’s two major parties as illegitimate in the context of a presidential election, which is obviously impossible because [step missing in argument].

The result is that the legacy media in this country have put themselves in a position in which they can report the truth, but only to a point. That point is where the truth about Trump and Trumpism collides too radically with the axiom that, if there are only two possible electoral choices in American politics (true), and one of the two choices has now come to openly reject a necessary condition for democratic elections — that when you actually lose you have to accept your defeat as legitimate — (also true), you have to continue to treat that party as legitimate, because the alternative, I suppose, is to “take sides,” which according to The View From Nowhere is not a legitimate thing for impartial journalists to do.

So it’s like the old Star Trek episode where Kirk has to talk Nomad into self-destructing, or something.

*It would have helped if Merrick Garland hadn’t taken more than two years to “investigate” whether the latter fact was actually a fact, before trying to begin to enforce the law against Trump.