I sent this email to a friend just now, in response to a couple of political opinion pieces he’d sent me.

These are all good points that you raise. The US has the lowest rate of social mobility, people born in poverty becoming middle-class, of any wealthy country.  Privilege is perpetuated by law (as you say, they killed the Death Tax) and elite institutions, like Harvard, that are not available to any but the top recipients of an excellent education (and funds for public education are constantly being hijacked by Christians and others to pay for their private schools), or those whose families have a connection or are generous donors.  (Example, Jared Kushner, C yeshiva student, Harvard alum after felon dad Charles gives the school a few million shekels)

There are a lot of factors about why things are so fucked up and so demonically divided right now. Of course Fox is a huge and horrible one, for the reasons you describe.  It’s really grotesque how much influence one ninety year-old billionaire reptile can have on the media for the entire world.  Neither of these big picture articles about our current crisis (Mother Jones or Stephens) even so much as mentioned one of the scariest elephants in the partisan divided room:  the many-headed nightmare emanating from climate change, global warming, increasing deadly storms, sea level and ocean temperatures rising and ocean ecosystems desalinating as ice caps melt, drought, floods, wildfires and famine and eventually no food or living space for tens of millions, and then billions, displaced by rising sea levels and unlivable heat and turned into roving hordes of hungry on-the-move cannibals, and a final world war caused by scarcity of things like now monetized water.  Talk about a refugee crisis, they’ll probably decide to nuke these ravenous cannibal migrants. Talk about elites.

My problem with Bret Stephens is really the same problem I have with Mother Jones. They are pushing a thesis, motivated by an ideological position, so Stephens talks about these corrupt, cancelling, illiberal  radical left elites out of touch with the person who’s lost his job in middle America, completely disconnected from the millions of deaths of despair, and the murders, and the hopeless lives of millions of abused Americans, but he is also one of the same corrupt , out of touch elites, being a respected opinion writer for the New York Times.  Both he and the Mother Jones writer resort to simplified arguments that leave out nuance and tremendously important details to advance the particular case they are making.

The Mother Jones guy dismissed the idea of any kind of conspiracy at play in the crisis that our country has come to, pointing out, irrelevantly but at length, that belief in conspiracy theories is about the same as it’s always been, even if the wife of history’s most corrupt Supreme Court justice is a far right Christian political operative, on the board of the influential, secret nonprofit Council for National Policy, who brokered the deal between Donald Trump and the evangelical leaders in 2016, was in and out of the West Wing regularly during 45’s administration (and heads would always roll when she left) and also was in a religious frenzy in the Jesus-invoking texts to the Chief of Staff as Trump’s January 6 coup was sputtering, in the hours and days after she attended the Big Guy’s rousing speech in the freezing cold earlier that day.    Then all White House phone logs, texts, secret service texts and calls, irretrievably deleted, all Homeland Security heads’ communications also gone, from the hours before, during and after the riot at the Capitol for which hundreds are being, eh, vengefully held hostage.  There are complex right wing conspiracies at work all around us (for example, the association of Republican state attorneys’ general that met to work out how to limit drop boxes and things like that prior to the 2020 election, are probably meeting right now, the fake electors, election deniers overseeing upcoming elections, continual destruction of evidence, lies about the existence of evidence never produced, etc). and it doesn’t take Oliver Stone to tell you that.

Stephens does something similar when he focuses on the corrupt idiot asshole privileged  heads of elite institutions (accurate enough)  and uses them to prove his larger points that misguided, hypocritical, often tyrannical liberals suck and only sober conservatives like him see the world as it actually is and are prepared to lead it (debatable, like all political positions).  

The worst one in this category, for my money, is fucking David Brooks, who also writes for the New York Times.  I avoid his stuff the last few years, too aggravating to read that know-it-all’s confident conclusions about his opinions.   The insidious thing about Brooks is that he can make very reasonable points while he hides his ideological agenda most of the time but then sometimes it just pops out in a grotesque, tell-tale aside, like nonchalantly dropping in a gutter formulation of what’s wrong with poor people in terms of their moral character.

Anyway, it’s occasionally interesting to read some of this stuff, but I don’t put any more stock in the opinions of these folks that I do in my own reading, thinking and talking to people whose opinions I respect. Political commentators are in the business of simplifying things, convincing readers of their astuteness and expertise, and making difficult, complicated, scary things seem to make sense, but the version of reality they give you is always missing essential ingredients that you need to have a nuanced, really intelligent conversation about the subject. That’s just one reason I resent these fucking pantloads.