CARTOON: Dems Get Honest For Once
The opposition political party’s complex and baffling allergy to genuinely opposing.
“There is, simultaneously, another force that functions systematically within our deranged political present to render genuine understanding of encroaching authoritarianism so much more difficult. It is the opposition political party’s complex and baffling allergy to genuinely opposing.”
— Rick Perlstein, You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle
The Marc Steiner Show: America's Political Crisis & 'The Infernal Triangle' With Author Rick Perlstein
The Mark Steiner Show
Real News Network (1/30/24)
The political crisis that has gripped the US over the past decade is the outgrowth of this country's peculiar political history. Just as the hard right turn of the 21st century GOP can be traced back to the failures of post-Jim Crow desegregation, so too can the Democrats' failure to uphold any 'left' politics worthy of the name be drawn back to a betrayal of labor decades in the making.
Few are as equipped as Rick Perlstein, historian of the post-1980s conservative movement, to place our current conjuncture in the context of the long arc of US history, as he does in his new column, 'The Infernal Triangle: Authoritarian Republicans, Ineffectual Democrats, and a Clueless Media'. Perlstein joins The Marc Steiner Show for a discussion on his work and the present political moment as the US enters yet another election year.
30-minute audio
You Are Entering The ‘Infernal Triangle’
Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media
By Rick Perlstein
The American Prospect (1/3/24)
As a historian who also writes about the present, there are certain well-worn grooves in the way elections get written about by pundits and political journalists from which I instinctively recoil. The obsession with polling, for one. Polls have value when approached with due humility, though you wonder how politicians and the public managed to make do without them before their modern invention in the 1930s. But given how often pollsters blow their most confident—and consequential—calls, their work is as likely to be of use to historians as object lessons in hubris as for the objective data they mean to provide.
“Generations of this incumbent, consensus-besotted journalism have produced the very conceptual tools, metaphors, habits, and technologies that we understand as political journalism. But these tools are thoroughly inadequate to understanding what politics now is.”
Pollsters themselves are often the more useful data to study, especially when their models encode mistaken presumptions frozen in place from the past. In 1980, for instance, Ronald Reagan’s landslide was preceded by a near-universal consensus that the election was tied. The pollster who called it correctly, Lou Harris, was the only one who thought to factor into his models a variable that hadn’t been accounted for in previous elections, because it did not yet really exist: the Christian right. …
Read the rest, or 15-minute audio
The Infernal Triangle That Structures American Politics:
“In one corner, a party consistently ratcheting toward authoritarianism, refusing as a matter of bedrock principle—otherwise they are “Republicans in Name Only”—to compromise with adversaries they frame as ineluctably evil and seek literally to destroy.
“In the second corner, a party that says that, in a political culture where there is not enough compromise, the self-evident solution is to offer more compromise—because those guys’ extremist fever, surely, is soon to break …
“And in the third corner, those agenda-setting elite political journalists, who frame the Democrats as one of the “sides” in a tragic folie à deux destroying a nation otherwise united and at peace with itself because both sides stubbornly … refuse to compromise.
“And here we are.”
