freelansing in Seattle

I’ve been reading too many post-election analyses that point fingers in all the wrong directions and completely miss the elephant in the room. The problem is not what Harris did or didn’t do in her campaign or whether some different choices could have moved the vote a point or two in some crucial swing state. The problem is much more fundamental.

Our problem is that US voters now live in very different worlds—different perceptions of reality, based on the divergent media and information diets they consume. Until Democrats and progressives learn how to counter that fact, we won’t find winning strategies.

To point to the obvious, the far right has been building its own media infrastructure since the 1990s, first with right-wing talk radio and then with Fox “News,” which can only be properly understood as a 24/7 propaganda machine. These are augmented by dozens of podcasts, publications, influencers, and networks that constitute a right-wing media bubble, offering a completely separate reality to its audience, unburdened by facts. This malevolent media machine has been funded by Big Money since the beginning, but once the rich noticed the potential return on investment, they’ve been investing much more heavily.

Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter, then proceeded to rename it X and destroy most of what was good about it, including fact checking and content moderation. He re-instated thousands of right-wing accounts that had been previously banned for spreading misinformation and hate, and turned what had once been a useful social media institution into another organ of right-wing misinformation. Musk famously lost billions in the stock market in the process, but now he has a major role in the Trump administration, so that probably looks like a good investment to him.

In addition, Musk’s PAC spent an additional $200 million to elect Trump. Lots of other billionaires got in that game as well. Direct donations to candidates are limited to $6,600, but billionaires can spend basically unlimited amounts of “outside money” through PACs, because of the catastrophically undemocratic Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010. And they did, breaking all records this year.

And then, of course, is the Great Misleader himself, who deftly turned the term “fake media” around to target the fact-checkers and actual objective media instead of the misinforming media it once referred to. Once his followers were trained to mistrust all objective sources of reality, they could create their own separate reality unburdened by actual reality.

So, between the immense right-wing media machine and outside campaign spending spreading misinformation and manufactured rage against Harris, and “liberal elites” more generally, it’s easy to see why Harris faced strong headwinds, even against a felonious, lying, hateful fascist who is the epitome of what parents teach their children not to be.

Could Harris have done this or that small thing better? Maybe, but would critical voters have even noticed when half the country is living in their own media bubble, carefully manufactured to mislead the masses? The current billionaire captains of industry have built a giant misinformation machine producing delusion, hate, and rage. Against, ironically, the “liberal elites” for siding with minorities—especially this year’s boogeymen of immigrants and trans people. It’s billionaires convincing working folks to hate millionaires and poor people. That’s an alternate reality that the rest of us will have to live in for at least the next four years.

Writer Masha Gessen, who witnessed Putin’s rise first-hand, notes that a primary technique of authoritarian regimes is to destroy any sense of shared reality among the population. Once that is gone, people are much more easily manipulated.

Mainstream pundits and Democratic Party political consultants have remained a step behind, continuing to believe that superior policy positions within objective reality will somehow win the day. But not when half the country has abandoned objective reality for something that speaks to their base instincts. Voting for a felonious, racist, sexist, xenophobic, lying fascist may seem objectively insane, but not when objectivity has left the building.

That’s the puzzle we have to solve. The right-wing media machine has spent decades manufacturing rage, hate, and misinformation. Now they have manufactured fascism in America. How do we respond?