Murdoch and Mitch

      How did we get here? How did all this happen?

      I ascribe it mostly to two individuals: Murdoch and Mitch. (To be clear, the Mitch is not Mitch Stephens, my friend and colleague and the co-editor of this site. It’s Mitch McConnell. Murdoch is, of course, Rupert Murdoch.) They got us here.

      There were others, of course, who have brought us to this moment—Ronald Reagan, who made many believe government was the enemy; Grover Norquist, the fanatical anti-tax crusader who wanted to “drag government into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub;” social media, which spread the craziness from friend to friend; Newt Gingrich, who launched an enduring era of partisan warfare; and many others.

      But Murdoch and Mitch deserve the most dis-credit.

      Let me explain why, starting with Murdoch but going back quite a bit to put what he has done in perspective.

      Remember the John Birch Society, back in the late fifties and early sixties? They were political nutcases; crazy, Christian anti-Communist conspiracy theorists. They were founded in 1958 by right-wing businessman Robert Welch (he owned a candy company that made Junior Mints and, my favorite, Pom-Poms). He named the group after an obscure American missionary who had died in China at the hands, apparently, of Mao Zedong’s Communists.

      Among other things, the Birchers believed in withdrawing America from the United Nations, exposing Communists in the federal government and impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren. Oh, and that President Dwight Eisenhower had consciously acted as an agent of the international Communist conspiracy. Replace Communist with socialist, add “woke” to the mix, and does it start to sound vaguely familiar?

      They were a true-believing fringe cult and their stuff was so nuts, they were so beyond the pale, that no one near the political mainstream took them seriously or wanted to be associated with them. Even a vague suggestion that you had anything to do with the society was the political third rail and marked you as an adjacent nutcase.

      In a nutshell, so to speak, that’s what happened to Barry Goldwater.

      The 1964 arch-conservative Republican candidate for president had vaguely defended the Birchers, and it was one of the reasons—maybe a major one—why Goldwater was annihilated in the election. His views, occasionally mirroring the Birchers, were just too far from the American mainstream.

      Now fast-forward a few decades to the founding of Fox News. Rupert Murdoch was an Australian and British newspaper magnate who had finally arrived in American and had taken over the newspaper where I used to work, the decidedly middle-class, vaguely leftist New York Post (with a great sports section). He re-made it into a right-wing tabloid rag.

      In 1986, Murdoch expanded by launching television’s Fox Network. It wasn’t political at the beginning; its first broadcast was a pretty anodyne late-night talk show hosted by comedian Joan Rivers. Ten years later, though, Murdoch expanded out and created what he really wanted, Fox News, the broadcast equivalent of what the Post had become.

      At the outset, it had a reasonably small audience compared to the three responsible, fair-minded but mealy-mouthed network evening newscasts.

      But the Big Three soon lost their centrality and significance as they succumbed to louder voices in the 100-channel free-for-all made possible by newfangled cable television. In this new multiple-choice TV world, loudness became a virtue, wild claims an attraction and Fox News became a viable enterprise

      It attracted viewers and advertisers not in spite of its way-out-there ethos but because of it, because it had become the home—the sounding board, the echo chamber, the propaganda arm—for befuddled viewers, bizarre conspiracies and general far right-wing craziness.

      By making what had been the Bircher fringe entertaining, Fox invited the craziness into living rooms across the country. Murdoch took what had been beyond the pale and made it welcome in our house.

      By giving the radical right such an imprimatur of respectability, Fox News became the most-watched cable television network and the place where many Americans got their news and opinions.

      That audience and Fox’s constant, repetitive, insistent but telegenic conspiracist fear-mongering led directly to the elevation and ultimately to the election of that entertaining fear-mongering conspiracist reality TV star Donald Trump. He made great television for an eager television network.

      Then came Mitch.

      Like Franz von Papen and Gustav Krupp, German power-brokers who believed that they could control Adolf Hitler and benefit from his Nazi supporters, his power and his fecklessness, McConnell thought he could use Trump. And he did.

      He thirsted for power and through Trump got the power he wanted, becoming the most important legislator in Washington. He got the Supreme Court judges he wanted. He got the tax cuts he wanted. He brought his party with him.

      McConnell, a shrewd judge, knew of course that Trump was a lying, incompetent buffoon, but he was generally ok with that because it had enabled him to reach the pinnacle. Although, according to reports, he grew over time to deeply detest Trump, he was in too deep, and that alignment helped to solidly entrench the paranoid style in American politics.

      Now, reaping what he had sowed, and apparently regretting it, McConnell these last six weeks voted against confirming Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense; Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence; Robert F. Kennedy as secretary of Health and Human Services and Kash Patel as director of the FBI. He was, in fact, the only Republican to vote against all four highly unqualified nominees.

      He voted no because he hadn’t voted yes, when a yes would have counted immeasurably more. He didn’t vote yes, and didn’t direct his Republican caucus to follow him, when Trump was impeached for inspiring insurrection. McConnell didn’t vote yes although he accurately placed the blame for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Trump’s shoulders. He didn’t vote yes when yesses by enough Republicans would have barred Trump for life from ever again holding elective office.

      Sure, there were other actors and other factors, but without the early help of Murdoch and the later help of Mitch, the batshit-craziness of the last two months doesn’t happen. And we would still be a halfway sane country.