Why is it so teeth-grindingly shitty? What did we do to deserve this?
Talking politics of course. I’ve been struck lately by a probably impossible, but still wildly wonderful notion: how would it be if the participants in our public life acted purely in the broadest possible public interest? Is it that much to ask? You could frame it as, I don’t know, public service.
How would that be? Yep. Hard to imagine.
Two things in the past day just deepen the slough of despond, make acts in the public interest look like a chimerical fantasy.
The kerfuffle from conservatives in politics and press over a small tweak to superannuation taxation that even conservatives, when they proposed it, thought was a good idea, just makes me want to ball my fists and wail.
Bad enough just to be reflexively oppositional. Bad enough just to milk every moment for your own narrow benefit regardless of the policy specifics. We approaching the point ... have we passed the point? ... where a serious level-headed conversation on policy ideas seems possible.
But that’s not quite the worst of it. Yesterday came the latest in a dribbling series of concrete proofs that conservative media and politics act not on conviction but cynically. Rupert Murdoch, himself, admitting as part of the Dominion litigation against FoxNews in the US that Fox journalists/anchors/stars gave credence and air time to something they knew was ridiculous: Donald Trump’s protestations that the 2020 US election was “stolen”.
I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of the Fox/Trump specifics; the key point is that Fox and others promoted ideas they knew to be nonsense, ideas that clearly created social disharmony and anger, ideas that unravelled public confidence in the foundational institutions of democratic process, all for the sake of both political position and commercial benefit.
I mean really. Screw these people.
This gets to the core of conservative conduct over the past couple of decades: the capacity to promote a set of ideas you know to be simultaneously damaging and untrue purely for the sake of short-term advantage. It’s a corrupt and malignant combination and one that is both a prevailing political method and a media business model.
It’s one thing to argue from conviction. That’s laudable, and despite the abundant and growing evidence of conduct to the contrary it is the foundation assumption in our politics: that people are attempting to advance some kind of truth, some kind of honestly held version of events, prosecuted with an eye to the public good.
That’s just a fantasy notion. The deceit, the cynicism, the capacity to argue for a lie, is now so ingrained, so breezily self-evident, that even Rupert Murdoch is admitting it.
All of which takes us to decades of climate and environmental argument; something that might not just be political, but existential. In this country, across the Murdoch-tinged west, we’ve seen action that might save us stymied; time and time again. And not through sincere conviction, through the happy promulgation of lies for commercial and political profit.
My fists are balling again. My teeth are grinding.
What did we do to deserve this? What do we do to change it?
My teeth are stumps now, these truths you have expounded so succinctly have confounded me for decades, also, why do so many people vote against their modest and deserved interests ?
Murdoch is poison in a social democracy, all decency and moderation are vanished, all "good" replaced with "greed is good"