Fox fell into the hole it helped dig
The right wing, Fox News included, trained their audience to trust no one. Except them. It was the culmination of a decades-long effort by the right to discredit anyone not from their tribe and to dissolve external reality. Government, academia, science, and the media are the enemy. Cannot be trusted. Tens of millions of Americans, says MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, were trained to believe no one outside the conservative bubble. Until someone more demagogic than themselves came along. That someone was Donald Trump. The conservative base trusted him more.
The right had killed off any other source of reality-checking authority except the purveyors of blustery nonsense. Trust (or “anonymous trust“) has been destroyed.
See Hayes’ monologue from last night:
Some time back, I suggested that the trend began with the Reformation:
Say what you will about the excesses of Rome and the papacy (and not to ignore Constantinople), prior to the Reformation there was some central authority to define Christianity for much of the West, to set standards and protocols, if you will. The Reformation may have decentralized the faith and brought it closer to the people, but it also meant by the late 20th century that any American huckster with a flashy suit, an expensive coif, a sonorous voice, and a black, Morocco-bound, gilt-edged, King James red-letter edition could define Christianity pretty much any damned way he pleased. And did. Who was to say he was wrong?
That do-it-yourself spirit extends as well to Americans’ understanding of their founding documents. Every born-again, T-party convert carries a pocket Constitution and becomes an instant expert and his own defining authority on what is and isn’t the true American faith. It’s the American Dream: every man his own Supreme Court; no priestly judicial caste interposed between a man and his God.
Charlie Sykes said in 2016 that years of right-wing talk radio had essentially destroyed the truth function of facts:
“We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers. There’s nobody. Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood,” he explained. “The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that. ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bullshit.'”
The dissolution of external reality is not new. Just more visible and more consequential.