Cokie’s Law über alles
Longtime readers recall Cokie’s Law. Digby coined the term in 2008 for how skillfully the right wing tosses smears into the air to be carried by the media like the wind. Smears, lies, and disinformation become a “legitimate” subject of mainstream reporting not because they are true or meaningful but because they are “out there.” The law is named for the late NPR/ABC reporter Cokie Roberts:
“At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”
Thus right-wing smears, lies, and disinformation become, in campaign parlance, “earned media.”
James Fallows on Saturday did not reference Digby’s law, but essentially conceded that “the death-cloud of misinformation, ignorance, lies, myths, fears, stereotypes” has come to represent, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, an “artificial reality playing out in the minds of citizens.”
—It’s not a new problem in American democracy. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published when Warren Harding was in the White House, was about people’s inevitable reliance on “pictures in our head,” often stereotypes or half-truths, to judge events they had not witnessed themselves. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, about the convergence of information and entertainment (with entertainment coming out on top), was published nearly 40 years ago but grows ever more prophetic-seeming.
—It’s not even a new insight into this election. In the past week, while traveling, I’ve seen excellent essays by Nathan Heller, Julie Hotard, Brian Beutler (and Beutler again), Michael Tomasky, and a growing number of others on the “news” problem that extends far beyond the official “news media.”
Facts no longer define reality in a post-truth world. “All anyone was talking about” does. The right is more skilled than the left at ensuring its version of reality is in circulation at the beauty parlor and part of the culture. Watch any The Good Liars or Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse videos shot at Trump rallies. The MAGA faithful absorb extremist disinformation like sponges and, like sodden sponges, refuse to accept anything more, like objective fact.
There is a sad irony to the phenomenon. I’m so old that I remember rednecks beating up hippies for having long hair. Until country music discovered the mullet. Lefty New Agers later inhabited their own alternate reality of unseen energies and aliens (and QAnon-esque conspiracies):
As Larry Massett observed in “A Night on Mt. Shasta” (recorded during the Harmonic Convergence), “I met a lot of people I liked and almost no one I believed.” People following their spiritual journeys seemed alienated by modernity, and suckers for whatever snake oil came peddled by people who seemed genuine enough.
Today it’s the right’s turn to be alienated by modernity. For their tastes, a bigoted, 34-time felon/reality star and showman seems more genuine than a world of uncomfortable facts and neighbors who seem alien. Nothing feels right anymore. They’ve given themselves over to a cargo cult of truthiness supported by Trump rallies and right-wing influencers. News is curated disinformation. It’s the right’s version of the New Age only, considering Jan. 6 and Project 2025, far less benign.
Fallows again:
In essence, “news” is everything you don’t see or experience yourself. And with each passing year, a growing share of the “news” on which people base their sense of reality has come neither from personal experience2; nor from “regular” news organizations, flawed as they may be; but instead from the surrounding climate of social media and other sources that have been skewed in a nihilistic, suspicious-and-hostile direction. A large part of that skewing is intentional—a supercharged version of Fox News, as those I’ve linked to above all argue. Part of it just comes with the technology. And evidence suggests that in 2024 this mattered more than anything the official news media did.3 People had “heard” that the economy was terrible and no one could find a job and illegal immigrants were everywhere and Kamala Harris was an affirmative-action cipher. And they could see that eggs were expensive—and that Donald Trump had come up, fist-first, after the bullet whizzed by. No contest.
The result explains a lot about these past week in public affairs. If nothing matters, if everything is terrible, if elections are just about swapping one liar for another, why not just shake it all up? Or burn it all down? At least it will be entertaining along the way.
In 2016, actress Susan Sarandon, an advocate for Sen. Bernie Sanders, suggested to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that a Trump presidency would, in Marxist terms, hasten the revolution:
“If you think that it’s pragmatic to shore up the status quo right now, then you’re not in touch with the status quo,” Sarandon said. “The status quo is not working … I think it’s dangerous to think that we can continue the way we are.”
Right on cue (roughly a decade later), the Trumpist right is ready for its revolution. It’s Mullet Time. In his War Room, Steve Bannon is humming Springtime For Hitler.
“The thing you’ve gotta know is everything is show-biz!”