The Important Thing to Keep in Mind About the Important Thing to Keep in Mind
It’s whatever you say it is
I was reading the excellent Dan Froomkin on our wealthy media class’s active efforts to cover up Donald Trump’s racism when I came across a comment and a linked piece by Dan Egenberg on falling for distractions. I highly recommend it, with one reservation. I started writing a comment, and it quite quickly ballooned to full-piece length.
Egenberg says:
Steve Bannon — yes, that Steve Bannon, the Rasputin of Mar-a-Lago — once described their strategy in five words: flood the zone with shit. Translation: Dump so much noise into the system, so much outrage, that no one knows where to look.
And here’s where we keep screwing up: we look everywhere.
It’s true that each individual person should not look everywhere. But there are millions of us, and each person can look wherever they’d like.
Yes; it’s important for people not to get distracted by the latest shiny object Donald Trump throws out there. But I don’t think we’re helping ourselves when we react to someone learning about a Trump atrocity by saying “That’s not the really important thing.” It is to them, and whatever gets people on our side is good enough.
When Donald Trump throws out a new outrage to dominate the conversation and get people reacting off the back foot to him (as Egenberg perceptively diagnoses), he isn’t doing that to consciously divert our attention from a particular plan he’s hatching. What he wants is for you to forget about WHATEVER it is he did that is leading you to realize how unfit he is to be president (or, really, to live independently).
Whatever you’re outraged about? Don’t let the latest outrage distract you from (fill in the blank).
No one asks Trump anymore whether he thinks Democrats are “vermin” who need to be “rooted out.” No one ever asks him anymore whether Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. (More accurately, no one ever asks him why he lied about that.) The list of things Trump says he’ll get back to us on in “two weeks” is legendary; no one asks about any of those.
When was the last time anyone mentioned that Donald Trump is a convicted criminal? Or a rapist? Do people even remember these things?
They’re not all as substantially important as the attack on the 14th Amendment or the illegal hijacking of the treasury’s payment system, but people got outraged about them. And now they’ve faded into the ether. These are things Donald Trump doesn’t want us to talk about (to use Egenberg’s phrasing), and if people want to talk about them, they should.
Toxicity
As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo memorably put it, all power is unitary. Or as I like to put it, this is how you build toxicity.
Ever since the election, I’ve pointed at Missouri as an example of what toxicity looks like. Donald Trump, the insurrectionist leader Josh Hawley and their Republican governor all won easily, and Republicans maintained their dominance of the legislature.
You know what else they voted for? A constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights, an increase in the state minimum wage, and paid family and sick leave. Those are Democratic ideas. Those are ideas that the actual flesh-and-blood officials Missourians elected will go to their graves trying to destroy. (None of this is new, of course; Democratic priorities have 60-90% approval among the public, and always have.)
That’s what toxicity looks like. That’s what happens when people have gotten it into their bones never to vote for Democrats under any circumstances. We can fix that on our side (with difficulty) by getting new blood into the leadership of the Democratic Party; they have no answer.
So I recommend Egenberg’s piece and I recommend that people not get distracted. But I don’t agree that we should be telling people what’s most important to be outraged about. Whatever has voters looking at Donald Trump and the Republican Party in general and saying “WTF is wrong with those people?,” let them keep it, whatever it is.
SELF-PROMOTIONAL MUSICAL CODA
This felt a little too earnest for The Canonical Set, my usual project, so I enlisted Jay Feinstein (whom I only know through Instagram) to sing. The marvels of modern home recording!
Welcome to Forget I Said Anything; I’ve been writing what other people tell me to for 21 years, and I still do sometimes, but as Christine has only been telling me for two years I needed a public place to write what I wanted. So I know the How To Have A Successful Substack Manual says to pick a lane, a genre, a brand, and stick with it, but my personal copy of the How To Have A Substack That Makes You Feel Like A Whole, Living Person Manual says to write whatever I feel like, about whatever I feel like.
There will be screeds like the one above; as a former member of “the media” (not a fan of the blanket term) there will be a particular focus on how completely they’ve failed at their one job; there will be a recurring Today In Donald Trump Being Stupid feature, because my dubious superpower is remembering stuff other people forget; there will be less-screed-like considerations of life (political and non-political divisions); there will be thoughts on music, because I wrote about that professionally for years; there will be blatant promotional activities for my long-distance home-recording musical collaboration, my other long-distance home-recording musical collaboration, my podcast, my two books and whatever else I manage to create; there will be things I haven’t thought of yet.
I can’t promise it’ll be a good time, but it might be.