Are Politics Now Our Dominant Religion?
As we become siloed with fewer and fewer independent news sources to broaden out our views, the opinions voiced on Fox and MSNBC seem to be the sermons we pay most attention to.
David Brooks, a NYTimes opinion writer, headlined his latest column: “Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This?” He’s referring, of course, to Kamala Harris.
He follows up that question up with two more. The first: why are the polls so immobile. The second: why has our political system been stuck at roughly 50-50 for more than a decade?
In mid-June the race between Joe Biden and Trump was neck and neck. Since then, Brooks writes, we’ve had a blizzard of big events, and still the race is basically where it was in June. Over the past decade, he notes, we’ve had big shifts in the electorate, with college-educated voters going left and non-college-educated voters going right.
But still, the two parties are almost exactly evenly matched.
So why are we where we are right now? On one side, there is a relatively young candidate meeting every challenge as she pushes an agenda based on aiding a forgotten middle class. On the other side, we have a 78-year-old who is less coherent by the day, promises tax cuts for the rich, can’t answer legitimate questions about his economic policy, and promises to use the Justice Dept. and the military to punish those who disagree with him.
Why the heck isn’t she running away with this? Brooks suggests something I’ve often commented on: Politics has become religion in the US, perhaps the most dominant religion of our times. Think about that for a moment or two.
Politics is no longer simply about winning elections, he writes: “In an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification.”
The result: “Each party is no longer just a political organism; it is a political-cultural-religious-class entity that organizes the social, moral and psychological lives of its believers.”
He identifies the “progressive priesthood” as the highly educated urbanites who work in academia, the media, and the activist groups. The MAGA priesthood, he writes, is dominated by shock jocks, tech bros and Christian nationalists.
Sure, this is WHAT has happened, I agree with him there. But he doesn’t really address WHY it happened.
Here’s my view: Over the last decade, there’s been a significant pruning of the news organizations that, in the past, helped provide Americans with a significantly broader view – state-by-state, city-by-city and community-by-community -- of our society’s strengths and weaknesses.
But since 2004, a decade ago, more than 2,000 newspapers have closed, creating news deserts that have left people dependent on national TV and bloggers-with-a-viewpoint. Meanwhile, many of the papers that remain have significantly cut back their coverage, laying off editors and writers to meet expenses, while others have softened their political coverage so as not to push away the readers they have.
Rupert Murdoch brilliantly stepped into the void starting in 2012, creating a Fox channel that day-by-day offered less and less real news – downplaying anything bad about Trump, who he saw as a populist hero -- and more opinions-about-the-news. In essence, Fox offered a daily sermon designed to keep the faithful in the fold.
This, perhaps more than any other aspect of modern life, has pushed America into the news silos that we can’t seem to break free from. MAGA folks only watch Fox or Newsmax or One America News, channels I wouldn’t watch with a gun to my head (though I hesitate to say that these days.) My stations of choice are CNN, MSNBC – which offers me the sermons I appreciate -- and when I get tired of the politics, WCBS.
Rudyard Kipling had a phrase for all this in his poem, “The Ballad of East and West.” His words: “and never the twain shall meet.” Sadly so, folks. Sadly so.