By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
It’s too early to tell how the Fox News settlement will play in public life. Whether it causes Fox’s reporters to change their ways remains to be seen. Maybe their supporters will be chastened, and maybe they will claim that they couldn’t trust the system to give their leaders a fair trial, so they had no choice except to pay up. We’ll see.
One thing that became clear, though, was how Fox lost control of its own business model. Faced with losing viewership when they reported the actual news, they chose to abandon that game and give their viewers what they wanted instead: lies, and rage, and vitriol. They did this openly and obscenely for the sole purpose of making money.
No mob ever resists being pandered to: that’s what makes it a mob. But that money lust makes these folks seem oddly old-fashioned to me because the Republican Party has long since stopped equating profits with virtue. Witness how Ron DeSantis keeps picking fights with Mickey Mouse, because regardless of how vital they are to Florida’s economy, the lords of Orlando keep getting in the way of his favorite social causes: kicking immigrants around and baiting drag queens.
Say what you’d like about making money, at least it’s democratic (with a small “d,” folks). One person’s dollar is the same as any other person’s, and making more of those dollars has been the engine for a great deal of social change over the years. For instance, it was Disney’s decision to go after the dollars of humans in general that led it to a position of acceptance with gays, because it turns out that most humans are pretty okay with gays, especially since a lot of humans happen to be gay, or love someone who’s gay, or just don’t care because it isn’t their business.
That’s why so many confused Republicans keep falling into the trap of admiring Vladimir Putin. Putin hates gays, too. And he doesn’t mind becoming poorer if it helps keep them down.
Circle back once more to one of our culture’s foundation texts: Richard Hofstadter’s work on the paranoid style in American politics. Hofstadter asked why certain members of the poor habitually voted against their own economic interests; why a laborer would vote against unions, for instance. And he found this depended on neither intelligence nor education (a lesson that Hillary Clinton so memorably forgot); he laid it to people placing their values over their pocketbooks. He evened the scales, as it were: if we are pleased when rich people vote for progressive ideas, we must also respect poor people who vote for conservative ones.
There is a huge and concerning community of interest, then, between the likes of Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Vladimir Putin. If only it were as simple as greed.
It’s hard to draw a through line in modern Republican politics that picks up these different data points. I don’t know what Republicans stand for anymore. I fear that they stand for nothing except the needs of the moment: if they’re hungry, they stand for food; if they’re scared, they stand for guns; if they’re lonely, they stand for hate.
The left has its values too, of course, and it also tends to be one-sided in their application. I would like to hear a conservative’s ideas on how to deal with climate change. I would like to hear a conservative’s ideas on how to deal with China. I would even like to hear a conservative’s ideas on how to deal with transgender youth. Unfortunately, to hear these things today, I need to make those arguments to myself. Sometimes I even agree with them. But being a liberal, I am notoriously open-minded.
One thing I will miss, though, now that Dominion and Fox have settled, is seeing how our Supreme Court would have handled their case. Dominion had an ironclad claim but one can only assume that Fox would have fought it to the top, hoping to toss it into the waiting laps of Alito and Thomas and friends. God only knows what they would have done, because speaking of data points, that court nearly flies off the charts.
Having been on the take from his jet-set right-wing Nazi-memorabilia-collecting cronies for decades at this point, Thomas alone is in their pockets for hundreds of thousands of dollars by now (if these guys were bookies instead of billionaires, Thomas’s next stop would be pushing up daisies in the Meadowlands). His is the perfect Republican combination of social extremism, wealth accumulation, and personal perversity. That man would do great in Moscow.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka . They are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Davidow’s Chanukah Land can be found here.
