A few people may have noticed that this blog disappeared for a couple of days this week. ("Few" because, due to my own laziness and scandalously infrequent posting, it gets so little traffic now.) On Tuesday morning I got email from Blogger notifying me that someone had flagged the blog for review, so they removed it. I was allowed to appeal, and I did. This morning I got another message, telling me that they'd re-evaluated and "upon review, the blog has been reinstated," so here we are.
Needless to say, I'm immensely relieved. Seventeen years of writing had gone up in smoke, and like a fool I hadn't backed it up. The first thing I did after the reinstatement was to do just that. Coming on top of the Republican victory on Tuesday, this episode left me stunned, and I walked around in a daze for a while. Even if no one else had read it, this blog is my intellectual journal, allowing me to revisit my thoughts on a range of subjects over the past two decades - which highlights my carelessness in not having backed it up. I hope I've learned my lesson.
So here we are. Looking back at November 2016, I see that I had a similar reaction to Trump's victory then. It's worse now, because he won the popular vote this time, and the GOP won back the Senate. The outcome for the House of Representatives is still unsettled as I write.
I've mostly avoided the usual media, because I know pretty much what they're going to say. My timeline on Facebook is also predictable. I've seen it all before. Eventually I'll have more to say, I suppose, though I also have a backlog of other topics I've put off addressing, and I intend to write about them for awhile. For now, let me quote what an old Bloomington friend from the 1980s posted on Facebook.
I think the news media bares [sic] a lot of responsibility for Trump winning. News media is now primarily entertainment media. So they cover candidates who are entertaining. President Biden did not and will not offer a daily dose of entertaining "event"s because he is too busy doing his job as President and whose ego doesn't require constant validation. Whereas Trump is entertaining and will say anything to keep attention on himself. The current news media and Trump are made for each other. Sadly the entire world will now suffer the consequences.
I don't entirely disagree with this - I've criticized the corporate media harshly and often - but my friend overlooks a few things. One is that despite the "current news media," Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, and Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020. The Democrats also defied the odds and drubbed the GOP in the 2022 midterms, to the disappointment of most of the corporate media. By my friend's logic, none of that should have happened. So while the news media should be criticized, it seems to me that something else could have been involved; could it perhaps be issues? Like many liberals, my friend assumes that the masses are just sheep who do what the Lying Media tell them to do. (Not him, though - why not?) But you don't have to remember very far back to know that they don't, not always. And it wouldn't do to ask why. Ironically, my friend is echoing Trump's demonization of the media here.
I strongly disagree with his evaluation of Joe Biden's ego, which led him to seek re-election and to hang on to his candidacy no matter how unpopular he became. His dogged support for Israel's crimes also hurt him, as it did Harris. In general US media support Israel too, no matter what, so they can't be blamed for the public's revulsion against the atrocities in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. On the other side, Trump's notorious laziness didn't keep him from doing a lot of harm during his first term, and I expect his second term to be even worse. I'd hoped that the Democrats would control Congress, which would have impeded Trump's agenda somewhat, but that didn't happen.
One correction I want to make to yesterday's post. I thought that "the number of hardcore MAGA voters is dwindling," and I was flat wrong about that. From what I've read and heard, voter turnout this year was the highest it has been since 2008, and while some of that involved voters who opposed Trump and the GOP, it wasn't enough to counter Trump's highly motivated supporters.
P. S. A correction to the correction: a reader tells me that voter turnout wasn't as high as I thought. He thinks 2020 was higher. I'm not going to dig into it, because it's certain that Trump's base went to the polls in sufficient numbers that get won the popular vote this time.
