For reasons that will baffle my many detractors, I am often asked for advice about being an opinion journalist. One of my standard responses is: You have to be willing to disappoint your biggest fans.
What I mean is that if you start to see your job as telling fans what they want to hear, you risk becoming an entertainer rather than a thinker, and eventually you become a caricature. I’ve seen it happen numerous times. Patrick Buchanan was a brilliant columnist and a serious person. But over the course of his career, he listened too much to the people who said, “Go Pat, go!” and too little to friends who said, “I think that’s taking it too far.”
In journalism — or what passes for it — you can see the same arc most acutely in talk radio and TV hosts, who define their roles as telling the audience what it wants to hear rather than what it needs to hear. In the early Trump era, many prominent pundits were fairly conventional conservatives. When the audience veered towards populism and MAGA, the hosts followed the advice widely attributed to the French 19th century politician, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people, I must follow them, for I am their leader.” (In fairness, he didn’t say it, critics ascribed it to him.)
But the most dangerous realm for this dynamic isn’t political journalism. It’s politics. Politicians often are captured by their true-believing base. It’s most commonly seen among “conviction” politicians, who make a name for themselves on a single issue or idea. Congressman and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s deep populist support was enough to earn him the Democratic nomination three times (1896, 1900 and 1908), but his support wasn’t wide enough to ever win.
Segregationists like George Wallace, socialists like Norman Thomas, and even Buchanan himself offer similar examples of the problem. Sarah Palin, Bernie Sanders, Kari Lake and Ron Paul provide more recent cautionary tales.
One of the key problems is ego. Politicians see huge crowds or read favorable media coverage and assume their people are the people. In the U.K., socialist Labor politician Jeremy Corbyn was wildly popular among people who liked Jeremy Corbyn. He brought his superfans into the party, but his superfans didn’t represent the broader electorate or even the traditional rank and file who fled the party in droves.
At a campaign event for Lake’s 2022 bid for an Arizona U.S. Senate seat, she asked the crowd, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? All right, get the hell out.” John McCain was one of the most dominant political figures in Arizona, winning six back-to-back Senate elections. Thinking that she didn’t need support from Republicans, or the Democrats and independents who voted for McCain, was a pristine example of mistaking intensity of support for quantity of support.
But I started with journalism to illustrate a point. Jesse Watters, a reliable water-carrier for President Trump, is Fox News’ most popular prime-time host, averaging about 2.7 million viewers per night. That means on any given night, roughly 346 million Americans aren’t watching. But if you’re Trump, you might think Watters is representative of the American people.
Now Watters’ audience does matter, not least because GOP primary voters and small donors are undoubtedly more likely to watch. And because of idiotic “reforms” to our system, many politicians now care more about the primary electorate than the general electorate, because the greatest threat to incumbency is in party primaries. Also, primaries are what matter for the nomination.
The result: Politicians orient themselves to small, intense slices of the electorate. This polarizing dynamic is further intensified by social media. Politicians and activists mistake the “vibes” of X and TikTok for the real world. They become intensely “online” and responsive to the feedback they’re fed by social media algorithms.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently told Jack Posobiec, the exceedingly online conspiracy theorist and right-wing troll, that the Pentagon would livestream the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the Ft. Hood shooter. I have no issue with Hasan being executed, but a livestreamed execution of a man in a wheelchair is grotesque. Hegseth, who is reportedly contemplating a presidential run, cares about appearing strong and manly to Posobiec and his audience. Posobiec, if you didn’t know, is an open superfan of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, hosting “Franco Fridays” on his podcast.
It seems that Hegseth’s pandering to a tiny sliver of the electorate won’t yield a political snuff film. Even Trump and JD Vance are leery of the idea.
But, who knows, maybe if Watters starts pushing it, they’ll change their minds.
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