...her former party built a mighty, many-tentacled propaganda machine that fed various hateful and credulous constituencies a steady diet of lies and fear-mongering that have welded them into, what some wags might call, a "doomsday machine". A distributed Hate Media network in which talking points aren't just handed down from above, but the vast supply of excuses and lies the Trump regime needs to remain propped up are also manufactured locally, so that at all times the zombie MAGA legions have a rich and varied supply of both official and artisanal lies, deflections, bullshit conspiracies and whataboutisms to draw upon.
And how, on the other hand, Democrats are made up of a wide and extremely diverse set of constituencies and have no such weapon of mass media deception in their arsenal. Mind you, since it won't be published until September, this is just my idle but informed speculation based on chatter about the book, and selected blurbs, like this from The Bulwark: "It lays out a strategy for building a pro-democracy coalition large enough to defeat authoritarian populism."
And this from the publisher, MacMillan Press: "Longwell argues the path forward is not just polling or ideological debates, but building a new communications infrastructure and narrative dominance similar to what the political right developed."
At this point I might be tempted to say something snarky along the lines of "Well golly, I shall alert the media. Oh, wait. Liberal bloggers have already been alerting the media to this dynamic for more than 20 years. And the media has repeatedly told us to fuck off" except, thanks to the years of unstinting support The Bulwark has gotten from elements of the legacy media and cable news, Ms. Longwell's book is already rocketing up at least one best-seller list despite the fact that it hasn't gone to print yet, but you can pre-order it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, B Bookshop, Target, Apple Books, Audible and Kobo.
So the press has already been alerted.
Which is no surprise, given that it's being published by Macmillan, one of the major global book-publishing companies. Within trade publishing, it's considered one of the “Big Five” English-language publishing powerhouses. Their reach is huge, publishing thousands of titles each year across fiction, and Macmillan and its parent company back this up with a vast global network of distribution, marketing infrastructure, and relationships with booksellers, libraries, and digital platforms. In practical terms, being published by Macmillan means a book is backed by one of the world’s largest publishing organizations, with access to international distribution, professional editorial and marketing teams, and the ability to reach large audiences through bookstores, online retailers, libraries, and media promotion.
So this tome is getting one helluva marketing push.
But just for laughs, I'm going to try and compare and contrast Ms. Longwell's work with three other politically-themed books, which were published over the course of 16 years. Not for quality or content, since it would be completely unfair to review a book that does not yet exist and I have not read, but to interrogate the various ways similarly politically-themes books are published and received depending on who writes them, when they are written, and whether or not the author(s) are on good terms with the legacy media and powerhouse publishers.
First, we have Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane. It was written by staunch Liberal Crooks & Liars good eggs John Amato, David Neiwert, Jane Wong and published in 2010 by PoliPointPress, which is a small independent press with limited distribution.
In 2010, Crooks & Liars had been up and running for six years and was, along with a few others, a destination and gathering place for much of the Liberal blogosphere. Unfortunately the authors didn't have the money or the extensive media contacts necessary to create their own media push. And in 2010 the new hotness wasn't Liberals writing with increasing alarm about the trajectory of the GOP. The new hotness was .... the Tea Party. Add to that the fact that Liberal analysis of the Right losing its mind always includes a pretty severe critique of the complicit legacy media which, well ... suffice it to say that, however expert, fact-based and credible the authors of Over the Cliff might have been, and however vibrant and informative Crooks & Liars had proved to be over the six years it had existed, nobody in the legacy media wanted to hear from the Left about how the Right was losing its mind.
Contrast that with The Bulwark which, within a year of its launch, was effectively a division of MSNBC.
Next up, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism written by well-known, traditionally-Centrist Washington policy analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. It was published in May 2012 by Basic Books, which is a relatively small but respected New York publishing house that caters to serious nonfiction on politics, history, science, and public affairs. The book got the authors an interview on NPR and in The Economist largely because both authors were well-known Washington policy analysts who, over the years, had received the blessings of the Very Serious People.
However, you will also remember that this book was basically an expansion of the authors' Brookings Institute column in April of 2012, "Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem" which effectively got Mann and Ornstein blackballed by the legacy media. Because, to repeat myself, the legacy media, with its cult-like fetishization of Both Siderism, did not want to hear this shit. And most of them still don't.
Finally, lets look at "How the Right Lost Its Mind" by 'Wisconsin's Rush Limbaugh', Charlie Sykes. Note especially the date it went to print -- 2017 -- well after the rise of Trump. After the Left had been proven absolutely right about the right. The publisher was St. Martin’s Press, one of the largest U.S. trade publishers, a major imprint of Macmillan (about which you have already heard) known for producing bestselling fiction and nonfiction for a broad national audience. It also got strong reviews in legacy media outlets like The Washington Post, which helped boost sales and visibility.
On December 15, 2016, Sykes also got his very own pre-launch op-ed column in The New York Times heralding his upcoming book. And for a couple of years at MSNBC, you could not swing a dead vole without hitting Charlie Sykes getting glowing face time to opine about his book, Trump, and how Democrats were doing it all wrong!
And once Sykes had established a foothold at MSNBC, the Never Trumpers began their colonization of the place in force. After Sykes came Bill Kristol, then Sarah Longwell, Mona Charen, Tim Miller, Michael Steele and all the rest. And even though the place was now packed with Bulwark employees, somehow MSNBC also managed to find room in their lineup of regulars for every employee of the Lincoln Project.
It was during this period of unstinting praise from the legacy media, that Longwell, Kristol and Sykes gathered enough wealthy donors (and millions of dollars worth of free publicity) to launch The Bulwark in January of 2019.
Consider that the whole "Thank God someone is finally speaking out about how the Right has lost it's mind" ticker-tape parade for this handful of recently-former Republicans all took place 15 years after Liberal bloggers had been writing every day about the rising threat from the Right. 15 years after John Amato launched Crooks & Liars, which received no glowing, daily legacy media coverage, and no fanfare. There were no wealthy donors queuing up to back the enterprise. No millions of dollars in free publicity. There was no parade of Crooks & Liars writers and talkers invited to opine on cable news every hour of every day. There were no op-ed columns in major newspapers, and there were no book deals on offer from major publishing houses.
During all the years the Republican party was on its deranged downward trajectory towards fascism, Liberal critiques of the Right were routinely and categorically dismissed as the Cheeto-smeared ravings of crackpot alarmists living in the mother's basements.
We we're pariahs.
And when the Republican party enthusiastically nominated and elected Donald Trump in 2016 proving unequivocally that the Left had been right about the Right all along -- surprise!-- Liberals remained media pariahs but for a completely different reason. The legacy media absolutely did not want to be reminded of how arrogantly and stupidly wrong and complicit they had been in the devolution of the GOP and the rise of Trump, just as they they had been arrogantly and stupidly wrong and complicit in carrying water for Dubya, Iraq, torture and all that.
And you know how those dirty hippies are! Given half a chance, they'd would show up with bags and bags of receipts from the Before Time showing how right they had been all along.
Can't have that. No, no, no. Can not.
So much better, then, to turn the microphones and cameras over to a handful of recently-former Republicans with whom the legacy media was already palsy-walsy and who would never be so rude and ungrateful as to lay a big, fat slice of the blame for rise of Trump at the feet of the legacy media.
Now I must go and put a cold cloth on my Herbert Lom eye twitch, which tends to flare up when I write like this.
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