Shocker! Jon Ossoff and Abdul El-Sayed break the media's rules
They are showing liberals how to be free.
Liberals have a bad habit of putting the views and values of Republicans at the center of their attention. We do it without thinking about it, because it's normal. And it's normal, because I think we tacitly accept the argument that our views and values can't be broadly persuasive on their own. Making progress will require making better choices. One of those is pushing Republicans out of the center. They are not the arbiters of our reality. We are.
For example, liberals believe the GOP is a boy's club. We believe Republican misogyny is structural, from the top down. We frequently note that the president demeans women. (We frequently mourn that he won twice when running against a woman.) And we believe that whatever lip service the Republicans give to women, their goal is holding power for men.
Because we believe these things, a liberal news outlet made sure its audience saw this:
Courtesy of PBS and the Tennessee Holler.
Many liberals will argue that Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments are evidence that a new majority may be coalescing in opposition to the Republican agenda. To be sure, I think there's something to that interpretation. But whatever the case may be, the result is that Greene is the center of our attention, and with that so is the implication that liberals do not have the authority to say that the Republicans are a sexist organization bent on controlling women. (Indeed, Greene says she's not doing what liberals do, "shoving" women's rights "in men's faces.") Our beliefs are insufficient to being broadly persuasive. We have to get validation from "the other side." We can't be right on our own. For that, we need permission.
Liberals puts the views and values of Republicans at the center of our attention partly out of necessity. The Washington press corps does not treat the parties equally. There's one standard for the Republicans, another for the Democrats. To the news media, one party represents power that's natural and legitimate while the other represents power that must be constantly tested. Here's how I explained it last week to Alex Wise, host of Sea Change Radio, when he noted that what reporters agree on is that America is a center-right nation.
Yeah that’s what they agree on. I mean what they are really agreeing on, and they won’t say it, is that the true center of power in America is whiteness, and the true consensus is white supremacy. That’s what they’re really saying, but they’re not gonna say that, because that would be gauche. That would be impolite or some other word that a snob might use. But that’s what they’re really saying, though. And by the way, that's why the press looks at the Democrats as slightly illegitimate, because the Democrats are a multiracial, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious party, whereas the Republicans are white, white and white, all the way through. They therefore represent to the media, politically, historically and culturally, an automatic natural legitimacy. That I wish more people would really understand. That is the double standard that animates all of political journalism.
Given this double standard, liberals often feel like there is no choice. We have to put Republicans at the center, because those are the media's rules. (Even the liberal media conforms to them.) The result is that liberals end up playing Lucy and the football, taking the risk of trusting a fundamentally untrustworthy system in order to achieve our goals. This arrangement is so maddening that Leigh McGowan completely lost it on CNN recently. In doing so, "PoliticsGirl" represented every single liberal in America who screams at their TV.
Courtesy of CNN and Acyn.
But it doesn't have to be this way. I want to point to two examples. One is by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff. The other is by Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. Both men have demonstrated how liberals can liberate themselves, campaign by their own rules and control the terms of debate in order to bring their views and values to a broader public.
You probably already know about Ossoff. Recently, he said:
Courtesy of CSPAN and Aaron Rupar.
On the strength of "travels with Natalie," Ossoff bent everyone's attention his way, including Donald Trump's, and with that attention, he accused Trump of being a paper-tiger president. During an appearance on MS Now, Ossoff said Trump "retreats into this bubble of West Wing aides, who are his security blanket, to make him feel good about himself, to reassure him that he’s doing a great job, to help him while he designs his new ballroom, and he adorns the Oval Office in gold, and picks the interior decorations on this new luxury, flying palace he received from a foreign prince, when every single minute of every single day what the president of the United States should be doing is bearing his most solemn burden of care."
With that, Ossoff pushed Trump out and made himself the center of attention.
In El-Sayed's case, he rejects the "rules" that say he must apologize for something somebody else said, ie, what prominent tankie Hasan Piker said. (I wrote about Piker last spring.) Piker, who is viewed by some (me) as an antisemite, supports El-Sayed. The "rules" therefore state that he must denounce Piker to denounce antisemitism. That El-Sayed did denounce antisemitism isn't enough, however, according to those same "rules." El-Sayed must denounce Piker, too. MS Now's Katy Tur: "Why not fully disassociate yourself with him?"
His answer, in essence? No one defines my campaign but me.
Courtesy of MS Now and Justin Baragona.
Every Democrat knows the score, El-Sayed said. This campaign is about voters and their struggles, not "a streamer in California," he said. And then he throws the question back at Tur, raising viewers' awareness of the choices she is making. "I get that in the media, it's a lot easier to pick out one person and be like, 'this is what this [campaign] is about.' This is why a lot of people get so frustrated about politics and political media, because it doesn't actually speak to the challenges they face." (With that one sentence, by the way, El-Sayed summarized James Fallows' classic article, published in 1996, about "Why Americans Hate the Media.")
In reply, Tur says "it's not just the media and I reject that framing." She gives up the game. Her real question isn't why didn't El-Sayed "fully disassociate" from Piker? It's why isn't he playing by the "rules"? Tur implies that he isn't allowed to frame the facts. Only members of the press corps have that authority. With that framing, she put the views and values of Republicans – namely, El-Sayed's opponent, Mike Rogers – at the center of attention. Katy Tur isn't asking. She's telling. And Abdul El-Sayed is saying no: my campaign, my rules.
These are just two examples, but I think they are hopeful and point the way forward for liberals who are in the bad habit of accepting the argument that our views and values are not persuasive on their own. They are, or can be once we have made better choices. One of those is pushing Republicans out of the center. They are not the arbiters of our reality. We are.
