A few days ago, I entered a back and forth with someone on Facebook about the story of Epstein. This person insisted that it was a non -history and criticized time – this is what was important for him – to devote so much time to it. It was a “pseudo-history” as Argot journalism has it, a kind of repressed history without substance, consequence or even existence beyond journalists claiming that it is real. I said it was a category error. As journalists, our work consists in covering and explaining what is really going on, not to act as guards deciding on what goes to our substance or policies’ standards or anything else.
Now, it is very true that “what is really going on” has a lot of weight here. Many things happen all the time. The Kardashians occur. TV shows occur (a complicated subject to which we will come back). Fashionable diets occur. But in new politicians, when we say that “something happens”, I mean chains of events that lead to public opinion, the change in the dynamics of political power, the change of policy in a way that affects people’s lives, etc. When an exercise president is confronted with an important rebellion in his political coalition, having his presidency consumed by efforts to contain the cause of this rebellion and as it is a major story. The fact that the essence of what is happening – beliefs, conspiracy theories, etc. – In many ways, it is not changing this fact. Indeed, if you cannot fight with a large quantity of the absurd in the heart of our political moment, you will simply be lost or will have an unrelevant conversation with other guards.
I maintained at various times that TPM was ahead of the curve almost during the Obama years because we have paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called the crazy, strange world of the GOP and the far -right politics, the colorful, strange rural districts and almost always super racist (and sometimes women) of obscure rural districts. It was described as a kind of moving circus, cheap laughter, clicks – not a real policy. And have often been criticized for having paid him so much attention. I never thought it was right. And unfortunately, Trump’s presidency herself confirmed our reading of that time. The madman was the reality of republican politics. It was the John Boehners and Paul Ryans who were a kind of respectable veneer placed on his true engine of power and motive strength. From the outside, it appeared that these leaders had to direct the GOP while arguing the far -right Caucus Freedom. In fact, it was the Freedom Caucus that traveled the GOP through tacit collaboration with presentable and ultimately towable characters like Boehner and Ryan. Trump’s intuitive political genius was to see that you could abandon the man from the front and direct the gop directly from the Freedom caucus, which was the history of the Trump era.
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