“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Juian Baggini: Think democracy means the people are always right? Wrong
Western democracy is built around a tripartite trust: trust in the people to hold government to account and to set the general direction of policy, but also trust in politicians to make specific decisions, and in institutions to provide safeguards against rash or tyrannical actions. What we are seeing all over the western world are the last two pillars being torn down, leaving all trust resting on the people.
This is rightly called populism, not in the American sense, but as understood in the rest of the world. Populism is generally defined as a mode of politics in which the will of the people is seen as clear, virtuous and homogeneous. Populist politicians simply promise to do what this will commands, ignoring or denying the fact there are different, competing interests in society, not just those of the majority. Populists do not try to square the simple desires of the electorate with the complex realities of society but pretend that what seems simple is simple and that anyone who says otherwise belongs to an obfuscating elite looking for excuses to defend its own interests.
Those who oppose populists are accused of being anti-democratic because in a sense they are: they reject pure, direct democracy in which the people dictate policy, as did Plato and Aristotle. But they are completely on the side of the very successful form of democracies that we have developed, systems of government that are much better than any imagined by those great philosophers. We trust the people to play their part, but not to run the whole show.
Paul Rosenberg: Why the “two historically unpopular candidates” meme is a sham — one that boosts Donald Trump
One of the more popular media memes of this election cycle is that we have “two historically unpopular candidates.” This meme simultaneously reflects the media’s obsession with “balance” (mistaking it for objectivity) and obscures how much Donald Trump’s campaign is a historical aberration, as well as the deeper problems his candidacy embodies or symbolizes. In the cable news universe, no one invokes the meme more often than Trump supporters and surrogates.
There are at least three main problems with this meme. First, it’s a recent snapshot view, which clearly reverses cause and effect. Running for president has severely eroded Hillary Clinton’s popularity, due to the combination of intense political polarization and partisanship. On the other hand, becoming first the Republican frontrunner and then the nominee has elevated Trump, bringing him to his highest-ever level of national popularity in early September. Second, it ignores how popular Clinton was as secretary of state — much more popular than Joe Biden, her only “credible” competitor in elite circles at the time. Third, Clinton is not unpopular with nonwhite voters: African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans all have favorable views of her, at least in broad strokes. The meme thus obscures the racialized nature of Trump and Clinton’s respective popularity problems.
Heather Digby Parton: No future for frauds: Glenn Beck’s media failure shows Donald Trump and Sean Hannity can’t save conservative media
Washington Post columnist and former New York Times ombudsman Margaret Sullivan wrote a scathing piece last week indicting CNN president Jeff Zucker, Donald Trump’s previous television mentor at NBC, for Trump’s rise as a politician. She acknowledged that all the networks obsessively covered him and gleefully celebrated the ratings bonanza his candidacy created, but without all the free airtime and the imprimatur of CNN, the “non-partisan” news network, it’s unlikely we’d be looking at polls showing Donald Trump within the margin of error today. [..]
Right-wing media has been very successful over the past 25 years, from talk radio to Fox News to internet sites like Drudge and more recently Breitbart. But it’s possible that the form is getting tired. There have been a lot of failures lately and even talk radio has suffered from the loss of advertising support as it came under pressure from consumers.
Donald Trump may be coming into it at the end of its run. Maybe he could reinvent the form in some way but it’s not likely. With the exception of grandiose chest-thumping and tax avoidance scams Trump hasn’t shown the slightest creativity in his long career. But you can be sure that if he does decide to take the plunge into political media he’ll get his money up front and everyone else, including the taxpayers, will be left holding the bag when it fizzles. That’s his business model.
E. J. Dionne Jr.: How Trump ‘absolutely’ corrupts the GOP
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) has tried for months to walk a high wire on the vexing subject of Donald Trump. This week, she fell off.
Her tumble, on what most of us would see as an easy question about whether Trump should be regarded as a “role model,” came during a debate Monday night with Gov. Maggie Hassan, her Democratic opponent. They are locked in an excruciatingly close Senate race. [..]
And here is where the Ayotte episode fits neatly with Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s performance at the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday. He won style points for being smooth, but staying smooth meant ignoring or denying most of what Trump has said and inventing a statesmanlike Trump who doesn’t actually exist.
So to Trump’s many ill effects on our politics, add another: the intellectual and moral corruption of the Republican Party. Too many Republicans outside the Never Trump ranks have to deceive themselves about who Trump is or deceive the public about how they really feel about him. Or they just try to slide by, day to day, hoping not to blurt out the word “absolutely” where this man is concerned.
Richard North Patterson: Imagining The Post-Trump GOP: The Trainwreck Of 2020
So gently did Mike Pence throw Donald Trump under the bus on Tuesday night that the treadmarks on Trump’s forehead barely showed. But Pence’s bus was moving at warp speed when it mowed down Ted Cruz.
Observers may be forgiven for thinking that this debate was about 2016. Pence, after all, is Trump’s running mate, charged with helping him seize the White House. But his real mission was more subtle: to play the loyal Republican soldier while decorously avoiding the — perhaps impossible — task of defending Trump’s words and deeds.
The goal of this exercise was to embody for the GOP base what Trump is not — a conventional evangelical conservative who embodies all things good and true. This, some thought, was intended make it easier for restive Republicans to support their erratic nominee. But the effect was to evoke the wistful thought among the faithful that the nominee should be Pence himself. This moment of rue, no doubt, was meant to inspire a collective stirring of hope: ah, but there’s always 2020…
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