The distant past and the broken door
It is an interesting question. The media for the whole of the 20th century was a unified establishment voice that held the lid on everything until that started to come apart in the 60s. Even then it was the nightly news and local versions of the New York Times that kept things on an even keel. That was a forum that had its own legitimacy based on people such as Walter Cronkite. On one hand there was little choice of information but on the other the network news anchors were journalists who were held in great respect. Cronkite could pull the plug on the government but we all knew he wouldn’t do that for a ratings push. Needless to say that had completely disappeared by the 90s.
Have we lost everything? If Wallace or McCarthy had today’s fully free media channels it’s hard to see it not being more polarized. But, still, what you are calling a center right government then would have been a socialist government in this country now. These labels are always problematic and inconsistent but you can make a strong argument that Eisenhower ran a center left government on domestic issues and economics and center right internationally. Without the extreme reaction to Soviet communism we would have had medicare for everyone I’m fairly sure. The problem was already around then as the John Birch Society that has given us the Koch brothers who were raised in the faith of hypercapitalism.
The problem I have is not that you are wrong on suggesting that it could have been as bad then as now but that there are just too many variables. We lost journalism of the old establishment style but that was also what locked in racism and misogyny. Because of the sixty year power run of the US the shortcomings in racism and misogyny became locked in with radical capitalism planet wide. This was not totally a US failure but this country made it worse and then failed to do more than a token change when it could have driven a much more open and more equitable society.
I’m struggling with this because things are fundamentally different now and the problems that we are facing simply didn’t exist in the past. That’s the problem with phase change. What we are seeing now is simply not understandable in the historical context of the 50s to 80s so it just doesn’t fit. That is exactly why the hypercapitalist, authoritarian structure of the Republican cult is so completely out of sync with all but a frightened and reactionary minority. The rest of the population knows they’re not in sync with that but haven’t been given the option that clearly works yet. That is the broken door that the Republican cult followed Trump through.
Can we learn to manage not four or five establishment voices but millions of channels of information? Can we live with virtual realities that encompass a huge range of diversity? We actually have no choice. The only option is the incompetence and idiocy of failed authoritarianism that has no chance except, maybe, by brute military force and I don’t think even then.
This why I keep coming back to smaller regional governments and, perhaps, much smaller governments with lots of autonomy but absolutely no autonomy on human rights. What we lost in the old Cronkite days was a common ethical voice. We need to recover that at a planetary level but that cannot be authoritarian. That was the old mistake. At the same time it must protect diversity and billions of voices. That’s a challenge.
