If your job is to explain politics, and you find yourself unable to fathom why real-change candidates have surged, why extreme capitalism is being questioned, why twentieth-century certitudes need not apply, don’t minimize just because you don’t understand. Start understanding.
This is a ripe moment for curiosity.
What may be true that you have failed to see?
What has having health insurance caused you not to detect about how people with shaky insurance feel?
What mega-trends in people’s lives have you missed all these years?
You can agree or disagree with real-change candidates. But don’t minimize while you’re still pre-, not post-, a basic understanding.
Until you can, in your head, deeply make sense of why this is happening, why your old mental models don’t apply, don’t squash what you don’t get.
It’s not interesting, as an explainer of politics, to declare that you don’t get the phenomenon you don’t get. It’s your job to try to get it. Millions of Americans have lost faith in some foundational ideas about how this country works, and are rebelling.
Investigate why.
We’ve been living in the age of neoliberalism for four decades. It has been the frame of the Democratic and Republican parties. And now, in a way that once felt unimaginable, the neoliberal consensus is being challenged. And possibly shattered.
When our society has faced a choice between what’s good for money and what’s good for Americans in recent decades, we have largely chosen to do what’s good for money. It’s exciting that there’s a chance to change this. Those who are comfortable should take care not to obstruct.
When Trump was winning, the media bent over backwards to ask why. So many reporters dispatched to mine the psyche of the Trump supporter.
I don’t see that effort going into the Sanders and Warren, and even the Yang, phenomena, all of which are novel in our politics. Dig deeper.
Has anyone without health insurance been a regular on TV or in opinion columns analyzing the contest?
Is anyone paid by the hour being regularly asked whether they’re afraid of democratic socialism?
The worst country to report from is the land of your own tired reflexes.
We all come face to face with social phenomena we don’t understand, that take us back. But if you’re a person charged with explaining politics to the public, let me share the rule I try to live by: When you see something you don’t grasp, don’t thwart. Rent a car and report.
This is a time for notebooks, not twentieth-century encrusted truths.
