#2020primary

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Noam Chomsky wrote a book with Edward S. Herman in 1988 called Manufacturing Consent.  It is about how media outlets are controlled and manipulated by people in positions of power to influence public opinion.  

I couldn’t help but think back to Chomsky’s message in Manufacturing Consent as I took stock of the media coverage of this year’s Democratic primaries, which has been uniformly awful.  

Take, for instance, the popular narrative that after Joe Biden won Michigan that the Bernie Sanders campaign is all but over.  Headlines include:

Sanders not dropping out but where does he go from here?

Bernie Sanders will stay in primary race despite losses in key states

Campaign Says Bernie Sanders Will Not Drop Out Immediately Despite Michigan Loss

Defiant Bernie Sanders vows to soldier on in US campaign

The bleak picture painted by these headlines suggest that the Sanders Campaign’s chances of victory is slim.  But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  Right now, Joe Biden has 864 delegates.  Bernie Sanders has 710.  So Bernie is roughly 150 delegates behind.  And there are still over *2000* delegates that haven't been awarded yet.  

So why are so many pundits saying Bernie Sanders' campaign is basically over and has failed to “win key states” when the Obama campaign was even further behind in 2008?  Why the slanted media coverage?

The answer seems pretty clear:

You can see that strikingly today where there is huge debate about Sanders being a socialist. “How can we have a socialist president?” In fact, Sanders is what would be called a moderate social democrat in most other societies. In other societies, the word “socialist” is not a curse word — people call themselves socialists and even communists. In the United States, there’s a stigma attached to it by massive propaganda going way back to 1917. Such huge propaganda efforts to demonize the concepts of socialism and communism (saying it means the “gulag” or whatever) is again pretty much unique to the United States. It’s a barrier to introducing even mild New Deal–style social-democratic reforms.

This stigma is largely a type of manufactured consent, however.  When you ask people if they agree with the policies Bernie Sanders is proposing, polls consistently show that the majority of people approve of his policies.

Polls also consistently show that the Bernie Sanders campaign is the best suited to defeat Donald Trump in the general election.

So why do we continue to hear how dangerous it is to nominate Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential candidate from media outlets?  Why are people like Chris Matthews freaking out on national television?  Why are moderate democrats calling for the primary to be “shut down” when there’s still a relatively small gap between the candidates?

This is how the rich and powerful manufacture consent.  They use their influence over media outlets to ensure that a certain narrative is reinforced.   And frankly, I have to say that this year’s coverage of the Democratic primary has been uniquely demonstrative of that fact.  Never before has it been more plain that people in charge of powerful institutions are using their large bank accounts and ability to influence media programming decisions behind the scenes to try to sway public opinion in a specific direction by making certain narratives about politics appear to be "common sense" among the intellectual class.

How else can we explain the fact that we have been bombarded with opinion pieces over the past year telling us how Bernie Sanders isn’t electable, despite poll after poll showing that Bernie Sanders does better against Trump than any other candidate?  How else can we explain the fact that nearly all the other  moderates in the Democratic primary dropped out in near-perfect synchronicity just before Super Tuesday in an effort to shore up support for a single moderate candidate?  

The DNC has made it publicly apparent that they want to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination.  Some reports suggest that Barack Obama made several calls telling the other candidates it was time to drop out and get behind Joe Biden.  Whether that specific factoid is true or not, who knows.  But given the DNC’s very publicly announced bias towards Sanders, it seems probable that there was an organized effort to get the moderate candidates to coalesce around a single moderate.  

And so the DNC has now forced Joe Biden upon us.  A man who--not unlike our current President--apparently has trouble not touching women without their consent.  A man who is showing signs of deteriorating cognitive ability.  A man who is so gaffe prone that his own surrogates are trying to limit the number of public appearances he makes to avoid more media gaffes.  A man who, despite signaling support for the #metoo movement and women’s rights, once said this about Roe v. Wade:

“I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”

And even if you ignore all this, imagine how Donald Trump--a master of verbal misdirection and appealing to the electorate’s baser instincts on the bully pulpit--will manhandle a Democratic presidential candidate who recently tried to quote a well known phrase from the Declaration of Independence and forgot it halfway.  This is to say nothing of the ammunition Trump will have during the general election given that the Republican led Senate is now proceeding with an official corruption probe into Joe and Hunter Biden’s private dealings.

Despite all this, establishment Dems are doing their best to manufacture consent for Joe Biden.  And by every indication they are doing a hell of a job.  Before Super Tuesday, Biden’s performance was abysmal.  But once he became the only moderate left in the race, and suddenly received a storm of endorsements from other establishment politicians, he was suddenly electorally competitive.  Add to this a little bit of voter suppression designed to discourage young voters from participating, along with the emotional resilience of the “problematic Bernie Bro” mythology that has been empirically demonstrated to be false, you have an excellent full court press designed to manufacture consent for Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Keep this in mind as the primary campaign continues.  And keep it in mind this Sunday when Joe Biden debates Bernie Sanders.  Better yet, think about all of this if  Joe Biden gets the nomination, because if he does, he will almost certainly lose to Donald Trump in November.  Not just because he is a weak candidate, but because nominating Joe Biden is the end of the Democratic party as we know it.  

Progressives have made it clear that they are sick of being lied to and used to support Democratic candidates who then flip the script once they are in office.  They are tired of being black-mailed into supporting candidates like Joe Biden, who told a room of wealthy donors last year that “nothing will fundamentally change” if he is elected President.  

The media has done a fantastic job of making Joe Biden seem like an electable moderate.  But  “our needs our not moderate.”  As we speak, New York City can’t close schools to prevent the Corona Virus from spreading because over 100,000 kids in the NYC school system are homeless and depend on meals from school to get enough food for the day.  But since nothing will fundamentally change if Biden is elected, it sounds like he will not show half as much determination to solve this problem as he showed in opposing federal busing to end segregation in the 1970′s.