Commentary: If the Media Is Complicit, Community Organizing Is the Answer

Yesterday a reader sent me an interesting op-ed in the New York Times by University of Houston Professor Robert Zaretsky, I’m not going to quote from it extensively, but it is a fascinating read if you want to take a look.

What caught my eye was his homage to the 50-year-old work, The Society of the Spectacle, by French writer Guy Debord, with his vivid descriptions “of human social life subsumed by technology and images.”

Professor Zaretsky writes, “Whether we love Trump or hate him, is it possible we are all equally addicted consumers of spectacular images he continues to generate? Have we been complicit in the rise of Trump, if only by consuming the images generated by his person and politics?”

He goes further, “Do the critical counter-images that protesters create constitute true resistance, or are they instead collaborating with our fascination with spectacle?”

Since the election, I have been asked to give numerous lectures and talks at the university on a variety of topics.  But one point I have made to the students is that the media really, from day one covering Donald Trump, has gotten it wrong.

That continues to this day.

At his first press conference, the reporters took turns trying to ask tough questions to trip up the president.  In so doing, some of them openly clashed with him and some didn’t even get a chance to get their question out because there was so much pretext and lead up to the actual question.

The day after the press conference I was talking with a veteran reporter who had spent years in the Sacramento Capitol and we agreed that the media are approaching this the wrong way.  Ask a simple question, get the answer and then get someone else to give you a contrasting answer, print them both and let the readers make up their own minds.

Last week, the president gave his speech to Congress, and the media quickly whipped out their trusty fact-check reporters that no one cares about to rate the truthfulness of the talk.  The reality is this – Trump’s supporters don’t care if he’s lying.  Trump’s critics know he’s lying and don’t care if he’s telling the truth.  And the people in the middle aren’t reading the fact-checking reports anyway.

The media are stuck in their own rut and, in many ways, are being played by a guy who is surprisingly masterful at pulling the strings of emotion.

As Professor Zarestky puts it, “We may follow the fact checkers and cite the critics to our hearts’ delight, but these activities, absorbed by the spectacle, have no impact on it.”

These long-used media tactics do not work on Trump, because in part his supporters do not care if he’s lying, they love it when he goes after the system – whether it’s the swamp or the media itself.  And most of the core supporters of Trump aren’t watching CNN or reading the New York Times anyway.

Still, Professor Zarestky offers us a reed of hope – at least those of us who are appalled rather than delighted by what has unfolded in the last few months.

He concludes, “The unfolding of national protests and marches, and more important the return to local politics and community organizing, may well succeed where the anarchic spasms of 1968 failed, and shatter the spell of the spectacle.”

There is a solid point here.  But it is a lesson for the more radical elements.  Richard Nixon in 1968 with the help of a young Roger Ailes (yes, that Roger Ailes) was able to harness middle-America’s distrust of the radical anti-war and more radical civil rights movement into a push for law and order.  The riots and protests played into his hand.  The scene at the Chicago Democratic Convention probably salted his victory, even though it ended up every bit as close as the 2016 Election.

What we have seen since November 8 – sure, sporadic violence and some looting – is mostly thousands of people, maybe even millions of people who are suddenly activated in their communities like never before.

The amazing thing I have seen personally, aside from the sheer size of crowds in the high hundreds at times at various events, is that it is not simply the same old faces.  For example, two weeks ago when people came to the Board of Supervisors meeting on the MRAP, I met maybe two dozen people for the first time in person and none of them had ever been involved in activism.

The left, over the last decade and maybe longer, has abandoned the local.  Ironically under President Obama, the professed and sometimes criticized community organizer, the left has abandoned community organizing.

If the left wants to beat Trump, they need to not wait for him to simply implode, which he still might do – and they need to build up the farm system from the grassroots up.

A few weeks ago, we had a guest piece that talked about the more than six hundred people who showed up for an Assembly Democrat organizing meeting to select delegates – and the more progressive wing took over the party.

They need to not settle for party mechanisms because, as we saw with the DNC vote last week, that is still a battle, but rather they need to use their muscle and energy to take over school boards, city councils, and the County Board of Supervisors – and eventually use that muscle to take over the legislature and the Congress.

That is what the right has been doing for decades.  That is why the right had a huge number of quality candidates – all vanquished by Donald Trump – and why the left is finding itself out of power and taking to the streets.

So if this movement that we have seen is simply an anti-Trump movement, it will fail.  If this movement leads to the return of local politics and community organizing, it has a chance to succeed.

—David M. Greenwald reporting