"America's Great Divide" interviews.

[dneal]

PBS's Frontline has done some decent documentaries in the past few years, but what I really appreciate is that they post the "transparency interviews" - the unedited interviews they selected from to compile the documentary.

The "America's Great Divide" focused on the state of the country around the 2020 election period, reflecting back primarily to Obama's terms, Trump's arrival and term, and where we might be going.

Most of them are what you would expect, although less partisan and more candid than you would expect. Robert Reich, Steve Bannon, David Axelrod, Ann Coulter, etc... They portray the view from their personal "foxhole", and are generally is predictable although there are a few surprises.

Then there's the Frank Luntz interview. I don't agree with everything in it, but it's pretty powerful. He gets a lot right, and dispels a lot of myths/narratives. Yeah, it's an hour. You don't have to "watch", since it's just a fat guy sitting in a chair answering questions, but you can listen to it as you do something else. Workout, prepare dinner, take a crap, whatever.

It starts with:

We’ve got two different presidents here. We’re going to be starting the film around the inaugurations and the speeches and the inaugurations. Just lay the groundwork here of who these two guys are, why they both had enormous appeal to their voters, and how different. Just define it for us.

That's a pretty good question for Frank Luntz, and he's a guy who is qualified to give a pretty good answer.

He lays out the positivity toward's Obama's inauguration, the market crisis and the bank bailout, and how people felt about that. He talks about people supported healthcare insurance reform, but got the entirety of the system reformed instead. He talks about the rise of the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street (two different segments of society fed up with the system), "I've got a pen and a phone", Glenn Beck, etc... and ultimately how the outrage got us Trump and how Trump leveraged it.

From the interview:

We don’t trust anything anymore, and I think this is really dangerous for the democracy.

We don’t trust the media to tell us the truth.

We don’t trust the government to—to manage the economy or to be involved in a positive and uplifting way.

We don’t trust business to treat its employees with respect and decency.

We don’t trust culture to play to the best parts of us rather than to appeal to the worst parts.

We have so low a level of trust, and a democracy requires at least some faith in the future and some faith in the people who lead us.
No democracy can survive when wrapped in skepticism and cynicism, and that is where we are right now. And our politicians on both sides have created an environment of acrimony and partisanship and division that is not just poisonous; it is genuinely toxic. It is killing this country. And everyone who speaks in that language that dismisses a community or dismisses somebody else, we are not just trashing them. We are dehumanizing them; we are delegitimizing them. And when you get that far that you have no right to exist, that you have nothing to contribute to society, when we make that decision, there is no recovering; there is no coming back because you cease to exist.

And that is where we are right now.

And it scares the s--- out of me because you can’t show me a time when a democracy recovered.

My outlook isn't as pessimistic, but this is also why David Sirota's piece on the failure of the media isn't just "nothing new".

[Chip]

A broad-brush treatment. In several instances, his "we" does not include me.

I trust some of the media to try to tell the the truth, and expect other parts to lie and propagandize.

I trust the government to manage the economy for the public benefit, insofar as they can do that with all the special interests, graft, tax loopholes, and lobbyists.

I trust some businesses to treat their employees well, but most of them are run by vampire capitalist principles to exploit everything possible to fatten their executives and shareholders and subvert laws and regulations.

I don't agree that "politicians on both sides" have created this toxic situation. That's a mirror image of Trump's statement that the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville had "good people on both sides."

[dneal]

Fair points. "No generalization is wholly true"

[Chip]

Nor is it truly holy. . .