The Seagulls Descend

So I guess it's time to write about elections.

In the United States, I've noticed that elections seem to be a time for politically activated people to come together to bicker and fight and make points that everyone has already heard and considered, and prognosticate and proclaim and act like pundits even though we aren't pundits, and then, after a year or two of this, low-information voters who haven't been paying the slightest bit of attention at all swoop in during the final few days and decide the outcome based on something that they think they read somewhere. If a seagull has ever stolen some slightly unappetizing carnival food out of your hands after you stood in line for an hour to get it, you'll have a general idea how this feels.

Democracy is the way we choose our political representation, and while the electoral process currently presents choices that an increasing number of people find too unpalatable to consider, it's also a tradition that a gang of brutal fascists led by TV star Donald Trump are trying rather openly to bring to an end, so I'd observe that elections appear to be something that this gang of brutal fascists believe will not help their agenda, and ending them appears to be something that will help their agenda, and they're going to an awful lot of trouble to kill them off. There's a danger to focusing overmuch on elections, as if elections are the sole component of a politically activated life, but it seems to me that there's also a danger to ignoring elections, as if elections don't matter.

So today I'm thinking about our national flock of low-information seagulls, and those who feed them.

I understand why somebody would choose to be low-information. There's a cost to awareness. Awareness of a wrong creates a moral imperative to care, and that sort of thing can lead to real work and real expense and other inconveniences. And, in a time of rising fascism, the cost of awareness is made unnaturally high, because few things are more deadly to fascism than awareness—while ignorance serves fascism's ends.

And yes, it's tempting to stay in unawareness—to be a seagull, if you're at a level of privilege where that’s still allowed, floating along undecided on whatever breeze is most convenient, disengaged from reality, freed from natural responsibilities that attend civic life in the natural human system that is society. When somebody is low-information, the most important thing is staying low-information. Yet nobody likes to be thought of as unaware. What other people think of them seems to be a real issue for seagulls.

I think this is why, especially at election time, there are two sandwiches (binaries again!) that seagulls crave most: ease and permission.

"Ease" means whatever choice allows the most comfort. "Permission" means the most comfortable choice that can be made which still allows the chooser to be thought of as decent by those whose regard matters to them—which includes themselves. What's required are simple narratives, because human beings are creatures of narrative, and so a low-information voter needs a narrative to give themselves. Something simple to tell the mirror. Something simple to tell their friends. A bunch of people waved MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs at the Republican Convention last week, which reflects a desire to enact inevitable terror and tragedy and abuse and death for millions of our friends and neighbors. And a bunch of elected representatives in Congress hosted a man who has been bombing thousands of civilians to death using our bombs and our tax dollars, and starving them using our political support, among other atrocities, and they cheered and cheered for him. These sorts of things can only happen when permission has been manufactured.

Which suggests a booming market for simple narratives.

Let's keep the binaries going, and say that simple narratives typically fall into two buckets: equivalences and differentiators.

Equivalences assist fascism most, in case you didn't know, and false ones are best. As the quote goes, the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference.

Differentiation seems like it would probably increase awareness more, so it strikes me that it might be good if our election narratives, especially the simplest narratives, provided the most important points of differentiation rather than the most mendacious equivalencies.

I can't help to notice, however, that our legacy media, which so often treats being low-information as normal and even admirable, seems to be mostly in the business of manufacturing false equivalencies rather than identifying true differentiators.

This is because of something they call "journalistic neutrality."

My feeling is that journalistic neutrality is important; a journalist shouldn't allow their political beliefs to interfere with uncovering and publishing the truth and the evidence for that truth, whatever that truth might be. This would be a principle of neutrality grounded in evidentiary and investigated truth. And there are still a lot of journalists out there who actually hold to this type of neutrality, who work hard and risk their reputations and their well-being to deliver the truth no matter what, and increasingly journalists of this kind are being made to pay an increasingly high price for this sort of neutrality, because this sort of neutrality raises awareness, and awareness doesn’t serve the interests of power.

However, this is not what appears to be the primary mission of large parts of the mainstream American journalism project these days.

Journalistic neutrality is—within American political media anyway—the idea that news organizations shouldn't put their finger on the scale for either political party. This sounds fair on the surface, but this means its goal is not investigating the truth, but rather establishing balance between two sides—which flattens everything into just two sides, and then flattens both sides until they are equivalent.

A moment’s thought reveals this as a posture that requires putting the finger on the scale; ignoring and submerging huge swaths of truth in order to make the better side seem worse and the worse side seem better—and the worse the worst side gets, the more its crimes against decency must be artificially ignored, buried, pasteurized, neutralized, all in order to create the narrative that both choices are essentially the same. The worse the other side gets, the more this form of neutrality requires our journalistic institutions to stop reporting what is true, because reporting the truth as plain truth would mean reporting not only that the worse party is worse, but how much worse they have been allowed to get, growing in a field fertilized by this cynical ersatz journalistic neutrality. And it's not just the worse side that is the beneficiary. When the project is crafting equivalencies, normalizing badness takes on its own momentum, and those points of badness that both sides truly do share equally are normalized for both as good, or at least natural, or at least a given, the unchangeable reality, "how things are."

It's not that truths aren't reported. It's that they are under-reported, printed below the fold, hidden on page 13, festooned with weasel words and equivocating headlines. Lies are insinuated as possibilities by people who are "just asking questions." People trying to do some good and necessary thing are advised in open letters that goodness is a mistake, by people who (though we are not told this) are paid operatives for preventing that good thing. Truths are buried entirely, omitted from questions asked in debates, in press conferences, in talk shows. They're negated by equivocating wish-casting punditry that posits nonsense hypotheticals, alternate realities where the clear problems might not be real dangers to worry about, because at any moment, reality itself might change. Credulity is extended to individuals and institutions who have proved themselves inveterate liars, grotesque hypocrisies are politely ignored. Incredulity is manufactured based on the most specious pretexts and set against clear evidence. And more and more, what is reported is not so much investigating what is as speculating how might it be received? It's reporting not on the bloody present but some hypothetical shadow future, so that, when the seagulls finally grab at the proffered falsehoods, the fact of their acceptance is breathlessly reported as evidence that the chosen lies are true—reported by institutions that neglect to mention it was they who made the sandwich, it was they who waved it in the air.

Let's have an example, shall we?

The president is old, and his capacities appear to be failing. Maybe you've heard. It's a real story. It appears to be a real problem. It's a story that needs to be covered, in my opinion, and a journalistic neutrality committed to truth would report it in the context of everything else, and would give it the weight it deserves beside all other issues.

In my opinion that's not what we've been getting.

It was pretty clear ever since his disastrous debate performance last month that Biden's age—which, again, is a relevant story—was the story our legacy media was going to obsess over. And we all obsessed over it too, most of us, and as we all flew with the flock, it became the One Topic.

I can’t help but notice how this topic made such an easy counterbalance—the latest one—to all the narratives about Trump from "fascist" to "rapist" to "insurrectionist" to "threat to democracy" to "unfit" to "pathological liar" to "flagrantly corrupt" to "34-time felon," all of which are facts that have been disguised as opinions beneath a mask of weasel phrases and punditry and predictions that become self-fulfilling—none of which ever get down to the business of actually framing the entire differentiated picture for voters, all of which seem to be intended to create simple narratives of false equivalency for seagulls.

But then ... an event! An assassination attempt! The media seemed poised to switch the whole narrative over to the dangers of violent rhetoric—Biden had used the word "bullseye" and had responded to Trump's open threat to end democracy by pointing out that Trump is a threat to end democracy, and somebody had taken a shot at Trump—but unfortunately for the media, the shooter was a Republican and his motive remains unclear and the facts muddy. And perhaps you noticed that, just as suddenly as normalized political violence—a very real problem—became a concern, it stopped being one to our manufacturers of simple narratives.

I'd say this reveals that the real mission has always been crafting a false equivalence, one that would benefit the party most engaged in the normalization of political violence, in order to maintain the illusory neutrality that such a false equivalence projects. After all, if the concern really is normalization of political violence, there's a much easier and simpler narrative to craft about it. Trump's entire life as a public figure is marked not only by normalization of political violence but a proud celebration of it. If the media's concern was political violence, we'd get a picture of political violence that makes it clear that the Republican Party and their leader are the root cause of our atmosphere of normalized violence, even if they momentarily experienced some of that atmosphere’s malign effects. But if the media's true concern is building an equivalency that manufactures a sense of unbiased neutrality, then you'd find them trying out political violence as a message, then abandoning it when the ingredients proved unpalatable. Which, I'd argue, is exactly what we saw.

If our "neutral" media had been able to make Joe Biden's candidacy about normalizing political violence, it would have been able to create an equivalence with one of Trump's most frightening and alienating qualities—in service of the most violent party. Since the equivalence didn't take hold, the entire story—an almost successful assassination attempt!—was mostly discarded, and we returned to endless obsession over the fact that Biden is old and shows signs of cognitive decline, in such a way that obscures the observable truth that Trump is also old and has been utterly deranged since he was young. Equivalencies can work when they are false, for sure, but our equivalency-manufacturing media really salivates when they find one that feels true that they can keep making all the way to November. And Biden is old.

"Rapist" versus "Not Rapist" doesn't offer a seagull as much permission and ease as "Violent" versus "Also Violent." If the former is the simplest narrative available when a seagull swoops in, many will choose "Not Rapist," because—even if they don't really give a shit—choosing "Rapist" creates a narrative about themselves that disturbs their comfort, and comfort was the whole reason for staying proudly ignorant about most things in the first place. A focus on "Old" versus "Popular" meanwhile, deliberately downplays and ignores the whole "Rapist" angle, which signals that ignoring the "Rapist" angle is something reasonable that reasonable people can do, freeing seagulls to choose whatever sandwich they want, and one thing I’ve learned about people who don’t give a shit is that they usually choose whatever meat is bloodiest.

And so, in Milwaukee last week, after three days of ritual hate, the Republicans trotted Donald Trump out on stage, where he delivered 90 minutes of nonsense and threats and lies, and the simple narrative about Trump's speech rolled out on the front pages, proclaiming not that he was RAPIST, or a FASCIST, or AUTHORITARIAN, or a BIGOT, or an aspirational DICTATOR, or an INSURRECTIONIST, or clearly UNFIT for office, or a mass promoter of political VIOLENCE, or a THREAT to end democracy, or any of the other things that he manifestly is.

In the same way that they have decided that the narrative about Biden will be OLD, they decided that the simple narrative about Trump—almost as elderly, far more unfit, utterly deranged, the most divisive politician in a century, speaking in front of a crowd waving signs calling for rounding up the undesirables—was UNIFIER, on front page after front page after front page, based not on anything he is or anything he said, but only on the incorrect a priori speculation that a near-death experience might perhaps have changed him.

It's one of the most chilling things I've ever seen: the legacy media abandoning even their false neutrality to create a totally alternate reality, for the direct benefit of the worst person imaginable. It was an open capitulation to the fascist demand that media enter their misinformation stream and report on whatever it is they want said as if it were real. And it created permission for low-information people, who don't give a shit for anything beyond their own ease, to ignore reality; false equivalence where a more principled neutrality would delineate the differences.

And so the seagulls descended.

But then Joe Biden dropped out of the race. And suddenly there was a simple differentiator being offered, one that has proved rather popular so far: FORWARD vs BACKWARD.

So now the seagulls have scattered again, as confused as ants in a freshly kicked hill, while our narrative manufacturers scramble desperately to decide which of the new journalistically unbiased pro-fascist narrative will be most palatable, and the creepy fascist weirdos in the Republican Party, bereft of their talking points, resort to things like "she's a childless trollop!" and "I hate her laugh!"

Meanwhile we all try to predict what the seagulls will do.

I suppose I should make some predictions.

I should confess now that I have no idea what is going to happen. Some things seem more likely than other things, but as to what will come from all this, I simply don't know. This is something I've learned over the years by having been very confident about such things and being proved wrong. I used to know a lot more, and I knew it very confidently. In 2016 I was sure Trump couldn't win. In 2020 I was sure Biden couldn't win. Wrong and wrong. What the hell do I know about the future behavior of seagulls? Not much.

This is a bit of a disqualifying statement in our modern age. These days we are mostly in the business of punditry, especially around elections. We are encouraged to behave exactly like our media: to obsess over what is going to happen if person X does or says Y. We're invited to make savvy predictions and craft our support of candidate and policy and slogan strategically, not based on what is right or wrong or desperately needed, but to match our support to whatever a centrist voter in Pennsylvania who lives only in our imagination will or will not support. We're meant to know exactly which sandwiches the seagulls will find most appetizing before they descend and then position ourselves, not where we ought to be to effect necessary change, but wherever we think the flock will be, not so we can effect that change, but only so we can have been right ahead of time.

So often it feels as if we're accepting the current media framework of speculation and prediction and punditry, not so much dealing with what is or contending for what should be but living in a bleak and unbroken shadow future, where everything is already decided, which frees us from the moral imperative to have to do anything. It’s just as freeing in a way to believe everything is doomed as it is to believe that everything will be fine; either way you don’t have to do much thinking or work, or even take the next step that will allow us to take the next step, however easy or hard or palatable or unpalatable that next step might be.

So we behave as if we are political operatives, predictive wizards, demonstrating not our commitment to a better vision of the future by contending with reality here in the present and working for best outcomes, but rather our ability to know what will happen before it happens, so that when it happens we can say see? and if we are wrong, we just run on to the next topic, chasing seagulls. Trump survived an assassination attempt and my feed was full of instant surrender my God that image, it's so iconic, the Democrats are through, we're all cooked. This weekend Biden resigned and everyone is proclaiming that the Republicans are cooked. We argue over whether the nominee should be Harris or a brokered convention, proclaiming which will succeed, and deciding what we will support based on that. We argue over the VP selection as if our preferences will have bearing on the decision.

This is how our crafters of narratives operate. It doesn't have to be our way.

As fascism is most assisted by false equivalence, I think we'd do better to seek differentiators from both fascists and those who manufacture false equivalences.

How might we differentiate?

In answer, let me make some speculations and predictions of my own as promised.

1) There will be an election. There will be, practically speaking, two choices.

2) One of the choices will be an open and proud fascist, at the head of a party that has made itself a hate group that intends to control our bodies and our lives, and is eager to harm and kill in order to do it. This choice will almost certainly be Donald Trump.

3) The other choice will be the head of a party that is all too often capitulant or even accommodating to fascism, because they are a status quo party, and while our status quo includes centuries of significant and very real progress, our nation’s status quo is also historically corporatized and capitalized and supremacist, which means that if the status quo isn't changed, the order of the day will include not only defense of the progress made, but more empire building, and more money for the military and the cops, and more bombs to bomb people in Gaza and elsewhere, and more means testing here at home for poor people who need assistance, and an enduring willingness to treat fascist monsters as normal partners in the civic process. The choice for that party now looks likely to be Kamala Harris.

4) Once that choice is made, the openly fascist party will create the most outlandish and bigoted narratives about the status quo choice, presented in the worst possible faith, all of which will attack that opponent exactly where the fascists themselves are weakest. Maybe they’ll create some lurid and slanderous fictional version of Harris’ sexual history and attack her with it, for example. Maybe they’ll say she’s unfit for office and benefitted from unnatural advantages. Maybe they'll say she's corrupt. Maybe they'll say she's the real racist.

5) The media will test out these narratives of false equivalency, utilizing their practiced neutrality on matters of truth and fiction, and when they find a simple recipe that seagulls like, they will ride it all the way to November in a hellish feedback loop of mendacity.

6) A lot of people will ignore the real differences between the choices in order to proclaim the false equivalence that both choices are exactly the same. Some will do this because they’d like to support the worst choice and would rather seem neutral than bad. Some will do this for the understandable if distressing reason that they’d like to not participate at all. Others will ignore the real and serious problems with the better choice for similar reasons.

7) If the openly fascist party succeeds, we are going to see horrible changes to the status quo in this country, and, as usual, already marginalized people will pay the highest costs. We may truly see the end of democracy, the end of bodily autonomy, mass deportation, a quickly dropping curtain of theocratic autocracy—particularly if it turns out our corrupted Supreme Court has succeeded in knocking down the final guard rails to full autocracy. We’ll see the sabotage of safeguards for human health and thriving, and the deliberate demolition of what safeguards have been put in place to combat catastrophic climate change. And this will impart upon us a moral imperative to fight them, if we are people of awareness instead of seagulls.

8) If the status quo party wins, it will have to overcome attempts by the fascist party to overturn the results in the courts on some absolutely ridiculous grounds that our corrupt Supreme Court may well rule in favor of; and if our status quo party can overcome the courts, it probably will have to overcome an armed resistance of white supremacists who would rather see the country burn than share it. And if they overcome all that, they will probably still defend our unsustainable status quo, which will make marginalized people pay the highest costs. And this will impart upon us a moral imperative to fight them, if we are people of conviction rather than seagulls.

9) Our media will create narratives of equivalence for all of this, too.

10) People who would like to avoid awareness and the moral imperatives that attend awareness and conviction will accept those simple narratives of equivalence. And so the seagulls will descend.

OK, I tricked you. Those aren’t predictions. They're witness about what is happening already and existing patterns of behavior, which allows them to masquerade as predictions, because they don't just happen; they keep happening.

I think the counter to deliberate ignorance is witness. Witness isn't a debate, nor an argument. It’s simply paying the cost of awareness, observing with as much information as you can gather, and proclaiming things as you understand them. It's a focus on what is that leads to conviction to improve it.

Witness is one thing I try to do to differentiate myself from fascism.

I could pretend that our status quo party isn’t in the business of empire and capital and all the violence and entrenched supremacy that comes with it, but I wouldn’t be telling a true story. It wouldn't make me a fascist ... but it wouldn't differentiate me.

I could pretend that the other party isn’t a hate group animated by every bigotry and captured by a very real and open intention to demolish any progress we’ve made over the centuries, but I wouldn’t be telling a true story—even if my doing so did create a neutral and false equivalency. It wouldn't make me a fascist ... but it wouldn't differentiate me.

I could pretend that all of this will be solved by the election, and that nothing is needed but my vote, but I’d be telling a false story, and I wouldn't be creating differentiators.

Or I could pretend that the election doesn’t matter at all, and what I choose to do doesn't matter at all, but I’d face the same problem.

Or I could blame marginalized people with very little political representation for being disaffected toward elections, and even tell them that they will be at fault for the pain they would experience for their non-participation. It wouldn't make me fascist ... but neither does blaming marginalized people for their own suffering differentiate me from fascists.

Or I could choose from my relatively unthreatened position to not participate at all, as if non-participation in some way freed me from the moral burdens that attend belonging to this U.S. empire and all its crimes. Or I could pretend that by voting for the least-bad option, I am similarly exonerated from the same moral responsibility.

Yes, I could choose to use the election as a tool for self-exoneration, and it wouldn't make me a fascist ... but it wouldn't differentiate me from fascists.

Again, what we want here is simple witness. A refusal to accept false equivalencies by creating a real differentiation.

I can spend my time endlessly predicting who will win the election and who will or will not support the right thing, and why things can't change because of the way things are. I can spend my time shouting at people for not making the same choice as me, and tell them a lot of things they have probably already considered, in order to establish not change for the better, but my own personal rightness. I can do this, but it won't differentiate me.

Or I can lash myself to reality as tightly as possible, and observe with as much precision as possible what the stakes of the election are, what the outcomes of each of two choices might be, and realize that no easy or self-exonerating outcomes exist, but some outcomes are better than others. I can understand what each outcome might require of me, and I can witness to it. And then I can take the steps that are available to me given the information I have to create the best outcome possible, and prepare myself to take the next steps that might create better choices than those currently available, and make better outcomes possible, and then likely, and then inevitable.

I can refuse the invitation from our media establishment to join them in making sandwiches for seagulls. I can refuse to flatten everything into just two sides, and then flatten both sides until they are both equivalent.

If I do this, then I step away from the flock of seagulls instead of trying to predict where it will go.

And doing this might help create an impression among people who would prefer to stay low-information that there is no permission in the sandwich they’re eyeing, and swallowing it might not be as easy as they think.

Witness to truth raises the cost of ignorance, and conviction to improve the current situation raises the cost of complacency.

Which is also a narrative that seems simple enough.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, and the essay collection Very Fine People, which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He's standing over here with nothing to prove, he don't know what to do so he busts a move.