Twitter, MSNBC preelection meltdowns expose a huge problem for the left

In 1971, a Virginia lawyer — one that almost no one in America had heard of, at that time — knocked out a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that imagined what must have seemed like a fantastical future that looked nothing like their present, in which a mass of young baby boomers on college campuses was protesting war and corporate pollution, singing, “We can change the world.”

The memo writer — Lewis Powell, who did become famous months later when Richard Nixon named him to the Supreme Court — argued that pro-business capitalists could actually change the world, by launching a project that would include a new kind of right-wing media and a network of conservative “think tanks” or campus centers to fight back with a unified voice.

The so-called Powell Memo turned out to be a blueprint for the political world we inhabit on the weekend before the 2022 midterms, in which that onetime fantasy right-wing media world that became talk radio and then Fox News blasts out warped messages about crime or immigration crafted in misinformation dens like the Heritage Foundation — memes that slowly become embedded in the “balanced” mainstream media.

And while, to be sure, many of those idealistic boomers coming of age in 1971 did rise to positions of influence in politics or media or academia, their guiding ethos was very different. The ruling philosophy of the campus-based New Left that so frightened Powell and the Chamber of Commerce was rooted in a kind of freedom tied to their learning, a new individualism. These generations gravitated to sources of knowledge — but not power.

That lesson has now been drilled home at the worst time possible — literally hours before an election which President Joe Biden described quite accurately last week when he declared, “In our bones, we know democracy is at risk.”

The social media site that for the last decade has been arguably the most popular cauldron of ideas for folks on the left or center-left — Twitter, which for its plethora of flaws was also the place that gave rise to such diverse progressive movements as the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo, among others — has been taken over by the world’s richest man. And Elon Musk seems hellbent on wrecking the site he bought for $44 billion — possibly before the polls open on Tuesday.

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At the same time, the cable TV network that so often fails to actually live up to its billing as “the liberal version of Fox News” — that would be MSNBC — chose this critical preelection weekend to execute arguably its worst-ever betrayal of its oft-betrayed fan base. It sure looks like network executives caved to demagogic Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other right-wing critics by abruptly dropping one of its few Black female voices, the weekend host Tiffany Cross.

These twin blows came at the very end of a brutal autumn in which the right’s unified messaging — in so many ways the Powell Memo brought to life — is embraced by the icons of mainstream media like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or NPR. The fearmongering over cherry-picked crime stats or supposed migrant caravans, or an emphasis on high inflation over low unemployment, or cheap gas over deadly climate change that’s hatched in conservative think tanks and promulgated on Fox News has proved catnip to journalists so eager to prove their balanced objectivity — that they aren’t in the tank for Biden coming off the Donald Trump nightmare.

This is the reality at the moment when everything is on the line for democracy. The right has proved ruthlessly organized and efficient with its so-often-dishonest closing message. The left, meanwhile, has woken up in the first weekend in November to discover that no one has their back. How did we ever get to such a place?

The apparent ongoing implosion of Twitter feels instructive. Like most innovations that came from Silicon Valley in the 1990s and 2000s — and from the often libertarian-minded inheritors of boomer-created New Left individualism who sprung from Harvard, Stanford, or (sigh) Wharton to inhabit it — the 2006-launched website was always 15% internet-democracy-idealism and 85% Wall Street IPO daydreaming. That prevailing mindset made it all too easy for the company to sell out to the world’s wealthiest libertarian egomaniac when Musk made that foolishly overpriced offer that Twitter’s directors couldn’t refuse.

It’s remarkable how much damage Musk has done to Twitter and his reputation in just 10 days that shook the virtual world. The Tesla billionaire abruptly and cruelly laid off about half of Twitter’s staff in a move that even Musk belatedly seemed to realize went too far. He used his new site to spread a ridiculously false conspiracy theory about the right-wing violent attack on Paul Pelosi. The antisemite formerly known as Kanye West got his account back, use of the N-word on Twitter exploded, and folks on the left who’d once relied on Twitter to advance progressive ideas were starting to leave. Perhaps not coincidentally, election week could also mark the arrival of a paid verification system that seems designed to sow chaos.

If Trump, who was famously banned from Twitter and who plans to launch his 2024 White House bid next week, or Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who somehow got Musk to vouch for his warped “peace” plans to end the war he started in Ukraine, wanted to employ a chaos agent to trash the site, they could not have done better. But I don’t think that’s what happened. I think it’s more likely that Musk was willing to burn a large chunk of his obscene wealth in a wildly backfiring attempt to buy the one thing his billions couldn’t provide him: respect.

But America’s fragile body politic is suffering mightily from this bonfire of vanity. And let’s be honest: While Musk is a loathsome figure in all of this, folks on the left bear a fair amount of the blame for their own predicament. It’s a mindset that believes that intellect and facts will prevail to the extent it ignored what the right has been doing all these decades: building an infrastructure, which has proven much more powerful than lofty ideas.

Indeed, as I watched the Twitter implosion and the assorted election season failures of the so-called liberal media, I found myself thinking about a recent, outstanding essay in New York Magazine by Eric Levitz that brought a lot of cool social-science research to the broad themes I also explored in my recent book, After the Ivory Tower Falls: trying to explain why the fault line in American politics has become educational attainment.

The Levitz piece looks at many factors, but he hones in on modern, college-educated liberals’ seeming disdain for organizations. “Education polarization can be self-reinforcing,” he writes. “As left-wing civic life has drifted away from mass-membership institutions and toward the ideologically self-selecting circles of academia, nonprofits, and the media, the left’s sensitivity to the imperatives of majoritarian politics has dulled. In some respects, the incentives for gaining status and esteem within left-wing subcultures are diametrically opposed to the requirements of coalition building.”

Exactly. Today, America has a political right that seems better organized both on the ground — through community organizations, but especially church congregations — and through its top-down messaging from its rich people who seem more committed to building societal power than cashing in on IPO day.

There is absolutely nothing like this undergirding the Democratic Party. Recent analyses of the Democrats’ obstacles heading into the midterms, including the Levitz piece, have focused extensively on how becoming the party of college graduates has coincided with the working class becoming increasingly Republican. There’s a lot going on there, but one thing worth noting is that Democrats at the height of their mid-20th century power had a close relationship with organized labor. They have nothing comparable today.

Instead, the belief that brilliant thinking and the facts of a reality-based world could cut through a stainless-steel pipeline of disinformation has proved noble but hopelessly naïve. The Democratic Party and its supporters on the left side of the U.S. fault line would do well to study how the right spent decades laying their foundation. Unfortunately, the question that looms so large on this weekend of dying bluebirds and a wounded American eagle is whether we’ll even have the democratic atmosphere required for that new project to take flight.

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