Upping two comments from a thread about ‘fake news’: /// #1 /// (a) Trump is different in degree but not in kind from the tradition of cynical dishonesty spearheaded by people like Stone, Atwater, Ailes, and Rove since Nixon. And his victory, however dodgy, is firmly founded on that continuity and accumulation. And (b) people can call what the Dems have been doing for the last 25 years ‘centrism,’ but that’s a pretty 2-dimensional description; when you add the 3rd dimension, a better name would be ‘elitism’ — which leftists have been pointing out for decades. That ‘centrism’ has seen mounting failures for a long time in congressional and, even more so, state elections; the difference now is that that failure has become catastrophic. /// #2 /// It’s unwise to see the current situation as the result of technology rather than, say, as the result of a decades-long wrong turn by certain wings of the Dems. Fake news is a serious issue, but the real problem isn’t the supply, it’s the demand for certain kinds of fake news. Some of that demand was and would have been a fixture in American culture, but not all of it. Focusing on ‘fake news’ now seems to me like doubling down and, looking ahead, a monumental strategic error. Trump is president, and he’s appointing radicals at the highest levels of govt — who’ll be deciding how to decide what’s fake and how to respond to it. ///