I think I have figured out why my father watches Fox News. Now, my father, like all of us, has his racial prejudices and I have seen them evolve over time. He’s certainly a better man than he once was, not that he was ever some racist asshole who thought that blacks (or whatever) were bringing down the society. But there is no doubt that he grew up during a different time when white men were supreme. And he has not read White Like Me and doesn’t fully appreciate just how privileged he is. And so, like a lot of white men, he was skeptical about the civil rights movement when it affected him. Clearly, he believed that people should be allowed to vote and all that. But things like “busing” bothered him and he still has a general attitude that racial inequality has been “fixed.”

It is perhaps important to note that my father is not exactly white. By California standards, sure; he’s been part of the racial ruling class—part of the group that effectively has no race. But when we traveled through the south, it became very clear that my father was not white. And given that my mother was quite white, there were quite a lot of stares at the interracial couple with their mulatto kids. In fact, there was much worse than stares, but it really doesn’t matter here.

I’ve noticed over the past few years that my father has gotten more and more unhappy with Fox News. I take some credit for that. But he’s come to see that they very often don’t tell him the whole story. And very much to his credit, he’s noticed that on their panels of “experts,” very often no one disagrees. That to him seems fishy because if everyone agrees, why are they discussing it. It’s like, “Motherhood: good or bad? We’ll be discussing that tonight on Big Talk.”

On the other side, he seems pretty happy watching MSNBC—surprisingly, especially Al Sharpton. But if the subject of racial matters comes up, he gets very uncomfortable. Talk of blatant acts of racism—voter fraud and things like that—he’s on board. In fact, he’s often more upset than I am. But he does not like to be told that there is still systemic racism in our society. It upsets his whole vision of the nation as being fundamentally okay. And that’s where he’ll change the channel.

Back over on Fox News, he’s pretty much given up on watching the explicit opinion shows like The Factor. But he’s comfortable with Bret Baier and he was upset when Shepard Smith went on to his new floating post. He’s happy watching these shows even though he clearly knows that they are lying to him to at least to a certain extent and that they are deliberately withholding news from him.

I believe the reason he continues to watch Fox News—and by extension the reason a lot of people do—is that it doesn’t upset their world view—ever. Regardless of what rubbish is reported on Fox News, it will never report anything that might say that there is anything wrong with the utopian worldview of those older generations. They might report about welfare fraud, but they would never report about an economic system that keeps people in poverty that might push some of them to commit welfare fraud. They might report on Bernie Madoff, but they will never report on the systemic fraud on Wall Street. They might report on some government waste, but they would never report on how the government’s primary function is to take money away from the poor and give it to the rich. These absolutely true facts about the nation that we live in are upsetting to all of us. But to the old, to even acknowledge them would require a total rethink of the life they’ve lived. That’s hard, hard medicine. And Fox News more than any other news network doesn’t do that.

Even more disturbing, is the overall narrative that Fox News provides. It isn’t explicit, at least most of the time. That narrative says that the problems that plague our country are the result of those people: the young, the minorities, the terrorists, the intellectuals and their sneaky ideas. Fox News never slips up and betrays that “us against them” and “good versus evil” narrative. The viewers are constantly told that in this world, none of the problems out there are their fault. If everyone were like them, everything would be perfect. The nation is going to hell because a surf bum is getting food stamps, not because corporations are getting billions of dollars to make aircraft that don’t work.

Fox News is a pacifier—Barney & Friends for the old.

Afterword

I want to be clear: other than how they vote against their own interests, the average Fox News viewer is not to blame for most of our society’s ills. But the whole point of Fox News is to keep the viewer focused away from where the problems truly lie: the power elite.

One of my most hated memes is “Obama’s Katrina.” Any time anything happens that is bad or at least seems bad for Obama, the Katrina analogies come out. But here’s the thing: I was glued to the radio during Hurricane Katrina. While it’s certainly true that Bush got some bad press, it wasn’t that big a deal. In the pantheon of Bush’s screw up, it hardly makes the top ten. Bush came into office with a relatively low approval rating in the mid-50s. His approval rating only spiked twice, ironically, for two of his biggest blunders: the 9/11 attack and the invasion of Iraq. Otherwise, his administration is the story of a steadily declining popularity, primarily because, you know, he was a terrible president.

But after his re-election, it did look as though Bush would muddle on for the rest of his term in the low 50s and high 40s regarding approval. But then something happened that really turned the people against him. And it was not his response to Hurricane Katrina! The American people where quite used to Bush being at best ineffectual. Anyway, there was lots of blame to go around for Katrina. No, my friends, what turned the nation against him was his push to privatize the most popular government program in American history: Social Security.

Jonathan Chait discusses this briefly in a very good article about a more recent, but no less absurd, Obama meme, Barack Obama Is Not George W Bush. He point out that Bush’s approval rating started going down fast in 2005—before Katrina. I was glued to my radio at that time too, and I remember. It wasn’t just that Bush was trying to cram the Holy Grail of conservatism down the mouths of Americans. It wasn’t even that his PR campaign was so heavy handed and hyper-aggressive. It was that it was so hypocritical.

Bush campaigned primarily on keeping America safe from terrorists. (You know: the ones he hadn’t managed to keep us safe from?) And there was lots of Karl Rove work getting anti-gay-rights issues on the ballots of various states to get the Christians to come out. Bush certainly did not campaign on privatizing Social Security. And regardless, at least half the people who did vote for him did not vote for him thinking he would do so. People felt tricked. And that was especially fatal to Bush who was supposedly authentic. But here was clear proof: he wasn’t an earnest Christian who might thus have some unfortunate opinions; he was just a hack fronting for the rich and powerful.

Remember what conservatives said about Obama in 2012? Sure, he’s reasonable now. But just wait until he’s re-elected and then you’ll see the Kenyan socialist we’ve been telling you about! It’s called projection. Conservatives do it a lot: assuming liberals must be behaving some way because that’s how conservatives behave. And that’s exactly what Bush did. Suddenly “compassionate conservatism” was gone and in was “crony conservatism.” This was really helped by the widespread (and accurate) reporting that privatizing Social Security—while having unknown consequences for retirees—was going to be a huge windfall to Wall Street brokers.

Now, I understand. “Obama’s Social Security Privatization Scheme and Roadshow” doesn’t have the zing of “Obama’s Katrina.” But “Obama’s Iraq” might work. It at least has a little relevance. But I don’t even understand why anyone would seriously compare Obama to Bush. There are presidential comparisons that could be made: FDR, Johnson, Nixon, even Reagan. But Bush? You’ve got to be a very disappointed conservative to be thinking that Obama’s legacy will be anything nearly as bad as Bush’s. As I’ve written before, I don’t think history will be that kind to Obama. They’ll throw him in the middle. But Bush is like Hoover. Even after 5 years out of office, his approval numbers are under water. And this is before the historians really go after him.

The main thing is to stop using Hurricane Katrina as an analogy. It was not a major event[1] in the eight dark years that Bush was president. It is not the primary reason we think so little of the man. And the only way that Obama becomes Bush is if extraterrestrial pods start showing up around the White House. (Actually, even that would be an improvement on Bush.)

[1] Let me be clear: Hurricane Katrina was a major and unnecessary tragedy. But when we are talking about Bush the junior, his administration’s incompetent reaction to it was about par for the course. But killing well over 100,000 people and starting a civil war in Iraq for no real reason is worse. In the case of Katrina, Bush mostly did nothing. Doing nothing was what he excelled at. And we saw the tragic consequences over and over. But when he actually did something was when things went really wrong.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote something that allows me to discuss a long held theory of mine. He was writing about how the United Kingdom’s economy is finally starting to improve, The Three Stooges Do Westminster. This is in reference to a Three Stooges routine where Moe asks Curly why he is banging his head against the wall and Curly replies, “Because it feels so good when I stop!” Krugman’s argument is that the Cameron government for the last two years have imposed harsh austerity and now that they’ve pulled back, the economy is doing better. But rather than think that economies simply mend themselves if allowed, they think like Curly: their modest growth was due to the austerity (head banging).

Then Krugman gets to something that has greatly concerned me for years:

He is no doubt right. But the most important point is that this happens in the United States all the time and it works to the advantage of conservatives.

Here is the mechanism. Conservative economic policies are bad—or at least they have been for the last 30 years. Presidents have their greatest power in the first two years of their administrations. So they get to enact their bad economic policies early on. These are usually squeezing the poor (taking money away from them that they would spend) and gifting the rich (giving them tax cuts that they mostly will not spend). Thus, for the first two years we get Curly banging his head against the wall. But over time, the economy heals. So by the time that the Republican is up for re-election, the economy is finally starting to improve as it adjusts to the new bad conservative economic policies.

It is the opposite for liberals (or moderates as the case has been for the last 30 years). They actually have good economic policy ideas. In general, things get better when they enter office. But by the time they come around to re-election, the economy is stagnant or at least not improving as much as it adjusts to the new good liberal economic policies. Under Obama, it didn’t even take that long. It’s all complicated by other factors, but the overall framework is correct.

So our system benefits presidents who have bad economic policy ideas. Think about that. What can we do about it? Well, for one thing, we could have a better informed public. But it’s hard. I work very hard in my personal relationships to get people to stop fretting over little things (eg welfare fraud) and start focusing on big things (eg corporate fraud). But they don’t want to, because it is easier to despise that stuff they hear about every night on the news than the systemic corruption that the wealthy benefit from every day and that costs all of us poor people far more. Because if corporate fraud (and much else) is with us always, it ain’t news.

I know this is a temporary reprieve. But I really have to thank John Tamny from pulling me back from the abyss. There is nothing quite like blinding anger to help one out of a depression. I’m not expecting much; by tomorrow, I expect to be back down. But while I’m feeling relatively good, I wanted to take a moment to discuss something I saw today in the New York Times that I thought was hilarious.

The article is, Fed to Start Unwinding Its Stimulus Next Month by Binyamin Appelbaum. Now, the humor didn’t come from the author or the Times. It came straight from the Federal Reserve itself. As everyone outside Washington and Wall Street knows, the economy sucks and it is getting better at a glacial speed. So the fact that the Fed has decided that now is the time to start tightening—Taking the punch bowl away before the party gets out of hand!—is funny enough.

Are these guys and gals really that out of it? In a word: yes. But the high comedy is yet to come. The Times reports:

Remember: I was really depressed. Yet when I read that I howled with laughter! But you can be forgiven if you don’t see the hilarity. So let me explain. Before the 1990s, full employment was thought to be 5%. Since then, we have found that it is actually 4%. This is the unemployment rate that we can have without cause inflation. So the Fed saying that they will keep interest rates low “well past the time” unemployment reaches the still very high 6.5% mark is just ridiculous. And then they add that they will “especially” do this if the inflation rate continues to be below 2%. First, 2% should not be the inflation target; 4% should be. But the hilarity only builds, because it isn’t enough to hold interest rates down as long as inflation is at the long-run goal of 2%; it has to be below that rate.

In the end, what they are saying is that even though unemployment is ridiculously high, they are going to stop doing one of the things that can help that situation (bond-buying campaign). But we aren’t to worry, because they won’t stop doing the other thing (keeping interest rates down). Except that they will only continue to do that second thing as long as unemployment is super high and inflation is below target. John Edwards was right: there are two Americas. There are the clowns and everyone else. And the clowns are in charge.