Isn’t this just an ad hominem argument (in the technical sense of that term, not the colloquial use more common on ILP)? My first reaction to your point here was to point out that I’m not a Democrat, and my preferred political campaign got dumped on like crazy by a press that, whatever their other biases, is yet more uniform in supporting our two-party system. But if that’s how I must respond to this claim, then this is a claim that I, personally, can’t make the argument that I’m making, with the corollary implication that maybe someone else could so long as they usually vote Republican.
Me being ingenuous isn’t a premise of my argument, and nothing I’m saying requires anyone to trust me.
I don’t think this response works. It seems like you’re saying that it would be OK to treat journalism as distinct from politics so long as journalism reaches a certain conclusion (or doesn’t reach certain conclusions). But that’s an argument from consequences.
If instead the argument is that the press (which as you use it must exclude Fox, WSJ, Breitbart, and other right-leaning outfits, which are a minority but not insignificant) tends to lean left, and therefore must be in the pocket of the DNC, I don’t think that follows. National and global media will select for people who are college graduates (leans left), liberal arts majors (leans left), coastal (leans left), globalist (leans left), etc. etc. (leans left). More generally, people that think that information and education are the key to a prosperous society, i.e. people that buy into the whole aim of news gathering and reporting, are likely to lean left. There’s no need to posit anything more sinister (pun intended) than that the press as an institution is left-leaning by nature.
And a consequence of that is that they will be drawn to the left politicians they will likely vote for, they’re scorn the right politicians that they disagree with, and left politicians will give them greater access and right politicians less access (c.f. Fox’s coverage of and level of access to politicians on the right).
But here again: we should decide before we get here whether the group of people who gather and report information about the unfolding of history should be treated as distinct from the people who run the government. It does not seem sound to say that we should treat them as distinct if and only if the information that gets gathered, or the tone in which it gets reported, supports the people I would like to see run the government.
And I take from your ingenuousness point that you agree, and if so it should cut both ways: perhaps it’s easy for me to endorse the distinction, because I too am a coastal globalist blue state liberal arts major, and it is easier for you to reject the distinction insofar as you’ve rejected your blue state coastal liberal arts roots, but we agree that neither of those are good arguments for or against the distinction.
So I propose this: we should support the distinction insofar as it is real, i.e. insofar as there is no coordination between press and politics, and that is despite how the press may end up supporting positions we don’t like. Fair?
The point I made above with respect to the press has interesting parallels to collusion with foreign governments: Putin can run all the pro-Trump bot armies he wants if Trump is just sitting by and watching, but if they coordinate it’s a different case. Certain conduct can be illegal if coordinated, even if the same conduct would be illegal if done without that coordination. Fair?
And if that’s so, and if members of the Trump campaign were having conversations, the possibility that they were coordinating is live. In other areas of law, the line between conversation and coordination is very thin, and it should be here given how easy it is to coordinate without coordinating. For example, in finance, expressing a desire for the spoils of an act (e.g. “We’ve got some emails we stole from your opponent that we want to give you, what do you think?”, “I love it.”) would probably count as breaching the “Chinese walls” used to silo groups receiving non-public information.
My point being, it may not take much to turn otherwise lawful conduct into unlawful coordination, and its lawfulness can hinge on whether or not it was coordinated. Is any of that wrong? Or maybe, should it be wrong? It seems clear that part of the disagreement here is that people that like what Trump is saying and/or doing are OK with acts that might technically qualify as illegal, and people that don’t like his words and/or actions want to hold him to the letter of the law. So, how should we deal with a political campaign coordinating with a foreign government, particularly one that is currently under sanctions and that we have reason to believe broke US laws to influence our election? This seems like something the founders had strong feelings about, are those concerns no longer relevant? What level of coordination is too much?
It also seems pretty clear that there are legitimate allegations against both sides of tu quoque and special pleading. And for better or worse our legal system actually depends on having laws that only get enforced some of the time and at the discretion of a lot of people, and often people in explicitly political offices. That’s why I keep going back to what [i]should[/] be the case, what we’re actually OK with rather than what’s technically permitted/prohibited. Perhaps that too is a politically tinged question; people will be actually OK with Clinton doing things they aren’t OK with Trump doing and vice versa , and they’ll make ad hoc arguments about the specifics to justify a distinction.
This just isn’t born out by the facts. Everyone that Trump has pointed to as a Democratic conspirator is literally a Republican, and the most significant thing the FBI did with respect to the election was release a letter that probably changed the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.
You really take the Nunes memo as dispositive? Setting asides the flaws within the memo, at best it only describes part of why the FISA warrant was issued, and we have nothing to compare it to because we don’t know what standard usually applies to FISA warrants. (EDIT: this poorly worded. We do know what the standard is, but we don’t have precedent for how it applies in practice in FISA courts.)
But Nunes didn’t even see the warrant application before writing a memo about it, and he’s since acknowledged that the headline omission wasn’t actually an omission, he just didn’t know that the political motive behind the dossier was indeed disclosed in the warrant application because he never saw the warrant application.
I thought D’Souza was a Trump supporter. But he makes a good point, what Trump’s doing is a big deal.
…see what I did there?
But would you agree that this sort of thing is happening to both left and right? Dems used to care about infrastructure and be anti-secret-courts, now they aren’t. The Republicans used to be anti-deficit and care about sex scandals. Now they don’t.