Rupert Murdoch

I’d be very skeptical if the scandal unfolding actually laid low the media empire that is News Corp, but there are some things worth noting about this. First, as accurate as it is to say that Murdoch and his company are forces for conservatism in the affluent English-speaking countries, in Italy he’s got the one property that isn’t owned by Silvio Berlusconi (himself sort of evil Mike Bloomberg; read the New Yorker article if you haven’t), which pits them not only as the opposition but also, effectively, the mainstream left.

Second, Rupert Murdoch doesn’t want to advance the cause of conservatism as much as he wants to destroy the power of the media to act as a check on power. This intensely destructive philosophy finds a natural niche on the right because of its pro-corporate orientation and the cultural aversion towards dirty hippies and other folks who aren’t gaga for getting stomped in the face by transnational capital. But he’s different from Roger Ailes, the head of Fox and true believer in the Republican Party.

Murdoch’s an extremely adroit practitioner of the ultimate corporatist strategy of keeping regular folks at each other’s throats when we should all be allied against him and the other people at the top. What is the news cycle? It’s not a parade of effective muckraking wherein corrupt people are thwarted and the massing of wealth and power gets its due comeuppance by a healthy democratic polity’s vigorous Fourth Estate. It’s a top-down nightmare of competing resentments.

Liberals find Michelle Bachmann ignorant and scary (and freakishly focused; she’s what Sarah Palin was supposed to be). Movement conservatives flock to her because as a first principle, they’ll gravitate towards whatever those snobbish, effete liberals hate the most, and other conservatives will find reasons to support her. The act of exposing Markus and Michelle Bachmann’s predictably awful Christian weirdness just hardens her white, middle-class fan base all the more because their basic grievances (there’s no work to be had, no guarantee of getting ahead even when there is, and life sucks) are legitimate and Rupert Murdoch and his ilk have been successful at channeling it and, unfairly or not, hammering at liberalism’s comparative inability to do so.

Fluffing the people who “got” Michelle Obama for eating a cheeseburger or who express outrage at the things that come out of Fred Phelps’s mouth is entertaining, and jabbing at a person’s moral superiority with a stick is a great way to keep them all exercised and paying attention, but it’s also complete bullshit. Measurable depreciations in the standard of living are really all that matter, but they involve math instead of dick tweets or verbal gaffes.

Almost every Tea Partier could be a Democrat, since when you strip away the ignorance of history and the false consciousness and the overt racism and the gold fetish and the misplaced rage at who it is who took their country away, it’s the Democratic Party who used to be able to address their fundamental anxiety. (Of course, the Democratic Party used to be really racist, too, but that’s a whole other subject).

There’s a natural alliance there, but the sophisticated half of the country thinks the patriotic half is stupid and the forgotten half thinks the entitled half is a cancer.

Anyway, this whole dynamic is precisely what Rupert Murdoch stokes. If you believe that the overarching problem with everything in the United States is imperial plutocracy’s tendency to gobble everything, no matter how obviously unsustainable, destructive and anti-democratic, you must agree that Murdoch is the primary enabler. He exists to enhance power. If he can be toppled, we have a chance.

In the meantime, the News of the World is gone. That’s one fewer tabloid out there, which is fine because I always preferred the Sun, anyway. Page 3 has tits!