I was cooking eggs on a recent Friday morning when the lights went out. First a boom! and then darkness. In the sudden quiet, we walked out to the road, where a squirrel lay stiff and dying under the transformer. A few neighbors came out, and we all stood around looking at the corpse. This is the third time it’s happened in recent years. Someone cracked a joke about making gumbo as we wondered how long it was going to take to get the lines fixed. I nudged the squirrel with my foot, but it was gone.

Something about this scene reminded me of the media landscape following Donald Trump’s recent election victory. With the corpse, of course, being the Democratic Party. Nobody saw this coming, they say. Certainly not the poor squirrel.

How long to get it fixed this time? Is anyone at the power company even paying attention?

Everybody’s got a theory and a soapbox. It was the rise of right-wing media, wrote New Republic editor Michael Tomasky (without asking why, exactly, more people are turning off the mainstream and liberal news, and turning on those once-fringe alternatives for answers). It was sexism, racism, and general deplorability (after decades of gains, and voting for our first Black president, why did the electorate suddenly decide to become more deplorable?). It was about ignorance and a massive failure of our civics education system (hard to argue with that, but isn’t education mostly run by liberals?).

A lot of the discussion, depressingly, went straight to identity analyses. Latinos did such and such. White women did so-and-so. Futures markets on Black men are down. This is the knee-jerk reaction, the safe space, where solace can’t be far away. Hey, let me fix that analysis for you: The trend was that many Americans, outside of the wealthiest enclaves, weren’t buying what the Democrats were selling, and many didn’t feel that the Democrats would do anything to actually address the country’s problems and make our lives better.

From my perspective, here in rural Texas with the squirrels and the Trump signs and the darkened lights, most of this discussion feels vaguely hopeless. Some would say ridiculous. Or infuriating. When is it ever going to get fixed?

If you want to know why people are turning off mainstream and liberal media, look no further than this: In the months leading up to the election, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and CNN (those are just the ones I tend to look at) ran a constant parade of articles glibly talking about how awesome the economy is, and how stupid and foolish Americans are to be unhappy with the current state of affairs. Look at the articles; the language could hardly be more condescending.

This is while large swaths of the population are struggling to buy groceries, can never hope to buy a house, can never get started on an independent life, are working ourselves into the ground, and have much less economic status than our parents and grandparents did. Every day we see the contrast between what the elites have and what we don’t. And what little relief we may have felt in our bank accounts during the Covid years has dried up. These celebratory, condescending articles deny what people are living through every day, and they........

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