So many of the slogans of modern, liberalish-libertarianism prove to be totally wrong when they get a test in the laboratory of reality. With the goings on in Trumpdonia yesterday, this is another of the piously recited tropes of the civil liberties industry that, given the test of time, proves to be a disaster.
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. Thomas Jefferson
Trump, the 100% creation of newspapers, and even more so the TV and fascist hate-talk radio which our idiot Supreme Court made the modern version of newspapers, is the definitive proof that that quote, as so often mined and recited or, as such clipped quotes generally are understood to be, is stupid.
As we are finding, a combination of the fascist media in the country, everything from Breitbart and FOX up to the august New York Times and the disastrous Constitutional machine imposed by the slave power to prevent equality, specifically the Electoral College, has given us a president who is an open agent of a foreign despot, be that Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdogan, someone who is destroying egalitarian democracy here and a party in congress that refuses to be any kind of check on his idiotically wielded power.
All of the anti-democratic seeds planted by the slave-power and the Northern commercial interests in the original Constitution which didn't produce poison before are bearing fruit now. The worst seems to have come last. We've had horrible governments before but none have been worse than the one that governs us now.
The impending danger of a government shutdown, I'm informed, is a product of Trump listening to FOX based scum like Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro, the three idiots on the couch in the morning on that network, my dear friends, we have, in effect, a government of "newspapers" or what we've replaced them with in the place of government. Trump's brain IS whatever he has seen on FOX.
I am pretty sure the first place I ever encountered that was on a TV show. If my misty recollection isn't correct about the medium I know it was the media that gave me that bit of self-serving Jeffersoniana and not a history class. I've heard it spouted - self-servingly- in the media, both electronic and print, so as to make that not matter.
It is one of the most serious limitations in the cult of the Founders, the founders fetish that is such a disastrous feature of our so-called life of the mind, that that collected entity "founders" is, as we all are, limited by what they could have known and the impossibility of them understanding the future. We live in the future they couldn't have imagined when they wrote the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, it is sheer idiocy to be ruled by their other world which no longer exists.
The absurdity of that founders fetish is well proven in that it has given us the government we have now, under Trump, under George W. Bush, under Democratic presidents so weak from knowing they will be attacked by the predominant right-wing and corporate press that they are pushovers for Republican fascists.
Constitutional fundamentalism, called "originalism" "strict constructionism" or whatever, is a means of using a comic book reduction of far more complex ideas and it is never done for honest purposes. Those who are honest in their earnest recitations of such lines are generally pious chumps who will generally take a stupid position that turns out to be bad for egalitarian democracy, enhancing the position of oligarchs and crooks and fascists.
Much as his history of such things as slave holding and slave raping has made me view everything that Jefferson said with a gelid eye, in this case this passage, so idiotically spouted in current usage, is far less stupid in his original setting of it, a letter he wrote from Paris to Edward Carrington in New York on January 16, 1787. This is the paragraph that the line occurs in.
The tumults in America, I expected would have produced in Europe an unfavorable opinion of our political state. But it has not. On the contrary, the small effect of those tumults seems to have given more confidence in the firmness of our governments. The interposition of the people themselves on the side of government has had a great effect on the opinion here. I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them. I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did any where. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.—The want of news has led me into disquisition instead of narration, forgetting you have every day enough of that. I shall be happy to hear from you some times, only observing that whatever passes thro’ the post is read, and that when you write what should be read by myself only, you must be so good as to confide your letter to some passenger or officer of the packet. I will ask your permission to write to you sometimes, and to assure you of the esteem & respect with which I have the honour to be Dear Sir your most obedient & most humble servt., Th: Jefferson
In almost every other part of that letter, Jefferson demonstrates that if he anticipated the media we have, he would have probably cut those often cited lines from the thing.
Our media is not one which deserves the privileges given to it by Jefferson's allies in the Constitutional Convention because it doesn't serve the truth it serves self serving lies. It attacks and opposes equality, it supports, in every way, "the general prey of the rich on the poor." It does that because it is owned by the rich and is staffed by people who are either rich (Tucker Carlson, other idiot sons of the oligarchy) or who want to advance by pleasing and servicing the rich.
It, in no way, performs the function Jefferson imagined that newspapers c. 1787 did. He in no way could imagine the effect of lie machines of 24-7-365 cable TV and hate-talk radio as they "penetrate the whole mass of the people".
The post-Sullivan decision, totally unregulated "channel of" free media has not given people, "full information of their affairs" it is the producer of propagandized and ignorant masses, which, in the age of computer analysis which can serve the purpose of ratfucking elections, can impose a regime of minority government of, by and for deluded but racist and ignorant people, corrupting their morals in every way.
As can be seen in the romantic view what he imagined were Indians who were without law, moral restraint was where Jefferson, correctly, put the ultimate power to prevent evil. Well, part of the libertarian modernist view of things holds that morals are out of style or merely situational or merely the product of social convention or, worst of all, to be determined by the superstition of "natural selection". Of course, Jefferson, if he had had the habit of effective self-examination, would have known from his own life that depending on moral restraint without effective laws is a guarantee of depravity ruling. His famous "newspapers over governments" line is bullshit, reality proves it is.
Every evil that Jefferson imagined we could avoid through "newspapers" depended on at least enough of the media to have morals and, foremost among those, was that they would tell the truth. If you want that to work, you've got to, at the very least, punish them for lying strongly enough to keep them from doing it. And that doesn't get to the corruption that comes from the media providing constantly distracting entertainment that will prevent enough of us from even paying attention to the truth. That is something that egalitarian democracy will either fix or it is finished.
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