Be careful what you wish for.

Remember when you lamented there was “no real difference” between the two major political parties?

Back in the 1990s, it was a common complaint. Moderate Democrats like Bill Clinton and Al Gore faced off against moderate, old-guard Republicans like George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole.

More radical instigators bubbled just above the radar but couldn’t get any traction. Far-left candidates like Jesse Jackson and Howard Dean won a few victories, then vanished. On the right, the same thing happened to the two Pats (Robertson and Buchanan). The most successful radical righter, Newt Gingrich was forced to resign as House speaker after his gambit to force Clinton out of office via impeachment backfired, and Republicans lost seats in the 1998 midterms.

In the 2010s, everything changed. The parties grew miles apart politically, socially and geographically. “Polarized” doesn’t begin to describe it. And populists, who never won before nationally (even Mt. Rushmore icon Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t pull it off in a third-party bid), are winning dozens of primaries and even general elections.  

What happened?

In a word: propaganda.

21st century breakdown

In the 20th century, policies were driven from the bottom up. More voters looked at the issues, decided which ones were important to them, and chose the candidate most aligned with their views. They got their information from fewer, relatively unbiased sources: the local paper, the network news, and so forth. Parties were still learning the art of “spin,” and their messages were filtered through media lenses before they got to the people.

The media climate of the new millennium has flipped that on its head.

As media outlets multiplied to include millions of internet sites, the two major parties figured out how to bypass the nightly news and daily paper. The fragmented nature of the media eliminated that middleman and allowed parties to take their messages directly to the people.

Because there were now so many potential sources of news, people no longer had time to sift through them all — especially in an era when the middle class began to shrink, two-income households became the rule, and free time was at a premium. (What free time there was could be filled more easily than ever, with the advent of Netflix binges and social media fixations.)

Given a broad choice of where to turn for their news and little time to make considered decisions, voters naturally gravitated toward outlets that reflected their views. These outlets suddenly discovered there was a market for confirmation bias: telling people what they already believed, rather than the truth.

Shifting sands

Politicians have long known there’s a market for telling voters what they want to hear. Why do you think there are so many broken campaign promises? But in the previous century, there were always media outlets to check this tendency. Serving as watchdogs and gatekeepers, they held politicians accountable by exposing scandals like Watergate and the Pentagon Papers.

Now, that’s changed.

Revenue sources for traditional media began drying up during the internet age, in a trend accelerated by the Great Recession. Brick-and-mortar stores were spending fewer and fewer dollars on newspaper ads. Classified ads migrated to Craigslist. The only thing left for newspapers was the Wild West of the internet, where they suddenly found themselves on equal footing with independent upstarts like the Drudge Report.

Things went a bit differently on the boob tube. More than any other news source, Fox News found success on cable by monetizing confirmation bias. And in doing so, it poisoned the well. Its main competitors, CNN and MSNBC, were conflicted. On the one hand, both emphasized news from the other end of the political spectrum because they, too, needed revenue to survive. At the same time, however, they sought to preserve the traditional media’s role as watchdog.

Delicate balance

That’s a difficult tightrope to walk.

Traditionally, mainstream media drew a clear line between advertising and marketing on the one hand, and news gathering on the other. The blurring of that line at networks like CNN and MSNBC cost them the one thing standing between themselves and power-hungry politicians: credibility. CNN became jokingly known as the “Clinton News Network” for coverage perceived as favorable to Hillary Clinton.

Is there something to that perception?

Does it really matter? A perceived conflict of interest can be as damaging to a messenger’s credibility as an actual one. And, of course, Fox News was motivated by the almighty dollar to undermine its competitors’ attempts to maintain credibility — even as it touted itself as “fair and balanced” despite a nightly lineup of right-wing political commentary.

With newspapers increasingly sidelined and the credibility of TV news all but gone, the mainstream media stood at the brink of irrelevance. It only took politicians to push it over, which is exactly what Donald Trump did with a relentless campaign to paint the mainstream media as nothing more than “fake news.” Except for Fox and its brethren, of course, so long as they agreed with him.

And agree with him they did, because it was in their financial interest to do so.

They’d succeeded in baking in their viewers’ confirmation bias to such an extent that those viewers would believe anything Trump said, and the facts be damned. Whereas the 20th century media had served as a filter and a watchdog standing between politicians and voters, its 21st century heirs served as amplifiers for political spin. And, in the meantime, spin had become more sophisticated.

Mere mouthpieces

Relegated to the status of propaganda machines, the media either embraced that role or became irrelevant. Or extinct.

Politicians like Trump had them exactly where he wanted them: in a no-win situation. Outlets like CNN felt they had to cover his daily bullshit briefings in order to maintain a sense of journalistic integrity — even though he himself was undermining that integrity at every opportunity.

Even Fox News had to toe the line and parrot his message, no matter how absurd, if it wanted to maintain his favor. And, more importantly, if it wanted to keep the viewers it had conditioned to believe him without question. Doing so had made the network tons of money, but it had also caused it to forfeit not just its credibility, but its control. No longer were its executives calling the shots; Trump was.

With confirmation bias firmly set on both sides and the old media template of unbiased watchdog in shambles, people stopped trying to figure out what was true and what wasn’t. With so many competing messages from so many biased sources, they threw up their hands and just decided to believe whatever their own side was saying.

Instead of voters setting the agenda for politicians, politicians new were telling voters how to think. Without a mainstream media filter, they could do so directly. And since believing the other side wasn’t an option, voters simply began to accept what their leaders told them — even if it flew in the face of scientific evidence, economic numbers, common sense or what those same leaders said 24 hours earlier.

If you’re looking for an example on the Democratic side, you need look no further than Joe Biden. His campaign looked to be on its last legs before Jim Clyburn, “the godfather of South Carolina Democratic politics,” endorsed him. After he won South Carolina, most of his rivals for the nomination dropped out in short order and endorsed him, too. The voters did what their leaders told them to do and sent Biden cruising toward the nomination.

Transformation

Virtually no one, meanwhile, does what the media suggests anymore — unless the media is parroting what their preferred politician is spewing.

All-but-unanimous newspaper endorsements of Hillary Clinton didn’t help her (and may even have hurt her some) against Trump.

Bill Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting was instrumental in bringing down the corrupt Nixon administration, didn’t matter, either. Woodward wrote a bestselling book exposing Trump’s incompetence and narcissism. It didn’t matter. Bernstein’s repeated claims that Trump was engaging in activities that were “worse than Watergate” didn’t matter, either.

Why? Because the people who bought Woodward’s book and who watched Bernstein make his claims (on CNN, naturally) already believed what they were saying before they said it. Their words were mere confirmation bias, preaching to the crowd. Few on the other side listened, and most of those who did weren’t convinced... because of their own confirmation bias.

Bernstein made the distinction that, in Watergate, “the system worked” and it isn’t working now. He was talking about the political system, but what really isn’t working is our communication system. It’s broken. We believe what our leaders tell us about the media, how the economy’s doing, or what might work against a deadly virus (even if scientific evidence suggests otherwise).

Propaganda works, not because it’s convincing, but because people are conditioned ahead of time to accept it. They believe what they want to believe.

This is why Trump’s approval rating is so constant. People have already made up their minds, and the one-sided “evidence” (aka propaganda) they listen to only confirms what they already believe. The more it’s confirmed, the more they believe it: It’s a vicious circle. And the more baked in it becomes, the more leeway politicians have to make outlandish claims with the assurance they’ll be believed. This is, of course, Trump’s playbook.

Could he shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it?

Probably.

Not only that, a huge chunk of people would believe whatever excuse he had to offer — and cheer him on.

This is where we are.