I almost love this story. Almost. Published by the Washington Post on Monday, the article is the latest in a long, noble tradition of "political journalist goes to random grocery store or diner to tell us what random passersby are thinking." But it's not often that you find a piece that really brings home the American Gothic tinge to all of it. You can almost hear it: the souls of the damned, crying out from behind the reporter's keyboard. The haunting wails of Americana as it shops for pork at the Piggly Wiggly.
SHEBOYGAN, Wis. — Dawn Mohr stopped by the local Piggly Wiggly to pick up $6 worth of pork steaks last week and immediately remembered just how much she’s grown to hate grocery shopping.
“Everything is so damn high,” she said, shaking her head at $3.09 bottles of Coca Cola. “Good ol’ Biden.”
Mohr, a 54-year-old home health-care aide, mostly shops the clearance aisles. Her $17 hourly paycheck, which inched up 80 cents in the past two years, is hardly enough to cover the basics anymore. She says there’s no question she’ll vote for Donald Trump again. Every trip to the supermarket cements her resolve.
“When Trump was president, there wasn’t inflation,” she said. “We could afford food.”
Aaaaah, that's the stuff. Just good old-fashioned Trump-supporting Americans, voters who don't mind migrant concentration camps or the undoing of democracy itself if it means bringing the price of a bottle of Coca Cola back under three bucks.
Among America's many Trump voters, the rose-colored glasses are tinted to near-opacity when it comes to Trump's actual record. By the time he left office, 400,000 Americans had died in a pandemic, Dawn. There were runs on toilet paper because the pandemic so wrecked worldwide supply chains that Americans feared having to wipe their nether regions with leaves plucked off their neighbors' shrubbery. Pictures of empty store shelves brought comparisons to the old Soviet Union.
No matter. The anecdotes in the Post's latest journey to America's heart of darkness, known more formally as "Wisconsin," are identical to prior iterations of this article. Most Americans know very little about anything, as it turns out, and what they do know doesn't much impact their own political choices. And you won't find many Average Joes willing to tell a big-city journalist that they're going to stick with Trump because of his crimes and racism and attempted coup, but there are plenty who will tell you that they just like how he kept the trains running on time, in the little “Steamboat Willie”-esque cartoon that runs in their mind when someone asks them to remember what the Trump years were actually like.
“Things were 100 percent better under Trump,” [another random shopper] said. “There was no inflation. Prices really skyrocketed since Biden took over. I have to walk past half this stuff now because I can’t afford it.”
And if you really can't get enough of Folksy Damn Anecdotes, you can also check out a similarly premised (but paywalled) Wall Street Journal article. That one starts out in a booth set up at the annual Strawberry Festival in Plant City, Florida, with a Trump supporter who sells "carved-antler knives and knickknacks" and paddles to beat your kids with. We're in civilization's end times, or at least it feels we're rapidly headed that way, and the road to hell is paved with scenes from the Strawberry Festival.
There are at least two distinct things going on in these articles. The first is that as pandemic-impacted supply chains began to sloppily sort themselves out in the early part of Biden's presidency, inflation was indeed an issue—especially when it comes to food. What these Midwestern Voter Safaris tend to leave out are the explanations for just why food inflation spiked during the pandemic-recovery period, and we now know that a great deal of it was due to price fixing and price gouging by corporate behemoths trying to pry as much cash from consumers' recovering wallets as possible.
The list of culprits include price fixing by egg producers, record profits posted by oil companies, and big profits posted by grocery stores themselves and by a host of other firms. During the middle quarters of 2023, in fact, over half of the nation's measured inflation was due to corporate profit-taking. The United States is far from alone in seeing that post-shutdown rash of corporate price-gouging: In 2022, German supermarkets began leaving shelves empty rather than put up with steep price hikes by international food giant Mars on everything from candy bars to cat food to cereal.
Inflation has sharply dropped since those days, but consumers have a long memory when it comes to price hikes and a much shorter one when prices cool. That's not surprising; you're far more likely to remember the face of someone who punches you in the nose than of someone who politely shakes your hand.
The second thing to note is that more than any other election, the press seems to be quite eager to talk about just how much American journalism is failing to inform the American public. That's the subtext of another Washington Post story, which purports to measure voter skepticism over whether Biden and Trump will truly end up being their parties' respective nominees.
The folksy voter interviews in that article are used to present a vapid both-sides narrative in which Biden being older than Trump is, once again, portrayed as a campaign disadvantage equal in magnitude to Trump's multiple indictments and attempts to overthrow the United States government.
“I’m hoping these aren’t the two candidates, but I’m afraid they are. One’s older than the other, one’s more senile than the other. It scares me,” one focus-group participant is quoted as saying. And this news isn't particularly useful other than as a measure of how little reality matters in our newest election cycle. Who's supposed to be the more senile one? We're not clued in.
Jeff Jarvis, a professor at The City University of New York, spells out his own distaste for such stories more concisely than most critics. "The Post and Times are election deniers of their own sort, denying the validity of the choice between competent leadership and fascism," he posted on social media. "They go find voters to fulfill their agenda."
That's indeed what's going on here. The nation's political journalists are, by and large, terrified of the prospect of having to visibly choose sides between a candidate promising to dismantle American democracy and another who is not promising any of that. The mechanisms of journalism have been so bent into delusions of faux neutrality that pointing out the Republican Party's march toward fascism is, according to many reporters and editors at major outlets, a story that must be balanced by some supposed equivalent disadvantage on the Democratic side—even if the balance must be invented by the press itself.
It's a shameful look for all involved. We don't need to hear the incessant bleating of the least informed Americans in the country over and over and over again. Journalists would do better to focus on informing their readers, rather than taunting them with false equivalencies so tortured as to make Americans even less informed than that.
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