In this post, I posited a way of understanding the election. Where Kamala Harris and down ballot Democrats engaged in traditional politics, it worked (as exhibited by Harris’ better performance in swing states and the retention of at least four of the swing state Senate seats, among other things). But propaganda worked far better across the board (exhibited, in part, by the large numbers of disaffected voters who supported Trump because they believed false claims about his policies or were mobilized by propaganda campaigns stoking fear).

Since I wrote the post, the election results have actually gotten a lot closer. Trump won by a lower percentage of the popular vote than Joe Biden did (and only just cracked 50% of the vote), and like Biden, won by narrow margins in the states that mattered.

If I’m right about that dynamic — that politics worked but propaganda worked far better — then it means much of the post-election soul-searching is misplaced (and, indeed, a dangerous misallocation of focus). That’s because Harris lost, in part, because of media disfunction, because electoral choice became dissociated from political persuasion more than any recent US election, largely due to an assault on the press and rational thought.

All this builds on Fox News and other institutions of right wing propaganda — though, partly because of the Dominion judgment and partly because Pete Buttigieg had started to crack through that facade, that’s an area where Dems did important work.

It builds on the hollowing out of the traditional press that has been happened for years, as corporate raiders turn news into a profit center. Several things made that worse, this year. As WSJ reported the other day, social media referrals to legacy newspapers cratered last year.