The bigotry, fear and ignorance ruling US voters

Long-time readers will know that I’m a sucker for Aaron Sorkin’s TV series. The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Newsroom — you name it, I’ve been lured by witty dialogue and warm-hearted protagonists into mistakenly believing in America, or at least believing in the best of what America can be. Fortunately, everywhere I look there are correctives, reminding me that the reality of the US is very far from what Sorkin projects.

Still, the pull is strong. When my wife and I were looking for a new show to watch during America’s election season, Netflix offered The Girls on the Bus, a sort of Sorkin lite: less erudite, less complex, but ultimately better for me precisely because it doesn’t fully capture my imagination. Maybe I am just jaded, happier watching a series that is not trying to convince viewers of something worthy, one that is less naive about the fraught relationship between the political system in the US and the country’s fourth estate.

The Girls on the Bus is a product of a different historical moment. Inspired by Amy Chozick’s memoir Chasing Hillary, a book about Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, the show’s apparent worldly wise levity is underpinned by a sense of despair. However well Serious Journalists may do their job by holding the powerful to account while trying to maintain some sense of objectivity and integrity, there is a greater set of cultural and technological forces pushing voters into the arms of demagogues.

This perhaps explains the ironic sense of nostalgia that pervades the series. Its title, which appears in the opening sequence courtesy of an old-school typewriter, alludes to Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus. That book is about the members of the press corps who covered the 1972 presidential candidates — Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat George McGovern — among them the father of gonzo journalism, Hunter S Thompson. The narrator-protagonist of The Girls on the Bus, Sadie McCarthy, is enthralled by the gonzo mystique; she regularly talks to Thompson’s ghost, and her laptop is prominently marked by a sticker supporting the McGovern campaign.

Yet the show is also an explicit riposte to gonzo’s macho posturing and to the double standards applied to men and women in the media (both then and now). It explores the highs and lows of four female journalists covering the Democratic primaries. McCarthy writes for a fictionalised New York Times; Grace Gordon Greene is the hardened correspondent in the quartet, whose strained relationships with her husband and daughter make for a cautionary tale about “being a career woman”; Kimberlyn Kendrick is that rare phenomenon, a black conservative, working ambivalently for the equivalent to Fox News; and Lola Rahaii is the Gen Z representative, not so much a reporter as a TikTok influencer, but trying to save the world nonetheless.

Life in this milieu of (still mostly traditional) news media is a combination of cynicism, hedonism and idealism. The Girls on the Bus can’t be accused of glamorising either politicians or the journalists who play their game — sometimes as teammates, sometimes as opponents — but arguably it is complicit, along with the Sorkins of this world, in legitimising the circus that goes by the name of American democracy.

Candidates putting forward a set of ideas and policy proposals, allowing an informed public to make decisions about the issues that affect their collective wellbeing? What a quaint notion.

There are many reasons that Donald Trump is returning to the White House. At the base of most of them are bigotry, fear and ignorance. Geopolitics and economics might have been viewed as swing factors if the vote was close. But it wasn’t close at all. The manufacturers of the culture war have triumphed. Voter turnout was significantly lower than in 2020, but Trump won both the popular and electoral college votes comfortably. America has voted, paradoxically, for the end of democracy.

When future beings, surveying the mysterious wreckage of a vast continent, wonder how its civilisation collapsed — before or after the earth overheated — they may puzzle over curious Trump-shaped Easter Island heads or Ozymandias statue fragments. But they won’t be able to read about it in the New York Times.