Plus: A revisionist history of Beavis and Butt-Head
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Layoffs of 115 newsroom staffers at The Los Angeles Times are the latest blow to the ailing news industry. What is the state of local journalism where you live, and how does it affect your community?
Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
In New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation Republican primary, Donald Trump, the former president, beat Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations.
Now many in the press are presuming a Trump vs. Biden rematch.
But I’ll proceed writing as though Haley could win, though it may strike some as unsavvy—because she could win, much as an underdog team could come back from a bad first quarter.
In sports, play-by-play commentators often have strong instincts about the likeliest outcome, but no one wants or expects them to focus their real-time analysis on those predictions. Americans would be better served by analogous norms in the press, which should focus less on predicting the future it foresees, particularly given that news coverage itself affects the future; as the 2016 election showed, conventional wisdom among “savvy” pundits can be dead wrong.
In that spirit, let’s look at the race right now. To win the Republican nomination, 1,215 delegates are needed. So far, Donald Trump has won 32 delegates. Nikki Haley has won 17. Before dropping out, Ron DeSantis won nine, and Vivek Ramaswamy won three.
The victor is not yet written.
The next primary, in South Carolina, is a month away. That’s a month for Haley to campaign one-on-one against Trump, in a state where she was governor. It’s a month during which Trump, who is famously erratic and older than he was in his previous run, may say any number of things that cost him support. And the many legal cases against Trump are likely to give voters new information, too. Yes, Trump remains the favorite, but he is by no means already the GOP nominee. And the many voters who are just tuning in deserve a press that covers the remaining primaries as ongoing contests that have yet to unfold, not as formalities with foregone conclusions.
Money Matters
What do I mean when I say that the political press influences the outcome of campaigns with its prognostications? Well, take fundraising. In National Review, the GOP strategist Whit Ayres argues that it will play a big role in the race. “The real question is whether [Haley] can raise sufficient money to sustain a monthlong, one-on-one campaign in South Carolina,” he told the magazine. “Donald Trump has never had to endure a one-on-one sustained campaign in the primary. She’ll at least stay viable for the next month, but she’s got to be able to raise some money.” Haley won’t be able to raise money if everyone is convinced that her loss is inevitable.
The Value of Staying and Fighting
Also in National Review, Jim Geraghty lays out the reasons, as he sees them, that Haley should and shouldn’t stay in the race. He makes clear that she faces an uphill battle in South Carolina and that she is taking a risk by challenging Trump in the state. He writes: “No one has polled South Carolina since Ron DeSantis dropped out, but the most recent Emerson poll had Trump at 54 percent to Haley’s 25 percent. That poll had DeSantis at 7 percent, Chris Christie at 5 percent, and Vivek Ramaswamy at 3 percent. There’s no law that says you must end your campaign when you lose your home state, but … it’s pretty embarrassing when it happens.”
What’s more, Geraghty notes, “the front-runner is a vengeful rage-aholic who loathes her, carries grudges, and is explicitly running on a campaign theme of retribution.” Still, he writes, there’s this:
The rest of the country’s Republicans deserve a choice, too. The Republicans who don’t want Donald Trump are a minority, but they are a large minority … There are a lot of Republicans who want to have an option to say, “No, Trump is not the right direction for this party,” and they deserve to have an opportunity to have their voices heard. If Haley drops out, very few Republicans will bother to participate in the remaining primaries and caucuses. There are 48 states that have not yet voted in this presidential primary.
Given all of that, Haley staying in the race is arguably a risky and admirable choice.
An Influential Mass Murder
On January 21, the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s death, Ilya Somin argued that we should remember the Communist leader as follows:
Lenin was the one who initiated the policies that caused about 90% of the repression and death in the Soviet Union ... later communist regimes tended to adopt similar policies to those of the Soviet Union and got similar results. Mao Zedong managed to exceed the Soviet Union in sheer numbers of victims (he had a much larger population to work with). Cambodia’s Pol Pot killed a higher percentage of his population in a shorter period of time, and arguably managed to exceed both the Soviets and Chinese in sheer torture and cruelty. But these mass murderers were, on major issues, still largely following the model first established by Lenin ... Ultimately, the root of the evil here wasn’t the personality of any one leader, but the ideology Lenin, Stalin, and their comrades all sought to implement. But Lenin was nonetheless notable for being the first to lead a regime that pursued these policies, and set an example for all that followed.
Provocation of the Week
In a recent episode of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, its host, Rob Harvilla, mused about how distracted we all are in the age of tabbed web browsing, smartphones, and social media––something he feels most powerfully, as a longtime rock critic, when he tries to watch a music video from beginning to end without doing anything else and finds that his attention span has been destroyed. It makes him think back to the 1980s, when MTV was regarded as a force that was polluting the youth, in part by destroying their precious attention spans.
He reflected:
Remember when “MTV-style editing” was a slur in magazines and newspapers and movie reviews and the venerable halls of shrewd cultural analysis? The quick, nonsensical cuts. The wanton flashiness. The narrative dysfunction. The brazen, lewd insouciant randomness of your typical MTV video. MTV was a sign of the apocalypse. MTV was the apocalypse.
Most of all, he recalled, the MTV show Beavis and Butt-Head was seen as corrupting young people. And yet, he argued:
At its core, the show Beavis and Butt-Head is about two burnout-loser-miscreant teenagers who just sit on a couch and watch music videos on MTV with zero other distractions, and then they share their feelings about what they see and hear … Do you have any idea how wholesome, how admirable, how culturally enriching, the mid-’90s TV show Beavis and Butt-Head feels now, in 2024? They just sit there and watch music videos, and listen! And pay attention! And have engrossing conversations with one another …
Watching old clips, I’d forgotten how much silence there is. They’ll go 30 seconds without saying anything to one another. There’s a genuine reverence, a focus. It’s astounding. It’s archaic. The sheer length and intensity of their attention spans feels like ancient history, like science fiction. It’s like that Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, where the dumbest person in 2005 is like the smartest person alive 500 years later … What I’m saying to you is that if Beavis and Butt-Head were actual human teenagers in the 1990s, then right now, in 2024, as adults, they’d be in the Senate. They’d be leading the Senate.
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