In the nearly four years I've worked at Mother Jones, I've written my share of viral stories featuring Democrats making political slam dunks. You know the kind I'm talking about:
From June 2019: "Kamala Harris Just Won the Internet With 'Her Hands'"
September 2019: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Republicans: History Will Remember You Backed Trump"
December 2019: "'Don't Mess With Me': Nancy Pelosi Fires Back at Reporter's Question After Impeachment Announcement"
There's nothing glaringly wrong with these stories, but they're not incredibly useful, either. They're effective, insofar as they satisfy the reader rooting for Kamala Harris or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Nancy Pelosi. But in 2023, they also hit like relics of an era that sits somewhere between Barack Obama and Donald Trump, when we said "girlboss" unironically and posted #Resistance hashtags. After nearly a decade of political corniness, I'm urging us to resist going back.
We all enjoyed last week's C-SPAN circus, but my colleague Inae Oh suggests that we should not allow the network to become another incubator for viral moments, lest we return to producing the sort of content I spent most of 2019 writing. "Adults who run our country now obsess over ways to appear in headlines claiming they’ve DESTROYED political foes, whose long game doesn’t extend much further than to create endless content," she writes. While Republicans do most of this clout chasing, Democrats aren't immune. Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) fed the content machine last week, but the result was a mix of unforgivable cringe and performance, Inae writes. So why would we give C-SPAN permanent control of the cameras, as some are calling for, and let lawmakers "commit such corny atrocities under the guise of faux transparency?"
One Trump-era meme had people longing for "precedented times." If we make C-SPAN boring again, we can have them.
—Abigail Weinberg
