Author Nicole Hemmer outlines how the American right wing has prepared itself for the impeachment trial for the past 50 years, and it's to all our detriments:
If you tuned in to Fox News to watch the opening arguments of the impeachment trial on Wednesday night, you were out of luck. Oh, the trial was still technically being broadcast on the network, but it had been reduced to a muted box on the side of the screen, while Sean Hannity assured viewers, “None of this will matter.”
This was the purest representation so far of conservative media’s efforts to minimize not just impeachment but the full array of President Trump’s misconduct. But minimization is only half the strategy to protect Republican control of the White House. The other half is scandalization: an effort to create an air of nonstop scandal around previous Democratic presidents and presidential hopefuls.
The rapid expansion of conservative media in the 1990s and 2000s, and the conservative scandal machine that powered it, transformed American politics. During the Bill Clinton era, new scandal-mongering magazines and websites made up what Hillary Clinton accurately called a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” What followed was a cynical, partisan impeachment that treated the serious constitutional remedy as just another political game. In so doing, Republicans diminished the significance of impeachment, making it less likely the public would take the current impeachment crisis seriously.
To write off Mr. Trump’s wrongdoing as run-of-the-mill politics, then, requires both minimizing what he has done and scandalizing what other politicians do. As an added bonus, the strategy damages Americans’ faith in government and public service, bolstering the Republican Party’s anti-government agenda. As such, it’s a powerful, effective political strategy — and a deeply nihilistic one.
These tactics have also served right-wing governments the world over as well. The Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, have always tried to portray the west as just as bad as Russia, as just one example.
Remember: the right wants to rule, so that they can enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. Making people believe "government is the problem" serves this narrative well.