Thanks for making the effort. I just don’t know enough about US politics to argue with you. Certainly the way Cheney was treated seemed odd to me and the ongoing support for Trump is incomprehensible.

To return to the original article, which is primarily about media manipulation, I see nothing in anything I read in WaPo or NYT, or anything I see on CNN, that indicates “the left has done a better job of moderating its positions.”

As a matter of interest, is there a left equivalent of a Sowell that you would recommend reading? The thinking left here seems to have been subsumed by the progressive left, which mainly spouts unreadable nonsense. I genuinely don’t know what the left stands for now, other than the destruction of old moral codes. It certainly doesn’t stand for the indigenous working class.

You are right we should definitely not import your social theories but the constituencies I mentioned above have swallowed them whole and are hugely influential.

I can understand why this appears to be the case from a British point of view. The key to understanding all the points you mentioned is this. From its inception, America has always had a fairly significant anti-government, anti-elite sentiment, which waxes and wanes over time and according to circumstances but is now at a historic high. Further, the media, the bureaucracy, and many/most politicians are heavily influenced or completely controlled by a group of entrenched lobbyists, political action committees, super-wealthy tycoons, multinational corporations, etc., whom I often refer to as “establishment” or “ruling class” for the sake of brevity. Both Democrat and Republican parties have been controlled for decades by this increasingly hated establishment through campaign donations and outright corruption. Americans have largely woken up to this, and both parties have powerful insurgent movements. Trump and his acolytes are the Republican incarnation while Bernie, Warren, and others are the Democrat version. The media, however, is backed by the establishment, who desperately want and need these populist/socialist? movements to fail because a President Sanders/Warren/Trump 2.0 might begin to cut into their neoliberal globalist agenda that keeps them wealthy and powerful. So, what you see in the media that we, as Americans, deeply mistrust is largely a fiction of a sensible and sane bunch of centrists presiding over a nation of crazies on the left and right. They glorify figures like Biden and Cheney because they, or more accurately their financiers, want to continue the dynamic where both parties are controlled by economic globalists who push free trade/open borders/NATO good/Russia bad/China good/etc. Their problem is almost nobody in America believes them anymore. As others have pointed out, the NYT and CNN are no better than Fox News, and for basically the same reason, but being older they naturally have more established credibility, especially with foreigners who can’t be expected to closely follow America’s social and political climate. Biden is, and always has been, far more popular in Europe than he is in his own country. Most Americans by this point have their own sources of news, but sensible Americans don’t completely trust even these. We treat our own media with a high degree of skepticism. That’s a large part of the reason I pay to subscribe to a British news site. There’s almost nobody on this side of the Atlantic I trust enough to give money to. Agree btw on not importing American social theories. America is a different animal from Europe entirely. The closest European dynamic is France with its history of popular revolutions and anti-elite sentiment, and I’m guessing no sane British person wants to imitate the French.