The more comfortable my older sibling Frisk and I feel with remembering childhood days of being political, eagerly following current events and investigative journalism, naïvely admiring the feats of Daniel Ellsberg and the Woodstein boys, the more estranged we feel from contemporary politics. We're still trying to get used to how different everything is today, even though I've been furiously trying to keep pace with it. When we were growing up, Watergate still felt somewhat novel, even though the 1980s papers were full of Reagan scandals. Frisk and I could read about Watergate, feel appalled by such a catastrophic breakdown of public trust, and try to make ourselves believe that such things were a rarity, a thankfully limited excursion from the routines of liberal democracy.
Then, uh, well, things happened, and now we're here in 2024, realizing that we were wrong to think of Watergate as a rarity. Now it's clearly a normality. U.S. politics and political media had hastily slammed the door shut on the Watergate scandal even though justice wasn't even nearly satisfied—Nixon went on to a lengthy post-Watergate period of propagandizing himself, and now he's practically a hero and model for others. Everyone decided that Watergate would never happen again, by which they meant they'd never let reporters threaten political stability again.
Once it was a massive scandal to report that a U.S. politician had a "slush fund", a secret war-chest to fund shady political activities. Now it's safe to assume that everyone has such a fund, and nobody calls it a "slush fund" any more but a "political action committee" or something else bland and corporate. It'll have a respectable brand name and liaisons with the press. Corruption is more fun than honest government, so long as there's a mutual agreement not to examine it closely; that way, journalism about corruption can stick to a lively and profitable and entertaining racket, a steady stream of political gossip that never adds up to anything actionable.
My sibling and I just aren't used to it yet. That sounds pathetic.
~Chara