Sometimes, you get an indication that someone on Fox News is getting high on their own supply. Or maybe Sean Hannity's graphics team is just getting sick of him. But it seems more likely that President Trump's late-night-phone-companion is so deep into the Lib-Bashing Vortex that he is starting to lose his grip on things. The result is that, Wednesday night, Hannity found himself bashing a political platform that included "support seniors" and "clean campaign finance."

The segment was designed to attack the platform of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old Democratic Socialist who defeated a titan of the New York Democratic machine in a primary Tuesday night. At one point, Hannity's production team decided to throw up the policies on the screen behind him. Except they failed to run the graphic through the normally rigorous process of Fox News scaremongerization and white-resentment optimization. They just put it up there, spin-free, and it looked...pretty reasonable?

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Sean Hannity just presented this agenda as a negative pic.twitter.com/mYoByIRyr5 — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) June 28, 2018

Hannity seems to think these positions are self-evidently extreme. But:

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look at this pic.twitter.com/ePDHhAQpf4 — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) June 28, 2018

In a 2015 poll, 85 percent of Americans said the campaign finance system must be "completely rebuilt" or see "fundamental changes."

A survey in May suggested voters from both parties in key battleground House districts across the country want "overwhelming, broad-based, and intense support for curbing big banks' influence in Washington, and holding financial companies accountable for discrimination." In one survey, 72 percent of likely 2018 voters supported a modern Glass-Steagall Act.

Everything else in the graphic is pretty self-explanatory. Either you believe LGBT citizens have civil rights—support for same-sex marriage now stands at 67 percent—or you do not. And if you can't get behind "supporting seniors" or "solidarity with Puerto Rico"—which, is, after all, part of the United States—then it's hard to see what any politician can do for you.

The amazing thing is Hannity laid all this out as, "This is the future. This is your modern Democratic Party." He's showing it to millions of people. There aren't likely to be too many converts among his viewers, but isn't this the kind of platform that would win Democrats elections?

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More than just discounting these policy prescriptions, though, Hannity's tone communicates that he finds the very idea we'd be interested in every American having housing to be absurd. He does not even acknowledge this as a possible goal of society, despite the fact that research indicates it leads to profoundly better economic and personal outcomes. That would mean The Losers getting something They Don't Deserve.



And that is the cancer at the root of the Fox News resentment machine. Thanks in no small part to the current president, the whole apparatus has been so completely oriented towards bashing people and filling your mug with liberal tears that the whole concept of a representative government that serves the people in real ways has gone by the wayside. In fact, it barely seems to factor in at all.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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