“Faith and Family” vs Democracy

On the normalization of Mike Johnson, the media’s inclination to accommodate power, and the perpetuation of “real American” extremism

What animates the man who rose through the latest round of Republican Speaker chaos in the House to become one of the nation’s most powerful politicians? What do the American people need to know about him, what should they expect from Mike Johnson?

“Faith and family” is the answer the Washington Post suggested.

On Sunday, one of the nation’s leading papers published a dispatch from Shreveport, Louisiana, titled: “House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana hometown guided by faith and family.” It is ostensibly an investigation into Johnson’s roots, written by a Post reporter whose beat is described as “Red states.” Yet the final product is indistinguishable from a political ad campaign for the politician at the center of the “reporting” – or from a sympathetic home story for a reality TV contestant. This is a rather bizarre kind of political journalism: It is “reporting” in the sense that a reporter goes to a place and collects impressions and interviews. But the result is a tendentious collage that entirely obscures that which it supposedly set out to illuminate.

The reason to dwell on this piece is not that it is uniquely awful, or that the author is singularly inept and/or disingenuous. If only! On the contrary, this reporting is indicative of pathologies that characterize too much of mainstream political journalism and the political discourse in general: A tendency to launder and normalize extremism for a broader audience, an impulse to accommodate and naturalize power, no matter where it resides – and an inclination to perpetuate ideas that form the bedrock of the ethno-religious nationalism that has galvanized behind Trump.

Jee Jee Johnson’s son Mike

The headline accurately reflects the framing and general thrust of this piece. “In northwest Louisiana,” we are being told early on, “people navigate their lives by family and faith. The politician raised here shares a heavy reliance on both.” Family and faith. The pillars of American society. Who could possibly object?

Certainly not the first witness to whom we are being introduced: Meet “Jeanne ‘Jee Jee’ Johnson, 69” – she is the Speaker’s mother. “Johnson saw her son’s selection in spiritual terms. ‘God did this,’ she said. … It’s so good for America.” Divine intervention, good for America. Just like that.

The Post reporter characterizes Jee Jee Johnson’s son as “a staunch conservative who championed religious causes” before running for office. What else could he be, coming from here, the place where “people navigate their lives by family and faith” – and what’s wrong with that?

But wait, what does that actually mean, “a staunch conservative who championed religious causes”? The piece offers one sentence to answer that question – a single sentence on the actual record of the man who receives so much glowing praise from his friends and neighbors, the man who is now is position to significantly shape the nation’s politics: “Although more low-profile than other Donald Trump supporters in Congress, he played a pivotal role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election and opposes abortion rights, gun control and same-sex marriage, views shared by many supporters at home.” The man of “faith and family,” he “opposes” abortion rights and same-sex marriage. It’s what we would expect from a “staunch conservative.”

But what about the other parts of his record that are mentioned here: a “pivotal role” in the attempt to nullify a democratic election – was that the family or the faith animating him? And is opposing gun control a “religious cause”? Or is there perhaps more going on with this Mike Johnson from Shreveport, Louisiana – are there terms that might capture more adequately than “conservative” and “religious” what the political project is he’s been pursuing with such commitment? That, unfortunately, is not a question this article is interested in.

Besides, here is the important part: Those are all “views shared by many supporters at home,” we are being told. And to be fair, yes, “The election was stolen and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president” (my words, not the article’s): I guess you can call that a “view.” And Mike Johnson, man of the people, is aligned with these views of folks back home. Everyone is just navigating their lives by family and faith.

Speaker Mike, man of the people

Let’s meet our next witness for who this Mike Johnson truly is. We hear from a man who is presented to us as “Royal Alexander, 56, a conservative lawyer.” What can Mr. Alexander, who is from Shreveport himself and knows the Speaker personally, tell us about Johnson and the community from which he hails: “It’s a cultural conservatism, a view not only of politics but of religion and faith” – ah yes, family and faith, remember? “People here,” Alexander continues, “are rugged individualists who want to make their own decisions.” So much folk Americana in so few words. Rugged individualists. All they want is the freedom to make their own decisions. Well, and also the freedom to impose their decisions, their faith, their ideas on the rest of the country – after all, the new Speaker is co-sponsoring a national “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and he is rather all in on mobilizing the coercive powers of the state to criminalize all those whose behaviors he deems “deviant.” But sure, “rugged individualists.” Should we, the audience, have been informed that Royal Alexander, this “conservative lawyer,” has actually run for office as a Republican, has spent many years as a GOP operative, and continues to serve as a rightwing pundit who rails against all the usual suspects of “woke” leftism? The Washington Post doesn’t think so. Conservative lawyer. From Shreveport. That’s all we get.

Next, we meet “Shreveport native” Celeste Gauthier, 45. “Politics here is personal,” she says. What she is personally worried about is all that aid to Ukraine and Israel causing inflation and driving up prices to the point where she can’t go to the grocery store anymore. That is not at all an adequate diagnosis of how these things are – or rather: aren’t – connected. But the Washington Post doesn’t dwell on that. In any case, Gauthier believes things might turn around now: Many people down in Shreveport know Johnson personally, and “we often get overlooked and maybe we won’t anymore.” After all, the Speaker of the House is a man of the people.

What else do we learn about Mike Johnson in this piece? Republican state Rep. Alan Seabaugh describes him as someone who “will try to find common ground and work it out without it being personal” (nothing personal about criminalizing and ostracizing all those “deviants,” I guess). School counselor Rosemary Day, “whose children Johnson’s mother used to babysit,” praises the Speaker’s leadership, because “that’s the mind-set in this area.” Very reassuring. Finally, there is retired nurse Tina Hickey, a Republican, who “was thrilled to see such an ‘honest, transparent, Christian man’ elected speaker.” Family and faith. 

Does everyone down in northwest Louisiana support Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House? Not quite. The article acknowledges that the people who live here “remain divided, like much of the country, along ideological and racial lines.” And after hearing from so many who are fully on Johnson’s side, the piece presents three people who are being introduced to us as potentially more critical voices.

There is Rev. Theron Jackson, who laments that as a Congressman, Johnson has, so far, “done little to make the community better.” He is also concerned about gerrymandering diluting the Black vote in Louisiana. Jackson is not a Republican – but not a Democrat anymore either: He used to be, but “now considers himself an independent.”

There are two voices introduced as Democratic in the story. One is 83-year-old Beth Hayes, a retired nurse and registered Democrat. We learn, however, that she “was proud of Johnson and had high hopes for him as speaker.” The Democratic Party? Ah, well, she “has become more independent in recent years,” and very casually, the article mentions that she has actually voted for Trump twice. Oh.

Finally, there is security guard Jesse Lee, 72 years old. Lee is a Black man and a Democrat – but he, too, is optimistic about Johnson’s Speakership: He expects him to “help all those back home” and help the people of Louisiana come together, overcome their divisions, “Because we all serve the same God.”

Remarkably, then, the piece leaves us with ample praise for Johnson – the leader, the family man, the man of faith, the man of the people, the uniter – and actually not a single criticism specifically directed at him. Nothing on his white Christian nationalism, his bigotry, his political extremism. Not a critical word. The critique by (former) Democrats comes late in the piece and is directed at the state of Louisiana politics, at gerrymandering – but not explicitly connected to Johnson or the political project he so vehemently supports. Instead, just like the socio-economic deprivation of Black communities in the Shreveport area, it’s just something Johnson hasn’t yet rectified. And even that part ends with Jesse Lee, the Black veteran, serving as a character witness: “I think he will.”

Mike Johnson gets his home story

If reality TV producers want an audience to embrace a contestant, they deliver a home story. Send a camera crew down to wherever the contestant is from, film them in their natural habitat, laughing with family and friends, have people with personal connections to the contestant talk about what a wonderful kid they are, how proud the community is of them: One of us, and now out there on the big stage – can you believe it! Strip all the pretensions of Very Serious “Reporting” away, and that’s what the Washington Post produced here: There is no investigation, no analysis, no context – it’s a home story effectively serving as part of an accommodating project that erodes the democratic guardrails and shifts the boundaries of what is regarded “respectable” ever more to the right.

At least in reality TV, manipulating the audience is the stated mission and the producers are just doing their job. What’s the excuse here? It could be a deliberate attempt by the journalist and the outlet to make Johnson look good. That would certainly explain the article. Frankly, I’d prefer it if this were the case – just partisans producing partisan stories. But I believe there is something much more pervasive and, in a way, insidious going on: Dynamics that shape and distort the mainstream political discourse well beyond individual intent or partisan commitment.

When journalists are criticized for this kind of diner / home story reporting, their instinct is to emphasize they are just doing their job the way it’s supposed to be done: They are observing, functioning as objective vessels to relay the stories that are out there.

What they are actually doing, however, is not adequately described as observing / mirroring / reproducing the world (“the story”) – they are rather selecting / amplifying / constructing / producing it. We necessarily rely on the stories they choose to tell, and how they choose to tell them. There is no such thing as “just reporting the facts” or “just relaying the story.” The job is to select from the myriad events and developments, from the near infinite number of voices and perspectives, those which deserve the attention of the public and decide on a presentation and framing that best contribute to an adequate understanding of what is shaping the polity. There is no way for journalists to be just passive observers, no way for them not to intervene. The actual decision is what kind of intervention they want to make.

The act of creating and constructing (rather than merely observing and relaying) the story in this Washington Post piece is most visible in the author’s selection of the voices that are being platformed. That selection reveals precisely the impulses, tendencies, and dynamics that are shaping media coverage and the mainstream political discourse more broadly.

It is, first of all, predicated on the idea that some groups – white Christian conservatives in rural areas, specifically – represent “real America.” They are therefore presented as “regular folks” – a normative concept that assigns them the right to be heard as they are imagined to be in tune with the nation’s essence and soul. “I’ll never stop asking red state folks what they think,” Molly Hennessy-Fiske, the Washington Post reporter behind this sympathetic collage, defiantly posted on social media in response to criticism. Boosting the thoughts, views, and sensibilities of these “folks” as a necessary civic service – since they are otherwise ignored and forgotten, don’t you see, due to the ignorance and arrogance of educated, mostly liberal elites in coastal urban centers. These aren’t empirical statements, however, but ideological claims. They are based on a widespread ideology of “real Americanism” that is centered around an essentialist view of who gets to represent the nation. If you do – or have a special connection to them, speak for them, as Trump supposedly does – it is your prerogative to have your message amplified.

The selection of voices and the kind of sympathetic story it creates is, secondly, incentivized by the rules of neutrality-theater journalism that govern much of the mainstream political coverage. The reporter and the Washington Post get to tell the world and, crucially, themselves: Look how neutral and nonpartisan we are, we are reaching out to real American folks, we are listening, we are providing a platform for conservative viewpoints. They may even believe this might buy them some credibility with the Right: Can’t you see? There is no liberal bias here! It is a form of appeasement that will never yield the desired result, as the goal of the decades-long rightwing campaign against the “liberal media” was never to achieve fairness, but to undermine trust in all the institutions of American life conservatives don’t control.

Accommodating extremism

Ultimately, this report is indicative of a much broader tendency in American mainstream politics of accommodating extremism as it ascends to authority. Predictably, as robust consequences for the extremists and insurrections who are rising within the Republican Party never materialized, the conventions of the mainstream media discourse took over: defer to power, no matter where it resides; protect access; sacrifice clarity on the altar of “balance” and “neutrality.”

“Normalization” might be an overused trope – but here it applies. Religious zealotry is presented as the outgrowth of a worldview shaped by “faith and family,” those widely accepted pillars of American culture; a professional life spent in rightwing activist circles and among partisan extremists is reinterpreted as a career of service and leadership; a radical political agenda is sanitized as the manifestation of the worries and desires of “regular folks.”

This is another iteration of an apologist sleight of hand that is often deployed to provide cover for the Republican Party: If extremism is not defined by its ideological and political substance, but purely as “something fringe,” then the minute it becomes GOP mainstream, it ceases to be regarded as extreme. Just like that, radical ideas and politicians get automatically legitimized: By definition, the Republican Party, regardless of how substantively extreme, gets treated as “normal” simply because it is not fringe, because it is supported by almost half the country.

The result is a portrait of Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, as someone well within the bounds of the regular, the respectable. Here is a normalization machine that perpetuates itself: Once it has successfully transformed Johnson into someone who is legible as “normal,” he will get the “normal” treatment: Rising political stars can expect a certain sympathetic fascination, even deference, and they get a home story that makes them look good. Mike Johnson just got his. All about family and faith.