Ezra Klein

The aftermath of the 2016 election has been dominated by two questions. How did Donald Trump win? And did the Democratic Party tilt too much toward Hillary Clinton, choking Bernie Sanders’s candidacy and condemning America to a Trump presidency? Lurking in these questions is a very modern vision of electoral politics. Today, we see elections, and even party primaries, as open platforms; to imagine anything else is unnatural. But primary elections didn’t exist in American politics until the beginning of the 20th century, and they did not decide presidential nominees until the 1970s.

[Commentary] We like to imagine American politics as a kind of scored debate, with political actors acting as the debaters, the media acting as the judge, and the public acting as the audience. Much of cable news is based, implicitly or explicitly, on this metaphor.

[Commentary] There is a case to be made that the media created Donald Trump. It was, reportedly, his anger at being dismissed by political pundits that led him to run for president in the first place. And it was, arguably, the media’s wall-to-wall coverage of his every utterance that powered his victory in the Republican primary. But slowly, surely, the media has turned on Trump. He still gets wall-to-wall coverage, but that coverage is overwhelmingly negative. Increasingly, the press doesn’t even pretend to treat Trump like a normal candidate. It’s a common criticism of political reporting that it’s hampered by a faux-evenhandedness — if one side says the sky is blue and the other side says it’s orange, then the headline will be "Opinions on Color of Sky Differ." But that hasn’t happened this year. The media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon. Trump, for one, has noticed the negativity of his coverage. It’s become a favored explanation for his sagging poll numbers.

A Q&A with Susan Crawford, Former Special Assistant to President Obama on Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy.

When asked why there should be a public option for Internet access, Crawford replied: “We need a public option for Internet access because Internet access is just like electricity or a road grid. This is something that the private market doesn't provide left to its own devices. What they'll do is systematically provide extraordinarily expensive services for the richest people in America, leave out a huge percentage of the population and, in general, try to make their own profits at the expense of social good.”

The private market cannot sufficiently provide these options because as private entities, rather than equitable distribution, they will always be seeking the highest reward. “They're going to leave out less wealthy areas and places that are more remote,” she explained. “But we're one country and every American needs this access just the same way every American needed a telephone line.”

Crawford sees the Internet as a utility that will provide a changing platform that should be adaptable to future networks. What is required to make this happen, ultimately, is leadership, according to Crawford, noting that infrastructure issues are bipartisan by nature.