Non, je ne regrette rien

“Journalism’s Bleak Future — Trump Is Obsessed With Destroying the Media.” So wrote one Dara Brewton, identified as “Actress and Writer,” for Newsweek a fortnight after the election. I wonder if she’s any good as an actress? If only Mr Trump were obsessed with destroying the media! If only it were possible for him — or anyone else — to do so. Ah well, I can dream, can’t I?

But I was amused at the headline, not so much by the preposterousness of saying that anyone so much a creature of the media as Donald Trump could be out to destroy — let alone be “obsessed” with destroying — the media. Nor even that someone at Newsweek (as opposed to some obscure substack) thought this to be an arguable point of view for an opinion piece in a respectable (albeit online) magazine. Rather, I was struck by the irony-blindness of both Ms Brewton and Newsweek in advancing their hypothesis without making any mention of the media’s decade-long obsession with destroying Mr Trump.

Of course they, like most of the President-elect’s media detractors were themselves victims of that obsession and so could not be expected to see it in themselves. In their own eyes they were just doing what journalists do routinely — or what they have done routinely since Watergate — which is to seek out some bit of putative wrong-doing on the part of the powerful people they don’t like which can then be ballyhooed into a scandal and, if possible, a legal action, that will drive them from office.

If Mr Trump is to have a hope of “destroying” anything, it must instead be the public’s continuing willingness to take the media’s self-righteous malice at its own valuation as a disinterested quest for virtue and truth in public life. And there are signs, mainly in the oft-remarked decline of public trust in the media — which is now, in the wake of the election, even lower than it was when I have mentioned it before in these pages — that more and more people are catching on to the kind of game the media have long been playing with our politics.

Not that they can be expected to see this for themselves. A similar irony-blindness to Ms Brewton’s was evident a few days earlier in a Guardian piece by Joan E Greve headed: “‘No time to pull punches’: is a civil war on the horizon for the Democratic party?”

Joe Biden (she wrote) stood before the American people, millions of whom were still reeling from the news of Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race, and reassured them: “We’re going to be OK.” In his first remarks since his vice-president and chosen successor, Kamala Harris, lost the presidential election, Biden delivered a pep talk from the White House Rose Garden on a sunny Thursday that clashed with Democrats’ black mood in the wake of their devastating electoral losses. Biden pledged a smooth transfer of power to Trump and expressed faith in the endurance of the American experiment. . . . The message severely clashed with the dire warnings that many Democrats, including Biden, have issued about the dangers of a second Trump term. They have predicted that Trump’s return to power would jeopardize the very foundation of American democracy.

In other words (not Ms Greve’s), either Mr Biden is lying now or he was lying then. I wonder which Ms Greve believed to be the case? The answer, apparently, is that she never asked herself the question. Instead she went through a whole litany of possible reasons for the Democrat loss without ever mentioning that maybe, just maybe, the real reason was that the American people had seen more clearly what she herself had only and momentarily glimpsed: namely, that all the campaign rhetoric about Mr Trump’s “threat to democracy” was just a scare-tactic and that the Trump majority had spotted this rhetorical fakery long before Mr Biden implicitly acknowledged it in his Rose Garden statement, and with his subsequent cordial meeting with Mr Trump in the White House.

At least Ms Greve was willing to entertain the idea that the Democrats’ loss might have been owing to something that they had done wrong — perhaps their unceremonious dumping of Mr Biden and the installation in his place of someone who apparently had no ideas of her own to run on and who had never won an election outside of the one-party state of California. Lots of elected Democrats thought the same — or at least thought it politic to claim that they thought the same, and that they were looking close to home for explanations of why they lost.

“We’re having ongoing family conversations that will be candid, clear-eyed and comprehensive, and we look forward to continuing those discussions,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to The Washington Times. Soon to be Senate Minority Leader Charles “Chuck” Schumer told the paper that his party “will spend a long time learning and then figure out how to move forward.”

But the other side in the Democrat “civil war,” mentioned in the Guardian headline, the side mainly consisting of media folk disinclined to apologize for their radical progressive views, appear never even to have considered blaming themselves. Instead, they blamed the racism and sexism of the American people. Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” it seemed to them, had now grown to majority proportions.

Here, for example, is Elie Mystal for The Nation: “Everyone who hates Trump is asking how America can be ‘saved’ from him, again,” he writes. “Nobody is asking the more relevant question: Is America worth saving?”

America deserves everything it is about to get (he writes). We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better, safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid. . . America did this. America, through the process of a free and fair election, demanded this. America, as an idea, concept, and institution, wanted this. And America, as a collective, deserves to get what it wants.

Jill Filipovic is much of his mind: “In the coming days and weeks, you’ll read a lot about what Harris did wrong. . . But we should also be asking why so many Americans were willing — even enthusiastic — to again vote for Donald Trump. This election isn’t an indictment of Kamala Harris; it’s an indictment of our nation.”

Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post was far from the only progressive commentator to denounce “the role of racism and sexism, misogyny, grievance, white nationalism, that was very much a part of Donald Trump’s campaign. And I think we need to acknowledge it. We need to talk about it. And then I think, as a country, we need to confront it. We have never done it in our history. We probably won’t do it now.” Mr Capehart himself, in a long career in journalism, has done little else but confront such theoretical evils in the armory of those with whom he disagrees. Perhaps that can excuse the rest of us from having to do so.

Meanwhile, over at the far-left Boston Review, Harvard professor Peter E. Gordon blamed not the racist, sexist etc. American people but democracy itself. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald J. Trump,” Professor Gordon avers that “the tragic ascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw.” What price now Mr Trump as a “threat to democracy”? Stephen Colbert has the answer: “I wish, you wish, so many of us wish this hadn’t happened, but that is not for us to decide. This is a democracy. . . And in this democracy, the majority has spoken, and they said they don’t care that much about democracy.”

Neither does Professor Gordon. His piece plays off the title of Karl Marx’s essay on the coup d’état that brought Napoleon III to the French throne in 1851 (after he won the presidential election of 1848) and presumably looks forward to a similar dénouement to the Trump presidency, thus demonstrating, to the good Marxists of Boston anyway, how his election shows that it was democracy — the democracy that elected President Trump against the advice of the permanent ruling class — that was the threat. A threat, obviously, to themselves.

What Marx understood—and what too many of us have today forgotten — is that there is always a powerful countercurrent in history that can sweep away like Noah’s flood whatever political gains may seem to have been made. In his fury and frustration Marx damned all the various forces in that flood as a lumpenproletariat with Louis Bonaparte as its charismatic leader.

In other words, What brought Louis Bonaparte, aka Napoleon III, to power, was the mistake of allowing the deplorables of the lumpenproletariat to vote. Marx is said to have “glimpsed” that

Bonapartism was not a political movement that expressed the interests of a particular class; it was a movement born from the dissolution of class, the displacement of real interest by mere fantasies of interest that grow ever more powerful as the realm of the symbolic takes on a life of its own. Only this, I believe, can explain why modern forms of right-wing populism have such an uncanny and free-floating quality that they seem to survive with no other content than the fever dream of political solidarity itself. Democracy without content becomes a mere spectacle, a void organized around the two poles of “the leader” and “the people,” filled with nostalgic images of national and racial community.

By a now-familiar irony, “democracy without content” seems a far better description of Ms Harris’s campaign than of Mr Trump’s and was a big part of the reason why she lost. But never underestimate the power of an enlightened “intellectual” to make reality fit the Procrustean bed of his ideology. Even The New York Times noticed that “In more than two dozen interviews, lawmakers, strategists and officials offered a litany of explanations for Vice President Kamala Harris’s failure — and just about all of them fit neatly into their preconceived notions of how to win in politics.”

Professor Gordon is a particularly egregious example, however, of how there are none more class-conscious than the upwardly mobile intellectual meritocrat looking down on the unschooled rabble beneath him who don’t know what’s good for them and are unwilling to take their advice on the subject. Joel Kotkin seems to me to have got it right when he wrote for Spiked Online that “the party of the oligarchy thought it had a right to rule forever.”

Also at the New York Times, however, the inimitable Thomas Frank agrees that the real threat of a Trump presidency was to the ruling Democratic party rather than to our democratic republic, but he thinks that “The Elites Had it Coming.”

Everyone has a moment when he first realized that Donald Trump might well return, and here is mine. It was back in March, during a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, when I happened to read the explanatory text beside an old painting. This note described the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century as “settler colonialism.” I read it, and I knew instantly where this nation was going. My problem with this bit of academic jargon was not that it was wrong, per se, or that President Biden was somehow responsible for putting it there but rather that it offered a glimpse of our poisoned class relations. Some curator at one of our most exalted institutions of public instruction had decided to use a currently fashionable, morally loaded academic keyword to address a visitor to the museum — say, a family from the Midwest, doing the round of national shrines — and teach them a lesson about American wickedness.

Mr Frank was just one of many, beginning with Senator Bernie Sanders, who blamed the loss on the Democrats’ having turned away from their traditional base of support among those that they continue to refer to, in Marxist terms, as “the working class” — as if blue-collar work was the only kind of work there is — or, now, isn’t.

Here, for example, is Michael Tomasky of The New Republic on “Why the Democrats Have Been Making the Same Mistake—for 44 Years”

Having lived now through four particularly stinging Democratic presidential election defeats as an adult (1980, 2000, 2016, and 2024), I can tell you two things. One: The baseline criticism in every case has been the same. Two: Democrats, being (mostly) liberals, tend to overthink and overanalyze things. Parties lose elections for a hundred reasons, and yes, it’s worth giving some thought to all of them. But it’s striking to me that in these crushing defeats that have occurred over the course of 44 years, the basic thrust of the criticism has been the same: The party lost contact with working-class voters.

This has always been said, of course, because it’s an exceptionally easy thing to say — and to see. Not so easy, apparently, is doing anything about it when you’re ideologically wedded to an agenda that the working class finds repugnant. As Nick Tyrone wrote, also for Spiked,

There are many reasons why Donald Trump has won another presidential election. A big one, that many people who are now in mourning won’t be able to acknowledge, is that the metropolitan liberal left, of which I am a part, has been going down a particularly self-destructive path in recent years. If metropolitan liberals hadn’t done so many things wrong, Trump almost certainly would have lost. The good news for the Democrats in the US is that they can make the changes needed over the next four years in order to win next time. The bad news is that most of the changes they need to make involve giving up on shibboleths that a lot of them will be loath to give up on.

That’s the kind of insight that’s available to you when you are willing to abandon ideological thinking — whose principal attraction to the “intellectual” classes is its reassurance that, since they are on “the right side of history” they can never be wrong about such things. Pretty obviously, from that starting point, you can never learn from your mistakes but can only keep doing more of what caused you to make them in the first place. Thus Mr Tomasky and others like him appear to think that all the Democrats have to do to persuade the working classes to come home is to offer more economic hand-outs with borrowed money, supposedly to be paid for (eventually) by taxing “the rich.”

“Whether or not progressives are ready to accept it,” wrote John Burn-Murdoch for The Financial Times after a deep dive into the exit polls, “the evidence all points in one direction. America’s moderate voters have not deserted the Democrats; the party has pushed them away.” It may be then, as Joel Kotkin wrote, that “Democrats need a new Clinton” — meaning not Hillary but Bill, who showed that he could learn from an electoral rebuke — but they are most unlikely to get one for so long as they continue to allow the media’s ideological “progressives” to call the party’s tune.