Melting the ideological permafrost

Since the second inauguration of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, the constitutional date on which newly elected American presidents assume office has fallen on January 20th, at the coldest time of the year. This year, the second inauguration of President Donald Trump had to be moved indoors for the first time in 40 years on account of the cold. Yet inauguration day in the year of Our Lord 2025 seemed to many observers (including many who did not welcome it) to bring with it a remarkable thaw in the ideological pack-ice of progressivism which has been impeding any real political or cultural progress for most of the present century.

In American Greatness, Roger Kimball put it this way:

As I write, we are but 6 days into Trump’s second term. But it is as if we had suddenly awakened from a bad dream. Things that would have seemed impossible last month are suddenly not only possible but real.

Even those who had supposed the dream of the Biden years to have been not at all a bad one must have felt this to some extent — even a few Europeans.

The new sense of possibility that opened up with the new president’s flurry of executive orders dealing with the immigration crisis must have dawned on, among others, Friedrich Merz, leader of the German Christian Democrat Union. On the day after the inauguration he “delivered remarks unlike anything ever heard from a conservative German leader,” according to the Wall Street Journal,
and condemned the “wreckage of a decade-long misguided immigration policy” in Germany.
In Britain, also facing a long-unstemmed tide of immigration but locked into four more years of stagnation under the Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer, the Substack blogger Ed West looked at Mr Trump’s first week in office with a wild surmise and wondered, “Can you just do things?”

The media, not surprisingly, were inclined to think that, no, you cannot just do things. Or at least that Mr Trump can’t. And they were up to their usual tricks to try to stop him from doing anything they could. Yet there were a few signs that the usual tricks were no longer working all that well. Can there be anyone who has not been shut up in the media’s cold-storage locker for the last decade who, when the PBS NewsHour reported that Elon Musk “appear[ed] to give a fascist salute,” did not roll his eyes and say, with the PirateWires writer Riley Nork, that “people are kinda done with ‘everything is Hitler’”? I think not. And I think people are kinda done with a lot of things right now.

People were kinda done with “gender” ideology even before the Trump announcement that “it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” The new (and the old!) DEI bureaucracy in Washington was done the same day, while its clones in industry in even its last redoubt of higher education were already beginning to follow it into oblivion. Mark Zuckerberg is apparently done with his army of “fact checkers.” The Washington Post still has theirs, but now they’re hedging on “Democracy dies in darkness.”

With the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025, women’s sports look to be pretty much done with men pretending to be women. Starbucks is done opening its rest rooms to all comers. Some say that “climate change” apocalypticism is done, thanks in part to transparently self-interested attempts by negligent politicians in California to deflect blame for the wildfires that burned up a significant portion of Los Angeles in January from themselves and onto global warming. There are even indications (or so I am told) that California itself is done with Governor Gavin Newsom, though I’ll believe it when I see it.

If New York magazine is anything to go by (there’s a first time for everything), the youth of “Generation Z” are kinda done with progressive pieties. Oliver Bateman of UnHerd comments that,

Just as Wall Street’s “greed is good” ethos eventually displaced and mocked the earnest idealism of the hippie and New Age generations which preceded it, today’s young Right has learnt to wield irony like a weapon, turning woke-scold pieties into punchlines. The old Left-winger went from being a moral authority to a figure of mockery in less than a decade, and today’s progressive activists are headed for a similar fate.

Finally, our friends at Commentary magazine are not kinda but totally done with (gulp) their 15 year-old media column. As editor John Podhoretz writes, in the February issue, “Media don’t matter.”

In some sense, all conservative polemic. . . is a subset of media criticism. . . But media criticism in the old style has an anachronistic quality. The institutions that dominated news gathering and the expression of opinion are going the way of the dodo. In a decade, almost none of the giant machines that controlled news flow in the United States will be standing.

He may be right about this. But in saying that “Media don’t matter,” even though Mr Podhoretz uses the word “media” as a plural noun, he treats it as a singular entity. “Media” here has got to be a shorthand expression for what, when we need to for clarity’s sake, we normally qualify as legacy media, or mainstream media or corporate media or liberal media or left-wing media or perhaps, simply, big media.

Whatever they are called, we should fervently hope that they are, indeed, on the way out. In any case they don’t matter to most people already, and even to the people for whom they do matter they matter less and less. The big media behemoths which have ceased to be profitable will eventually be broken up or live on, as the Washington Post already does, as some mega-rich plutocrat’s plaything. Even now they are being replaced by lots and lots of littler, nimbler media, like Substack, and these must be counted as media too — media that do matter, especially to the ever greater number of those who have abandoned the big-city dailies and television network news shows.

But if big media no longer matter to most of the American public, they still matter to those who remain within the political world, and especially to the Democratic party. As I have written before,
those who imagine that the big media companies are nothing but a sort of appendage of the Democratic party have got it the wrong way around. It’s the media who are the senior partners in this combine and who call the tune that Democratic — and not a few Republican — politicians have to dance to.

Although their power to influence the opinions of ordinary Americans is undoubtedly much diminished, in politics perception is nine-tenths of the game. And the perception of our political class as a whole is, or has been up until now, that the media’s power either to advance or destroy their careers is as great as it ever was. The origin of that power, I believe, lies in the legend of Watergate and the prerogative that that episode in American media and cultural history has given to the big media to cry “Scandal!” any time they want to remove some minimally fallible human impediment in the way of the progressive juggernaut.

For 50 years and upwards, the threat of scandal — including the scandal of heterodoxy for opinions outside the media consensus — has been the means by which our media masters have managed to keep their political clients, willing and unwilling, in line. A word to the wise is sufficient so that, usually, they don’t have to be so heavy-handed about this as they were in early 2017 when the media’s Antifa shock troops camped outside Senator Chuck Schumer’s home just to make sure he didn’t even think about coming to some accommodation with Mr Trump’s first administration, as Newt Gingrich had done twenty years earlier with Bill Clinton’s.

Chuck has learned his lesson, of course, but the whole world has now seen the media’s impotence in the face of Mr Trump’s “shock and awe” blitz of executive orders. It is a failure that replicates their failure, in spite of an alliance with the deep state and the politicized courts and Department of Justice during the Biden administration, to stop his return to power and, with it, his ability to reverse some of the supposed historical certainties of the left.

Others besides Senator Schumer — others, perhaps, like Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania
— may now begin to realize that big media’s scandal power is finally going the way of the big media themselves. Maybe they don’t need to be afraid anymore of what the media can do to them to keep them all lined up with the wokies of the now rather tatterdemalion “Resistance.”

If, as Glenn Harlan Reynolds (aka Instapundit) believes, “It’s like a spell broke” since the election, this must be the reason. The “spell” is that cast by the Great and Powerful Oz of the media, who turns out to have been only as powerful as people once feared he was. Maybe they, and we, are kinda done with the media’s scandal culture too. “Since November’s election,” wrote Mr Reynolds,

the woke is going away, and all sorts of problems are resolving themselves. But why? There are several reasons, but basically, it’s a preference cascade. . . Soviet citizens knew their system was founded on lies, too, but the system kept them isolated, unaware that so many of their fellow citizens felt the same way, and unable to come together to act. This technique, used by totalitarians of all sorts, is called “preference falsification,” in which people are forced to profess belief in things that they know not to be true.

This new freedom from an ideological prison of which the media have long been the jailers must be what Mr Trump was referring to in his inaugural address as a “revolution of common sense.” Common sense should have told us years ago that there are only two sexes or that American history wasn’t defined by racism or that climate change did not pose an existential threat to life on earth, but for so long as the media threatened us with scandal, or “cancellation,” for saying so, too few of us were prepared to listen to the voice of common sense. Only when the media tried — oh how they tried! — and failed to cancel Donald Trump, could the rest of us begin to understand that we no longer had to fear to believe the evidence of our senses, and of common sense.

Of course the media continue to do the same things they have always done by trying to drum up scandal wherever they can against the president or his people. When, nine days into the new administration, an army helicopter collided with an American Airlines passenger jet at Reagan National airport, killing 67 people, it took less than an hour before media voices began to be heard,
blaming Mr Trump for the disaster. Then, when he subsequently blamed DEI hiring policies for air traffic controllers put in place by the Obama and Biden administrations, that became the scandal. Not the DEI rules but Mr Trump’s mention of them by way of politicizing the tragedy.

An old favorite turned up again when New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” column headlined that “Trump’s War on DEI Opens the Door to Jim Crow’s Return.” They were calling their signals from the same racial politics playbook that was used back in 2021. to propagandize in favor of the infamous HR1 Voting Rights bill that would have nationalized our elections in order to do away with local restrictions on voter eligibility and, therefore, potential electoral fraud.

As Christopher Caldwell pointed out in The Free Press, “affirmative action” has been hugely unpopular for the 60 years since Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, just as DEI is now, yet even Ronald Reagan didn’t dare to take on the dreaded “backlash,” in his own party as well as the media, that he knew would ensue if he tried to repeal it. That there has been so little lashing back now that President Trump has done it, comprehensively and almost casually, was perhaps a sign that big media’s latest cries of scandal — for example against such cabinet nominees as Pete Hegseth, now running the Defense Department — were less effective than expected.

But where does their obsolesence leave big media’s now-forlorn Democratic clients and dependants? “‘Give us a little time’: Democrats search for a guiding principle against Trump,” wrote Burgess Everett for the Semafor website. It’s another way of saying that their “guiding principle” hitherto, which has been sheer hatred for the man, has been tried and found wanting by everyone not living in the media’s fantasy world. Now, the Democrats may have to learn the hard way that a “guiding principle against” something or someone isn’t much use. Principles, properly understood, must be for something and can only be against their own neglect or violation. Fortunately, Democratic politicians who must reckon with public opinion in order to stay in office may be in a better position to realize this truth than their well-wishers at Semafor and elsewhere in the media.

“Instead of the vitriol of personal invective,” wrote J. Peder Zane for RealClearPolitics,

most Democrats have responded to Trump’s aggressive efforts to dismantle Biden’s policies merely with fierce criticism, which is their right and proper role as the opposition in our two-party system. It feels like a return to normalcy.

“Unfortunately,” he continues,

one corner of American society — the legacy media — is unpersuaded. Where Democrats seem aware that many of Trump’s actions are broadly popular . . .the folks at MSNBC, NPR, AP, and all the rest have no such restraint. Their dispatches continue to paint Trump in the darkest colors [and] their stories read like dispatches from people caught in a fever that has broken for much of the country. Given our recent history, it is hard to know if this movement toward normalcy will last. What does seem certain is that the legacy media will not change; they seem determined to go down with the ship.

Mr Zane puts his hope in the power of reality, eventually, to expose the fraudulence of the media’s dominant narrative of the last decade. I wish I could be so sure. If anything characterizes the big media, the media that are now melting away along with the ideological glacier with which they have so long been advancing, it is the belief that reality is ultimately subject to their power to mold and shape it. Until there is a clear majority of people who recognize how delusional this belief is and who can see the unchanging, unreconstructed reality behind and beside it, the story told by the media will continue to compel belief, at least for those who want to believe it. And the return of “normalcy” will remain so far precarious.