The 2016 election broke certain members of the media, particularly the progressive culture warriors.
President Trump is such a repudiation of their worldview, and such a brutal contrast to their deeply held beliefs, that they can barely comprehend he won, let alone accept he did it legitimately. Rather than confront difficult realities — that they are not the dominating political force in this country and that a significant percentage of the electorate rejects their ideals — some progressive media types have locked themselves away in loops, theorizing ad infinitum about all-powerful bogeymen and far-reaching foreign conspiracies. Many fantasize about the one weird trick to remove Trump from office.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid, for example, spent part of her show this weekend speculating about what might happen should the president refuse to allow himself to be arrested by federal marshals. This is a real thing that was discussed on a real show by real political analysts.
“Let’s say that Donald Trump decides he doesn’t want to give an interview with [special counsel Robert Mueller], but Mueller says ‘Oh, but you will.’ And he’s subpoenaed to [be] interview[ed] [by] Robert Mueller. And Donald Trump simply says, ‘I don’t recognize that subpoena.’ This is a president whose behavior is different as president of the United States. He doesn’t follow convention. Who would force him to comply with the subpoena ordering him to do an interview with Robert Mueller?” Reid pondered.
She asked later, seriously, “What if he refuses to open the White House door? What if he fires any Secret Service agent who would allow the federal marshals in? What if Donald Trump simply decides, ‘I don’t have to follow the law? I refuse to be held under the law. No marshal can get into this White House and any Secret Service agent who defies me is fired.'”
[Also read: New York Times editorial board goes full authoritarian]
These absurd hypotheticals are packaged to appear as if they’re for the enlightenment of viewers, but allow me to go out on a limb and suggest they are really meant to comfort the speaker. They’re meant to reassure the storyteller that order will soon be restored, that their politics are very popular, and that the reason things didn’t go their way in 2016 is because they’re of a vast conspiracy.
After all, Reid is not the only progressive in media indulging in these master puppeteer fantasies.
It has been 14 months since Trump was sworn in as president. Time hasn’t worn down the people most shocked by the GOP’s victory. On the contrary, it seems to have made them wilder and more desperate to expose the truth behind who is really running the show.
Progressive politics didn’t lose the White House. The Russians “hacked the election.” Voters didn’t reject progressive ideals. They were tricked by “fake news.” And so on.
The U.S.’ top geopolitical threat is Russia. “Fake news” is a genuine problem. The Kremlin meddled in the 2016 election by spreading disinformation. All of this is true.
But these truths don’t make the groundless ravings of the same media personalities who scoffed in 2012 at warnings about Moscow any less ridiculous or pitiful. These truths don’t justify the equally pitiable fact that they’ve nothing to show for the hours, weeks and months they’ve dedicated to increasingly fantastic theories.
If you consider yourself a constitutional conservative or a libertarian, it’s hard not to be amused by this ongoing post-election meltdown. For both groups, politics and culture have one overwhelming flavor: disappointment. Yet most of them take defeat on the chin and move forward, looking to the next political contest.
Losing at the ballot box is a regular occurrence for them. Watching as preferred candidates are pushed to the side in favor of obviously inferior alternatives is what happens. The general erosion of civil liberties and federalism has been an unpleasant fact for decades. Then there’s the culture war, which has been little more than a steady stream of losses. Books, movies, songs, television shows, etc., have increasingly mirrored a certain worldview, and it’s not exactly conservative or libertarian (there are exceptions, of course).
The gung-ho progressive, on the other hand, has seen so many incremental gains in politics and the culture wars recently that I think he has forgotten what it’s like to lose. He has forgotten that half of the country doesn’t think like him, and that a significant number of voters oppose his worldview so much that they’d even vote for Trump.
And that’s the unkindest cut of all.
