Congratulations, Elitists: Liberals and Conservatives Do Have Common
Interests Now
Well done, snobs of the #Resistance. You made the Horseshoe Theory real.
Matt Taibbi
Jun 3
"Trump-defender" Glenn Greenwald.
The hilarious headline in the Daily Beast yesterday read like a cross of
Clickhole and Izvestia circa 1937: "Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of
Right-Wing Media? FROM HIS MOUTH TO FOX'S EARS!"
The story, fed to poor Beast media writer Lloyd Grove by certain unnamed
embittered personages at the Intercept, is that their former star writer
Greenwald appears on, and helps provide content for - gasp! - right-wing
media! It's nearly the exclusive point of the article. Greenwald goes on TV
with. those people! The Beast's furious journalisming includes a "spot
check" of the number of Fox items inspired by Greenwald articles ("dozens"!)
and multiple passages comparing Greenwald to Donald Trump, the ultimate
insult in #Resistance world. This one made me laugh out loud:
In a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and
back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his
very own news cycles.
This, folks, is from the Daily Beast, a publication that has spent much of
the last five years huffing horseshit into headlines, from Bountygate to
Bernie's Mittens to classics like SNL: Alec Baldwin's Trump Admits 'I Don't
Care About America'. The best example was its "investigation" revealing that
three of Tulsi Gabbard's 75,000 individual donors - the late Princeton
professor Stephen Cohen, peace activist Sharon Tennison, and a person called
"Goofy Grapes" who may or may not have worked for Russia Today host Lee Camp
- were, in their estimation, Putin "apologists." Speaking of creating your
own news cycles, this asinine smear inspired serious stories by ABC News and
CNN, and when Gabbard denounced it as "fake news," Politico jumped in with
the now-familiar retort:
"Fake news" is a favorite phrase of President Donald Trump.
For years now, this has been the go-to conversation-ender for prestige media
pundits and Twitter trolls alike, directed at any progressive critic of the
political mainstream: you're a Republican! A MAGA-sympathizer! Or (lately),
an "insurrectionist"! The Beast in its Greenwald piece used the most common
of the Twitter epithets: "Trump-defender." Treachery and secret devotion to
right-wing politics are also the default explanation for the growing list of
progressives making their way onto Fox of late, from Greenwald to Kyle
Kulinski to Aaron Mate to Jimmy Dore to Cornel West.
The truth is, Trump conservatives and ACLU-raised liberals like myself,
Greenwald, and millions of others do have real common cause, against an
epistemic revolution taking hold in America's political and media elite. The
traditional liberal approach to the search for truth, which stresses
skepticism and free-flowing debate, is giving way to a reactionary movement
that Plato himself would have loved, one that believes knowledge is too
dangerous for the rabble and must be tightly regulated by a priesthood of
"experts." It's anti-democratic, un-American, and naturally unites the
residents of even the most extreme opposite ends of our national political
spectrum.
Its only defense is shaming and threats. "You're a MAGA-enabler!" has become
the answer to all challenges. A fascinating recent exchange between New York
Times writer and author Barry Meier and Yahoo! chief investigative
correspondent Michael Isikoff showed the reflex. When Meier, who just wrote
a devastating book about the pernicious influence of private oppo
researchers like Fusion-GPS, pressed Isikoff about his initial credulous
reporting of the Christopher Steele dossier, Isikoff replied by asking Meier
how he felt about the identity of the people embracing his work:
Your conclusions about the accuracy of Steele's allegations, which are not
very much different than mine. has led to your book being greeted by Trump
loyalists and the conservative media outlets as a great journalistic
achievements on your part, and pretty much ignored by other media. You're
being embraced by The Federalist and. you're scheduled to be on Tucker
Carlson. does it make you a little queasy?
Follow the logic. Isikoff, who himself denounced the Steele dossier, and
said in the exchange he essentially agreed with Meier's conclusions, went on
to wonder aloud how right a thing could be, if it's being embraced by The
Federalist and Tucker Carlson. Never mind the more salient point, which is
that Meier was "ignored by other media" because that's how #Resistance media
deals with unpleasant truths: it blacks them out, forcing reporters to
spread the news on channels like Fox, which in turn triggers instant
accusations of unreliability and collaborationism.
It's a Catch-22. Isikoff's implication is a journalist can't make an impact
if the only outlet picking up his or her work is The Federalist, but
"reputable" outlets won't touch news (and sometimes will even call for its
suppression) if it questions prevailing notions of Conventional Wisdom.
These tactics have worked traditionally because for people like Meier, or
myself, or even Greenwald, who grew up in the blue-leaning media ecosystem,
there's nothing more ominous professionally than being accused of aiding the
cause of Trump or the right-wing. It not only implies intellectual
unseriousness, but racism, sexism, reactionary meanness, greed, simple
wrongness, and a long list of other hideous/evil characteristics that could
render a person unemployable in the regular press. The label of
"Trump-defender" isn't easily removed, so most media people will go far out
of their way to avoid even accidentally incurring it.
This fact has led to countless stupidities over the course of the last five
years, with no better example than the latest uproar over the "lab leak
hypothesis" about the origins of Covid-19.
Without taking any position on whether or not the theory is true, it's
undeniable that media professionals denounced the possibility for over a
year largely because Donald Trump happened to believe it. Now that
conventional wisdom has shifted gears on this story (the reason for that
switch is a compelling mystery in itself, one the press has yet to explain),
we have people like ABC's Jon Karl coming out and saying things like, "Some
things may be true even if Donald Trump said them." The way Karl announced
that the concept was now discussable was particularly hilarious: "Now,
serious people are saying it needs a serious inquiry."
Karl's statement was meant to be profound and bold, but it's actually a
damning admission of incompetence on the part of a press corps that spent
years turning hundreds of non-Trump questions into referenda on Trump. Does
hydroxychloroquine work? Is it a good idea to have Russian and American
troops sitting in each other's laps in Syria? Did Barack Obama's FBI send
"spies" into the Trump campaign?
The desperation to say "no" on the latter question just because Trump was
saying "yes" led to all-time absurd headlines like, "F.B.I. Used Informant
to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims." As for
Karl's point about Covid-19, if reporters were afraid to go near an urgent
science story for fear an untoward revelation might give secondary comfort
to Trump, what does that say about how they might have covered a dozen other
issues more directly related to the last president, from impeachment to the
"insurrection" to Russiagate and beyond?
The consistent pattern with the Trump-era press, which also happens to be
the subject of so many of those Greenwald stories the Beast and the
Intercept employees are complaining about, is that information that is true
but doesn't cut the right way politically is now routinely either
non-reported or actively misreported.
Whether it's Hunter Biden's laptop or the Brian Sicknick affair or infamous
fictions like the "find the fraud" story, the public increasingly now isn't
getting the right information from the bulk of the commercial press corps.
That doesn't just hurt Trump and conservatives, it misinforms the whole
public. As Thomas Frank just pointed out in The Guardian, the brand of
politicized reporting that informed the lab-leak fiasco risks obliterating
the public's faith in a whole range of institutions, a disaster that would
not be borne by conservatives alone.
But this is only a minor point, compared to the more immediate reason the
constant accusations of treachery and Trumpism aimed at dissenters should be
ignored.
From the embrace of oligarchical censorship to the aggressive hawking of
"noble lies" like Russiagate to the constant humbugging of Enlightenment
values like due process to the nonstop scolding of peasants unschooled in
the latest academic jargon, the political style of the modern Democratic
mainstream isn't just elitist and authoritarian, it's almost laughably
off-putting. In one moment it's cheering for a Domestic War on Terror and in
the next, declaring war on a Jeopardy contestant flashing the "A-OK" sign.
It's Dick Cheney meets Robin DiAngelo, maybe the most loathsome conceivable
admixture. Who could be surprised a politically diverse group finds it
obnoxious?
During the Trump years conventional wisdom didn't just take aim at Trumpism.
The Beltway hoi polloi used the election of Trump to make profound arguments
against traditional tenets of democracy, as well as "populism," (which
increasingly became synonymous with "the unsanctioned exercise of political
power by the unqualified"), and various liberal traditions undergirding the
American experiment. Endless permutations of the same argument were made
over and over. Any country in which a Trump could be elected had a "too much
democracy" problem, the "marketplace of ideas" must be a flawed model if it
leads to people choosing Trump, the "presumption of innocence" was never
meant to apply to the likes of Trump, and so on.
A turning point came after the death of George Floyd last year. On the one
hand, it was understood that the ensuing protests were directed at Trump.
Police brutality = institutional racism = Trump: it was all of a piece,
hardly needing explanation. But there was another element, turbo-charged by
propaganda pieces like the 1619 Project. We now know (thanks to a
surreptitious recording of a New York Times town hall that somehow did not
become a major journalism scandal) that the Times's dive into history was
part of an effort, following the collapse of the Russiagate story, to "shift
resources" into race as a way "to try to understand the forces that led to
the election of Donald Trump."
This was already ethically questionable, committing to a massive
quasi-historical project framing the United States as a nation built around
the institution of slavery as, essentially, a plan B for covering Trump
after the collapse of Russiagate. Would the Times have run the 1619 Project
under President Hillary Clinton? Doubtful, but whatever: let's stipulate for
a moment that Trump deserved to be described as the historical by-product of
our slave-owning legacy. What about the rest of it?
By last summer, after the patriotic mania of Russiagate receded, the newest
moral panic that the kente-cloth-clad Schumers and Pelosis were suddenly
selling, in solidarity with famed progressive change agents like Bank of
America, PayPal, Apple, ComCast, and Alphabet, was that any nation capable
of electing Trump must always have been a historically unredeemable white
supremacist construct, the America of the 1619 Project. First "half" of
Trump supporters were deplorable racists, then it was all of them, and then,
four years in, the whole country and all its traditions were deemed
deplorable.
Now, when the statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt came
down, there was a new target, separate and apart from Trump. The whole
history of American liberalism was indicted as well, denounced as an
ineffectual trick of the oppressor, accomplishing nothing but giving
legitimacy to racial despotism.
The American liberalism I knew growing up was inclusive, humble, and
democratic. It valued the free exchange of ideas among other things because
a central part of the liberal's identity was skepticism and doubt, most of
all about your own correctitude. Truth was not a fixed thing that someone
owned, it was at best a fleeting consensus, and in our country everyone,
down to the last kook, at least theoretically got a say. We celebrated the
fact that in criminal courts, we literally voted to decide the truth of
things.
This new elitist politics of the #Resistance era (I won't ennoble it by
calling it liberalism) has an opposite view. Truth, they believe, is
properly guarded by "experts" and "authorities" or (as Jon Karl put it)
"serious people," who alone can be trusted to decide such matters as whether
or not the Hunter Biden laptop story can be shown to the public. A huge part
of the frustration that the general public feels is this sense of being
dictated to by an inaccessible priesthood, whether on censorship matters or
on the seemingly daily instructions in the ear-smashing new vernacular of
the revealed religion, from "Latinx" to "birthing persons."
In the tone of these discussions is a constant subtext that it's not
necessary to ask the opinions of ordinary people on certain matters. As
Plato put it, philosophy is "not for the multitude." The plebes don't get a
say on speech, their views don't need to be represented in news coverage,
and as for their political choices, they're still free to vote - provided
their favorite politicians are removed from the Internet, their
conspiratorial discussions are banned (ours are okay), and they're
preferably all placed under the benevolent mass surveillance of "experts"
and "professionals."
Add the total absence of a sense of humor and the inability of "moral
clarity" politics to co-exist with any form of disagreement, and there's a
reason why traditional liberals are suddenly finding it easier to talk with
old conservative rivals on Fox than the new authoritarian Snob-Lords at CNN
and MSNBC, to say nothing of the shock troops at the Daily Beast or The
Intercept. For all their other flaws, Fox types don't fall to pieces and
write group letters about their intolerable suffering and "trauma" if forced
to share a room with someone with different political views. They're also
not terrified to speak their minds, which used to be a virtue of the
American left (no more).
From the moment Donald Trump was elected, popular media began denouncing a
broad cast of characters deemed responsible. Nativists, misogynists and
racists were first in line, but from there they started adding new classes
of offender: Greens, Bernie Bros, "both-sidesers," Russia-denialists,
Intellectual dark-webbers, class-not-racers, anti-New-Normalers, the
"Substackerati," and countless others, casting every new group out with the
moronic admonition that they're all really servants of the "far right" and
"grifters" (all income earned in service of non-#Resistance politics is
"grifting"). By now conventional wisdom has denounced everyone but its own
little slice of aristocratic purity as the "far right."
They're wrong on the ideology, but right about one thing: they've created a
brand of imperious elite politics so revolting that it has the potential to
unite even this Balkanized wreck of a country. If they keep this up,
liberals and conservatives may start talking for real, and maybe even fix a
thing or two.
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