The very sad news of
the death of the journalist Gwen Ifill, one of the anchors of the PBS News Hour, is in our house a kind of
“objective correlative” of a more pervasive distressed mood following the
general election. I had no personal
acquaintance of Ms. Ifill, but I was a great fan. She was a luminous presence of intelligence,
amiability, and spiritual generosity, a person of refinement and moral
weight. She understood the distinction—strangely
unobserved by many of her professional peers—between reporting the news and
trying to make the news.
Journalism has played
a huge role in recent political events, either through an actual or a perceived
“media bias”. We say that seeing is
believing, but it as often works the other way around. We seek confirmation of what we already
believe, often with great success. That
is perhaps the essence of living or writing in a “bubble”. My fear going into the election was that,
whatever the outcome, about half the country would be left feeling
aggrieved. I was right about that,
though wrong in identifying which half.
From one point of view this election barely had a winner. Trump was behind in the gross popular vote,
and he won only because of the vote in the Electoral College—the way the Cubs
won only because of the rules of baseball.
According to most of the sources I read Donald Trump won because large
swaths of the American electorate cannot accept America’s increasing
“diversity”. I think that is exactly
backwards. Mr. Trump won because America
is already “diverse” in ways apparently unfathomable to the nation’s elite
journals. Looked at from the broad
perspective that includes the “down-ballot” and state elections the vote
was a stupendous Republican victory, an electoral blizzard.
Years ago, while I
was researching my book The
Anti-Communist Manifestos, I came upon a man named Sender Garlin, an
American Communist journalist and one-time staffer on the Daily Worker. Among other
things, Garlin had played a role in the conversion to Communism of the young
Whittaker Chambers. Though his politics
were grim, he was a fellow of good humor as is suggested by the following
anecdote he reported. In 1927 Garlin was
working for the Bronx Home News, and
was assigned to write the story about Lindbergh’s solo flight to Paris in May of
that year. His editor, ever mindful of
his journal’s parochial mission, put the following headline on the story:
“Lindbergh Flies over the Bronx on Way to Paris”. I was reminded that cosmopolitan
self-absorption is still vibrant in the Borough of Manhattan as well, when on
the second day following the election the New York Times ran a two-banner headline proclaiming that “Democrats,
Students and Foreign Allies Face the Reality of a Trump Presidency.”
Hard
upon that, I was sedately tooling about in my second-hand Mazda, with my radio
tuned, as always, to NPR. NPR has
suspended its regular programming in order to focus full time on their
“International Festival of Sore Losers,” an enterprise possibly accordant with
my own mood. The “New Yorker Hour” came on, featuring the famous magazine’s editor
(David Remnick) and two of its staff writers (George Packer and Amy Davidson)
in conversation about the election and its meaning. These are three extraordinary intellectuals. I actually remember Remnick as a brilliant
Princeton literature major nearly forty years ago. And you don’t get to be a New Yorker staff writer by just showing
up. But this conversation, I mean…Tell
me not in mournful numbers. Concerning
the rubes who elected Trump there’s been an intellectual development among the
Sore Losers. They (the rubes) are more to be pitied
than censured. True enough that they may
mostly be academically uncredentialed and unpigmented persons of xenophobic,
homophobic, and racist character, but one has to make allowances for their
upbringing, which has been among grain silos, cow pastures, revival meetings,
and meth labs. The conversation partners
joined in the heavy, heroic effort to understand their compatriots in
Bartlesville and Altoona, though they had to stoop ever so low to do it. Being deplorable in elite eyes might be
painful; but being pitiable must be crushing.
I hope it will not come to suggesting “Hug a Hillbilly” lapel buttons.
I
think that we can conclude that American journalism—as opposed to certain
inspiring American journalists—failed us rather badly during the late political
campaign. Fortunately as we face the
anxious days ahead we do have other and more promising institutions, and in
particular our Constitution with its reasonably clear delineation of powers and
the limitations on those powers. For
stamp our little feet as we may, wave “Not My President” signs as we wish, he
will indeed be our president. According
to Mr. Trump Americans have become so used to losing that we don’t know what
winning is. That is one of several of
his positions for which I find scant empirical backing. It seems to me that a large cohort of
Americans—including some who wield the overwhelming power of the press—are so
used to winning that they have forgotten how to lose in the spirit of the
democratic compact.
