American Liberalism Is Dying

You may have noticed, but the long knives are out for Glenn Greenwald. And not just for Greenwald. They are going after Naomi Wolf, Alan Dershowitz, Alex Berenson, Tulsi Gabbard and any liberals who have dared to appear on Fox News. Even worse, who have dared appear on the Tucker Carlson show.

In a long and excellent Substack column unabashedly liberal commentator, Matt Taibbi, tracks the self-immolation of modern American liberalism. The political philosophy that championed free and open debate in the marketplace of ideas now routinely cancels and silences those whose voices it cannot tolerate. No link here, because the Substack column is only for subscribers.

This has led to the production of a totalitarian despotism led by so-called and often self-designated experts. Under the guise of fact-checking, the oligarchs who control the media censor any opinions that contradict their own dogmatic beliefs.

Importantly, as we have been following on this blog, liberals who have stood up against big tech and Democratic party censorship have found themselves aligned with more conservative voices. 

Since they are completely devoid of arguments and serious thought, leftist radicals now dismiss arguments they don’t like by labeling them Trumpian. If Trump believes it, if Trump said it, it must be wrong, bad, even evil.

Taibbi tells about the most recent Daily Beast attempt at taking down Greenwald for the crime of appearing on Fox News.

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.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and former members of the ACLU, like Taibbi, Greenwald and Dershowitz, have recently found themselves agreeing with more conservative thinkers:

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.

It’s pure Platonism-- credit to Taibbi for analyzing this correctly. The proles and the plebes should not be able to think for themselves. They must be told what to think by experts. This new priesthood, this guardian class of philosopher kings will offer the correct opinions, aka the orthodoxy, which you must accept, lest you be called a bigot, or worse. What could be worse? Why-- if you don't agree with experts people will think you're an idiot. And many people who are bordering on idiocy-- cf. Ibram X. Kendi in yesterday's post-- will go to great lengths to hide the fact.

Taibbi analyzes the advent of this new totalitarian despotism. I mention for the record, that it was well analyzed by none other than Naomi Wolf:

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.

Among the more telling recent happenings, we find Jonathan Karl, serious journalist as he is supposed to be, declaring that the media dismissed the story of whether Covid-19 came to us from a lab in China, and whether the sainted Anthony Fauci-- speaking of philosopher kings!-- had been sending money to the Wuhan lab to perform the experiments that produced the variant on the virus, because Trump had said it and that it might have benefited Trump.

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.

So, the media learned, during the Trump era, to define what is reportable in terms of whether or not it advantages Trump. Obviously, we no longer have a liberal media and we are not dealing with a free and open press. We are dealing with organs of state propaganda:

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.

Our elite leftist intellectuals reacted badly to the election of Trump. By their glazed-over eyes a public that could elect Trump could not be trusted. The left needed to take over the national mind. While drooling over the virtue of democracy, and of the threats to democracy, they have been shutting down the open discussion that is its basis. For the record, the constant evocation of democracy is code for the Democratic Party. The left has been using the word democracy in order to turn people into Democrats.

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.

And Taibbi also calls out the now widely discredited 1619 Project, a tissue of lies, misinformation and distortions that was conjured in order to explain how the country could have elected Donald Trump. The answer was-- racism, bigotry and prejudice. The project was designed to show that America was still racist to the core:

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.”

By now, everyone knows that the 1619 project was a fraud. That the once venerable and once respectable New York Times could have destroyed its journalistic reputation to propagate lies tells us more than we wanted to know about today’s cultural climate:

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?

And of course, the riotous insurrection that swept through America’s blue cities after the death of George Floyd made radical leftists believe that they had been right all along. Corporate honchos, hiding in fear of the peasants and their pitchforks, quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

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.

You would have thought that they were trying to destroy the Republican Party. A few years earlier a Washington Post columnist by name of Jennifer Rubin had called for the incineration of all Republicans, ideally with there being no survivors. That the imbecile Rubin did not know that the other word for incineration is Holocaust and that the no survivors meme brings back the notion of a Final Solution shows what happens when people are put in jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with  merit.

It has been, Taibbi explains, the end of American liberalism:

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.

So, the free exchange of ideas is too dangerous. The left must shut it down. We must all believe in the experts or the fact checkers or the philosopher kings. Who elected Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg? Who gave them monopoly control over the marketplace of ideas?

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.”

It is, Taibbi repeats, pure Platonism:

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.”

The last bastion of free and open discussion turns out to be, you guessed it, Fox News. Taibbi concludes:

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).