FREDDIE DEBOER: Where to Now, Chris? Where to Now?
[Chris] Hayes clearly hates Trump. But Trump is just as clearly a force that has given his life meaning. It’s hard to look at Hayes’s public persona and not conclude that he begins and ends each day with thoughts of Trump. It reminds me of the obvious but essential insight that our hatreds can structure our lives, lend them purpose, make the hazy and unsatisfying feelings of adult life coalesce into something that feels real and vital. And in all of this Hayes epitomizes liberalism’s essential sickness, its absolute inability to think systemically, its desire to be the pained and righteous victim instead of the compromised leader, its deep attachment to whining and complaining that the system’s not fair, its allergy to power, its implacable dedication to being a sighing chorus that laments the world instead of changing it. He dreads a Trump win in 2024, and he so desperately wants Trump back. A tragic figure.
Donald Trump is 75 years old and unhealthy. Whether he wins back the presidency or not, he will die sooner than later, and will no longer be present to serve as the lodestar for contemporary liberalism and its antipolitics, its addiction to negation. And then where will American liberals go? I suspect their movement will crawl even deeper into a bitter and paranoid culture of zero-sum racial fatalism. That is not a plan; that is total surrender.
Back when he was a writer, Hayes quoted Harry Reid:
After the election, I conducted a kind of exit interview with retiring Senate minority leader Harry Reid. I asked him what the Democratic Party stands for, and after speaking of his own upbringing in deep poverty in the rural town of Searchlight, Nevada, he said: “People have asked me the last year, ‘What message do you want to leave with people?’ And here’s the message: I want everyone in America to understand, if Harry Reid can make it in America, anyone can. And I want those young men and women out there who are looking for a way out to realize, if Harry Reid can make it, anybody can. That’s what America is all about.”
This is, in some ways, a perfect summation of the Democratic Party’s message in the Obama era: In America, anyone can make it out, anyone can rise to the highest heights. Immigrant, native-born, black, white, disabled, gay, straight, male, or female—no matter your background, there’s a place at the top for you.
Does that sound anything like the message American liberalism wants to deliver now? Absolutely not. Today, American liberalism wants to tell you not that America can be a place of justice and equality where we all work together for the good of all, even as we acknowledge how badly we’ve failed that ideal. In 2021 liberalism wants to tell you that the whole damn American project is toxic and ugly, that every element of the country is an excuse to perpetuate racism, that those groups of people Hayes lists at the bottom are not in any sense in it together but that instead some fall higher on an hierarchy of suffering, with those who are perceived to have it too good in that hierarchy deserving no help from liberalism or government or the Democratic party – and, oh by the way, you can be dirt poor and powerless and still be privileged, so we don’t want you, especially if you’re part of the single largest chunk of the American electorate. Anyone who tows the line Harry Reid takes here is either a bigot or a sap, and politics is a zero-sum game where marginalized groups can only get ahead if others suffer, and Democrats fight to control a filthy, ugly, fallen country that will forever be defined by its sins. That’s the liberalism of 2021, a movement of unrelenting pessimism, obscure vocabulary, elitist tastes, and cultural and social extremism totally divorced from a vision of shared prosperity and a working class movement that comes together across difference for the good of all. In fact, I think I learned in my sociology class at Dartmouth that a working class movement would inherently center white pain! Better to remain divided into perpetually warring fiefdoms of grievance that can accomplish nothing. Purer that way. Now here’s Chris with part 479 of his January 6th series, to show us the country’s biggest problems.
Read the whole thing. Yes, there’s plenty of anti-Trump throat clearing, and no, I don’t think Harry Reid is the perfect person to be delivering a patriotic message, either. Wrong guy obviously — but it’s the right message. And with the exception of Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Tulsi Gabbard, there aren’t many Democrats left who can deliver it.