But analysts should never lose sight of the part their own words are playing in the political ecosystem. And the fact is that a Charles Blow column or a Greg Sargent tweet that doubles down on Hillary Clinton’s anti-Trump-voter remarks is merely helping to whip up anti-Trump enthusiasm among people who already loathe Trump and everything he stands for.
It’s Trump haters telling other Trump haters that it’s the height of virtue to hate Trump and those who love him.
That’s politics not as persuasion or policy argument but as masturbatory expressivism: one team intensifying its own political arousal to ensure that everyone does what he or she would have done anyway, though with even more enthusiasm than before.
In the case of Clinton’s remarks, it’s especially easy for liberal opinion journalists to lose sight of when they’re at risk of serving as cheerleaders at a partisan pep rally. That’s because some indeterminate number of Trump voters do hold blatantly illiberal and frankly deplorable views — and because journalists are often the target of alt-right abuse at Trump rallies and on social media. In that pressure-cooker context, with the political stakes enormously high, it can sometimes look like Hillary Clinton is less a politician trying to win an election than an extra-partisan champion of the unvarnished political and moral truth.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member