No post-election analysis better expresses the prevailing sentiments of self-flagellation and overwrought humility than that published by my friend and former Daily Beast colleague Will Rahn, who wrote a widely circulated article assailing the media’s “unbearable smugness.” We Beltway journalists, he says, live in a bubble of our own devising that has left us woefully out-of-touch with the country we cover. “Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress,” he writes, mocking a stereotypically outraged liberal response to Trump’s victory.
Rahn is right about the media’s piss-poor predictive capacities. But the normative assessment about what last week’s election result forebodes is another story entirely. Rahn and many others seem to think it justified that people who feel condescended to by liberal elites would respond to this condescension by putting a demagogic clown in the White House (whereas I’m inclined to believe such spiteful behavior confirms the condescension). A common thread in all these media mea culpas is the author’s donning sackcloth and ashes, bowing and scraping before the masses. In the prolier-than-thou damning of its peers, this sort of elite anti-elitism, which is no less smug than the style of analysis it skewers, is itself a form of elitism. “See,” the journalist newly woke to the concerns of downscale, Middle American whites can say, “I am more in tune with the attitudes and plight of the common man than my oblivious, latte-sipping colleagues.”
Here’s the thing: Hillary Clinton was without question a “deeply flawed candidate,” as Rahn writes. The economy is not working as well as it should be for a large number of Americans. Our society is becoming increasingly stratified in all sorts of discomfiting ways. All of these things are true. And yet none of them justifies a vote for Donald Trump.
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