(First published in The Dominion Post, November 25).
It’s now more than two weeks since Donald Trump became US
President-elect, and I’m wondering when the weeping, wailing and gnashing of
teeth (to use a biblical metaphor) is going to stop.
Many commentators in the media, both here and in the US,
just don’t seem to get it.
Yes, Trump is a thoroughly unappealing man, but the
political narrative was rewritten on November 8. There was a sudden change of
scriptwriter. The world has moved on and whether we like it or not, we’d better
get used to it.
Unfortunately the US media seem determined to compound the
mistake they made during the election campaign, when they were so blinded by their
virtuous metropolitan liberalism that they failed to see what was going on
around them.
Now, rather than admitting they gravely misread the public
mood, they’re further undermining their credibility by attacking American voters
for supporting the wrong candidate.
You’d think, when traditional media are struggling for
survival in the face of disruptive digital technology, that they would do
everything in their power to make themselves more relevant to the lives of
ordinary people. Instead they seem intent on accentuating the perception that
they are remote and disconnected.
Earlier this week I read a report in the Washington Post – one of the most brazenly
biased of the major American papers – that purported to be an account of Vice President-elect
Mike Pence’s attendance at the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, where he was pompously lectured from the stage at the end
of the show.
The Post’s story was
heavily coloured by the reporter’s own opinions and freighted with questionable
assumptions. It opened with the sentence: “Mike Pence was elected
vice-president by a coalition of mostly white voters nostalgic for what they
thought of as the good old days in America and galvanised by promises to deport
millions of undocumented immigrants.”
There you have it, right there – the same elitist disdain
that was evident in Hillary Clinton’s ill-advised dismissal of Trump supporters
as “deplorables”.
Well, even deplorables have a vote, as Clinton discovered.
Trump, whatever his shortcomings, pitched his rhetoric directly at the large
number of American voters who felt forgotten by the political establishment.
There seems little doubt that these voters felt as poorly
served by the news media as they were by mainstream politicians. Trump capitalised
on that too.
But rather than step back and critically assess their own
performance, the US media elite insist it was the electorate that got it wrong.
There’s a fierce antagonism toward “uneducated” voters who apparently
don’t know what’s good for them. This was also evident in the recent rant by
the British celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, who suggested that Britain and
America are now uninhabitable following the Brexit vote and the presidential
election, and that New Zealand suddenly looks a highly desirable bolthole.
Dawkins explicitly attacked “anti-intellectual” voters. He
was just one step away from arguing that plebs shouldn’t be allowed to vote at
all.
The irony is that Dawkins and his ilk smugly think of themselves as
liberal. In fact their bitterness at the outcome of the election reveals them
as deeply intolerant of dissenting opinions – the antithesis of liberalism.
Even now, the US media seem to have learned nothing from the
election result. The playwright Arthur Miller’s famous observation that a good
newspaper was a nation talking to itself no longer seems to apply. Like the politicians, American journalists have become remote from the people they purportedly serve.
The Washington Post
article went on to say that Pence’s attendance at Hamilton – written by a Puerto Rican and starring a multiracial
cast – brought him face-to-face with a symbol of “the new America”. It might
have been truer to say that like it or not, right now Pence himself is a symbol
of the new America, if only the myopic reporter could see it.
Admittedly, the world was dazed by the speed with which the
political ground shifted under everyone’s feet with Trump’s election. If
political events were measured on the Richter scale, it would have been at
least an 8.
But Trumpophobes need to get over it. They need to move
beyond anger and denial to acceptance.
A week after Trump’s election, I read a hand-wringing lament by a
left-wing New Zealand commentator. What struck me was how pointless and
irrelevant it suddenly seemed.
The world had moved on and left the writer stranded on an island of her own outrage. She was shouting "Help!", but the passing ship had already vanished over the horizon.
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