“This is the inter-elections decompression season, when the liberal media admits their past lies, now, when it doesn’t matter, in order to ‘prove’ their credibility for future lies, when it does matter.”
To wit: an apology from formerly conservative Wall Street Journalist Bret Stephens now at the NYT: I Was Wrong About Trump Voters (paywalled, see here instead). Alternate title: Hey, maybe I shouldn’t have called Trump voters idiots and traitors. Emphasis mine:
Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds. What were they seeing that I wasn’t?
That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.
I was blind to this. Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected.” My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges.
Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.
It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
No wonder they were angry.
Well, gee willikers! Ain’t that broad-minded of Stephens? Now go back and read the Blogline of the Day (by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit) and see if it fits. Or not – I’ll tell you it does.
And just like that, we see the time “honored” Progressive starting the “forgiveness” parade so as to reset the plate to demonize the NEXT Republican. It’s always the “HE’S HITLER!!” until the time of normalization is needed so as to use that Republican to then be used against the latest target. You watch – if Trump isn’t the next President, but Ron DeSantis is, all will be forgiven (well, perhaps some) of Trump in order to hang and then quarter, then roast what’s left of DeSantis. And that latter activity NEVER ratchets downward – the media’s rhetoric only goes up and up.
A late mea culpa by one of the Elite who kinda realized that we of “Flyover Country” despise them, not for who they are but for how they treat the rest of us (and no, you don’t actually have to live in Flyover Country to feel put upon – there’s a lot of us in the East/West coastal areas that are kindred spirits except we get to see the sneers up close and personal (right, Gary Kiedaisch? Chris Sununu!) every day.
I should be asking whether or not Stephens (and those like him who have this now gauzy feeling of having done wrong) has learned anything from the runup to this announcement. I’m thinking no. I’ve seen this happen again, but the lure of no longer being part of the “cool gang”; it’s like high school all over again, where status is everything, even if not earned or deserved.
Don’t worry, he’ll be safely back in the fold in about 3…2…1 months – just in time for the General Election.
