The election takes are still flowing as freely as the Dom Pérignon at one of Kamala Harris’s Silicon Valley fundraisers. Many liberals agree on one thing: the American people suck, especially the working class.
The Guardian headline on a Rebecca Solnit piece this week reads, “Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do.” The Nation’s Elie Mystal went further, arguing that the country was so bad it deserves the hell that’s coming. Headlined “Trump is Not a Fluke — He’s America,” with a subhead intoning that “the country will get what it deserves,” Mystal writes: “We, as a nation, have proven ourselves to be a fetid, violent people, and we deserve a leader who embodies the worst of us. . . . Trump reflects us more accurately than perhaps any president ever has.” Rather than ask ourselves how to save America from Trump, as many of us patriotic naifs are now doing, Mystal asks, “Is American worth saving?” and his answer is a resounding no.
Some prominent liberals even dismissed the well-documented problems of the economy, so eager were they to make the case that the American masses are just plain terrible. On X/Twitter, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones called the idea that voters were discontent with the economy a “rationalization,” while Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, on MSNBC, dismissed it as “BS.”
“I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that,” Glaude insisted, adding that those bringing up issues like the cost of living were in denial about the country’s essential racism and badness: “People don’t want to believe what this country actually is.”
Never mind that extensive polling consistently flagged the seriousness of inflation to voters struggling to afford groceries, housing, or gas; to this Princeton professor, that’s just a made-up story. As for the “evil racism at the heart of America” narrative, well, that’s hard to square with the…
Auteur: Liza Featherstone
