OPINION:
ONE NATION AFTER TRUMP: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED, THE DISILLUSIONED, THE DESPERATE, AND THE NOT-YET DEPORTED
By E.J. Dionne, Jr., Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann
St. Martin’s Press, $25.99, 344 pages
In his gushing review in The New York Times, left-wing journalist Ari Berman referred to the literary troika of E.J. Dionne, Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas Mann as “the wise men of Washington.” For some of us who have observed them closely over the years, “Three Stooges” would have been more like it.
From his pulpit at The Washington Post, Mr. Dionne dispenses regular, predictable doses of the liberal line while also serving as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. Mr. Ornstein, one of those all-purpose talking heads ever ready to grab the nearest microphone, hangs his hat at the once-influential American Enterprise Institute, considered by many its token liberal. Mr. Mann, another beneficiary of the think tank welfare state, double dips as a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a Brookings senior fellow.
Once you know this, nothing contained in their new book should come as a surprise.
It could, however, have used a more accurate title. By simply replacing the word “perplexed” with “perverse,” and the word “disillusioned” with “delusional,” the title would have been truer to its contents, truly a guide for the perverse, the delusional, the desperate and the not-yet deported.
It is also an accurate description of the mishmash of special-interest and identity politics they see as key to a winning coalition that will restore political correctness in the post-Trump era. If this sounds familiar to you, it should. It is the divide-and-conquer formula of separating American citizens into aggrieved, subsidy-seeking minorities whose votes can then be bought with taxpayer dollars “for women, for Latinos, for the LGBTQ community, for religious minorities, and for so many of our other fellow citizens,” to directly quote from the authors’ own laundry list.
The great irony of the 2016 presidential election — and one that seems to have escaped Messrs. Dionne, Ornstein and Mann — is that it was the year that “identity politics” backfired on its creators. The left in general and the Democratic Party in particular had spent generations encouraging bloc after bloc of our fellow citizens to think of themselves as aggrieved, put upon and deserving of special treatment. “Diversity” — the celebration of cultural, linguistic, sexual, racial and regional fragmentation — became the Open Sesame that the left saw as a path to power.
What these demagogues failed to realize was that the more they encouraged Americans to think and vote along tribal lines — as members of this or that minority or bloc — the more they guaranteed an eventual reaction on the part of the biggest “minority group” (“plurality group” might be a more accurate term) of them all: morally conventional, law-abiding, financially responsible, unashamedly patriotic, stand-for-our-National Anthem citizens of all races, colors, creeds and sexual orientations.
Under-covered by liberal mass media, mocked and disrespected by a corrupt, dissolute popular culture and liberal intelligentsia, millions of these folks had been doing a slow burn for decades. All Donald Trump had to do was fan the flames with his sometimes refreshing, sometimes irresponsible brand of short-handed, hard-hitting rhetoric.
From the beginning of his candidacy I was one of many conservatives to express reservations about many aspects of Trumpism. I even created a new label for it. Donald Trump, I wrote, was neither a Liberal Republican nor a Conservative Republican. He was a Banana Republican, using the same rabble-rousing, techniques against the left that it had been using against the rest of us ever since the New Deal. And so it came to pass.
There is an almost childishly naive quality to the authors’ yearning for the good old days when three left-leaning television networks and lock-step liberal newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post dominated political coverage, almost always to the advantage of left-of-center parties and politicians. Suddenly the diversity mongers have turned monopolist, asserting that the freer, wider range of coverage and commentary available today is just so much “fake news” we would be better off without.
Occasionally, the authors rediscover the obvious by tripping over it. “The polarization of our politics is both a product and a cause of the decay in civil society and decline in mutual trust,” they concede. In this they are correct.
Crude, debased songs, series, films and fiction, dumbed-down curricula turning out brainwashed, barely-literate graduates with few practical skills, and the glamorizing of self-destructive, slob behavior on screen and in print were all well underway at the height of the liberal media monopoly and long before the birth of Fox News, much less the advent of Trumpism.
Unfortunately, they will probably also outlive it.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.