What Does Liberalism Even Mean Anymore?
Whatever political ideology you align with, we can all agree on one thing: the political discourse in this country is deeply fractured. There’s an onus on all of us now more than ever to be civically engaged and fight for what’s right, but what about the onus we have to question all political leaders, their motives, and the media that informs our reality?
Unsurprisingly, since Trump took office, cable news ratings have surged and late-night shows with a heavy political bent have experienced massive growth. The demonizing of a hot-headed, pompous, and orange-colored financial industry type has given the media establishment a steady stream of revenue and even more power over the “right” and “wrong” ways an American can think—which essentially boils down to “racist” and “non-racist.” In alignment with the president’s stark rhetoric, a media script has emerged that is rigid and tired with little room for nuance or original thought. In fact, nuance and original thought is not encouraged; it’s frowned upon and rarely featured in mainstream press.
We can’t forget though, that Obama paved the way for Trump’s ascendancy. It’s clear that President Obama fit the aesthetic bill for the American people: he had swag, he worked his way up the ladder, he was of immigrant descent, and eloquent. Trump does not fit the aesthetic bill: he’s brash, misogynistic, and inarticulate, but he still did something that Obama did not do. He spoke to the American people who the media establishment left behind—and however cringe-worthy that faction of the country may be to you—it is 100% worth examining as we move forward with establishment-backed president elect, Joe Biden.
This leads us to some hard questions: Can someone who has made racist comments do anything good? Why wouldn’t Democrats and Republicans work together on issues that they in fact ideologically aligned upon (as you’ll see below)? Who benefits from fostering partisan divisiveness? Who profits from the woke narrative? Why is the wealth gap growing at exorbitant rates? These are some questions below we were lucky enough to ask Batya Ungar- Sargon, opinion editor at the Forward and ADL & Aspen Institute’s new Civil Society Fellow.
We recently listened to The Genuinely Interested podcast you spoke on. You guys speak about the "woke" narrative and how it is posed as empathizing with minorities, but data shows that despite Trump’s racist comments, minority votes for Trump in this election increased. Our question to you is: who is the woke narrative benefiting?
This is a great question that I ask myself a lot. Let me just start by saying Biden still did much better than Trump with minorities, but as you say, Trump made surprising inroads, despite his sometimes racist rhetoric. It turns out, it didn’t bother large numbers of Latino, Muslim, and even some Black voters; Trump doubled his support with Black men since 2016, according to exit polls. It’s just one of many signs that a lot of the “anti-racist” narrative floating around today that is supposedly promulgated on behalf of minorities is quite distant from how many in these communities view themselves.
So what’s in it for liberal elites who are pushing this narrative? Why are affluent white liberals so eager to believe we’re living in a white supremacy, for example? Here’s my best guess: The narrative of wokeness or “anti-racism” as it is often called is an outgrowth of an academic discipline called “Critical Race Theory.” This view has its origins in philosophers like Hegel, Marx, and Foucault, who share a common belief: Equality is impossible, because at the core of every human interaction is a power struggle that someone is winning and someone is losing. Human history for these guys is just an endless rotation of oppressor and oppressed, a revolving door of masters and slaves in Hegel’s view, proletariat and bourgeoisie for Marx, privileged white people vs. marginalized people of color in Critical Race Theory. For these thinkers, power struggles are inescapable, and the whole idea of equality is just a fiction behind which the oppressor hides.
So why does this view that erases equality and pushes oppression as the root of everything appeal so much to affluent liberals? To me, it seems like the answer is that despite the pieties they espouse, liberal elites don’t really believe in equality, either; no affluent person does. They know their prosperity comes at someone else’s expense, and a worldview that was actually invested in equality would insist they share more of their good fortune.
Still, they want to believe they are good people. They’re liberals! So just imagine the relief when they are told that the inequality that resulted in their having so much while so many Americans have so little is not the result of their failure to pay more taxes or to send their kids to public schools, but that it stems from something as immutable as the color of their skin. It totally relieves them of the responsibility of doing anything about it. All they can do is feel guilty. They get to keep all their money while feeling like heroes! How perfect.
Of course, there are still horrifying pockets of race-based inequality that persist in America, and they deserve our immediate attention. But there’s now bipartisan consensus about this—the need to end mass incarceration, for example, or for police reform. The totalizing view of America as a white supremacy seems to me a displacement exercise that comforts the wealthy, which you know is true because they can’t get enough of it.
We dislike Trump as a human being. He is obnoxious. He has said hurtful, racist comments and publicly would not denounce white supremacy which is so bogus and bizarre. But we do find it fascinating that not only was he considered a liberal elite prior to his campaign trail, but also that during his presidency the median household income increased.
Why do you think the media-at-large was unable to emotionally detach from the way they felt about the president's personality and acknowledge any positive achievement? Who is making these rules that leave no room for neutral-toned reporting with nuance? Who is actually behind creating this provincial framework and what are their motives?
I, too, have been shocked at the refusal to acknowledge Trump’s wins, many of which were actually really progressive. Thanks to his economy, the base pay of the lower 25% of wage earners rose by 4.5%, which is unprecedented in recent history (certainly, nothing like this happened under Clinton or Obama). He brought truly unprecedented unemployment to marginalized communities and gave millions and millions of dollars to HBCUs. He freed over 4,000 Black men from prison; men sent to prison because of Joe Biden’s crime bill, the irony of ironies. Had the Democrats not been so totally committed to their loathing of Trump, they could have gotten much more out of him. This is a man who will do literally anything to be praised on cable news.
There are a number of reasons the mainstream news media refused him that praise even for policies they should have applauded. For starters, the media realized in 2015 that hating on Trump was really, really good for business. TV ratings for CNN and MSNBC went through the roof. With Google Analytics and social media, you know exactly what stories are getting clicks, and the anti-Trump stuff did so well it literally saved the New York Times, which was struggling for its existence.
This is why Trump’s name appears so often in the Times -- every 250 words or so, even in places like the Food section. It’s because of the Times’ digital media business model. Like Facebook, the Times is selling its readers’ emotions to advertisers—literally. Look up “Project Feels.” The more the reader feels, the more likely they are to click on an ad. And just the name Trump makes affluent liberals see red.
In other words, digital media met an affluent liberal audience desperate to be told that the people they looked down on were evil racists and that we live in a white supremacy. So the New York Times, Vox, MSNBC, and CNN gave them what they wanted. And media companies went from being broke to making bank.
All of this gets to your really smart point about the Democrats, who are supposed to be the party of the people. There was a time when Democrats represented labor, while the Republicans were all about the rich. We’ve seen a reversal of that under Trump. Trump’s economic agenda was protectionist in nature, and very much geared at the working class. (Like many Scandinavian countries, he coupled this with a big corporate tax cut early on.) Meanwhile the Democrats have doubled down on a thirty-year trajectory of going all in on college-educated voters.
After decades of consensus between the two parties about a free market global economy that serves the top 20%, Trump represented the return of the repressed. And there’s nothing elites hate as much as having the masses impose their will. So much of the hatred of Trump is about class. We in the upper classes hate his infantile vocabulary, his needless lies, his gross, undignified brawling, his ignorant conspiracy theorizing. I hate that stuff, too. But a lot of it—not all of it, but a lot of it—is not about morality.
Trump made four or five racist statements throughout his presidency, and about the same number of antisemitic ones. The rest of the opposition to him wasn’t about values at all. It was about taste. Trump is gross. That spray tan, that hair, the golden toilet, the vainglorious pettiness: He didn’t fit with the vision upper class people have of a leader. But we in the media clothed our taste-based objection to Trump, which is of course a stand in for class, in terms of values: He’s anti-truth; he’s racist; he’s a Nazi.
That’s how you end up with an MSNBC host worth $25 million looking down her nose at a person without a college degree and sneering, “You voted for Trump? You racist!” and feeling like a hero.
The class divide is growing rapidly, and we see it clearly with Covid (those of us who can work from home) and then also in these day-to-day scenarios with people like Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi eschewing the Covid rules they say we all must abide by. I know you mentioned having some Marxist theories for why the class divide is growing. Can you explain what the hell is going on?
There’s a huge Covid class divide. The economy has not just bounded back for upper income Americans; it’s given them higher housing values and lower interest rates. Meanwhile, 12 million service industry workers are still out of work. Small businesses are struggling. The affluent see Covid as a health problem, while for the working class it’s about economic survival. And liberals are doing the same thing they did with Trump: Clothing their class privilege as science and facts and morality.
The politicians are even worse. Instead of coming up with a clean Covid bill, Democrats are now trying to pressure Biden into student loan forgiveness. Can you believe it? What kind of society thinks it’s ok to ask 12 million people who lost their jobs to Covid to foot the bill for the student loans of the top 40% of earners? Sure, maybe it will accidentally help someone in a food line who dropped out of college. But college-educated Americans are back at work. The Covid recession is over for them. Why are the Democrats designing legislation to help the people who need it least, in the belief that some of the benefits might trickle down to help those who need it most?
It’s depressing to see this consensus among Republicans and Democrats on what is essentially trickle-down economics, which voters hate, and then see the parties at each other’s throats on all the things Americans are united on. And there are a lot. Look at Florida: going for Trump while voting for a minimum wage hike, or California voting against Affirmative Action but for Biden.
This is not surprising! Americans are not actually polarized. We’re pretty united over the major issues: We want police and prison reform. We want a higher minimum wage, a public healthcare option, legalization of marijuana, access to firearms within reason, and first term abortions. The polarization is only at the top, or over symbols of the class divide like Trump.
Any intelligent and empathic human being (which used to parallel with democratic ideals) wants equal rights for everyone across the board. We want prison reform. We want less corporate control. We want people to be able to live and take vacations and eat real food. Yet, we’re just really confused how people are not acknowledging that the democrats are just as in bed with corporate and pharmaceutical interests as republicans. Do you think that people are just so jaded at this point that they feel they have to "take what they can get" meaning "at least Biden cares about the environment" but then he just put some dude from DuPont on his transition board.
Democrats are in bed with Wall Street and Silicon Valley and meanwhile Republicans have been at the forefront of criminal justice reform and are writing OpEds in support of labor unions and Amy Coney Barrett wept with her daughter when they watched the George Floyd video. The right won the free market economic fight and the left won the culture wars. So why can’t we admit it?
Maybe because to admit that would be to lose the power that comes from telling people you’re the underdog. I don’t know enough about psychology to say for sure why this has happened. Why when finally, finally, the Republicans are saying, “Woah, looks like the police are sometimes racist. We do need police reform!” the left had to then go, “Reform? Who said anything about reform? We need to defund the police!”
Maybe one of your readers will write to me and tell me why that is!
Something I think has become clear is that affluent liberals don’t vote for Democrats because they are saints; they vote for Democrats because they know that in so doing, they’re not actually voting against their economic interests. Not too much, anyway. If the Democrats were truly pro-labor, you’d see a lot fewer Wall Street guys voting for them.
Obviously the Republicans don’t care about poor and working class Americans, either. They’ve got their own sordid bedfellows. And who knows if the Republicans who were keen on Trump’s protectionist economic agenda will survive without him—probably not. But then, no one expects Republicans to care about the working class.
The truth is that neither party represents working class Americans. And these supposed “socialists” – what are they running on? Free college and banning fracking. It’s maddening.
As the opinion editor of the Forward, you get to see perspectives from so many people on the state of politics today. Does your job make you more optimistic that American Jews at least are largely open minded and progressive? Or do you see the stark black and white divide through the opinion pieces that is portrayed by the media/Twitter?
The deal I make with my readers is that in exchange for making you read the smartest version of the opinion you disagree with to challenge you, I will also get the smartest version of the view you agree with to comfort you. I think it’s working. Our readers routinely cite the variety of opinions they find in the Forward as one of the things they value most.
So I would say I am very optimistic that I still have a job despite being perhaps the only major non-right-wing media outlet left still running OpEds by Trump supporters. We Jews are something of a bridge in a divided America. A quarter of our community loves Trump. We don’t get to just throw them away.
Many Jews of color come from repressive regimes like Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, and Uzbekistan. It is my view that you don’t get to tell people who experienced real oppression who to vote for. You see liberals telling them that Trump is a fascist and they’re like, “Suuuuuure….” But that’s our superpower as Jews! Before Covid, I often went to Shabbat meals where we would fight about Trump. Because Shabbos is more important than politics.
Some people hate what I’m doing. It’s not easy. They call you all sorts of names, try to get you fired, etc. You have to just tune it out and keep doing what you think is right. I am very, very lucky that the Forward supports my vision because we’re one of the last doing this kind of work.
Mazel tov on being a Civil Society Fellow! Can you share a bit about what you will be doing and what the goals for the fellowship are?
Thank you so much. I feel truly, truly humbled to have been included. My goal is to learn from the unbelievable group of people I’ve been chosen to join, to squeeze everything I can out of the program’s leaders and fellows, and to live up to the honor bestowed upon me when they selected me. Civil discourse is in a real crisis in America, and the fellowship is designed to strengthen that core, which to me is the most Jewish and Democratic value I can think of. Democracy is pretty much all about tolerating those we disagree with. God willing, this is a step in that direction.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek. Before that, she was the opinion editor of the Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in America. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, the New York Review of Books Daily, and other publications. She has appeared numerous times on MSNBC, NBC, the Brian Lehrer Show, NPR, and at other media outlets. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.