When This Blows Over

It's all incredibly revealing. What it points to is a mainstream,
Democratic left that is so bereft of ideas and so disconnected
from everyday people that it ends up pursuing an utterly
substance-free politics of emotion and feeling and doesn't even
realize it's doing it. They are good, everyone else is bad; they are
light itself, everyone else is darkness; and so no self-awareness can
exist and no self-criticism can be entertained. Not for even one
second, in Heffernan's words. The Cult of Hillary Clinton is the
clearest manifestation yet of the 21st-century problem of life in
the political echo chamber.
Mercifully, some mea culpas are now emerging. Some, though
not enough, realize that Hillaryites behaved rashly and with
unreason. In a brilliant piece titled "The unbearable smugness of
the liberal media," Will Rahn recounts how the media allowed
itself to become the earthly instrument of Clinton's cause,
obsessed with finding out how to make Middle Americans "stop
worshiping their false god and accept our gospel."
Indeed. And the failure to make the gospel of Hillary into the
actual book of America points to the one good thing about
Trump's victory: a willingness among ordinary people to
blaspheme against saints, to reject phony saviors, and to sniff at
the new secular religion of hollow progressiveness. The liberal
political and media establishment offered the little people a
supposedly flawless, Francis-like figure of uncommon goodness,
and the little people called bullshit on it. That is epic and
beautiful, even if nothing else in recent weeks has been.
- Brendan O’Neill