In The Nation’s final issue before the results desks across electronic media univocally confirmed the reality of The Once and Not Future King’s electoral ouster, Eric Alterman assessed the danger represented by the man’s epic dishonesty and the press’s broad inability to call it what it was. Mr. Alterman was on the money and an unpublished letter said so. A perusal of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent would do the press corps a world of good.
Eric Alterman, “The Plot Against America,” The Nation, 16-23 November 2020 (www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-plot-against-america/).
Eric Alterman’s critique of the press’s coverage of the Trump administration was fully on point. Authoritarian wannabes will vie for Mr. Trump’s mantle and base; they likely will be more strategically and less pathologically mendacious than the departing president and consequently will pose a continuing threat to democratic governance. Hiding behind the evasion of “only reporting” will neither inform the citizenry nor hold officeholders to account nor ensure the fourth estate’s long-term health. “Truth will out” only when public exposure of dishonesty and malfeasance is swift and assured.
One thing can be said about George Will: He’s consistent. His effort to balance his contempt for President Smallhands and for the Republican Party that abets his atrocities with his distaste for the left, indeed for anyone not of his ideological stripe, turns him into a logical and factual contortionist. In this editorial carried by The Richmond Times-Dispatch, he makes broad, broad strokes with his false-equivalency brush as he strives to demonize antifascism, progressivism, and popular protests. The opportunity to take another run at Mr. Will was to be relished. I did. The Richmond Times-Dispatch took another pass.
George Will, “So Much to Protest, So Little Time,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 9 August 2018, A9 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/george-will-column-poor-portland-progressives-so-much-to-protest-so-little-time/article_7142b880-f77c-5118-b2db-f5d7a38c9df4.html).
George Will’s message is muddled. Unraveling his larger point is difficult: Comparing Oregon’s dismal history of race relations with actions of progressive activists in Portland? Insinuating that all counter demonstrators are “antifa”? Equating early twentieth-century Klansmen with activists publicly opposing white nationalists and other extremists? None of this withstands scrutiny.
Progressivism vexes Will but it seems oppressive only to those who feel their privilege threatened. Personal experience in rallies, marches, and counter-protests tells me that participants, with few exceptions, are concerned citizens who abhor violence and are merely exercising their First Amendment rights. Conflating all antifascism with “antifa” is interesting rhetorical legerdemain but anyone sensible likely harbors antifascist sentiment. Furthermore, President Trump’s flirtation with authoritarian tropes legitimizes progressives’ concerns about the country’s direction.
What amazes is Will’s failure to mention the two men murdered on a Portland train in May 2017 when defending two teenage women of color from a racist tirade by an alleged white supremacist. Will’s reference to the Faulknerian epigram on the past’s omnipresence is on point but perhaps not as he intends. Trump has emboldened white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates, movements meriting relegation to the past yet moldering in the present’s dark recesses. Does Will believe that this should pass without rebuttal by citizens of good will?
Will’s distaste for Trump has made him a man without a country politically. He has abjured the Republican Party, but his affinity with the right seems intact, his compulsion to demonize the left is unshaken, and his safe port appears to be the framing of questionable equivalences. Will is fond of apothegms. Perhaps he should ponder the words of conservative icon Edmund Burke: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”