If the years since 2020 have demonstrated anything, it’s that the elites of blue America and the elites of red America are both driven by fear of non-elites.
On the left, they’re afraid of disaffected underlings organizing on Slack. On the right, they tremble before enraged strangers yelling at TVs.
Consider two big political-media stories that bookended 2023. Both concerned events that took place in 2020 — and, in their contrast, say tons about the dueling political impulses that have shaped the country ever since.
Back in the spring, the big news was Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox, which had aired luridly false accusations about the company’s ballot-counting machines. Before the network settled for $787 million, the public got a chance to read thousands of damning words of internal Fox communications. The messages between executives revealed that higher-ups were aware that the stolen-election story was dangerous nonsense — but absolutely terrified of alienating regular viewers.
Last week, media chatter was about another 2020 controversy: New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet’s sacking amidst a staff uprising over a conservative op-ed. Bennet this month finally published his side of the story, making nuanced arguments about the alleged decline of open-minded reporting. But the organizational picture he paints is much simpler: The Times, in his telling, was led by some of the most accomplished names in American journalism — but absolutely terrified of alienating junior staffers.
On one side, an institution afraid of its base. On the other, an institution afraid of its team. Does this sound familiar?
It should: It’s the difference, in a nutshell, between the worlds occupied by the institutions of the right and the institutions of the left, particularly in Washington.
Kevin Phillips, the mastermind of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” famously said that he never understood Washington until realizing a core truth: “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.” The line, from the 1960s, got a lot of attention when Phillips died this fall. But by that point, it may already have been obsolete. In the 2020s, it turns out that the key to understanding politics is knowing who’s afraid of who.
At the very least, the concept can serve as a decoder ring to a lot of otherwise odd-seeming stories that have roiled Washington’s institutions — from nonprofits to Capitol Hill offices to political parties trundling toward the nomination of two historically unpopular candidates.
Take the world of think tanks and advocacy. On the left, a storyline of the past few years has been of institutions ground to a halt by staff-driven turmoil over workplace diversity. One particularly vivid story in The Intercept........