Victor Davis Hanson explores progressives’ response to Donald Trump’s election in a column for National Review Online.
In media land, Donald Trump is a reckless tweeter; Barack Obama’s outreach to GloZell and rapper Kendrick Lamar is just kicking back and having fun (Lamar’s latest album portrayed the corpse of a judge to the toasting merriment of rappers on the White House lawn). In media land, Donald Trump risked world peace by accepting a phone call from the democratically elected president of Taiwan; Barack Obama’s talks with dictators and thugs such as Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Raul Castro were long overdue. In media land, jawboning Carrier not to relocate a plant to Mexico is an existential threat to the free market; not so when Barack Obama tried to coerce Boeing to move to Washington State to produce union-made planes, or bullied a small non-union guitar company, or reordered the bankruptcy payouts of Chrysler and essentially took over the company.
In campus land, the election of 2008 was cause for ebullition; in 2016, elections by nature were traumatic as students were reduced to whining toddlers who needed cookies and milk.
(Note that campus post-election micro-parenting is not extended to departing students when they are hit with huge student-loan totals. Then they suddenly morph from helpless teenagers to full-fledged adults who must pay up what they borrowed to the colleges that did not educate them. Offering cookies and “caring” are a lot cheaper than not collecting overdue loans.) In campus land, federal laws should be rendered null and void — as in 1861 (over slavery) or 1961 (over racial integration of schools) — as colleges see fit; Donald Trump is a near fascist for wanting carry out the oath of his office by enforcing all federal statutes against states’-rights subversion.
The university and the media share two traits: Both industries have become arrogant and ignorant. We have created a climate, ethically and professionally, in which extremism has bred extremism, and bias is seen not as proof of journalistic and academic corruption, but of political purity. The recent election, and especially its aftermath, embarrassed journalists and academics alike — and should not be forgotten.