Ross Douthat: The twilight of the anti-Trump idolshttps://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2021/02/28/ross-douthat-twilight/Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency and especially in the COVID era, there was a quest for figures that could be held up as embodiments of everything that Trump’s opposition wanted to restore: reason, technical competence, idealism. Over time these figures took on the character of familiar dramatic archetypes — the Good Republican, the Heroic Whistleblower, the Beleaguered Expert, the Tough Blue State Governor, the Europeans.
...
The first month of the Biden era has been a hard time for these characters. ... we’re seeing archetypes of anti-Trumpism exposed as idols — not just fallible but failing, not just imperfect but corrupt.
You may have noticed, for instance, the long-overdue collapse of the heroic story around Andrew Cuomo, the Tough Blue State Governor par excellence, whose pandemic news conferences inspired such fawning media coverage ...
For the sake of the heroic story, the fact that Cuomo and Bill de Blasio jointly botched New York’s initial response to the coronavirus was airbrushed out of the televised hagiography. ... that the governor shipped potentially contagious patients back to nursing homes was reported on but didn’t dent Cuomo’s reputation ...
... Meanwhile, a similar deglamorization has arrived for the at the Lincoln Project, the collection of Republican strategists dedicated to using their skills to bring down Trump. They started with a sermon about saving the Republic, lapped up Resistance lucre for their ad campaigns, and now — well, it now turns out they had an accused sexual harasser among their founders, a toxic workplace culture and a mission that sought “generational wealth†for its leaders ...
Finally, the wheel has also turned for the Wise and Sophisticated Europeans, whose governments were once portrayed as having vanquished the pandemic with science, while Trump’s America was a failed state where the coronavirus held illimitable dominion over all.
That trans-Atlantic contrast diminished when Europe experienced its own autumnal wave, but now, in the race to vaccinate, the whole narrative has been reversed. America’s vaccine program looks far better than Europe’s catastrophic nonrollout, and the only major European country doing really well is Britain, which rather famously Brexited out of the Continent’s technocratic utopia not so long ago.
This twilight for the anti-Trump idols should be a teachable moment in two ways. First, it’s a reminder that the problem of media failure in the Trump era does not begin and end with the conservative bubble. As my colleague Frank Bruni wrote last month, Trump’s outsize awfulness often worked as a “concealer†over sins and follies not his own. But there should have been more scrutiny for what lay underneath: The issues with Cuomo were always apparent, the issues with the Lincoln Project somewhat so, and the fact that America and Europe were never so very far apart in their COVID response was discernible as well. Yet anti-Trumpism frequently produced narrative conformity in media outlets that congratulated themselves on not being like those sycophants at Fox.
Douthat is the NYT's token
House-Conservative and a Never-Trumper. He lacks the snarl of, for example, the WashPost's
House-Conservative Jennifer Rubin. He also, as he does in this piece, seems capable of at least some self-reflection. I wonder, though, what he was saying about Cuomo, the Lincoln Projecters, and EuroLanders last spring and summer. I wonder whether Douthat, back then, viewed and wrote about: Cuomo as a
Tough Blue State Governor; the Lincoln Projecters as
Good Republicans; EuroLanders as
Wise and Sophisticated. Perhaps not, his comments about the EuroLanders suggests he did not, or saw actual data and reversed/ceased fairly early.
If he did, at least he's acknowledging reality now (though if he did he really should add the words, "I was wrong.").
