Scandal, and the media’s power either to declare its existence or to withhold such declaration, is the revolutionary Left’s chosen method of seizing and retaining power in our time. Working in cooperation with elected and unelected Democrats, the fbi, the Department of Justice, and other elements of the deep state, the media can, at will, conjure a whole web of criminal history out of legal gossamer to taint and ultimately render unelectable anyone who threatens their power. This is what they have been trying to do to Donald Trump ever since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower.
All the elements of this elite coalition are essential to its success, but the media constitute its leading element; only they have the power to manipulate public opinion so as to establish a consensus—a consensus reaching even far into the Republican and conservative opposition—in favor of what they choose to portray as the new decency. Today, being associated with the scandal of Trumpism is what getting divorced was in the old days: it is simply not done by those with aspirations of social acceptance among the elites.
The ultimate test of the media’s powers appears to be at hand.
The corollary to this ability to create scandal is, of course, that the media also have the power to suppress scandal when it comes to their own people, as it has lately come to President Biden and his family. But, unlike the power of scandal promotion, that of scandal suppression may prove to have its limits. No one can accuse the media of failing to reach new heights of disingenuousness and mendacity in their attempts over the past three years to stifle the scandal of Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling. But now that it is obvious to all but the most entrenched partisans that Joe Biden was heavily involved in his son’s “business” dealings, the ultimate test of the media’s powers appears to be at hand.
Of course, Mr. Trump, now four-times indicted, each time on laughably flimsy charges, continues to serve as the scandal-magnet he has always been. But the contrast in treatment between the former president and Hunter Biden by the media and the Democrats’ many allies in the permanent government ought to make it plain to even the most rabid Trump-haters that, as the estimable Mollie Hemingway puts it, “we have a Department of Justice that is working to literally imprison the top political opponent of the current president, and has been using all sorts of power to go after him.”
And yet so accustomed are we to the media’s partisan scandal-mongering that even many Republicans take it for granted, just as they take for granted the perennial ballot-box stuffing in Democratic strongholds like Chicago or Philadelphia. It would be surprising if ordinary, non-political people weren’t beginning to catch on to the ways they are being manipulated by means of the media-scandal machine, and there is some evidence that they are. According to Gallup,
Just 7 percent of Americans have “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media, and 27 percent have “a fair amount.” Meanwhile, 28 percent of U.S. adults say they do not have very much confidence and 38 percent have none at all in newspapers, TV and radio. Notably, this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined.
Something similar is going on with the fbi and the doj. An nbc poll released over the summer showed that “37 percent of registered voters surveyed said they have a positive view of the fbi, while 35 percent said they have a negative view. Views of the agency have soured since October 2018, when 52 percent of Americans had a positive opinion of the fbi and just 18 percent had a negative view.” Among Republicans, however, only 17 percent had a positive view while 56 percent had a negative one. The numbers for the doj were similar.
Such results, as firm indicators of “institutional disintegration,” were shocking to, among others, Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal, but they can’t have come as a complete surprise. Trust in the media, certainly, has not been far off this rock-bottom level for decades, and it has been clear at least since the election of Donald Trump that the fbi has taken a similar turn into outright partisanship in its enforcement of the law. What is shocking to me is that the fbi and the doj under Attorney General Merrick Garland seem no more concerned about their plummeting reputation for probity than the media are concerned about theirs.
In the media’s case, the post-Trump business model depends on their forfeiting the trust of those who don’t agree with them in order to cement further the attachment of those who do—and seem never to tire of hearing their own views of political things repeated back to them. Such a strategy may not work in the long term. The Washington Post, for example, is said to have lost half a million digital subscribers (down from a high of three million) since Mr. Trump left office and will lose $100 million this year. But what option does the paper have other than to keep preaching to an ever-diminishing choir? In any case, to the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, $100 million is pocket change, and I don’t foresee the paper’s partisanship disappearing anytime soon—or that of the rest of the media.
It is different with the fbi and the doj. You would think that those organizations whose proper functioning depends in large part upon their continuing to enjoy the public trust would make some effort, however disingenuous, to reassure the public that they remain fair and impartial administrants of the law. At the very least, these government agencies must surely evince a trifle of embarrassment at being seen to pull a full Inspector Javert on the former president while treating the current president and his son, whose crimes are far more obvious to begin with and are becoming more obvious with each passing day, as mere peccadilloes deserving only of a fine and probation.
These government agencies must surely evince a trifle of embarrassment.
And yet no such embarrassment do we see. The Left has institutionalized double standards over the past ten years. Any objection to their conduct is slapped down with the charge of “whataboutism”—this being the contemptuous name given in sinistral precincts today to what used to be called the Kantian categorical imperative, or the Golden Rule. That must be why fbi Director Christopher Wray continues to stonewall where he can and delay where he otherwise cannot the Republican House Oversight Committee’s investigations into the Biden family, all the while refusing to conceal his contempt towards the congressional investigators looking into the Bidens’ dubious activities.
Meanwhile, General Garland continues openly to emulate Captain Ahab in his implacable determination to, as the editor of this journal succinctly puts it, “get Trump.” Soon we may expect to hear some doj equivalent of a Leonard Downie Jr. (see “Scandalum scandalorum,” in The New Criterion of March 2023) or Jim Rutenberg tell us that politically motivated, selective prosecutions (and non-prosecutions) are the new objectivity and fairness, and are essential to the survival of democracy.
General Garland continues openly to emulate Captain Ahab.
The total politicization of the doj—exemplified by what is being called “January 6 jurisprudence,” which was invented out of ideological whole cloth to go after the Trump supporters and, ultimately, Mr. Trump himself—is not even controversial anymore in the agency’s eyes. Nor is it controversial, apparently, in the eyes of the legal establishment. This is just the way things are now, and it is the way things must always be so long as the coalition of the media and the Democrats and the rest of the deep state holds together. That’s all clear enough, and yet the mystery remains as to how such people can continue to thumb their noses at public opinion, even as it grows ever more cognizant and disapproving of their corruption.
I can’t help thinking that the apparent unconcern of the security services and the media about their devastatingly poor public image reflects a quiet confidence on their part that there will never be another Republican president, or at least not one who could or would dare take on the deep state–media complex and its scandal machine.
But how, you may ask, can our new oligarchs be so sure that the civilians and foot soldiers of the Democratic Party, excluded from power themselves but still unwitting accomplices of the elites, will not wake up one day and realize that they are being used by unscrupulous and power-hungry officials, both elected and unelected, whose only desire is to retain power?
The answer, I think, lies in the peculiar social dimension of ideology. There is a widespread idea these days that we are all ideologues, even if we don’t know it. The amiable Marxist professor Terry Eagleton, writing for UnHerd, expresses this belief well when he argues that
people don’t tend to regard their own beliefs as ideological, any more than people go around calling themselves Spotty or Fatso. Ideology is what the Other has . . . . Other people’s beliefs are ideological in the sense of being rigid, doctrinaire, immune to argument and detached from the practical world, whereas one’s own convictions are flexible, pragmatic and eminently reasonable.
Yet for all these similarities between the adherents of opposite political views, I think there is still a distinction to be made between them: there is no comparable social dimension to the opinions of ordinary, legitimately non-ideological folk. Such people can admit to error and change their minds, whereas the ideologue cannot do so without apostatizing and abandoning a social identity for the sake of which he became an ideologue in the first place.
Ideology tends to beget ideology.
It’s true that ideology tends to beget ideology as an equal and opposite reaction to itself. The Right thus seeks more and more to establish an ideology of its own designed to match the idealistic fervor of the other side. What results is a cobbled-together, ersatz ideology accompanied by a social—a better word might be tribal—dimension that didn’t exist hitherto. This is a regrettable development and part of what lies behind what Bill Bishop calls “the Big Sort” of Americans into ideologically exclusive communities.
But precisely because the Right’s ideology is an intellectually feeble and recent thing compared to the sleek and often brilliantly engineered (albeit utterly wrongheaded) program of the Left, it follows that the Right must yet retain something of the old, non-ideological modes of thought—enough, at any rate, to adapt, slowly, to changing circumstances in a way the rigid ideologue cannot. Because he believes in the ultimate truth of his perfect system of social organization, the ideologue must classify all the world into one of only two categories, believers and unbelievers. And if, with the help of the media and the entertainment industry, the true ideologues can manage to cast the degree of shame necessary on unbelievers to vote at least once for Democratic Truth or against Republican Indecency, those unbelievers will ever after be most reluctant to vote any other way. That’s why Republicans, for whom ideology is not natural or inveterate, have typically been less likely to think and vote in lockstep with one another in the way Democrats do. It is also why Republicans are much more likely to change their minds.
An illustration of how ideology inevitably becomes self-reinforcing in this way was recently provided by Helen Joyce, the Irish journalist and author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, in an interview with Peter Boghossian:
Something you may not have thought of is that there are a lot of people who can’t move on from [transgender ideology]. And that’s the people who have transitioned their own children. So those people are going to be like the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific islands and didn’t know the war was over. They’ve got to fight forever. This is another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we’ll ever have experienced. A lot of people have done what is the worst thing you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably, because of it. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they’ll still be fighting, and each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups.
Admittedly, this is an extreme case. For most ideologues and those only loosely involved in the ideological fellowship for social reasons, the situation does not call for a “fight to the death,” as Ms. Joyce says it does for those parents who transitioned their children. But because these more casual ideologues have chosen to make their political views a central fact of their social identity, they will find it just as difficult to question the ideology’s demands, and just as difficult ever to change their minds.
This example of the cranking of an ideological ratchet has been extended by Leor Sapir of City Journal to the practice of “doctor-activists like Jack Turban, Meredithe McNamara, and Johanna Olson-Kennedy who have tethered their careers, finances, and personal reputations to ‘gender-affirming care.’ ” But why should it not also be extended to those who have gone far out on a moral limb in defense of the Bidens, or on the attack against Trumpian conservatives (also known as racists, fascists, etc.) and Mr. Trump himself?
It seems probable that the horrific death tolls of both the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the last century owe something to the need of revolutionaries to justify previous atrocities by committing more atrocities in the present. This became all the more prevalent the more the revolutions fell short of expectations. Our own homegrown revolutionaries of today are busily destroying centuries of customary and constitutional order in the name of an “anti-racism” that is far more racist than whatever it claims to be against and an “anti-fascism” that is hardly distinguishable from fascism itself—all because it is unthinkable for these ideologues to admit that they, or their ideology, have been wrong.
Like those Japanese soldiers fighting on after 1945, these parents will continue to fight.
All such people are in a similar position, if not to the same degree, as the parents who have transitioned their children and thus could not live with themselves if they looked unblinkingly at what their decision has meant, or is likely to mean, for the children. Like those Japanese soldiers fighting on after 1945, these parents will continue to fight. This will go on for as long as they cling to the ideology with which they have so completely identified themselves and to which they have committed their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. The only remaining question is when or whether the admiration of their many ideological fellow-travelers will turn to pity, like that of Helen Joyce, for those whose delusions are necessary for their continued existence.
