On Hope’s Disuse

Kevin D. Williamson of National Review and Will Wilkinson over at Vox were recently sparring about the current swell of “socialist” candidates, and wrestling with exactly what their ascension means. KDW sees some of it as rhetorical semantics, a point that Wilkinson partially concedes. The exchange, I think, delivered some forward progress.

In an age where our nation’s cultural and political gulfs are in constant focus, it’s easy to forget just how curiously functional — meaning, productive — our public dialogue actually is. I often get the sense that the media creates divisiveness ex nihilio. By painting that divisiveness with such conviction and frequency, the media stokes it. Not to say that political tribalism, factionalism, or whatever you’d like to label it, hasn’t been on the up and up. It has.

But when every news article is prefaced with an acknowledgment of our current political malaise, or has an undertow of dread about our political culture, you begin to wonder if said media hasn’t latched onto a story line so seductive it’s hard to let go. The longer the media parrots that story — one about a nation in dire straits because of deep cultural rifts, economic duress, and the rising tide of populism — the more true it becomes. As they say, civilization is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The more I read American journalists lamenting our political pickle, the more catastrophic that pickle seems.

I think we’ve witnessed a bit of mission creep. What began as the media trying to capture salient trends in American life, on the heels of Trump’s victory — things like fading opportunities in rural America, acute distress in the deindustrialized Midwest, resurgent animus towards immigrants and minorities — transmuted into the media trying to persuade the public that such trends infuse virtually every sector of American life. That, quite literally, no analytical energy can be spent without a doleful nod to our sorry political state. That every victory must now be editorialized as a great triumph in an era of political regression and that every defeat must be framed as another casualty of today’s cultural cesspool.

Let’s hope things aren’t that bad.