The media’s sickness is terminal
One of the media’s favorite refrains against Donald Trump in 2016 was that he lacked the “temperament” and “maturity” to govern. The charge was usually leveled by the most ill-tempered, immature journalists imaginable. It is typical of the left, which owns almost all of the media, to demand “civility” of its opponents while granting itself limitless incivilities.
In the grip of government power, when they need to tame their opposition, liberals will pompously talk about the “rules of decorum.” But the moment they are out of power they immediately start breaking them. In the 1990s, the rattiest members of the Clinton administration famously called for a “civility commission,” which led to a sham group at the University of Pennsylvania populated mainly by uncivil liberals upset at Rush Limbaugh and company for challenging their power.
The relativism underpinning liberalism makes it hopelessly willful. Its relationship to civility is determined not by any principle independent of human will but by pure political opportunism. Insofar as civility is useful to gaining or preserving power, liberals pretend to honor it. But the moment civility becomes an impediment to holding or regaining power, they give themselves permission to violate it. The “ends” suddenly justify the means, and anyone who questions their uncivil behavior fails to see the “higher” good at stake.
In this atmosphere, anything goes, at both the low and high ends of liberalism, as we have seen since Trump’s victory: Upper East Side liberals trotting over to Central Park to watch a play in which a Donald Trump character is stabbed to death; audiences laughing at comedienne Kathy Griffin for holding up a mock-severed, bloody head of Trump; liberals retweeting actor Peter Fonda calling for Trump’s son to be thrown into a “cage with pedophiles”; liberal activists cheering attempts to throw Ivanka Trump off a plane; liberal activists congratulating a restaurant for refusing to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders. In the latter case, the only surprise is that the restaurant didn’t poison her. Maybe that will happen in Trump’s second term.
