The Link

In an intriguing essay, Wesley Yang, an anti-Woke progressive opposed to what he calls the Successor Regime, postulates a connection between the election of Trump, the Russia collusion story, and the societal upheaval we are now undergoing.

The Russia hysteria served a psychological function for those at a loss as to how the country they led had slipped from their grasp. It allowed them to offload the blame for the serial failures through which they rendered themselves beatable by a carnival barker onto the machinations of a foreign power. It allowed them to indulge fantasies of the president’s imminent replacement. It helped media companies reverse a downward spiral and restore themselves to profitability as they turned all of public life into a mutually profitable kayfabe with the object of their obsession.

But when the campaign of leaks and innuendo failed to dislodge Trump from power, the horizontally integrated pieces of the newly assembled anti-Trump messaging complex needed to pivot. They sought a new basis for maintaining the ongoing state of emergency, and they found an out-of-the-box solution in the form of “anti-racist” doctrines elaborated in obscure corners of academia and the activist industrial complex but increasingly circulated by online publications through the 2010s. The executive editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet, made this point explicitly in a town hall meeting:

“We built our newsroom to cover one story [Russia collusion], and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story... It is a story that requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred, but it is also a story that requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years. In the coming weeks, we’ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world. We’ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story.”

. . . we see the coalescence of the new sensibility that now pervades the official pronouncements of all American institutions, and we see where it came from. The failure of the campaign seeking to treat Trump as an aberration in an arc of history otherwise headed toward the millennium led to the embrace of an analysis framing him as the latest manifestation of an all-pervading, transhistorical phenomenon at the “foundation of all of the systems in the country.”

Monomania of this sort is of course the end of the journalistic endeavor as such (since journalism seeks to tell us the contingent particulars of what happened rather than reaffirm a daily catechism containing all the answers) and its replacements by a priestly vocation. 

I think Yang is on to something.  The origins of this disaster go back years but Trump's election seemed to destabilize already fragile elements of our society and then George Floyd's death provided the immediate trigger.