Revolt of the Elites

I've been reading the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Ever since cofounder Robert Silvers died, NYRB has been led by faceless editors without a clear personality or viewpoint. But NYRB has published a series of articles that not only display its liberal contributors' (and readers') contempt and hatred for Trump's (faux) populist rebellion on the Right, but go so far as to suggest it's time for the liberal elites -- that is the suburban voters, professionals, college-educated whites, and Blacks who make up the base of the Democratic Party -- to revolt against our skewed political institutions, which have been rigged by the rightward skidding, minority Republican Party.

The current issue of NYRB contains two such articles -- one by Fintan O'Toole ("Dress Rehearsal"), which suggests that Trump's attempted coup did not succeed only because of his personal deficiencies as a would-be dictator -- and that the next January 6 could be much more catastrophic. O'Toole, who became the literary establishment's darling with his recent memoir/history of his native Ireland ("We Don't Know Ourselves"), teaches at Princeton University.

Alexander Burns, a Politico columnist who formerly worked as a national political correspondent for the New York Times, goes even further. His NYRB article suggests that it's time for liberals to overturn the political institutions created by the hallowed Founding Fathers that have fallen under tight Republican control -- the Senate, Supreme Court, and the Electoral College.

In other words, Burns calls for a Trump-like coup of the Left, not the Trump-led Right. (Remember this article was published in the staid, intellectual New York Review of Books -- not in Jacobin.)

Here are Burns's key, closing paragraphs:

"No iron rule in American politics says an electoral majority greatly disadvantaged by the country's political institutions has to operate with effusive respect for them. A Democratic candidate who wins the popular vote and loses the Electoral College -- like Hillary Clinton and Al Gore -- is not bound by law to concede promptly. A popular president constrained by the Senate's rural majority does not have to keep private his view that the institution is obsolete.

"In the age of Trump, Democrats have developed a great sense of pride in their role protecting America's frayed democratic norms. But there may come a time... when many of the voters who make up the Democratic Party's base and a majority of the country... might find that it is no longer tolerable to be ruled by a dwindling and overpowered minority. There is only so much satisfaction to be drawn from being the sole party with an unblemished record of dutifully surrendering power."

I find myself cheering this new kick-ass attitude on the part of liberal pundits. Yes, as I've long argued, it's time for Democratic leaders to bring the same weapons to the Republican brawl.

But -- as independent voices like Glenn Greenwald point out -- there is something unnerving about this liberal backlash against Trump. Are the intellectuals featured in NYRB -- and the rest of the liberal media -- simply making an argument for the neoliberal status quo? The Clinton-Obama-Biden political establishment that has repeatedly sold out working people and upheld the corporate dominance of the Democrats' biggest contributors?

I don't recall one article in NYRB -- or in any liberal opinion publication -- calling for the radical redistribution of wealth in this country. Yet, as Bernie Sanders's presidential campaigns -- which came under daily fire from the New York Times and Washington Post -- showed, much of Trump's scorned constituency were first and foremost Bernie voters.

Rather than appeal to this white, working-class electorate -- by offering them a more equitable vision of America -- the liberal punditocracy is now calling for a political revolt. I'd start by calling loud and clear for a tax-the-super-rich plan. But don't hold your breath that the liberal elites will campaign for that.

Btw, where is the organized Left in all this? I forgot.. there isn't one. At least one that matters. They're too busy finding their sexual identities and attacking comrades who don't agree 100% with them -- or have accomplished more. Or something.