The Damage Trump Has Done to Liberals

Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to America. He has undermined our most cherished institutions, destroyed norms of decent behavior, made racism and misogyny acceptable, disregarded facts, lied with impunity and stoked nutty conspiracy theories. And I could go on.

But he’s done something more subtle to liberals. In this case I don’t mean his “owning of the libs” as he likes to say. Owning the libs is about deliberately getting under their skin and making them over-react. That’s done so easily by so many people that Trump hardly corners the market on it, though he has taken it to an art form.

What I mean is that he’s made it almost impossible for center-left people like me to give some credit to the other side. I come from the old world where you could say that conservatives and Republicans sometimes had a point and that they shared our goals but just had a different way of getting to the same place.

It was a good thing to live in a society where one party believed government could solve nearly every problem while the other was skeptical of its competence and worried about its overreaching. It was a good thing to have one party that emphasized communal needs while the other valued individualism and self-reliance. It was a good thing to have one party that embraced free trade, internationalism and an engaged foreign policy while the other wanted to pull back a bit more.

As my friend Spencer Black once told me, we used to play the game between the 40 yard lines. Now we’re not even in the same stadium.

The press has struggled with this since the day Trump became a serious contender for his party’s nomination. The traditional formula of treating both sides even-handedly just didn’t work with Trump. He did not have a valid point. He did not buy into traditional classical liberal values. He didn’t deal in facts and logic. He didn’t hold himself to consistency. He didn’t even respect the free press itself.

The problem is that when the other side is so clearly wrong — ignores or makes up facts or simply lies — it blows apart the desire on the part of moderate liberals like me to be fair to the other guys, to give their arguments a fair consideration and to ask ourselves if they might be right, even just a little.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof made this very point in his column last week. He wrote:

I worry that the liberal penchant for renaming things is counterproductive. When we employ terms like “Latinx” and “A.A.P.I.” or we fret that it is offensive to refer to “the French” or “the college-educated” or we cite “people with uteruses” rather than “women,” the result is meant to be inclusive but actually leaves many Americans feeling bewildered and excluded. The way to win elections is to engage voters rather than wag fingers at them. Slogans can’t replace evidence-based policymaking that understands trade-offs and embraces nuances. It’s easy to say housing is a human right, but that doesn’t get anyone into a home. My guess is that we liberals will continue to do silly things from time to time and that our silliness will be directly proportional to our smugness.

Smugness is not new for my people. Liberals have long felt superior, both morally and intellectually. Earlier in his piece Kristof claims that Baby Boomer libs were more humble because they had experienced failure both on the policy and the political front. The Great Society didn’t produce one and Reaganism dominated politics for the last part of the 20th century. But if liberal Boomer humility is a thing I sure haven’t noticed it.

Nonetheless, I agree with Kristof that it has gotten worse. Young liberals who are growing up with Trump cannot conceive of a world in which Republicans and conservatives are not the enemy, not just people with different policy approaches to the same problems but people who see problems liberals don’t see and ignore problems liberals see as fundamental. People who, when the facts don’t support them, simply claim those facts are a hoax. People who are immune to embarrassment over ignorance and guilt over hypocrisy.

It always seemed to me that a fundamental part of being a liberal was to be fair-minded, to allow the other side to at least make its case and to consider their arguments and to admit they had a point when they did. Trump has made a mockery of that impulse. And in that way he’s done even more damage than it appears.