Zabar’s Café, via ilovetheupperwestside.com. I actually had breakfast there once with a bunch of New York Times reporters, believe it or not, though not very directly. I was sitting with my then very young son at one of the long tables in the coffee shop adjacent to the delicatessen, eating bagels with nova and cream cheese after his violin lesson, when a big mixed-sex mob of eight or ten of them sat down next to us and began eating and talking, but they weren’t questioning me about my economic anxieties or reasons for voting Democratic. They were talking with each other, about the fascinating overseas assignments they had just come home from or were about to embark on. They were all young and good looking, in nice weekend casual clothes, and there may have been some flirting going on inside the general boasting. I was struggling at the time financially, recovering from a series of career setbacks in editorial freelancing and stuck in a job I’d fled ten years earlier that was never going to make me any money, and I really couldn’t afford the violin lessons, which the kid in turn wasn’t even enjoying, and the world was at war and they or their colleagues were making plenty of money for misreporting it, and I was in a black envious rage with all of them, not gonna lie.
Anyway, as the political scientist Nicholas Grossman says in a piece that just showed up in The Bulwark and seems to be attracting a lot of deserved attention,
I’ve never seen centrists like Yglesias say to people on the right (or center) that it’s important to read progressives (even if they’re super woke, or whatever the left-wing equivalent of Hanania’s racism is). Nor have I seen traditional conservatives like Brooks call for empathy with people on the left, or claim that any left-wing extremism is merely an inevitable reaction to centrist and conservative elites’ mistakes.
Reporters don’t do safaris to “Biden Country,” seeking to understand the voters who put him in the White House. While there are pieces explaining how, for example, black women in Georgia suburbs made a big difference in the 2020 election, there’s nothing approaching the ongoing coverage of white men in Ohio diners.
I’ve been thinking about these matters for a while, and I think there’s a pretty simple explanation for the lack of interest on the part of the high-class press in liberals, which is that the reporters and assignment editors and high-end opinionists believe they know everything there is to know about the liberals already. Trump voters are a deep and intriguing mystery to them, but liberals aren’t. And this is not because they’re liberals themselves, though many of them no doubt are, but because both groups belong to what Ron Suskind’s interlocutor (an anonymous Bush administration official commonly identified as Karl Rove) referred to in 2004 (around the time of that breakfast) as “the reality-based community”:
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'
And it’s obviously not, and not meant to be, the interesting part of the quotation. Isn’t believing in the judicious study of discernible reality sort of what everybody does, in our normal existences? Don’t we trust ourselves to check, whether it’s by looking out the window or looking at the weather report, when we decide whether to pack an umbrella? We all belong to the reality-based community, as a general rule. The interesting part of the quotation was the assertion of an alternative mode of existence, of people who wouldn’t bother to study reality, preferring simply to make shit up (I think that’s the technical term).
In 2004 it was calling itself an “empire”, because then the Republican Party was dominated by neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Dr. William Kristol, and the shit they were making up was on imperial subjects, like the fiendish weapons programs of the dictator of Iraq and the unified desire of the people of Iraq to be liberated from him. But it had already taken other forms, such as the “voodoo economics” of the conservative ascendancy that had begun some 25 years earlier with the claims of Arthur Laffer and Ronald Reagan, or the confluence of paranoias against Communists, Jews, fluoride treatments, and so forth that came together during the Republicans’ long exile from power from 1933 to 1952, which is what Richard Hofstadter was thinking of, obviously, when he first broached the idea of the paranoid style in his original intellectual Cletus Safari into the world of McCarthyism, “The pseudo-conservative revolt”, in 1954. Delusionality has always been a central element in American conservatism, going back to the Anti-Masons and Know-Nothings and probably quite a bit further than that. It was a mystery then, too.
The high-end journalists and opinionists think Biden voters are basically the same as them, because they have a very clear idea of why a person might decide to vote for Biden—many of them do it themselves, as I was saying; because they think Democrats sound smart, and foreigners like them, and Republicans sound weird, and Trump is disgusting, and they have lots of gay friends and wish they had some Black ones, and they loved Succession. Probably there’s some particular policy agenda they like, on abortion or the junior high history syllabus, or the preservation of the earth. They’re not exactly ignorant.
But they all went to high-end sleepaway colleges and finished in four years, and did their high-end internships, and got their high-end jobs, and they’re the Coastal Élite Senators Hawley and Cruz keep sneering at, just as much as Hawley and Cruz are themselves, and most of us are really not. Graduates of the top 12 colleges constitute less than 1% of the total number of college graduates in the US, and that’s not enough to elect a president.
Grossman makes it very clear:
Over 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden, and the vast majority sure aren’t societal elites. They struggle with rising costs—of housing, healthcare, groceries, college, etc.—and economic disruptions from globalization and technological change. They might be hurt more by the decline of shopping malls than the decline of coal mining, but both impose economic difficulties on the larger community.
By every reasonable definition of working and middle class, the Biden coalition has tons of them.
By income: Biden won by about 10 percentage points among voters whose families made less than $50,000 per year.
The data are less clear regarding voters whose families made between $50,000 and $100,000—one major survey showed these voters went for Biden by 15 percentage points, while another showed them evenly divided among Biden and Trump, 49–49—but no data show Trump decisively winning this group, as he did voters with incomes over $100,000….
And remember too that they see a lot of conservative Ivy League grads among America’s actual elite. Five GOP-nominated Supreme Court Justices went to Harvard or Yale, Ron DeSantis has degrees from Harvard and Yale, Trump graduated from Wharton business school at UPenn.
And of course voters of color are overwhelmingly Biden voters, no matter how hard the elite media may work at showing a Republican trend among Latin voters (by relentlessly missing the fact that “Hispanics may be of any race” and it is a whiteness phenomenon).
Reality is a big part of the reason. Biden voters have economic and other kinds of anxieties too! And it’s really irritating that the élite media seem unable to grasp that. It’s as if they couldn’t remember the “solutions” part of Rove’s formula for the reality-based community, but only the “judicious” part, because “judicious” is the part that applies mostly to the press, its bothsidery and insistent calm. If they talk about solutions that might be favoring the side that believes there’s a problem and unfair to the side that refuses to see it, and we can’t have that!
If they could recognize how often a Democratic vote is as much determined by policy questions that Democratic voters are perfectly familiar with—they’re not that wonky (Don’t mess with Social Security and Medicare! Make it easier to go to college or get an apprenticeship! Create jobs with benefits! Get more of those jobs to Black people! Stop killing Black people! Stop killing LGBTQ+ people! Protect my kids’ future! Save the Earth! Make it as easy for me to go bankrupt as you do for a casino or a bank!! Stop widening the gap between the richest and the poorest!) the reporting would be a lot better.
And not just the reporting of the reality-based electorate, but also of the reality-untethered, because that’s the real difference: that our anxieties are about real things, and theirs are fantasies. I know it’s not pleasant.
This is really good Yaz. Tight- well thought out and constructed.
Good job!
Another angle on all of this is the sourcing of the public's opinions, as we've discussed (and has been discussed by Steve and others).
The right wing media sphere — including talk radio, social media, YouTube etc. — propagates organized campaigns of ideas that are parroted by conservative voters who watch FOX etc.; but New York Times reporters don't pay attention to any of that, so the "diner safari" interviews always seem enlightening, like real investigation, since they present a puzzle ("Why do these people believe this stuff?"). Steve M. has repeatedly expressed his frustration that the Times can't seem to put a single reporter on Limbaugh and his descendants.
Whereas liberals say stuff that has recognizable sources..."reality," as you are correctly pointing out, but, more directly, media that everyone in their cultural and social environments are familiar with. I've seen Times reporters in places like Majority Report, meaning, they're aware of the left-wing new media world, but it's still unusual.