Civics: commentary on elite and media hysteria

Thomas Frank:

The significance of liberal hysteria goes beyond this, however. The Trump era began with outrage at ‘populists’ who didn’t listen to the highly educated and were bringing authoritarianism to America. It has ended in a resounding professional-class triumph in which powerful corporations constantly tell the world what noble antiracists they are… in which the news media is not only post-objective but actively on a crusade to suppress the ideological Other… and in which tiny political missteps not only get people fired but sometimes bring them under a crushing hailstorm of public humiliation.

In the supreme irony of our times, many of the same liberals who were so concerned about Trumpist authoritarianism four years ago have enthusiastically accepted a system of social media censorship in which ideas that contradict the findings of established authorities are in certain cases banished from the public sphere. And they are slowly but clearly coming round to the administration’s proposal to turn the government’s surveillance powers on what is called ‘domestic extremism’. It was fears of Trumpist authoritarianism that made this new, liberal authoritarianism possible.