This morning, the Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts Jr asked “Who cares what’s wrong with Donald Trump? What’s wrong with us?” and then immediately labels “63 million people” who must be the “us” in which he obviously doesn’t include himself.
Pitts may have missed that even on his side of the political fence, while none of his cohorts are letting up on Trump [yet], there might be some stirrings of engage in self-criticism.
There has been a lot more of it coming from the right, even after having won an election, on a consistent basis.
Witness Andrew McCarthy in National Review making even a stronger possible legal case for impeachment than Vanity Fair’s Thomas Frank, who can only sputter that “breaches of decorum…may be cause enough.”
Witness Ben Shapiro warning that “pretending to care about the sins of the Left in order to justify the sins of the Right…because many people believe that fighting the Left requires tossing out morality of means in favor of morality of ends….actually throws into sharp relief the hypocrisy of the Right.”
From the Left, we have the ADL finally noticing that there is a pervasive Judeophobia coming from the corners of the “new civil rights movement”, even if they haven’t quite brought themselves to notice that it is way more trenchant than the version emanating from the alt-right, precisely because it tends to be tolerated, if not outright excused.
More notable because it came from a prominent media figure and unrelenting Trump critic was Jake Tapper specifically calling out “progressives” for celebrating a well-known cop-killer, and naming Linda Sarsour and the Dyke March for "ugly sentiments" which must have irked the former Obama staffer and now DNC Vice Chair who had recently threatened Sarsour's critics with an order to "Fall back!"
And yet.
Conservatives allow for the possibility that there is some substance to any of the assertions that the President committed some forms of political malfeasance that might be indefensible, legally or otherwise. There has been no such parallel admission from the mainstream liberal press or any Democrats regarding anything that happened before or during the election cycle as might pertain to Hillary Clinton. Further, the fact that Jill Stein herself spearheaded some of the recount efforts should obviate the salience of any such “criticism” that might come those quarters further left; the Sandernistas came around, and the resistance can do no wrong. Because Trump.
This is important because there is one element of “whataboutism” that might be legitimate: while conservatives might not necessarily want to, as Shapiro puts it, “toss[] out morality of means in favor of morality of ends”, what they can assert with some credibility is that any criticism from the left and even center-left is ipso facto tainted by both the obvious attempt to score political points and the inability or even unwillingness for them to even minimally scrutinize their own standard bearers, whether a Sarsour or a Clinton. [Was there any mainstream or Left acknowledgement of even “reckless irresponsibility”, then or now?]
Therefore it would be logical for Trump supporters to conclude that oppositional criticism is anything but constructive. While eminently plausible that the President is immune to any criticism, constructive or otherwise, the majority of his conservative critics aren’t interested in tearing him to possibly mitigate the damage he’s doing to their cause; the sustained criticism from those such as Shapiro, McCarthy, the Weekly Standard and at least half of the staff at Commentary which predated the election and hasn’t let up gives it a lot more credibility than anything coming from the President’s left.
[Plus, you have to give them credit for speaking freely despite the fact that they might hand talking points to the “resistance”. Tapper and the ADL notwithstanding, the MSM, DNC et al certainly aren’t going to do the Right’s work for them.]
Tapper and the ADL have proven at least the possibility that what constitutes mainstream liberalism has something to contribute in discrediting doctrinaire progressivism [in a way that anyone to their Right might not be able to do]. Whether that capacity for self-criticism will carry over to more mainstream members of their party—ones who defend the Sarsours, Ellisons, Max Blumenthals and Soroses—remains to be seen.
Pitts' version of self-reflection: “…63 million…people who dislike Mexicans and Muslims, people who oppose same-sex marriage, people mortally offended at a White House occupied by a black guy with a funny name, they voted for Trump.” We've seen this before: after the 2004 elections, the British Daily Mirror screamed "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”
If Pitts and his ilk would make even a faint attempt as bipartisan criticism, as Tapper and the ADL have begun to and the aforementioned rightward pundits have been doing all along, maybe it would do some good. Otherwise all they’ll do is chase their own tails until they see their own reflection.
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