The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack .
I have little to say about the late Robert Mueller as a person, not just because I didn’t know him but because I count myself among those who believed, then and now, that the Mueller investigation was a colossal waste of time and energy. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump clearly called for some serious rethinking on the part of America’s liberal mainstream. At minimum, it demanded some measure of accountability from the elite operatives and pundits who had so confidently assured everyone that Trump couldn’t win and that Clinton had it in the bag. The Democratic Party ’s leaders held themselves up as the only things standing between the country and fascism, and the smug, self-righteous offering they put to voters ultimately handed the keys to a nuclear superpower to the former host of “The Apprentice.”
Instead of accountability — instead of any reckoning with what had just occurred — the guardians of America’s liberal mainstream preferred to insist that literally anyone else was to blame and that, in fact, they did not really lose. In 2017, Russiagate formed the locus of this delusion by mystifying things and outsourcing an electoral defeat to malign external agents. The problem was not that Democratic strategists had underestimated and misunderstood Trump’s appeal, allowing him to win voters who had once supported Barack Obama. It was not that Clinton had more or less spat on the millions of primary voters who had rallied behind Bernie Sanders . It was not that Democrats had abandoned blue-collar workers in the Midwest or chosen to meet an antiestablishment moment by lecturing struggling Americans that their anger was misplaced. If the Democratic Party , by definition, cannot fail, then it can only be failed by cosmic forces beyond anyone’s control. Source: YouGov Beyond the many factual problems with Russigate reporting, and the straightforward fiction of vote tallies “hacked” from Moscow that took hold among a sizeable chunk of identified Democrats, the accompanying investigation stood in as an institutional solution to what was actually a political problem. Rather than reckon with what had happened, elite liberals demanded instead to speak to the manager: in this case, putting their faith in a Republican former FBI director and the harmonious institutional equilibrium he symbolically represented. No need for politics, in fact. Our institutions were fine before the Orange Man came along and, if Hillary had won, we’d be at brunch.
This episode is just the tip of the iceberg. During Trump’s first term the culture of the “resistance” became the reigning ethos among mainstream liberals and Democrats. In due course, many books were sold and many media appearances logged. Members of the Bush administration who criticized Trump were welcomed while the party’s left was openly spurned. Meanwhile, an obnoxious and often cringeworthy partisan fan culture — consisting of Mueller superhero cartoons, Democratic Avengers memes, and awful podcasts whose one and only idea was to Unite Blue — increasingly stood in for the real work of politics. The tragedy, or one of them, was that Trump’s victory had genuinely shocked millions of earnest liberals who would have been ready to do that work had their leaders wanted them to. Instead, the Democratic rank and file was sold the facile bedtime story that all it needed to do was Trust the Plan: Vote Blue. Watch MSNBC. Buy the books. Follow David Frum on Twitter. Subscribe to The New York Times and Washington Post. Resistance culture told liberals that the political situation was just too damned exceptional to step beyond the bounds of normalcy or orthodoxy. Criticizing or making demands of the Democratic Party, it said, is a luxury we simply cannot afford. Resistance culture deserves its own special indictment. With Joe Biden ’s victory in 2020, this vision appeared to some to have been vindicated. But Trump did not go away and, still standing four years later, he was needlessly handed a second victory by the same leaders and operatives who had handed it to him the first time. Here, resistance culture deserves its own special indictment. For eight years, its guiding ethos of blind, unthinking deference had assured everyone that the single most effective strategy against Trump and MAGA was never criticizing powerful Democrats or questioning their chosen narratives.
By the second half of Biden’s term, this meant ignoring what was plain for all to see: that the president was a deeply dishonest and compromised figure who was visibly no longer able to do his job and was destined to lose reelection. It meant shrugging off the cancellation of primaries and caucuses by party apparatchiks and waiting until the most disastrous debate performance in modern political history to finally oust Biden. It meant being angrier at people who were protesting a genocide than the people who were actually carrying one out. The irony, and tragedy, here is that all of this was electorally catastrophic for the Democratic Party. If the goal of the resistance was to stop Donald Trump, its culture and strategy finally achieved the opposite. The other tragedy is that a different course after 2016 could have kept Trump from ever entering the White House again while fostering a genuine renewal of American democracy in the process.
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