Liberals Are Giving Up on America

In their despair at Donald Trump’s victory, liberal pundits are concluding that the masses, especially the working class, are irredeemably terrible. That’s apolitical nonsense.

A Donald Trump campaign sign is posted next to a Vote Here sign at a polling place at a church in Tempe, Arizona, on November 5, 2024. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)


The election takes are still flowing as freely as the Dom Pérignon at one of Kamala Harris’s Silicon Valley fundraisers. Many liberals agree on one thing: the American people suck, especially the working class.

The Guardian headline on a Rebecca Solnit piece this week reads, “Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do.” The Nation’s Elie Mystal went further, arguing that the country was so bad it deserves the hell that’s coming. Headlined “Trump is Not a Fluke — He’s America,” with a subhead intoning that “the country will get what it deserves,” Mystal writes: “We, as a nation, have proven ourselves to be a fetid, violent people, and we deserve a leader who embodies the worst of us. . . .  Trump reflects us more accurately than perhaps any president ever has.” Rather than ask ourselves how to save America from Trump, as many of us patriotic naifs are now doing, Mystal asks, “Is American worth saving?” and his answer is a resounding no.

Some prominent liberals even dismissed the well-documented problems of the economy, so eager were they to make the case that the American masses are just plain terrible. On X/Twitter, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones called the idea that voters were discontent with the economy a “rationalization,” while Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, on MSNBC, dismissed it as “BS.”

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