Resistance culture was a disaster for America's liberals
Pod did not, in fact, save America
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 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 anti-establishment 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.
