"It’s a kind of disdain for actual voters"

Yesterday morning I posted some thoughts on the elite press's fixation on open primaries under the title, "Straussians* of the Center Left" which concluded with...

There is an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery quality to arguing that following the will of the party's voters somehow suppresses it while going with a plan conceived and all but solely supported by the journalistic elites of the NYT et al., a plan that allows for no direct participation of the party's actual voters is the democratic option. 

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What we're seeing is the latest reminder of the long-standing indifference and often open hostility of the elite press, particularly the New York Times, toward the idea of democracy. You can find examples of this going back at least a century or so with the way papers like the NYT covered the rise of fascism in Europe, but the more telling cases are more recent and closer to home. There was virtually no pushback from the mainstream press in 2000 when the Supreme Court installed the candidate lost the popular vote and probably the electoral college vote as well. We've also seen it in the blasé attitude toward voter suppression.  Since then things have only gotten worse. The disdain for Democratic primary voters has been palpable, culminating with the current enthusiasm for an option that will basically cut actual voters out of the process entirely.

None of this is surprising. While it is possible to find people of humble beginnings holding prominent positions in the New York Times, New York magazine, and company, they are rare and they become more rare the higher up you go. You don't have to look very deep to find signs of class bigotry and a profound distrust of rule by the people. This is always been true. Recently, it's just been closer to the surface. 

Yesterday afternoon, Josh Marshall ran a piece that made many of the same points (which if you're writing about politics, is always reassuring). 

We’re now a day out from President Biden’s semi-expected but still shocking decision to depart the presidential race and the rapid ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive nominee. We don’t know what the first polls will tell us. We should be prepared for them, at least at first, not to be dramatically different from Biden’s in the weeks leading up to the big and now genuinely historic debate. That’s not pessimism about Harris’ campaign. It’s a recognition that the best argument for the switch is not that she would instantly transform the campaign but be better able to make the case against Donald Trump over the next three months. But now the great majority of Democrats are treating her ascension with something approaching euphoria.

That’s both a measure of her as a candidate and an end to the protracted agony of the last three weeks. But already we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”

The Wood article really is jaw-droppingly bad. His ignorance of the history and workings of politics would be embarrassing in a high school newspaper editorial. We'll get back to it if I have the time and the stomach for it.

Back to Marshall.

The point is that beneath this seeming appetite to let politics run its course in all its ferality is something quite different: It’s a kind of disdain for actual voters and how actual politics works – not always pretty, mixed with peoples overweening ambitions, their intense loves and fears, and all the rest. If Democrats want to get behind Kamala Harris, stop fighting with each other, stop watching the unmerited pain of an aging leader most of them respect and even love, and get on to running a campaign against a menacing adversary … well, that’s just fine. They don’t have anything to prove to folks who write for a living.