US election: media pontificators left whining to an empty hall

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

For almost a week now, emissaries have journeyed into the heart of whitest America seeking contact with tribes of deplorables. Their discoveries, by and large, have been disappointing.

“What are these communities like?” asked a Guardian podcast presenter speaking to a film producer who had ventured into Trump country.

“It would be lovely to paint them all as Ku Klux Klan members,” the producer says, “but many of them, if you moved in next door to them, they are warm, kind … they bring you pies … there’s a community spirit.”

The need to get out more is one of the many lessons the cognoscenti should draw from their abject failure to foresee last week’s insurrection.

Learning lessons, however, ­requires a degree of self-awareness, a quality somewhat lacking in the chin-pulling classes.

Support for Donald Trump’s anti-establishment revolt stretches further than many commentators suggest. Take for example Fauquier County, Virginia, a 50-minute drive from Capitol Hill. Fauquier residents are hardly poor; household income is almost double the national average. Yet Trump voters outnumbered Clinton voters by six to four. In Washington, DC, by comparison, Clinton voters outnumbered Trump voters by 20 to one.

Those who claim this is a revolt of the economically dispossessed clearly haven’t done their homework; exit polls show that people with household incomes of less than $US50,000 tended to vote for Clinton.

The revolt was not political or economic but cultural. It was a revolt of the commuter belt as much as the rust belt and wheat belt.

Putnam County, New York, a comfortable hour’s commute from Manhattan, is the seventh richest county in the US. Support for Trump was 57 per cent, three points more than Mitt Romney achieved in 2012.

The revolt spread as far as the Hamptons. Four years ago, Suffolk County on Long Island was Obama territory. Last week it fell to Trump with a 4.5 per cent swing.

The picture is consistent; Clinton held the major cities while fringe county voters preferred Trump. Coloured county by county, the US is red with a blue coastal fringe in the northeast and southwest and blue blobs scattered in the middle.

The media class lives exclusively in blue territory, which helps explain their inability to grasp Trump’s appeal. It explains why they stared blankly at the cameras as their iPhones lit up with results from swing states. A Trump victory was beyond their imagination; there was nothing in their moral universe that could explain it; they were — quite literally — dumbfounded.

The gap between the media class and the public they serve has been developing for a half-century. Lionel Trilling coined the term “adversary culture” in 1965 to describe the philosophy of a new class hostile to values of the free market, patriotism and traditional morality.

By the early 1970s, news, together with increased doses of commentary, was provided by “ranking members of the privileged class, the most prestigious, powerful, wealthy and influential journalists in all history”, as Pat Buchanan observed.

In 1975, Kevin P. Phillips noted the rise of a “mediacracy” with a precise cultural agenda. Chic residential districts of Back Bay in Boston, east Manhattan and Shaker Heights in Ohio had turned from conservative bastions into enclaves of progressive liberalism.

Four years ago, Angelo Codevilla declared them members of a new ruling class, united by the conceit they were the best and brightest “while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional”.

With the election of the deplorable Trump, the ruling class has been deposed. To them it is the end of life as they know it. “The world changed late last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin wrote in Vanity Fair. “That’s a terrible feeling for a father.”

“Where does this leave us?” Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times. “What, as concerned and horrified citizens, should we do?”

Beneath the sentimental rhetoric lurks a realisation of powerlessness. For 18 months they have been lecturing Americans, in ever more strident terms, about the dangers of Trumpism, but Americans called their bluff. The recriminations have begun. Some blame Facebook, which has allowed Americans to see the world through eyes other than those of the media establishment.

Facebook’s executives should take responsibility for “this very real civic crisis, in which the electorate has unprecedented access to information and an unprecedented inability to comprehend it”, wrote one commentator. Facebook had “the social responsibility … to stop allowing its customers to be grossly hurt on a massive scale”.

The shattering defeat of the US cultural elite has resonated strongly in Australia, where our own media class largely shares the same values. A profound discomfort has taken hold. If the thundering of The New York Times no longer prevails, what hope for The Sydney Morning Herald?

“I watched in stunned shock and dismay,” writes Anne Summers. “I am fearful.”

Trump will “almost certainly inspire a truly awful wave of ugliness against women and minorities around the world”, writes Waleed Aly.

Huffington Post Australia’s Emily Brooks spoke to a child psychologist who warned young girls might feel “disempowered” by the result. “Hillary’s loss was a loss for women everywhere,” she writes.

Seldom in a free democracy has the media been so one-sided. The line between journalism and campaigning was crossed the moment Trump was confirmed as the Republican nominee.

It is not hard to see why, since most opinion makers live and work among people who saw the presidential contest as an existential battle between good and evil. How do you balance a debate between Joan of Arc and Attila the Hun?

The mediacracy will fight back, viciously one suspects, in cultural opposition to Trump’s presidency. Dealing with the hostility, half-truths and distractions may be the new administration’s biggest challenge.

The noise will matter, but not as much as it once did. The spell has been broken. They can pontificate all they like; Middle America isn’t listening any more.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.