One week before the “last election” or (yet again) “the most important election of our lifetime,” esteemed Harvard professor Steven Pinker published a calm New York Times Opinion piece about how well America is doing (“Trump Says the Country Is ‘Dying.’ The Data Says Otherwise.”)

Real earnings are higher than ever. The “misery index” (unemployment plus inflation) is back down to Trump-era levels. Homicides are down. Environmental pollution — at least relative to economic goodies — is down. Even life expectancy, an area where the opioid crisis, deaths of despairs, and the mishandling of COVID-19 has long relegated America to the rear of her rich-country peers, is recovering, rising again toward its prepandemic level.

Except, nobody believed Pinker’s prediction. Put differently: the echo chamber in which the NYT dabbles did not include the audience their editors believed needed to hear this message.

The cold shower of Tuesday’s election result, as solid a vindication of Donald Trump as one could ask for, was the electorate shouting Pinker down. His piece was, it turned out, a typical ivory-tower inability to understand what troubles real folk, amounting to a highly credentialed version of the “This is fine” meme (the one with a happy dog in a burning room).

Life expectancy and real earnings may look fine, but don’t “feel” fine — and more importantly, there are umpteen other topics voters care about more.

Bret Stephens’ postmortem in the same magazine exactly a week later was much more insightful.

Trump was literally Hitler according to the establishment media, intellectuals, and opposing politicians. Imagine the confusion, then, when the plebs didn’t believe them — are the plebs now Nazis? 

(Psychologist Rob Henderson, not exactly a simp for Trump and with plenty of Democrat credentials — minority, foster kid, Air Force, Ivy League college, and Cambridge PhD  —  titled his election rundown “I Can’t Believe Calling Him Hitler Didn’t Work.”)

Stephens voiced some strikingly similar reflections to what the very same people, in the very same positions, on the very same pages, said after Trump 1.0 eight years ago: “The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.”

For a brief moment after Trump had won the first time, there was a viable reckoning, a mea culpa tour among intellectuals and journalists who promised to cover more of the country and feature more conservative voices. We, the intellectuals, failed you, the People. Lackadaisically, it lasted only for a few weeks before collapsing spectacularly in a cesspool of wokeism, COVID insanity, media censorship and deplatforming, gaslighting on inflation-triggering government spending, warmongering, and many other unseemly behaviors.

Bari Weiss, now of The Free Press, was one such important whistleblower and NYT defector who, in 2020, accurately observed that, “the lessons that ought to have followed the [2016] election — lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society — have not been learned.”

She could have repeated that description this week.

All Is Certainly Not Well: The Rules of a Game

What Weiss did emphasize was imploring us all to calm down. America is fine, stronger indeed than whatever fears you harbor about what might topple it — exceptional, even, in its way to live and let live. Pinker isn’t “wrong,” as much as he is selective about his indicators: America’s economy is the envy of the rest of the world.

For classical liberals, it’s important to remember that this election result doesn’t constitute any kind of “win.” We still have a Leviathan government larger than anything the founders could have conceived of even in their wildest nightmares. The debt and deficit are both out of control (if anything about to get much worse under Trump, bar an Elon cost-cutting miracle); Social Security is still a mess, defunct in a few short years. Military adventurism is despicable, the southern border a farce, health an institutionalized disaster, the central bank unfit for purpose.

But this is a better place to start.

We avoided a much worse fate in the continuation of a disastrous regime and a subsequent alignment of all the major societal powers (bar the Supreme Court) in a left-wing direction. Like Dan Klein and Zachary Yost thoroughly explored in several long reads for AIER’s Fusion this summer, classical liberals should favor Republican ideas. Not because we like them, not because they’re even remotely good, but because they’re verifiably less bad.

With two-and-a-half of the three branches of government thoroughly in control of one slant of America’s pretty narrow Overton window, the real challenge now begins. The new sheriffs in town are, thankfully, balanced by extremely left-wing academia, media, and entertainment institutions —  not to mention the deep state/bureaucrat classes — which means the country’s new bosses will face devastating scrutiny.

As classical liberals, that is — now as ever — also our job: we have to be the scrutiny we wish to see in the world.

Wokeness was already dying, concluded The Economist in September (“winding down,” as Stony Brooks sociologist Musa al-Gharbi politely calls it). Across America, DEI is collapsing. ESG turned out to be a low-interest rate phenomenon. 

We must be vigilant that a Trumpian government doesn’t reinvigorate these ills, accelerating them as his first administration did.

Name-calling and victory laps are poor form. No matter how tempting, gloating must be avoided — if not only because there is very little to be happy about between two “rotten candidates,” at least from the perspective of classical liberals. 

Among legacy media pundits, intellectuals, or coastal elites there has been an ignorance, or willful desire not to accept “the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes.” Translation: the topics and causes they hold dear, most others don’t.

That leaves them two choices to ponder: first, accept that maybe, just maybe, they had some things horrifically wrong — big government, overindexing on kindness and wokeness and transgenderism and racial obsession, misjudging COVID, censoring ideological opponents, shoving DEI down everyone’s throat, and more. Or second, they must try better to convince the majority of the population that these things are as existentially important as they once thought they were.

Either way, there is some soul-searching required among America’s left, the thought leaders at The New York Times, or the Democratic Party as a whole.

The classical liberal should extend them every possible olive branch there is, and for the health of the republic, let’s hope they take it.