How liberals helped enable the rise of Trump

Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee. He was chosen by Republican voters in Republican primaries, and then backed by Republican elites at the Republican National Convention. And less proximally, but no less obviously, much of his rise is the direct result of the Republican Party's behavior and decisions over the last several years.

But Trump is about much more than the GOP. Yes, he poses a threat to the Republican Party's political prospects. But he also poses a threat to the American Republic itself. And even if he goes down to humiliating defeat in November, as seems increasingly likely, he will have done much to corrode our public discourse, and to usher back into American politics the sort of strongman populist politics that are more often seen in banana republics.

The Trump phenomenon is a systemic failure. Like France's surrender to the Nazis, it implicates everyone. Including the left, by the way, which has spent much of the Trump circus smirking and feeling morally superior. And really, who can blame them?

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But here's the thing. Liberals cannot plausibly claim to be totally removed spectators in this Trump trainwreck. They've played a role in his rise, too. Here are four ways.

1. PC culture

Let's get a few things out of the way first. Most PC culture is well-meaning, trying as it does to police discourse — as all cultures do — towards more pleasant and inclusive norms. And yes, it's absolutely true that a lot of so-called anti-PC rhetoric is just racism or trolling. Just as it's true that many Trump voters are voting for him for straightforwardly racist reasons.

But PC culture can also be corrosive. Don't just take it from this conservative. Take it from neoliberal magazine writer Jonathan Chait. Take it from hard left campus activist Freddie deBoer. Heck, take it from Barack Obama.

DeBoer is particularly eloquent:

This is a class thing. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is beloved for pointing out how culture and aesthetics can be used to enforce class privilege. And post-1968 culture can be an even more ruthless instrument of privilege.

If the things you are supposed to believe change every five years — whether it's the coolest indie band or whether opposing same-sex marriage makes you a bad person — it's hard to keep up. Witness this hilarious exchange where an entire panel of well-to-do left-wing women have to dance around the question of whether trans women's reproductive rights are being denied.

PC culture like this invites backlash. And backlashes are rarely subtle. You can bet that a lot of white working-class Trump voters are racist. But you can also bet that a lot of them simply don't necessarily always speak properly, and have an inferiority complex about it, and are furious about how they will be called not wrong nor mean, but almost Literally Hitler if they don't use whatever the latest PC phrase that changed five minutes ago is. And you can bet they're going to just love a guy who goes up against every single PC taboo (yes, including ones that are taboos for very good reasons). They might not agree with everything he says, but they like that he's saying it.

2. Media saturation

Almost every media outlet not called Fox News or The Wall Street Journal is a part of the left-wing establishment. I'm not saying there is a vast left-wing conspiracy. But conservatives (correctly) believe that the media is part and parcel of the left, sharing a set of unspoken views and attitudes that cause large groups of powerful people to behave as if they were an organization, by unspoken agreement, even if there is no explicit coordination.

Trump was built up (and then torn down) by this very media. Trump played the media like a fiddle, sure. But as a Harvard University study showed, while Trump got wall-to-wall coverage all through the campaign, that coverage only turned sharply negative once he began amassing victories. Trump coverage went from 57 percent positive and 43 percent negative during the early Republican primaries to 61 percent negative and 39 percent positive after Trump became the presumptive nominee.

Good job, liberal media! You helped put an unhinged psychopath a mere Hillary Clinton away from the presidency. Surely the institutional rot that you've encouraged through your unprofessionalism will harm everyone but you. Kudos.

3. Crying wolf

Trump poses a unique threat to our institutions. That's true. It's also true that this is something that the professional left — whether in politics or the media — has said about every other Republican nominee in recent memory. The threat that Donald Trump might nuke someone just because he feels like it is a very scary (and real) prospect. But I remember my left-wing friends earnestly and seriously saying that I should not contemplate voting for John McCain, because as a hawk and an old man, he might also engage in a nuclear first strike just because he felt like it. And that's not even getting into the conspiracy theorizing and fervid fear-mongering that the left indulged in during George W. Bush's presidency.

No wonder a lot of people don't believe liberals when they say Trump is unfit to be president. They've been saying it of every major Republican for years.

4. Strongman politics

Barack Obama has enabled and expanded the imperial presidency, whether it's kill lists or rewriting legislation by executive order. To be sure, the growth of the imperial presidency has been a very bipartisan, multi-decade effort. But Obama gets special credit for being the man who self-righteously campaigned on "restoring the Constitution" and then took Bush-era executive abuses way beyond what anybody in what now seems like the distant past might have contemplated.

You can come up with all the excuses you like. Some of them are legitimate (GOP obstruction!). But this is simply strongman politics. And when you send the message that the only person who can get things done is a strongman, people will look for a strongman.

Enter Donald Trump.