THE NEW YORKER FINALLY REALIZES DEMOCRATS ARE THE PARTY OF ELITES

I write a poison letter to what I used to think was the greatest magazine in the world.

The New Yorker magazine messed up my subscription a few years ago and jipped me out of a year of fees, so not wanting to pay double I didn’t read it for a year. In that time my views changed. I started watching “alternative media.” These were YouTube podcasts and news shows, hosted by embittered former “Bernie Bros,” who had now become such hardened leftists (and they will make it clear to you, “I’m not a liberal, I’m a leftist”) that they spend more time pointing out the hypocrisies of the Democratic party then they do criticizing Republicans. And why shouldn’t they, if you close your eyes and throw a rock you will probably hit anti-Trump content anyway. The real fight is a class struggle, a fight between top and bottom, not between blue and red.

I always had a subversive streak in me about subjects other than politics, but aside from being a Christopher Hitchens fan my politics were mostly that of normie middle of the road Democrat. I could call balls and strikes about presidential politics with someone at work like I was talking about a football game. And everyone I knew was liberal so my opinions wouldn’t alienate anyone. I would joke I was to the right of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors because I thought San Franciscans should have affordable parking and not have to sell their cars for bicycles. I got my news mostly from the San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, and NPR — plus I got my political analysis from CNN/MSNBC. I never touched FOX because of The Daily Show’s critique of the network. But now my subversive streak was creaking into my politics. These YouTube shows spend much of their time reading between the lines and pointing out how the above cited news sources were so biased towards the establishment that it seems a misnomer to call them liberal. The “liberal media” are in fact deeply conservative.

And I read some books. The most important being Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, about how the media repeat the security state’s propaganda in regards to interventionist foreign policy without push back or proper investigation. For example the Reagan administration delegitimatized a democratic election in Nicaragua in 1984 because this was not a favored nation state, and the new government did not cooperate with US interests. While elections in El Salvador and Guatemala at the same time, which were not truly democratic and resulted in US sponsored dictatorships, were portrayed as legitimate elections. I now apply Chomsky’s “propaganda model” theory to current US intervention and can plainly see that news organizations known to be liberal like The New York Times and CNN are in fact working to reinforce neoconservative propaganda; current conflicts in Israel, Ukraine and Syria being the biggest examples. This book should be mandatory in every American journalism school but isn’t. Because of this omission many idealistic young journalism students who are getting into the news business to speak truth to power, do not realize they will in fact be serving the powerful because they do not know the truth.

Another important book is Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal (2016) about how from Carter, to Clinton, to Obama, the Democratic party shifted away from being the party of unions and the working class and became one of elites. They condescended to Americans who did not have an Ivy League education, and crushed populism in favor of corporate interests at every turn. Democrats turned away from the New Deal and toward white collar professionals. A huge example being when Obama bailed out the banking industry in 2009 after they had defrauded millions of American homeowners. Obama helped the corporations socialize the risk of business while privatizing the profits.

In the 2016 election the left had a strong populist movement in Bernie Sanders that has shut down the Democratic establishment. And Donald Trump, who is really a corporatist, won the election with a populist message that Steve Bannon had whispered into his ear. But The New Yorker, which had previously given a favorable review to Frank’s 2004 anti-Republican book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? pretended Listen, Liberal didn’t exist and wouldn’t review the book. And at the same time they failed to learn the lesson of the 2016 election.

And on my return to The New Yorker I saw the publication with new eyes. The cultural articles were often dull and can have an elite tone. However operas and modern art exhibits are probably best explained by elites. The movie reviews are well thought out, and actually have less agenda behind than an anti-woke or product-pushing YouTuber. And sometimes a smooth and colorful writing style may be enjoyable in of itself even if the point the writer is trying to make is wrong-headed. The magazine is still capable of coming out with good articles so long as they aren’t political.

But the politics.

The “Talk of the Town,” section’s opening story is generally an op-ed piece that I used to think brought the biggest news story of the week into proper perspective. Now I see it as piss-poor political analysis. As the writers in The New Yorker like to pretend the two books listed above don’t exist, they do little but manufacture consent for the neoconservative movement and conduct propaganda for the Democratic party. They covered for Biden’s obvious cognitive decline and the Democratic party’s failure to deliver on campaign promises. And what sickened me the most was the Ukraine war propaganda. They failed to give their readers context that the US backed a coup of the Ukrainian government in 2014, much like it has backed coups in Latin America. Failed to tell their readers how the war could have been avoided if Ukraine had followed the Minsk accords. Failed to tell their readers how Boris Johnson, on behalf of the Biden administration, sabotaged peace talks months after Russia’s invasion in 2022. And for the past two years they have characterized the war as Russia’s subjugation of Ukraine, rather than America’s proxy war against Russia. And so the Ukrainian people have been put into a meat grinder that resembles the front lines of World War I, in order to further US interests to weaken Russia and enrich the military industrial complex (Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc.). How can I respect a magazine when their articles could have been ghost written by the CIA?

Then there’s Israel’s genocide of Gaza. Their reporting on this, like mainstream media in general is schizophrenic. They do have articles sympathetic to the Palestinians and critical of Netenyahu. But they stop short of holding the Biden administration accountable for funding the genocide, and they lie when they say he is working for peace behind closed doors when the results show he is not. And they scratch their heads in regards to protestors who want to stop funding genocide. Worst of all they try to discredit the protest movement as painting them as misguided at best or antisemtic at worst. One article about the campus protests reads “ . . . it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, she finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone.” This ignores the fact that many of the protesters are Jewish and take great pains to avoid anything that resembles antisemitism. If there were examples of antisemitism by protesters it would be filmed and played on repeat over cable news.

And they paint the “uncommited” voters who would not vote for Kamala Harris unless she commited to a different policy than Biden, as hopeless suckers for Trump’s triangulations. “If you’re antiwar . . . it can actually be really hard to figure out who represents you, if anyone. That’s the kind of information vacuum, the kind of ambiguity, that Trump thrives in,” says staff writer Andrew Marantz, who thinks he knows what he is talking about.

If I wrote an article that did nothing but provide examples of when The New Yorker had bad takes you wouldn’t finish it because it would be as long a New Yorker article.

After Trump’s second win mainstream outlets are writing articles reflecting on what the democrats have been doing wrong that led to their loss. These supposedly great writers for great publications are willful idiots who had eight years to learn the lesson of 2016 but didn’t. Or perhaps they are not idiots but they are liars who have been given permission by their handlers to be a little more honest than usual.

So I wrote this letter, the old-fashioned version of a negative comment, which I am sure they will not publish. The YouTube podcasts I mentioned before love to beat up on CNN and The New York Times because they are big targets and most of them don’t even read The New Yorker. So I thought I should deliver the beating.

Dear New Yorker editors,

Andrew Marantz’s article (“Have the Democrats Become the Party of the Elites?” Dec. 14) is one of a trifecta of articles from mainstream publications finally unburdened of the obligation of having to provide cover for the Democratic party. The other two being the Washington Post’s “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge,” about how White House staff covered for Biden’s decline while the entirety of liberal media willfully declined to investigate a matter that was obvious to the naked eye. And The New York Times article “Is the awkward ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood Behind Us?” about how Hollywood used film and pop culture to condescend diversity politics to the American public, thus creating preachy and unwatchable box office bombs that will be forever dated to the era that the Democrats defeated themselves.

The insights that the power establishment have finally given Marantz permission to have -- about how the Democrats have ceased to be the party of unions and the working class and have become the professional managerial class of the tech industry -- could have been obtained by The New Yorker eight years ago after Trump’s first victory. You see The New Yorker positively reviewed Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, about how Republicans have convinced the working class to vote against their own interest. But in 2016 The New Yorker, and other liberal outlets he had been previously welcome to, shut him out and did not review his book Listen, Liberal. The book answers the question definitively: yes the Democratic Party are the party of elites; and outlines how Clinton and Obama’s neoliberalism consistently betrayed everything the leftist movement stands for. Marantz even mentions Frank in his article but does not name “Listen, Liberal” because the content of that book being eight years old is too much for the greatest magazine in the world to admit.

Over the past eight years The New Yorker could have had Frank as a contributor and taken editorial positions that urged the Democratic party to remain a party of the worker and the left. Instead, you pummeled your readers with mindless anti-Trump content that had all the literary merit of a Joe Scarborough monologue, and let Biden off the hook when he pulled stunts like busting the railroad union strike in 2022.

Congratulations on having insight on who you are eight years after everyone else did.

Sincerely,

SloppyMemes

Interview with Thomas Frank on the Katie Halper Show:

‘Nuff Said!