We can learn from useful archetypes of the liberal elites

 

This was going to be a Facebook joke, playing on the contrast between the haughty New Yorker grand dame and the plainspoken Trump 2.0 disdain for reflexive mass media TDS. When I looked Jane Mayer up in Wikipedia I discovered the need to write this post. The woman is an archetype of the particular kind of box highly influential lefties in the nation’s press come from. They are by no means representative of the nation they purport to understand and cover objectively in their reporting and opinionating.

Back in April of this year, I wrote a post called “TDS is a coalition not a monolith.” It described criteria that define various ways in which Trump haters are limited in their knowledge of American life despite  levels of education, power, and prosperity that might seem guaranteed to give them broad insight into their countrymen as a whole. Limiting factors include the isolating effects of being among the overpaid and over-indulged, the vertical siloing effects of geography and professions, and the horizontal slicing effects of urban and suburban residential neighborhoods, schools attended, and career-specific travel itineraries. The result is a common delusion that a widely traveled, highly educated, and well connected liberal is necessarily in touch with the deep character of the nation. Such a person can still live in a smallish box created by the severings of vertical and horizontal slicing phenomena. Jane Mayer is an outstanding example of just such a boxing impairment.

How can you be one of the ‘Chosen’ and still be an ignoramus about the nation of your birth and the character of the most extraordinary president in U.S. history? Here’s how.

The first millstone around her neck? New York City. Both by birth and by career destination. She is presently a writer for the New Yorker magazine, whose most famous ever cover ironically told us more about the city’s weakness than its strength:

NYC: Self-appointed, proudly myopic center of the universe

And yes, Jane Mayer was from that New York (unlike imports like Thurber and S. J. Perelman). Her father was a composer, her grandfather one of the founders of Lehman Brothers (among the too-big-to-fail firms who gave us the subprime bubble/recession), and her education was a tribute to far-flung elite parochialism: the private Fieldston K-12 school, a sojourn as an exchange student in England’s Bedales School, then college a brief train ride away from NYC at Yale. Already a sophisticated up-and-comer, she became a senior editor of the Yale Daily News, an on-campus stringer for Time Magazine, and graduated in 1977 magna cum laude in something and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society.

Then she spent her entire career in the field of journalism. First with three small newspapers in Vermont, then with the Wall Street Journal, where she spent 12 years. Wiki highlights her many achievements there:

She moved on to the New Yorker in 1995, has co-authored two books critiquing iconic conservatives, and solo-authored a third about the “Dark Side” of the War on Terror. She lives in Washington, DC, where she serves as the magazine’s White House correspondent.

I tell you all this not to belittle her, but to make a larger point. She’s a world traveler, she’s been a witness to and reporter of world-changing events, and is unquestionably a mover and shaker in the world of contemporary mass media. 

My question is, just how expansive and inclusive is the world she has actually lived in? New York, DC, and foreign climes seem to account for far more time than she could have possibly have spent west of the Capitol Beltway. Who does she talk to? We know she’s been a well-received guest of David Letterman, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Meyers and Tavis Smiley on PBS. (Confirmation bias much?) She had a character reputedly named for her on the hit show 24. She’s appeared on distinguished literary and academic panels at Harvard, Yale Law School, and the Newseum in DC.  Her husband is a former national editor of the Washington Post. Her daughter was the 2015 winner of the Truman Scholarship in Washington, DC. Impressive. So what does she write about that puts her so much in demand?

Hmmm. That’s the most interesting part. She was in Germany for the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of her three books was about Ronald Reagan. Was it about how the renegade Republican from Hollywood won the Cold War and famously told Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” at the Brandenberg Gate? Of course not. It was called “The Unmaking of a President” and described reversals of fortune in Reagan’s second term. Her other co-authored book was called “Strange Justice: the Selling of Clarence Thomas” (whom many eminent legal scholars now consider one of the greatest living Americans). That book was so successful in the media world Wiki editors are (still) actually smacking their lips about its triumphs:

Her book about the War on Terror was focused on the transformation of terror fears into an attack on American ideals. In her other principals essays and columns, Mayer consistently concerns herself with money and corruption in politics, usually on the Republican side of the aisle.

I’m pretty sure she has never in her life been told to shut the fuck up. I’m still thinking about her going back home to her affluent community in the safest part of DC, bewildered beyond her ability to comprehend how anyone could fault her for reporting that all the National Guard did in the Capitol City was pick up trash on streets lined with a Mercs and Bimmers.

How could it be? Couldn’t. Not when you’re buried up to your neck in personal laurels bestowed by the people on earth who hate America the most. It takes a lot of laurels and 70+ years of privileged protection from reality to get that blind and boneheaded…