The New Yorker’s Cavalcade of Ignorance

How honest are we about our ignorance? How honest do we want to be? In answer to that eternal question, which is—or should be—of particular interest to reporters, the 20-page, 12-essay onslaught of postelection “dispatches” that dominates the latest issue of The New Yorker is one of the most honest pieces of magazine publishing we are likely to ever see. Some of the greatest minds in America have gathered in the pages of the country’s leading weekly to declare how little they understand things now, and how little they care to understand them moving forward.

“Stunningly, Trump fared better in New York City this year than he did in 2020,” writes Jelani Cobb, which is frankly a stunning assessment coming from the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, given Trump’s marked improvement in the five boroughs in 2020 and the obvious and extensively documented rightward shift across the metro region over the past decade. “How could Americans be such nice and decent people and support someone so debasing, so deranged, so hate-filled [as Donald Trump]?” asks Adam Gopnik, who makes no attempt to answer these questions, though he clearly wants to be seen as a thoughtful person for asking them.

The New Yorker drew together some of its highest-end chroniclers of the American zeitgeist, who then reveled proudly in their own attachments to in-group biases and cliches. They celebrated a kind of communion with their suffering readership, who found comfort in the certainties these writers gave them. This communion is grounded in ignorance. “I was alarmed by the number of white men who had shown up to vote,” the short story writer Lorrie Moore recalls of her polling place, refusing to interrogate her alarm. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan introduces us to two Trump voters she met while door-knocking for Kamala Harris in Allentown, Pennsylvania, but they turn out to be a racist and a loner, exactly the types of people we needn’t trouble ourselves over.

By contrast, almost, Kelefa Sanneh nearly achieves a self-critical reckoning with Trump’s victory. “[A]s far as we can tell, Trump’s America is a place that is more polarized by education than it used to be and less polarized by whiteness and non-whiteness—by race, properly understood.” This casual, less-than-earth-shaking observation upends a decade of opposition dogma about Trump and his supporters, a party line that The New Yorker has held with monotonous discipline. But for now, Sanneh’s “as far as we can tell” must take the place of any actual engagement with the views and priorities of any Trump voter of any background, which barely appear across tens of thousands of words from the crème de la crème of The New Yorker. The 76.7 million Americans of all races and creeds and education-levels who vaulted the president-elect to a 86-vote victory in the Electoral College appear only as concepts and caricatures to them.

For this befuddled class of pseudo-stylists and their still-loyal readers, The Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin, Adolf Hitler, and the now-realized menace of American fascism are phenomena with far greater impact on the 2024 election than border security, inflation, global chaos, or crime—real-world phenomena which are also barely mentioned here. Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law and history at Harvard, recounts “the Klan’s dominance of nineteen-twenties Indiana,” then warns: “What happened in Indiana could happen again, on a national scale.” Imagine living in an ivory tower so high that the past 100 years of American history, encompassing the Great Depression, two world wars, the civil rights revolution, Vietnam, the end of the Cold War, and the entirety of the three decades since, vanish into the middle distance, leaving Donald Trump at the head of a nationwide Klan rally transposed from 1920s Indiana.

Rachel Maddow, chief prime-time fear-peddler at MSNBC, notes that Father Coughlin’s antisemitic attacks on the gold standard in the 1930s were meant to boost his own personal investments in silver, though the only posited connection to Trump is the contestable observation that “America’s most ambitious and accomplished demagogues have also been crooks.” It is a TikTok level of laziness for Maddow not to at least allude to Trump or some member of his family owning some major quantity of gold or silver, the latter of them the apparent metal of choice for American fascists. But this is The New Yorker, which is far less important than TikTok by now.

“American Fascist,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s contribution, uses some variation on the word “fascist” 44 times across two and a half pages, along with 15 combined mentions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Putin. One imagines the interior of Snyder’s brain as a scarcely endurable popcorn machine, a rhythm of repetitive hissing and clicking that produces buckets of nearly identical thought kernels. Perhaps silence would be even harder for Snyder to endure. He offers one accidental moment of reflection, which serves to frame the entire New Yorker feature: “A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meaning … When a fascist calls a liberal a ‘fascist,’ the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.”

Snyder believes himself a meaning-bearer in a landscape of lies. He is hardly alone. Exempted from the need to understand or even bother to describe the objects of their disdain, the magazine’s chosen blatherers accuse the invisible masses of the worst possible affronts to democratic order, language, and perhaps reality itself before an audience that is presumed to share their prejudices and to have uniformly voted the same way that they did. They are on one side, with “bad America” arrayed on the other. Snyder quotes the historian Robert Paxton, who warns that “the Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base, which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.” This is a ludicrous, ahistorical, paranoid, self-discrediting, and of course convenient statement for Paxton and Snyder and The New Yorker. It allows them to stand bravely against an entire nation of monsters, and just sorta leave it at that.

The New Yorker symposium offers a few not-so-veiled hints at what the next four years could be like and how the readers and writers of the magazine and their middlebrow Ivy-educated ilk are likely to experience them. The second Trump presidency will be a period of further estrangement and mutual scorn between the increasingly self-isolating enclaves of dying authority and a broader society that it is even less interested in knowing anything about. Maybe this is a good thing. Perhaps the higher levels of the American media complex, masquerading in the clothing of a different century, should embrace their essentially patrician urges and accept their permanent bafflement at the inscrutable, inexplicable passions of the American polity, thus exempting themselves from any deep concern about what the rest of us are up to.

It’s not a terrible outcome. After all, we know by now that alienation and bitterness sure beat some of the alternatives. The major anti-Trump theme of the first term is that our amoral and unpatriotic president was hiding his true interests from the American people and pursuing a secret agenda on behalf of Vladimir Putin and whichever other thugs he allegedly owed favors to. This sort of hallucinatory thinking, and the assumption that intricate conspiracy is Trump’s major method of governing, dominated the pages of The New Yorker for nearly a decade, expressing themselves in dozens of articles whose bizarre logic might have been taken verbatim from the government-controlled wing of the Turkish press. Such dot-connecting brain rot is blessedly absent from these dispatches. The New Yorker should be congratulated on its progress.

Still, as if obeying some buried reflex, Jane Mayer—whose discovery of shocking new sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh resulted in perhaps the very worst piece of journalism published anywhere in America over the past decade—lunges lamely towards some Trumpian nexus between the heights of state and shadowy figures that only she and a handful of other crack investigators can see. Apparently a former Scalia clerk wrote a National Review blog post musing about the future retirement of various conservative Supreme Court justices, a piece which Mayer sees as a “smoke signal to the elder Justices that it was time for them to go.” The print title of the essay is “Dobbs Was Just the Beginning.” (George Saunders is a novelist, so he can be forgiven the soggy conspiracism in his essay: “Might it be that one reason we’re feeling sick right now is that our natural desire to be fond of one another is being thwarted by distant, profit-based forces?” he asks. Sure, George.)

None of the 12 writers call for mass protests or active resistance, gestures which—however futile—might at least show a performative degree of belief in the magazine’s own rhetoric. Instead, a tone of exhaustion and resignation dominates. “[W]hen hundreds of experts in multiple surveys put a man in strong contention for the title of the Worst President in the Nation’s History, it says something about our respect of expertise that we decided to give the man another go,” sighs Rachel Maddow, a Rhodes scholar. “Trump is a franchise blockbuster, familiar and splashy; Harris an independent art-house film with subtitles,” writes Lorrie Moore, who then goes on to call Trump “a figure from Margaret Atwood’s dark imagination.” Trump is so familiar by now that his return has snuffed out the originality and wit of Lorrie Moore.

The New Yorker and the shifting American mainstream may fruitfully agree to ignore one another, but new and ever-weirder phenomena are likely to emerge from their separate bubbles. The most alarming and most edifying of these dozen essays both have to do with the special dangers that a second Trump presidency allegedly poses to women. “The big two genders are said to be at war,” begins Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker’s chief correspondent reporting from the barbarous island of Youth. What do the new fault lines of American politics require out of conscientious citizens? “For those of us whom God made heterosexual,” she writes, “the intimate realm is politicized now more than ever. But it’s from this foundation that we find a way out. It’s from here, in the arena of flesh and friction and surprise and transcendence—an arena that may be increasingly foreign to screen-bound, isolated, radicalized young men, and rightfully unappealing to their female counterparts—that we learn not just when to take up arms against another person but when to try harder to see them, or allow them to change us.”

A translation may be in order here. Tolentino is saying that Trump’s reelection means politics must now conquer the deepest and most mysterious recesses of human desire, with love, happiness, and perhaps even the future propagation of the human race amounting to a swing state no less critical than Michigan, and perhaps even as important as Pennsylvania. This is a dreary vision of how people should think, feel, and behave. But the problems Tolentino identifies are all too real. There actually are tens of millions of icked-out women and Twitch-addled young men who are in danger of seeing civic life primarily as a means of making the other side of the gender war unhappy.

This is a very bad thing. In the best essay in the feature, Harvard historian Jill Lepore assigns blame to an in-context unlikely place, namely the political wing of the center-left establishment. Lepore recalls how she was raised by a pro-choice father and a fervently pro-life mother, someone who “was not, as Democratic messaging this year seemed to suggest about women voters, a battered woman, too timid to speak her mind, afraid of my father.” In a Harris campaign ad, Julia Roberts told women that the voting booth was “the one place in America where women still have a right to choose,” an inner sanctum in which one can “vote any way you want, and no one will ever know.” Out in the real world, Lepore writes, women “didn’t need the Democratic campaign ads that treated them as if they required rescue from their own marriages.” Instead, they “went to the polls and voted to protect the right to abortion, within limits, and then, owing to a thousand other concerns, two in five of them voted for Trump.”

Lepore gets that if a losing party wants to win another big national election, it must try to understand the Americans who have come to dislike and distrust it. Aversion to the Democrats is actually not an insane reaction to the state of the country and world, or to the pinch of one’s own conscience—there might even be members of your own family who have arrived at just this assessment of reality, for perfectly nondepraved reasons.

Lepore writes, “a great deal of Democratic messaging has involved college-educated women telling women who never went to college how to think about their own bodies, or their own very real American dreams.” America is a democracy: In order to rule, a party must tell and listen. Magazines are not political parties, but they are equally in danger when their native sense of curiosity is so dead that even huge, momentous events in the life of the nation aren’t enough to pique it, or prick it, into asking why.