Soft Intellectuals
28th October 2020
In her essay “Stop Being Shocked” published October 14 on Tablet, Bari Weiss listed troubling anti-Semitic trends taking place in the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She brings up multiple true-life examples reinforcing her assertion. She then goes on to say that she, like the majority of American Jews, is “disgusted by Trump and Trumpism”; a movement which in her words “normalized bigotry and cruelty in ways that have crippled American society.”
In his book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, published in 2009, Jonah Goldberg highlights penetrating methods and tools used by progressive Democrats to vilify their opponents. Nevertheless, today, Goldberg is a member of the #NeverTrumper community. He finds members of the American Left like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris less offensive than the intrepid, braggadocious, and proud American patriot Donald J. Trump.
I suppose mainstream media provide many Americans with necessary reasons to generate feelings of “disgust” toward Trump. “The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses,” wrote Vladimir Lenin 100 years ago. He continued: “He who now talks about the freedom of the press goes backward and halts our headlong course toward socialism.” Mainstream media omit Trump’s administration efforts to improve the lives of low and middle-income Americans with newly designed trade agreements; they don’t discuss policies that revived crippled economy. Nor do they highlight the tremendous success of the Trump administration in the Middle East.