Tough times for liberals, so it’s time to toughen up

Liberals are at a loss. The U.S. president, who turned out to be more vile and duplicitous than they even had imagined, may or may not be indicted within a year’s time. Meanwhile, Congress is run by conservatives who, spurred by the greed of donors and the fears of their base, are growing ever more comfortable telling blatant lies, preparing cover-ups and counter-narratives and overhauling the nation’s tax code in the manner of a Vegas caper.

So the federal government is hostile territory. Meanwhile, liberal safe havens are in tumult. Everywhere, institutions that liberals rely on are drowning beneath a progressive wave of #metoo.

Voices long deemed soothing sound suddenly screechy, even menacing. So long, Garrison Keillor, folksy host of “A Prairie Home Companion.” Goodbye, Charlie Rose, earnest public television interviewer. Good riddance, Harvey Weinstein, Democratic donor and purveyor of the kind of movies that well-educated people liked to talk about. Can we stop now? Well, not yet.

Moving up the culture ladder in New York City, the still-proud capital of liberalism, something appears deeply rotten at the top of the Metropolitan Opera. Meanwhile, Peter Martins, the longtime head of the New York City Ballet, no longer seems quite so elegant and refined. WNYC, the public radio station in New York, added to liberal woes last week. The station announced the firing of erudite interviewer Leonard Lopate and one-of-akind musical programmer Jonathan Schwartz.

For the most part, these beheadings are taking place after revelations by other liberal institutions — the New York Times, The Washington Post — or belated actions from the boards of the institutions themselves, pursuing internal investigations. The system is slowly working, and evolving to higher standards — at least in one part of the American cultureplex.

The timing, however, is brutal. With Trumpism on the march — even if it’s occasionally a Chaplinesque march — liberal redoubts of news and culture have been tarnished by their own guardians.

No liberal (or anyone else, apparently) laments Weinstein’s departure from the red carpet, and Rose’s interviews won’t be hard to surpass. But the collective house-cleaning is bracing, and disorienting, nonetheless.

Many of the comments on the WNYC web site responding to the firing of Lopate and Schwartz were angry not at the hosts but at the station that dismissed them:

“Anonymous accusations. Draconian punishments. Who wants to live in that kind of Stalinist, Game-of-Thrones world? Much less fund it?”

On the whole, liberal institutions will be better for this season of purges. Some will likely go too far seeking to meet evolving, uncertain standards of a new era. And, yes, a backlash is hardly unlikely.

But American culture and U.S. politics are under growing duress. Conservatives are becoming less democratic, more fearful and more aggressive. Instead of purging their predators and liars, they are nominating them for high office. The White House is run by people who exhibit contempt for suckers who tell the truth and follow the law. To preserve the institutions they revere, and on which civil society depends, liberals have to shed some ungainly weight, muscle up and step into the ring. If the fight goes well, they can pick up their pledgedrive potholder after the republic is secure.