Samantha Bee’s ascendant social liberalism a problem

Ross Douthat

When the histories of the Trump era are written from exile in Justin Trudeau’s Canada, they will record that it was none other than Jimmy Fallon who brought down the republic.

Or so you might have thought, at least, listening to the furious liberal reaction to Fallon’s willingness to treat Donald Trump like any other late-night guest last week: kidding around with him, mussing up his combover and steering clear of anything that would convey to viewers that Trump is actually beyond the pale.

But the Democrats’ problem in the age of Trump isn’t really Jimmy Fallon. It’s Samantha Bee.

Not Bee alone, of course, but the entire phenomenon that she embodies: the rapid colonization of new cultural territory by an ascendant social liberalism. It isn’t just late-night TV. Institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The NBA, the NCAA and the Atlantic Coast Conference — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the NFL is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.

For the left, these are clear signs of cultural victory. But the scale and swiftness of those victories have created two distinctive problems for the Democratic Party.

First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion.

This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act.

As James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, he’s occupying “a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever.

Trump’s extremism also limits his appeal, of course.

Something like this happened once before: In the 1960s and 1970s, the culture shifted decisively leftward, but American voters shifted to the right and answered a cultural revolution with a political Thermidor.

That Nixon-Reagan rightward shift did not repeal the 1960s or push the counterculture back to a beatnik-hippie fringe. But it remains an advantage for the Republican Party, and a liability for the Democratic Party, that the new cultural orthodoxy is sufficiently stifling to leave many Americans looking to the voting booth as a way to register dissent.