In this struggle, who are the targets?This seems to be a list of all the groups we identify as liberal "elites." Apart from immigrants, there seem to be no ordinary people on this list. We're given an employment count for the non-profit sector, but that seems to Edsall's way of saying, Look at how vast the world of liberal elitism is. (In fact, most non-profit workers are employed in hospitals or have other healthcare jobs. They're not in liberal organizations that are trying to change the culture, as Edsall apparently wants you to believe.)
The list is long, often focusing on academia, especially on elite universities like Harvard, Yale and Stanford; fields such as sociology and psychology; sanctuary cities; the nonprofit sector, which employs 12.8 million people, with an annual payroll of $873.1 billion; the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants; the three major television networks that are not Fox; the top ranks of the Justice Department, the C.I.A. and the armed forces; the array of civil rights enforcement departments embedded throughout the public and private sectors; and the already faltering diversity, equity and inclusion nests in corporations across America.
This is what we talk about when we talk about liberalism these days: People who've ascended to the commanding heights in government, in academia, in the media, in the non-profit sector, in the HR departments of private corporations. People with big brains and lots of degrees who tell everyone else what to do and how to talk. This is who we think voted for Democrats this year: elitists, and only elitists.
But that's not true. Nearly 75 million people voted for Kamala Harris. America simply doesn't have that many college professors, non-profit executives, and chief diversity officers. Not everyone who voted for Harris is a liberal, but there are clearly millions of ordinary liberals in America -- people who have no control over the culture, people who don't have mutiple degrees from the finest colleges, people who just want a tolerant, generous, decent country. They're teachers, librarians, blue-collar workers, baristas, retirees. They want a higher minimum wage, they want abortion to be legal, they want police brutality to end, they want medical bankruptcy to be a thing of the past, they want gay and trans people's rights to be respected, they want people of all ethnic backgrounds and belief systems to coexist peacefully, they want slavery and the civil rights era to be taught honestly in schools, they want libraries not to be targeted...
Yet they're invisible. They're invisible because commentators across the political spectrum believe that they don't exist, that all Democrats are elitist winners of the meritocracy's Hunger Games.
It would be pointless to wish that the mainstream media might start sending reporters out looking for these invisible liberals. That didn't happen after Donald Trump won in 2016 and it didn't happen after Republicans struggled in 2018, 2020, and 2022. After every election, the media safaris go only one way: toward the rural diners where Trumpers hang out.
There are new media outlets -- ProPublica, for instance, or Judd Legum's Popular Information -- but they concentrate on hard news that's being ignored by bigger news outlets. Right now, the lead story at ProPublica is "Missouri Voters Enshrined Abortion Rights. GOP Lawmakers Are Already Working to Roll Them Back." At Popular Information, the lead story is "North Carolina Supreme Court Candidate Seeks to Disqualify 60,000 voters — Including His Opponent's Parents." That's what these outlets do best. That's the best use of the scarce resources they have.
But I wish someone in the new media had enough resources to report the news that ordinary liberals exist. It's clearly not something our political culture understands, and that's distorting our understanding of America.
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