The politics of personal enmity have been a fact of life for so long that it’s sometimes hard to remember that it wasn’t always this way. We stopped being able to disagree without wanting to kill each other and forgot that it’s possible to consider someone else’s views without accepting them. It bled into everything and ruined all it touched, eradicating a cultural common ground.
A “liberal” position that I’ll happily defend is that I think stuff like National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service are good in principle. Mister Rogers (a registered Republican) agreed and once defended the concept of publicly funded news and cultural programming before the Senate.
While these things have long skewed liberal, they were not always so unhinged and totally myopic, as they became with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, when NPR especially veered hard towards aggressive activism, as detailed by then-senior business editor Uri Berliner in The Free Press.
“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed,” he wrote. “We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.”
All that was discarded after 2016, replaced with “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.” Berliner continued:
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.
What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.
On the streets, the activist took to scolding America for conjuring the specter of fascism, which was then and forever just around the corner. An endless series of crises emerged and flowed into each other, forming a never-ending stream of outrage and emergency. There was always a march, always a protest, always some public expression of “Resistance.” Everything became political in a way that it had not been before. Constant culture wars churned the commons into a no man’s land. Trenches were dug, and the lines of contact were frozen.
Today, a lot of this seems like a fever dream. The reelection of Trump was met with a muted response, unlike anything we saw the first time. No mass demonstrations. Resistance, on its own terms, failed. Culturally, the pendulum swung back, as it always does in America, and people are coming out of the foxholes. We are learning how to talk to each other again after “hyperpolitics,” a term coined by historian Anton Jäger to describe the totalizing nature of mass politics that took shape in the 2010s.
wrote about this recently for The New York Times Magazine in an article entitled, “Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over.” He’s also a novelist, a columnist for New York Magazine, and a columnist for the New Statesman.In his writing, he is as critical of the left as I’ve become of the right, which, in some parts, looks like a doppelgänger of the left that Barkan dissects. Yet Barkan and I still sit in different places along the political spectrum. Does that mean we shouldn’t be able to discuss ideas? Does it mean that we can’t appreciate the same kinds of art?
Before we sat down to record, I read a bit from his forthcoming book, Glass Century (I pre-ordered a copy, and you can too here). In its style and substance, it instantly reminded me of a short story by Irwin Shaw called “The Eighty-Yard Run,” which is, in part, a tale of the arrested development of a man who is trapped in the past and therefore is unprepared for the future.
Well, the future is now, and we have to face it together amid the rubble of the hysteria inaugurated by the Twenty-Teens. To that end, Barkan has also just launched a new magazine called The Metropolitan Review, which consists of an official website, a Substack, and print publication, for which they are currently fundraising.
“We live in a time when elites are distrusted and their institutions have come in for reckoning, much of it deserved,” Barkan and his co-editors write.
The answer is to build anew.
A point Barkan made during our talk is that novels have greater staying power than political books because the latter are generally written in response to ephemeral circumstances. I thought of something Walker Pearcy said about art, and novelists are, after all, artists:
My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it’s poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or listener or viewer something he already knows but which he doesn’t quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know.
Building culture from the wreckage is hard but exciting work, and the time to start is now.
You can follow Barkan on Twitter at @RossBarkan, and I hope you’ll enjoy our talk.
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