Mediaboss Marketing

By Berber Jin

After Trump announced Americas withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords on June 1, fear and concern dominated my social media newsfeeds. Many Stanford students shared New York Times articles warning of the dangers of climate change, and how Trumps decision to pull out threatened the future of the planet. On the day of Trumps announcement, the Times top four or five articles dealt with the ramifications of the deal. Such warnings were predictable, and as a regular Times reader myself, I initially shared similar sentiments. Other liberal news outlets followed suit.

So, I was shocked when, upon venturing to Fox News website, I was confronted with a very different headline: US aircraft carriers join Japanese forces off North Korean coast for military training. There were no fancy infographics about the melting Antarctic ice shelfonly a photo of naval warships conducting military exercises. In fact, you couldnt find any mention of the Paris Accords until you scrolled down the homepage.

Upon further perusal of conservative-leaning news sitesfrom Breitbart to the National ReviewI found coverage of Paris to be nowhere near the magnitude of the New York Times. Yet in the few articles that did cover the event, I found no hint of the warming denialism that liberals seem to believe of every conservative in the country. Instead, I found much more reasoned analyses of the situation than the Huffington Posts TRUMP TO PLANET: DROP DEAD headline, laughably complemented with a photo of planet Earth being consumed by flames.

Considering that the global market towards renewables is becoming more and more competitive, coupled with China and India rapidly adopting cleaning energy economies that would have met the Paris standards regardless of the agreement itself, many conservatives dont treat warming as the big issue. Instead, they see the violation of US sovereignty as the biggest issue in the climate agreement. I read convincing arguments that the Paris Accords placed an undue burden on America, forcing us to stifle economic growth in exchange for only a marginal reduction in US pollution.

Not for the first time, I found it was the right who had covered the issue fairly and reasonably, while the left leaned towards sensationalism.

Though Stanford students like to think of themselves as critical thinkersand deride Trumps tens of millions of supporters as hopelessly brainwashedour reaction to Paris suggests we should restrain our condescension.

The values of liberal ideologytreating global warming as a moral absolute, global citizenry and cosmopolitanism, and intellectual superiorityprevented and blinded us from seeing the Paris pullout as the rest of America did. For most US citizens, patriotism, national integrity, and financial stability matter more than transborder commitments to environmental morals.

These Americans rightly saw Paris not as a crucial fight against global warming, but as an agreement that hurt the country to no global gain.

Of course, differences in values can be healthy: when acknowledge and treated seriously, they can lead to important dialogue over pressing public policy issues. Yet in 2017, we have reached a new and dangerous extreme: we have become so convicted in the truth of liberalism that weve become unable to recognize such differing values. Instead of identifying and evaluating the drastically different approaches to the Paris Deal, we jumped to condemnations of the stupid, uneducated conservativea group of warming deniers who are supposedly anti-science and anti-progress.

Stanfords conviction in liberal ideology as ultimate truthand of any alternative value system as backwards or bigotedblinds us. Perhaps if the populist right were a minority with rapidly disappearing relevance on the national stage, such blindness wouldnt matter. Yet they are precisely the oppositeTrump conservatives control our country now, and they have a vision for America that fundamentally conflicts with our way of life.

This is not going to be another plea for empathy for flyover-country conservatives. The entire debate over whether to condemn or empathize with these voters is part of the problem. We continue to treat Trump supporters as a species to be analyzed behind the walls of academia. They are, to us, harmless: poor, backwards, white-lashing, and hopelessly brainwashed.

Situated at Stanford, we believe that we are at the forefront of change, pushing the boundaries of science, technology, activism, and public service. In our naive hope for a world rid of dying white racists and brimming with artificial intelligence and automation, most of us see the recent populist surge as only a temporary setback. After all, the demographics of the electorate are inevitably shifting in the Democrats favorright?

What we fail to see, however, is that we are no longer revolutionaries at the forefront of history. As we sip our Coupa chai and engage in intellectual banter about feminism, we see ourselves as progressives debating ideas that are far ahead of our timeideas that will become an American, and eventually a global reality.

But maybe it is the Trump-loving middle Americas that are the true revolutionaries.

In a recent op-ed for the New Republic, Michael Tomasky spoke of todays conservative movement as vanguardist. It is certainly acting like one. They first seized an election that was supposed to mark the culmination of liberal hegemony. Now, they are amazingly taking back the intellectual monopoly that the educated elite has on contemporary discourse. Everyday Americans are no longer turning to the Paul Krugmans of the world for commentary on politics and policy. Instead, they turn to anti-intellectual intellectuals like Steve Bannon, Curtis Yarvin, and Milo Yiannopoulos.

And the vanguard is expanding its ranks with zestpulling away millions of establishment Obama supporters toward populism, and coaxing in disaffected liberals from Irving Kristol to David Mamet.

Meanwhile, we liberal anti-vanguards have, in the words of Tomasky, become defensive and distrustful. In response to the 2016 election, we clung ever more closely to political correctness, feminism, and intersectionalityideas that are no longer products of the grassroots resistance, but rather products of a disaffected ivory-tower academia, adopted by the elite Left that the rest of the country increasingly despises.

Such ideas are not hated because conservatives are bigoted and backwards. Instead, they are hated because they are taught from within the classrooms of Horace Mann and Harker, of Stanford and the Ivies. They are hated because they do not emerge from organic experience. Rather, they are only accessible to the families that pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for their children to receive an elite education.

I am not saying we should give away these values to accommodate a vision of America that we oppose. However, it is time for us to recognize that we are no longer the revolutionaries. We are instead the reactionaries, struggling to adapt to, and even recognize, a country that is very much fighting against the establishment citizenry of which we are all very much a part. We can no longer dismiss Trumps America with scorn or pity them as basket cases. Instead, we must recognize the true danger they pose, and widen the appeal of our vision of America.

The narrative of an out-of-touch elite growing increasingly defensive amidst an increasingly insurgent and upset populace is one that we should all be familiar with: it has sparked the worlds greatest political revolutions. We are, hopefully, far from this. Yet a shift in our frame of reference is long overdue.

Read the original:
World on Fire? Liberals are the New Reactionaries - Stanford Review