Granting Elites What They Deserve

It's election year and there's a war on (although no small number of journalists, politicians, and pundits question that), so perhaps no one should be shocked that many elements of the elite media are displaying a higher degree of partisanship than in recent memory. What seems to be angering many observers, however, is the extraordinary degree of partisanship on display over the past two weeks. Leading Democrats such as Ted Kennedy and Al Gore have lost any inhibitions -- well, the former is better known for exhibitions anyway -- but they and the "mainstream" media may have miscalculated the public's mood for such shenanigans.

The blogosphere and talk radio, in particular, are full of outrage at liberal elites for seeming to root for America's defeat in Iraq. Not that this didn't go on daily during the Vietnam War, but it's been years and we've forgotten how odious the practice can be while our soldiers are being killed in combat.

A story on this in the current issue of The Spectator (free with registration) illustrates the point (hat tip to Instapundit). While lounging beside a hotel pool in Baghdad, the reporter (Toby Harnden) was "accosted" by a female American magazine journalist who, he says, had "impeccable liberal credentials."

"She had been disturbed by my argument that Iraqis were better off than they had been under Saddam and I was now — there was no choice about this — going to have to justify my bizarre and dangerous views. I’ll spare you most of the details because you know the script — no WMD, no ‘imminent threat’ (though the point was to deal with Saddam before such a threat could emerge), a diversion from the hunt for bin Laden, enraging the Arab world. Etcetera."

"But then she came to the point. Not only had she ‘known’ the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the ‘evil’ George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. ‘Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.’ Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing."

"She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerry’s poll numbers. ‘Well, that’s different — that would be Americans,’ she said, haltingly. ‘I guess I’m a bit of an isolationist.’ That’s one way of putting it."

This morally odious position is echoed in the attempted moral equivalency between the Iraqi prison abuses and the beheading of Nick Berg. The Washington Times reports from Berg's home town of West Chester, Pa., 25 miles north of where I sit. Berg's friends and neighbors are appalled and hurt that his story has already been pushed off the front page by the Abu Ghraib onslaught.

Have the NY Times, the Wash Post, and the networks finally overplayed their hands? September 11 didn't change everything -- nothing does -- but it did reduce Americans' appetite for jejune, narcissistic displays by morally challenged elites. Surely shock jock Howard Stern's troubles with the FCC stem in part from this new cultural atmosphere.

I'm reminded of an email exchange with a colleague who holds an endowed chair in an academic department. He wondered when the public would have enough of highly politicized, nihilistic universities and simply withdraw their support. The crash of America's system of higher education, he thought, could be swift and dramatic. America's elite media have been in decline for over two decades now, and their irrelevancy only grows when their partisanship is accompanied by a less forgiving public and the growth of alternative sources of information. We may be witnessing a significant shift of power among, if not from, elites. Institutions, whether for-profit corporations or universities, must adapt to survive and grow. Parochialism and narcissism are mortal enemies of survival in any marketplace or moral system. Put more directly, rooting for your own country's defeat in a just war against murderous fanatics is itself thuggish and repulsive, and any group that does it deserves to be defeated, ostracized, and ignored.

Update: John Podhoretz has a searing column on moral equivalency in today's NY Post.