When “Legends” Fail

March 1, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s a difference between liberals and conservatives, not just in their policy preferences or their views of Trump. They also differ in how they react to bad stuff in their own camp. Liberals are far more willing to recognize these inconvenient truths and to do something about their flawed leaders. Conservatives rally to the defense.

But you wouldn’t know that from reading Ross Douthat. It’s hard for conservatves like Douthat — thoughtful, principled, horrified by Trump — to say something good about Republicans these days. So instead, he goes after liberals. In his column yesterday, “The Twilight of the Anti-Trump Idols” Douthat is at pains to show folly and error of liberals for making heroes of Andrew Cuomo and the Lincoln project. Both of these parties turned out to have feet of foul-smelling clay.

. . .in the substitution of figures who ended up exposed as corrupt or just incompetent, we can see once again the importance of thinking about how we got Trump in the first place. Our society’s sickness may be particularly acute in Trump worship, but the affliction is more general. The stink of failure hangs over the liberal and cosmopolitan as well the populist and provincial,

See, Douthat says, liberals are just like conservatives. They share the same moral failings; they both suffer from the same “general affliction.”

Well, no. Of the “legends” Douthat mentions, only one is an actual Democrat — Cuomo. The other legends include the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans; Mitt Romney, also a Republican who occasionally opposes Trump; and “Europeans,” whose countries seemed to be doing better on controlling Covid-19.

Republicans in government and media have stood by Trump and his administration through all the lies, corruption, impropriety, cruelty, and incompetence. The strongest criticisms from official Republican organizations and Fox News have been aimed at those who dared criticize Trump. They are even hard pressed to find anything bad to say about the insurrectionists who invaded the capital.

Democrats and other liberals, by contrast, are hardly coming out in support of Gov. Cuomo. Nor have I heard them laud the Lincoln Project and Mitt Romney lately, though I don’t pay as close attention to these things as does Ross Douthat. As for the Europeans, have liberals been dismissing troubling numbers as “fake data.”? Do liberals circle the wagons when one of them has stumbled? Ask Al Franken.

I’m not sure how to account for this difference. Is it just Trump? Or do conservatives generally run no risk of losing support when they shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue or the Capitol building?  I’m skeptical about Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations” as causes of behavior rather than as after-the-fact justifications, as when conservatives use “loyalty” as an ideal to support their choices. But in this case maybe their stronger emphasis on loyalty leads them to defend their “legends” even when those paragons have done things unbecoming a legend.