Where Have All the Journos Gone?

The old exegetes are played out. Overtaken by events, baffled by shifting attitudes, enamored with old doctrines, blinded by the dawn’s new light, our interpreter class finds itself out of its league.

How much digital ink will be typed over the Oval Office tiff, in which President Trump and Vice President Vance rhetorically sparred with Ukrainian President Zelensky, only to be forgotten two weeks thence? The “news” is a Wall Street business now—every publication engages in high-frequency trading, straining to produce words, opinions, analysis, insights, and havering takes to match speed with our overworked attention span.

There’s just one rub: fossil assembly is ossifying—fast. Churning out obsolete copy repels readers. Sure, niche audiences stick, forgetting to remove their payment method, losing track of receipts, neglecting to check bank debits. But soon enough the cost of production doesn’t pencil out. See: The CIA’s fishwrapper The Washington Post.

The weekend following the dinero dustup was, to the Beltway commentariat, dark, cold, and lonely, despite the first shoots of spring along the Potomac. The blue-tick brigade solemnly drafted obituaries for a “respected America” that ate its own barrel on the world stage, in between bites of sausage hash at brunch or Domino’s cheese pizza at their kids’ birthday party. It was a parade of respectable remonstrations: “embarrassing,” “humiliating,” “childish,” “dismaying,” a “setup,” and, the most frequently pulled, “a gift to Vladimir Putin.” Posting these minglings of gloomy adjectives and nouns were required after-hours work: to keep up appearances, the pundit club had to issue its usual bromides. The airs had to be put on!

It was all, as the wokescolds like to say, so tiring. How many times can a paying patron listen to the clapping Greek chorus line shrilling cheap history, moralizing briefs, hysterical fulminations? When will he tune out, crumble his playbill, which is a printed copy of Schlesinger’s The Vital Center, toss it to the ground like a candy wrapper and exit the theater to search for a true portrayal of our tilted globe?

“We live in the age of Hitler. Our religion is World War II,” wrote Alec Ryrie. America’s self-conception, which is largely shaped by elite media diffusion, is of the vanquisher of tyrants, a friend of freedom, a liberator on righteous crusade ready to expend treasure and blood to see that others enjoy the fruits of liberal democracy, like Pop-Tarts and $15-a-month Netflix subscriptions.

The postwar fallout, which saw Uncle Sam step over the bodies of fallen western nations, birthed a metaphysical war between the forces of individual liberty and collective terror. It also led to whizbang knock-on technical innovations like space flight and the internet, but also inane duds like TikTok dances and the influencer business-model.

But abstract dalliances have an expiration date. The real, the concrete, the implacable solidness of reality must return. Clio doesn’t twirl in one spot sempiternally. The spirit is always moving.

This epochal page-turn was inevitable, though it’s been given some giddyup but the least abstract of presidents, Donald Trump, who, through decades of archived interviews, has made plain that he regards the world as cutthroat, unsparing, a chisler’s rodeo, a racket of wills. Or as historian Sebag Montefiore described it, so-called “international affairs” has always been a Hobbesian “multiplayer game” in which “everybody is against everybody.” The past half-decade of the “rules-based international order” was a respite to the rule.

President Trump’s truculent regard for American benevolence is much closer to the mean than his charitable predecessors. It’s at once prescient and mossbacked: nineteenth-century mercantilism is renascent. The era of the American paladin is receding, if only because our $36 trillion raincheck will soon serve as a lien on our “jodhpurs and pith helmets.”

And where, oh where, are the great epistemic authorities to help navigate this fast-moving scene? Surely not in the new-media likes of Matt Yglesias, who fatuously insists we can “sustain indefinitely” our arms shipments to Ukraine. Nor in commonplace columnists like Noah Smith who insist “America has gone from the guardian of global order to a predatory gangster state.” (Mr. Smith’s bifocals must be permanently tainted black and white after falling into one too many toilet bowls when he was in middle school.) Nor is it even in normally sensible opinion-slingers like Douglas Murray chiding the MAGA-right for buying Putin propaganda like the newest Trump.JPEG.

Don’t misunderstand me. We aren’t guideless, wandering in a dark wood with nobody to illuminate a way, not out, but back from the thicket. Christopher Caldwell has been consistently one of the best, if not the top of the chop, American journalists clear-eyed about Europe’s der todestrieb. Writing in The Free Press, Caldwell cuts through the high dudgeon Twitter takes to train in on Zelensky’s gambit: outshowing the showman to save face. Likewise, British journalist Ed West’s inimitable drill-down pen discloses hushed sentiments expressed only in sighs away from mic range. On the European frustration over the Trump-Vance-Zelensky cockup, West, speaking for the continent, admits “[w]e admire and respect Zelensky—we just don’t want to risk war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf, nor take on the huge financial cost of re-armament.”

Ahhhhh. Unembarrassed clarity. Now is that really so hard?

For chroniclers mired in shallow lines, it’s easier to keep swimming circumambiently, oblivious that the familiar wafting waters are drying up in the passing sun. As old-right essayist Garet Garret famously put it, “There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.”

Our soft ideals have hardened into a jaundiced discernment. The worm’s turned. Yet our newscasters are the slowest to the sublunary punch.