At first, the ongoing media meltdown about the Washington Post’s presidential non-endorsement this year seems like yet another self-involved tsuris. In presidential races, it’s not clear how many battalions a newspaper endorsement commands, and American democracy somehow survived prior to 1976, when the Post regularly started announcing presidential endorsements.
On a deeper level, though, this outrage makes much more sense. The Post’s silence on the presidential race points to a continuing argument within the American cultural and financial elite about how to respond to the prospect of a second Trump presidency.
A few days before the Post announcement, the New York Times ran a guest essay by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (of How Democracies Die fame) that advocated a complete civil-society resistance to Trump if he were returned to the White House. After noting the failure of other strategies to block Trump, the men call for a mode of “societal mobilization,” in which “influential groups and societal leaders — chief executives, religious leaders, labor leaders and prominent retired public officials — must speak out.” “Societal mobilization” in this sense means a coordinated effort by business moguls, religious officials, elite academics, and others to oppose the elected government when it crosses some “red line.” (Whether the pledge of some Democratic politicians to try to pack the courts would itself trespass over a “red line” is unaddressed in this essay.)
Levitsky and Ziblatt have proven very influential in “resistance” and Democratic power-player circles. When Democrats mulled nuking the Senate in 2022, Chuck Schumer reportedly invited both men to speak to his caucus about the supposed need for the nuclear option to save “our democracy.” Their New York Times essay also taps into bigger trends in progressive political strategy. Over the summer, the “Democracy Futures Project” (orchestrated by some of the same people associated with 2020’s “Transition Integrity Project”) laid out a framework for full-scale political and social resistance to Trump. In addition to elected officials and government bureaucrats mobilizing against the presidency, “individuals, organizations and corporate executives” should also be organized into an anti-Trump resistance.
The decisions of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers to stay officially out of the presidential race have stoked so much angst in part because they may suggest a fracture in the “societal mobilization” crusade. Every financial and media titan who does not fall in line behind the “resistance” is another crack in the full-spectrum coalition against Trump. Societal mobilization relies upon the complete subsumption of normal life into political warfare; refusing to endorse in the presidential race cuts against that doctrine of political total war.
When Trump was elected in 2016, many of his opponents invoked similar needs for unified opposition. However, the spectacle of “resistance” mobilization only made American politics more contentious and actually played into Trump’s own hands. Trump is the maestro of negative partisanship and thrives on spittle-flecked opposition. The incessant press narratives tried to delegitimize the 2016 election as “hacked” gave him a perfect foil. The street action during Trump’s inauguration and especially the summer of 2020 did not restore democratic “norms” but expanded the Overton Window for political conflict. Few things would inflame populist sentiments more than an attempt to fuse big business, behemoth non-profits, elite media, and career bureaucrats into a “whole of society” campaign against the elected government.
One of the reasons why the anti-Trump resistance has failed so miserably to protect “democratic norms” is that it embraced a politics of emergency at odds with democratic pluralism. The time of crisis admits no half-measures. You’re either on board with the righteous or a threat to the soul of the nation. Disagreement is an anathema and silence is violence. That apocalyptic urgency is part of what has now motivated such strident denunciations of newspapers that have stayed out of the presidential race — and could augur more conflict in the days ahead.