This week’s Liberal Media Scream is a rare five-screamer featuring a liberal journalist turned “historian” and biographer claiming that voter patriotism demands reelecting President Joe Biden over former President Donald Trump.
Jon Meacham, the former top editor of Newsweek, said on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, “Patriotism is allegiance to an idea. It’s not just an allegiance to your own kind. That’s nationalism. Trump is a nationalist. President Biden is a patriot.”
Talking more like an East Coast elitist than a Tennessee native, the liberal analyst added with seriousness, “I’m lucky in that I don’t have particular policy passions, particular issues.”
And he included a condescending little jab at his home state. “I want the constitutional order to continue to unfold, and President Biden is devoted to that constitutional order. Donald Trump is self-evidently not. And I would say to my Republican friends — and I live in Tennessee, so that’s redundant — that it is, in fact, a moral question.”
Here is Meacham, on Real Time with Bill Maher, reacting to the news that former Attorney General William Barr (a Trump critic) will vote for his former boss:
JON MEACHAM: What Barr is doing, and what so many — I sometimes think of them as the Peter Millar Republicans, right, these are Republicans who are not full MAGA people, they’re men’s grill types who don’t want Democrats picking judges or setting tax rates.
They talked themselves into this twice. In ’16 and in ’20. And then came December and January of 2020 and 2021, and, at that point, I believe, and I say this with care, that it is become evident, to me, anyway, that there is a patriotic duty to support President Biden against Donald Trump for this reason: Patriotism is allegiance to an idea. It’s not just an allegiance to your own kind. That’s nationalism. Trump is a nationalist. President Biden is a patriot, and I’m lucky in that I don’t have particular policy passions, particular issues. I want the constitutional order to continue to unfold, and President Biden is devoted to that constitutional order. Donald Trump is self-evidently not. And I would say to my Republican friends — and I live in Tennessee, so that’s redundant — that it is, in fact, a moral question….
To me, the interesting thing about the Republican Party is if you are, in fact, going to put partisanship as your central organizing principle, if reflexive partisanship is the most important thing — I would argue that you need to go back and read George Washington’s farewell address. You need to read the founders that otherwise, you know, they love.
You know, they love the founders when they can move it around to agree with them. It’s very clear that if party spirit became the organizing principle, that, that was going to be fatal to the Constitution, and it’s very interesting when Barr said it’s “suicide.” The idea that President Biden is leading us to national suicide. I’m not sure what he’s talking about, but Lincoln used that image in his first major speech in the 1830s. He said if we ever fall, it’s not going to be from a foreign foe: It’s going to be from someone internally rising up and mastering those passions. And those passions about partisanship, that’s what’s ruining us.
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Brent Baker, the vice president of research and publications for the Media Research Center, explains our weekly pick: “Could Meacham be any more condescending and elitist? So much for the pretense of being a journalist and not a partisan activist. His take: I’ve decided which candidate is bad for America, so if you vote for that one, you are not only not a patriot, but you will bring about the destruction of the nation. And he wonders why his neighbors in Tennessee don’t appreciate him for denouncing them as on ‘the wrong side’ of ‘a moral question.’ I bet they have a lot more respect for his views than he does for theirs.”
Rating: FIVE out of FIVE SCREAMS.