Liberalism Didn’t Create Trump, Leftism Did

David Klion, The Nation, and the leftist allergy to accountability.

What does it take to get hired as a columnist for The Nation?

I’m not asking because I especially want a job there, I’m just curious. Like, hypothetically, if I were interested in pumping out sloppy, sub-1,000 word mind poops every few months, with indefensible premises, supported by zero compelling arguments, would The Nation publish them? Because I would consider letting them in exchange for money. DMs are open, guys…

In perhaps the silliest column I have read this calendar year, Nation contributor, David Klion, wrote the following, and ignited a small wildfire on social media:

Some of the Harper’s letter signatories who spent much of the Biden era bemoaning the excesses of the woke left, among them Anne Applebaum, Jesse Singal, and Thomas Chatterton Williams, have also condemned Trump’s attacks on free speech. While this is honorable and certainly preferable to the alternative, all of them should examine their role in helping to build a broad elite consensus that has functioned mainly to legitimize Trump’s actions.

I believe it was John Stuart Mill who once said, “What the fuck is this dude talking about?”

There are three things here:

1. Left-wing censoriousness

2. Criticism of left-wing censoriousness

3. Right-wing censoriousness

Regular readers of this newsletter will easily guess which two of those things I consider bad, and which one I consider defensible, but that’s only adjacent to my point today.

Klion is looking at these three forces and making an argument about causation. The order in which I listed them represents their chronology, and Klion doesn’t appear to dispute that. But let’s think hard about this supposed causal connection - and I agree that at least two can be unearthed here. Let’s see if we can’t do better than Klion did though.

If you don’t know about the referenced Harper’s Letter, you can read it and view its list of signatories here. It doesn’t come across as especially groundbreaking today, but at the time of its publication, it was quite significant. To be openly critical of the social justice brigades then was to risk career ruin, especially for folks on the left. This was one of the first times a large group of difficult-to-impeach intellectuals banded together to register a complaint and lived to tell of it. Reaction to the letter was angry, but it was surprisingly impotent.

We’ll start with the easy one. Liberal (and some centrist and conservative) critics of left wing censoriousness obviously got the idea to criticize left wing censoriousness from…left wing censoriousness. So that tracks. That is a cause/effect relationship, probably one that even David Klion agrees with.

What’s the other one though? Klion is arguing that the critics of left wing censoriousness are responsible for causing right wing censoriousness. But does that make sense? Like, any? Whatsoever?

Cleveland challenged New York in the ALCS and lost. Does that make it Cleveland’s fault that LA defeated New York in the World Series? (I’m using the city names because typing ‘Cleveland Gu*rdians’ gives me actual heartburn).

What the hell kind of logic is this? Is there a name for it? Did Aristotle ever condemn it? I don’t often encounter such face-slappingly stupid things in my daily reading, so I’m honestly wondering.

The only thing that even comes close to an example Klion offers in support of his ridiculous thesis is the fact that Bari Weiss and her Free Press don’t criticize Trump very much. That’s a fair observation, I guess. They don’t. But Weiss’s was one of 153 names on the Harper’s Letter. Having found himself unable to point out a single other who was guilty of his accused crime, Klion might have reconsidered his premise.

This is also just a tiresome game he’s playing. “Prove that you screamed loudly enough about the Bad Thing or the Bad Thing is your fault.” The Free Press doesn’t really exist to be a Trump-critical publication - that isn’t their niche. If Klion is looking for one of those, he shouldn’t have much trouble. Not only does he fucking write for one, there are about 4,000 others just a mouse click away.

I get some of this myself when I beat up on the left. “But Dave, why are you writing about [x] when Trump is so much worse?”

To start with, because writing about how horrible Trump is was never punishable by exile from polite society. The whole point of the Harper’s Letter was that writing skeptically about the left’s sacred cows was. It may be more common and accepted now, but it remains a less explored topic, especially by people (like me) with mostly liberal sensibilities.

Also though, I just consider it a useful form of Trump resistance to help cultivate an alternative that doesn’t completely disgust people.

For whatever reason though, Klion and his intellectual kinfolk never recovered from the perceived injury done to them by the Harper’s Letter. So its signatories have to be wrong, bad, and responsible for everything that came after. Whether or not that contention can actually be supported.

And the contention falls apart in the face of, oh I don’t know, every single utterance from every single Trump supporter to speak out since the beginning of his last campaign. They are very clear about why they’re okay with his speech chilling: they think the left did it first, and did it worse.

Said none of them: “I began supporting Donald Trump’s speech crackdowns after I felt Cornel West and J.K. Rowling had given me permission in the pages of Harper’s Magazine.”

The other causal relationship between our three forces is obviously left wing censoriousness opening the door to right wing censoriousness. But Klion can’t acknowledge that, because it would make him responsible for the thing he hates the very most. He would rather not have to hold that bag, so he’s passing it to people whose criticism of him he hasn’t gotten over. That those people were trying to stop the same thing he was trying to stop is lost on him: obscured by what I can only assume is a fog of denial and repressed guilt.

Fire Org’s Greg Lukianoff put it well:

What makes Klion’s piece doubly mystifying to me is that he makes clear his awareness that Trump’s popularity is a backlash to the ‘woke’ left.

“Flash-forward to 2025. The backlash against wokeness is the core of Trump’s second administration, and it’s being used to justify an assault on free speech unequaled since the McCarthy era.”

Yes. Yes it is. So how does he conclude that woke’s critics bear responsibility for it?

Pandora: *starts to open box*

Me: “Hey, don’t do that.”

Pandora: *does it anyway*

Evil: *abounds*

David Klion: “You all remember when Dave from Aged Well caused evil to abound?”

Perhaps making it more personal to David will help him better understand his error.

David Klion: *puts head in crocodile’s mouth*

Me: “That’s dangerous and you should take your head out of that crocodile’s mouth.”

David Klion: *shakes head and leaves it in place*

Crocodile: *bites his head*

David Klion (angrily, to me): “Why did you make this crocodile bite my head!?”

It bears mentioning also that Trump’s supporters do not regard his actions as being equivalent to the woke left’s. They’re 50% correct.

Trump and his gang have leaned on legal arguments to support the detentions of foreign students Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk; as in, their incarcerations, while controversial, were not technically unlawful.

That may be so, but their cases still represent an obscene assault on free speech principles. They were arrested for voicing opinions the Trump administration didn’t like, and that is not historically how we treat guests to the United States.

No one claiming to support free speech could be anything but repulsed at how its tenets were violated through our treatment of Khalil and Ozturk.

But Trump’s war on DEI should be understood differently, whether or not we support it. I wrote about this some months ago:

“Trump, Rufo, et al have predicated their onslaught not on some arcane piece of right wing, proto-fascist dogma, but on a central pillar of liberalism itself: basic human equality…Trump’s attack dogs have maneuvered liberals into a position where they can’t speak out against what’s happening without also speaking out against…liberalism.

And as the kids say, nobody’s ready to have that conversation.”

Trump is prosecuting his attacks by withholding federal funds from organizations he has charged with using them to promote ideologically slanted instruction and breaking civil rights law. Trump isn’t telling Harvard they can’t practice or talk about DEI, he’s saying they’ll have to self-fund if they want to do it.

Now, did I just “legitimize Trump’s actions?” It’s a bit hard to avoid that when I would consider the actions legitimate under any other circumstance. And by the way, so would David Klion. So would The Nation.

If a church wants to dedicate itself wholeheartedly to helping a presidential candidate get elected, they should be free to do so. They just shouldn’t remain tax-exempt.

It is perfectly *legitimate* to admonish public schools not to stage organized prayer while operating on the taxpayers’ dime. Is that a censorious position to take? I don’t really see it that way, and am not aware that anyone else on the left does either, but maybe.

If a publicly funded school required students to take lessons in which they were taught how dangerous and awful African Americans were, and if the school also had an open prejudice against admitting African American students or hiring African American teachers to their faculty, I would say that that was not only wrong, but illegal. And I’d say the very same if it were *a different racial group* being targeted.

Why all that matters is that the David Klion from his fourth paragraph appears to understand it. But then Paragraph Six David Klion doesn’t.

Paragraph Four David Klion feels like a guy who’s ready to acknowledge that policies aimed specifically and intentionally at curbing woke influence are a reaction to…woke influence. Bully for him.

But Paragraph Six David Klion has reached a different conclusion. He’s decided that actually, skeptics of woke influence caused the backlash. Presumably because Chris Rufo only became an activist after Jesse Singal gave him the idea…

What’s so infuriating and pitiful about this cope festival is how many leftists are sympathetic to it. Of course they are though. It’s a narrative that assures them they were right all along and should never have to change one single thing about what they believe or how they operate. Klion is telling his readers that it was our trying to stop them from poking the tiger, and not their poking it in the first place, that woke the tiger up.

The reckoning and rebirth would appear to be off to a fitful start.