What attitudes and actions does this require of us? Any reaction must begin with a sober recognition. Catastrophe is in the front room. The weather forecast includes the apocalypse.
Eugene Robinson expresses a very different view in his Washington Post OpEd “Take the Democrats-are-doomed narrative with a grain of salt” where he begins with a reference to wildebeest crossing the Serengeti:
Like wildebeests crossing the Serengeti, journalists travel in a herd. We follow not the life-giving seasonal rains but a safe, comfortable, groupthink story arc — call it The Narrative — whose current chapter is titled “Democrats are doomed.” (Photo on right is of great wildebeest migration which begins in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area of the southern Serengeti in Tanzania added by Hal Brown.)
He continues the wildebeest metaphor later in his essay:
I can’t recall another time when one of our political parties has so lost its way — and its mind — leaving the other to do all the serious work of governing. And one of The Narrative’s weaknesses is an inability to deal with novel situations — as though the wildebeests, expecting to be galloping across wide-open savanna, somehow find themselves in a dense rainforest.
Robinson goes on to say:
Sometimes, all is indeed lost. Sometimes a massive and complicated legislative framework collapses, and everyone has to start all over again. The Narrative seems to have internalized the aphorism that the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) used to attribute, perhaps wrongly, to Chairman Mao: “It’s always darkest before it goes totally black.”
But failure is far from inevitable, as I see it, and the window for success is certainly not measured in mere days.
He goes back to the Serengeti (images) for his conclusion:
The thing about The Narrative is that it requires periodic plot twists. When the “Biden is toast” story line changes to “Biden is back,” take that, too, with a grain of salt. The Serengeti is wide, and there are many miles to go.
This is yet another example for the contrasting, actually contradictory, opinions being expressed in the progressive media as to whether the barbarians are really at the gates of democracy and the end of our great experiment in representative government is about to go down in the flames of Trumpism.
I wrote about this last week in “Did we come close to a constitutional crisis on Jan. 6th. It depends on whom you ask...” In that diary I compared the view expressed in “Jan. 6 was worse than we knew” by The New York Times editorial board with the Politico Magazine article “Why the Fear of Trump May Be Overblown” by Jack Shafer Politico’s senior media writer.