What’s Behind the Centrists’ Resistance to the “Resistance Liberals”?
The point of stressing Epstein isn’t merely the immediate harms to his victims (though these are not trivial). Many who feared the worst about Trump pointed to the fact that he was an abuser because, to them, it showed how he thought about power. This was the correct inference. It is not incidental to Trump’s political project how many of its key figures—including the president himself, Elon Musk, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Robert F Kennedy Jr.—have had serious assault allegations made against them. It informs how they behave and how they justify themselves. Of course, in the eyes of “rationalist” commentators, that analysis becomes an emotional and unfocused overreaction.
I’m increasingly noticing how little that is written about resistance liberals cites one of us directly. This“libs were right” piece by Anne Lultz Fernandez is infinitely better than anything thus far surveyed, because it was written by a liberal who has held these views all along—it discusses the gendered aspect of how fears were dismissed and links this to the logic of abuse, and the fact that this is an administration staffed by abusers. With some honorable exceptions like Jamelle Bouie, such voices are absent from the most significant national publications. Perhaps those publications should be more interested in them.
Or, for that matter, perhaps the press could engage with the ordinary voters they so casually dismiss with unpleasant stereotypes. They were, after all, right. Those who feared the worst from the start are a minority, to be sure, but not a vanishingly small one. As far as I’m aware, this feature by me is the first piece of reporting attempting to profile such voters—Cassandras, as I called them. The resistance to listening to them seems basically pathological.
