From a CBS editor:
Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their
appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter
about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the
other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
It’s a
profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s
been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin
country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in
on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump
voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately
reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?
We
diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical
problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see
ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the
indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs
divined from an advanced understanding of justice.
You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.
Then there's this from The Spectator:
If you want to know why Trump won, just look at the response to his winning. The lofty contempt for ‘low information’ Americans. The barely concealed disgust for the rednecks and cretins of ‘flyover’ America who are apparently racist and misogynistic and homophobic. The haughty sneering at the vulgar, moneyed American political system and how it has allowed a wealthy candidate to poison the little people’s mushy, malleable minds. The suggestion that American women, more than 40 per cent of whom are thought to have voted for Trump, suffer from internalised misogyny: that is, they don’t know their own minds, the poor dears. The hysterical, borderline apocalyptic claims that the world is now infernally screwed because ‘our candidate’, the good, pure person, didn’t get in.
This response to Trump’s victory reveals why Trump was victorious. Because those who do politics these days — the political establishment, the media, the academy, the celeb set — are so contemptuous of ordinary people, so hateful of the herd, so convinced that the mass of society cannot be trusted to make political decisions, and now those ordinary people have given their response to such top-down sneering and prejudice.
I saw something similar during the Episcopal Church's controversy from the earlier part of this century, when those who did not entirely agree with the church's leadership were treated to condescending lectures about their un-educated status and unevolved morality and, when slow to realize their miserable state, were hauled into civil courts. The end result was a fractured, now-dying form of Christianity.