By Charles C. W. Cooke
Friday, August 01, 2025
Don’t look now, but, out of the corner of my eye, I think
I may spy a salutary pattern. For as long as I can remember, alterations to the
cultural scene went in only one direction. Recently, this has changed. Having
marched for years through our institutions, the American left is finally
meeting some resistance. Better still: On some fronts it has lost ground.
There, action is yielding reaction. NPR’s hiring of Katherine Maher signaled
that it intended to remain parochial. In response, Congress defunded it. Stephen
Colbert transmuted The Late Show into a de facto extension of the
DNC; in return, CBS canceled it. American Eagle made a commercial for denim
that inspired a ludicrous backlash among the identitarians; in reply, the
company’s stock soared. The owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos,
made it known publicly that he was no longer interested in subsidizing a daily
version of the New Republic; in riposte, the most annoying among his
employees chose to leave. Taken together, these developments have not fixed the
problem — in classical terms, they’re Marathon, not Salamis. They have,
however, indicated what is possible, and, in politics, possibility can prove
addictive.
To hear the left tell it, these shifts represent an
unconscionable threat to American journalism, American culture, and even to
American democracy itself. But that, of course, is so much self-serving
nonsense. There is nothing written in the stars that demands that all of
America’s institutions must be run — or even influenced — by a tiny sliver of
the population. Nor, in a free country, is it mandatory that what has been done
be preserved forever. If Congress can decide that NPR and PBS are worth funding,
it can also decide that they are not. If CBS can give Stephen Colbert the reins
of The Late Show, it can take them away should he prove
incompetent in the role. If American Eagle — and other corporations — can
choose to kowtow to the delirium of the neurotic online left, it can also tell
its emissaries to pound sand. And, yes, if the Washington Post can be
oriented towards the presumptions of the Democratic elite, it can just as
easily be reoriented away from them.
It has often been remarked that, when progressives warn
that a given change is a “threat to democracy,” they really mean that it is a
threat to bureaucracy. So it is here. For more than five decades, the
Democratic Party and its beneficiaries have proven extremely adept at
maintaining a host of powerful institutions that are able to deliver hard
results independent of the will of voters, and consumers. Observed on a
spreadsheet, the consequences of this play have seemed utterly baffling.
Because it couldn’t raise enough money from volunteers, NPR required millions
of dollars in funding from taxpayers. Because its appeal was so niche, The
Late Show was losing $40 million a year. Because his newspaper was so
cramped and so boring, Jeff Bezos was subsidizing it to the tune of $100
million per annum. From the perspective of the message-launderers, however,
this was a terrific deal: They got a large and prestigious platform that they
could use to insinuate that their strange little ideology was mainstream, while
some remote third party — be it a billionaire, a corporation, or an irritated
taxpayer in Boise — ended up footing the bill.
It is this latter part of the equation that is now in
jeopardy. Just as, during Covid, parents and school boards decided that they no
longer wished to send an unqualified blank check to the education system each
year, so the figures responsible for maintaining the Permanent Progressive
Archipelago are starting to express skepticism about their roles. From Harvard
to Twitter to the Los Angeles Times, the old quid pro quo is being
broken. It is astonishing that there was ever much room for a proposition that
amounts to, “You give me your money; I’ll use it to fund my fanatical political
project; no questions asked,” and yet, inexplicably, that has been the norm for
most of my adult life. In most realms, it still is, but the ball is now
rolling, and, as, one by one, the marks catch onto the ruse, that should change
for the better at last.
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