Tribe Withdrawal Syndrome

Headaches in the Wilderness

I have a confession to make. Only ten years ago I was full-on tribal. I described myself politically as a “Guardian reader.” The Guardian was where I was most confident I would find reliable information and the right sorts of opinions on everything from the benefits of Veganism to refugee rights and the persecution of the Uyghurs in China. I scorned the Daily Mail as a contemptible sensationalist rag, the Telegraph as a bastion of reactionary nationalism, the London Times as an establishment mouthpiece that valued profit margins above all and mocked progressive values. I read the New York Times and the Washington Post, watched the BBC and CNN and listened to MSNBC and despised all conservative US media.

It was a comfortable place to be. You knew where you were. We are the good guys, they are the bad guys, simple as that.

Then stuff happened. The Guardian and the BBC started publishing things about sex and gender that I knew were untrue and even harmful. Like thousands of others, I complained. The complaints led nowhere and the situation became worse. Meanwhile, they – along with the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and especially MSNBC – were all ignoring major social shifts and conflicts, or putting such a weird twist on them that the public was being badly misled. Journalists who tried to remedy the situation were fired or left of their own accord.

Today we see numerous excellent female journalists who once wrote for the Guardian publishing their articles in the Telegraph. “Why do you write for the right-wing media?” the unenlightened tribalists demand scornfully. Well, because all the once-progressive media have become – on matters of sex and gender at least -- regressive and repressive.

The best visual representation of this alarming shift is the hideous “Progress” flag with its ongoing mutations. The beautiful rainbow flag first hoisted in San Francisco in 1978 stood for sex, life, healing, sunlight, nature, magic and art, serenity, and spirit. Universal symbols – pretty “inclusive,” you might say. The aesthetically illiterate vandals of the tear-it-all-down “Queer” movement have fragmented it into groups, and now market the resulting eyesore as more “inclusive.” Whether it is their intimidating threats and shrieks of victimhood or the huge financial backing that has persuaded all those media I once saw as my “tribe” to go along with this absurdity I am not sure. Both, I guess.

I used to be quite good at reading. In fact, I was a university lecturer in English literature and literary theory for a few years back in the 1980s, when Barthes and Derrida were all the rage. That was before the post-structuralist ideas that were so fascinating in discussions of literary texts were transplanted wholesale into discussions of everyday life and society, where they certainly did not belong -- and the rot set in.

I have had to re-learn reading and listening. Today, I can’t hear any political analysis without feeling tension. It gives me a headache. Alert to casual dissonants in every sentence, I find myself saying “Yes!” and “Rubbish!” alternately. That means I also have to look back and realize that when I described myself as a “Guardian reader,” I was being lazy – delegating my views to a media outlet for comfort. It’s a bit shameful.

So let’s take the example of Rachel Maddow, who I have been listening to for almost ten years and of whom I was once a great fan. I see her as a fallen hero. She is so smart, with such a firm grasp of many aspects of politics that I have found it heartbreaking to see her simplistic analysis of the Democrats’ loss in the 2024 Presidential Election. Basically, it goes like this: incumbent parties are being ousted worldwide, and this is just another example. There has always been a certain contingent of US society that has hankered after a “strongman” who will solve the nation’s problems and this, combined with the general trend against incumbents, has produced the abysmal result we now see. And Trump only won by a small margin anyway. That’s it.

She says that some people have been trying to figure out what the Kamala Harris campaign could have done differently, how the media strategy and messaging could have been improved – “but I haven’t done much of that,” she says candidly in her interview with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim. Dead right she hasn’t. Her focus is on mustering the forces of democracy to become “pirates” to fight the incoming fascist dictatorship.

She doesn’t want to accept any blame for facilitating the election result, with week after week of over-the-top rants. Of course not. None of the liberal media do. When they briefly touch on what they quaintly refer to as “trans rights,” they rapidly change the subject: they never even broach the possibility of any sensible, popular policy change that might upset their “trans siblings” for anything as trivial as saving the country from what they believe is a fascist dictatorship.

What the Democrats got wrong, of course, was not about messaging or media strategy. It was about disastrous mistakes and policies. And I’m not even going to mention the treacherous, chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, now the only country in the world where girls can’t go to school. No, I’m talking about a range of issues that affect a majority of the US electorate: issues like the attacks on women’s and girls’ sport and the medical experiments being conducted on distressed lesbian teens and other “gender non-conforming” kids – under the approving eye of the Biden Administration. It’s not messaging or media strategy, Rachel. It's about sexist, homophobic practices and policies. To be sure, framing these practices and policies in terms of “trans rights” has slowed down the public’s understanding of them. But far more people understand now than four years ago – even more than two years ago.

Why can’t the Democratic Party – or any liberal media – discuss these issues frankly? You maybe heard of Representative Seth Moulton, one of only two or three Democratic Members of Congress who said his party was out of touch on issues such as women’s sports and it was wrong that discussion of these issues was impossible within the party. These remarks led to a big protest outside his office and one of his top aides resigned. Several former staffers and interns rebuked him in an open letter, calling on him to “reconsider your approach to these issues and offer an apology to the LGBTQ+ community, especially as members of this community have proudly served under your leadership.” Moulton observes in interviews that the backlash proves his point. Yes, it does.

But Rachel Maddow has a huge platform from which to call for such a discussion. Sure, several twenty-somethings would resign and furious letters would pour in. But she is strong enough to take it. Isn’t she? Too late to ward off fascist dictatorship this time around but how about getting Congress back in 2026?

The progressives are still there: they firmly support democratic institutions and want to get money out of politics; they want green energy and good public services; they support Dreamers and want sensible immigration policies; they support women’s reproductive rights and gay rights. They support all the things people on the left have always supported. But many Democrats know there are only two sexes and that sex matters in many areas of life. They care about their daughters’ rights. They don’t want gender-related drugs and surgery to be available to minors, even when those interventions are euphemistically labeled “care.” These progressives have not abandoned the left. The left has abandoned them. It is time to jettison the “No Debate” position of tribal Democrats and to stand up to the angry young crowd who are currently calling the shots. The liberal media should not be ignoring or shutting down dissent but encouraging and facilitating an open discussion of these harmful policies within the Democratic Party.