Magazines appear to be the most sluggish items to forward through the mail, and I received my November Harper’s just a few days before Thanksgiving. It included several articles analyzing the campaign, all clearly assuming (though not stating) that Hillary would win. Reading it in the aftermath was like reading Nostradamus predicting an alternate universe in which Bernie Sanders was elected.

The main article’s analysis of why the US  is not in this alternate universe, together with the supporting evidence in various articles in this issue, seems crucially important for us to understand as we move into the Trump era, and is the topic of this blog, which has significant quotations and paraphrasing from this magazine. If you are tired of the political stuff, and I don’t blame you, skip this edition.

The centerpiece is the cover story by Thomas Frank, who carefully catalogs the campaign by our professional, Ivy-League-heavy media, the “prestige press,” together with the political establishment, including the DNC , to discredit Sanders. When for the first time in modern memory a left-wing Democrat seemed to have a chance at the nomination, the press piled on to stop him.

Most of us won’t be surprised to hear that the media is not liberal-biased, but why would it intervene to derail the campaign of a popular, scandal-free nominee? Frank postulates that the professional class of reporters and pundits sees itself as part of a “meritocratic elite,” peers of the well-educated power brokers who work in “government, academia, Wall Street, medicine, and Silicon Valley.” Clearly the Democratic party has in the last four decades become the party of this class.

To the power elites, Bernie Sanders represented not progressivism but “atavism, a regression to the time when demagogues in rumpled jackets pandered to vulgar public prejudices against banks and capitalists and foreign factory owners. Ugh.” To preserve the status quo, the press, perhaps more instinctively than calculatedly, joined forces with the political elites to redefine legitimacy in a way that excluded Sanders and his ideas.

A lot of this reporting stooped to pure falsehood. Here are a few of the story lines, followed by my comments.

• “Americans are more anxious about terrorism than income inequality.” I think we got the answer to that on November 8th.
• The repeal of Glass-Steagall “had nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis.” That is very much an ongoing discussion, with plenty of serious economists positing a causal relationship.
• The idea that there is a “billionaire class” systematically supporting conservative causes is ridiculous. Books have been written chronicling, decrying, and exalting this effort which, among other accomplishments, completely reconfigured precinct maps after the 2010 census. In the same issue of Harper’s, an article on Medicare casually references “the right’s thirty-year crusade to change the conversation” as common knowledge.
• The TARP bailout helped Wall Street banks, which were in “upheaval” after the financial crisis, while limiting “the collateral damage that Main Street suffered.” Yet all affected Wall Street banks are flourishing today, while average Americans lost trillions in household wealth and were plunged into a recession.
• When Bill Clinton was president, “America was tough on crime, … welfare was being reformed,” and free trade was welcomed. This may actually be true, but these three efforts arguably led to our high and racially-skewed prison populations, increased income inequality, and exit of jobs and wealth, hardly results to extol.

The aspirations of the elites for the country seem sadly contrasted with their personal ambitions, focusing on incremental gains and compromise, both amply demonstrated during the Obama years: the No, We Can’t approach. The press seemed outraged by Sanders’ sweeping, “unrealistic” plans. Moving away from the herd-think, Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia economist, chided his peers:

It’s been decades since the United States had a progressive economic strategy, and mainstream economists have forgotten what one can deliver. In fact, Sander’s recipes are supported by overwhelming evidence–notably from countries that already follow the policies he advocates. On health care, growth and income inequality, Sanders wins the policy debate hands down.

I think it could be reasonably argued, and Frank does so argue, that the overwhelming support for Hillary during the primaries by Democratic elected officials including Obama as well as the DNC would be a situation ripe for reportorial investigation. Why were all “these players determined … to make this deeply unpopular woman the nominee, regardless of the consequences”?  In another article in this issue, author Chris Offutt, a Kentuckian now residing in Mississippi via Montana, points out that “white-working-class rage played a role in … the Sanders” revolution, implying those votes could have been with Sanders instead of Trump. That is, if the power elite were looking to win the election, they could have supported a candidate with wider appeal.

Are my husband and I part of the power elite? We don’t feel very powerful! We are skeptical toward banks, capitalism, and foreign factory owners. On the other hand, we and our offspring pursue chattering class jobs and have been sheltered (so far) from economic vicissitude by the relatively high earnings of these jobs and the concomitant ability to save and invest. So are the power elite our enemies? If people like us join the working class voters next time, could we end up with a visionary leader? Or should we consider our situation an anomaly, and simply hope for regression to the mean? After reading the November issue of Harper’s, I’m not sure I know where the mean actually is, or should be.