Saritha Prabhu

Liberals were devastated at the humiliating loss of their candidate. They didn't deal with it well.

Saritha Prabhu lives in Clarkville. She is a columnist for The Tennessean.

It’s a tough time to be a liberal these days. It was tough pre-election, and it’s been especially tough post-election.

The obvious reason, of course, is that my side lost, and that the Democratic Party is pretty much decimated.

But the deeper, more troubling reason is the wave of illiberalism that has been pervading liberal quarters, among many — not all — in the media, academic, entertainment worlds and among many ordinary Democrats.

Liberalism, as I see it, is about going wherever facts and reason take you and about changing one’s mind when new facts present themselves, and not about having dogmas and defending them till you are blue in the face. Unfortunately, many liberals, in all these years of trying to win elections and participating in scorched-earth politics, seem to have lost this core quality.

Illiberalism’s dictionary definition, incidentally, is to be biased, hide-bound, intolerant. I’ve, of course, thought of the possibility that my subjective take on this may itself be unknowingly illiberal.

The first example of illiberalism, as I see it, occurred before the election when many Democrats refused to look at Hillary Clinton’s ethics issues critically, and dismissed many voters’ genuine concerns about them as overblown and right-wing-driven.

There was more illiberalism right before the election — many seasoned mainstream media elites were infected by echo-chamberitis — they were talking to themselves, underestimated the anger in the country, couldn’t or wouldn’t see Trump supporters as multi-dimensional individuals, and believed that Clinton would waltz to a huge victory.

The problem with echo chambers is the people in it seldom know they are in it, therefore it’s hard to come out of it.

Unfortunately, there is a kind of groupthink, thought-and-language-policing and social-media-shaming culture that exists in liberal circles now. It can be argued that there is plenty wrong in conservative circles too, but my topic today is about progressive pathology.

Some of this has been chronicled in “The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech” by Kirsten Powers, a Democratic pundit. The left’s tactics, she says, use intimidation and there is an authoritarian impulse at work to browbeat people through social media into groupthink.

The illiberalism continued after the election. Obviously, liberals were devastated at the humiliating loss of their candidate. But the way they dealt with the loss wasn’t pretty.

They became easy to mock and parody by schadenfreude-filled conservatives. In short, there was some hysteria, some tantrums, in media, college campuses, and the entertainment world, and some bad behavior on public display.

Some examples of what I consider juvenile, grandstanding behavior: some fashion designers refusing to dress the new First Lady; people removing Trump signs off apartment buildings in New York City; many performers being forced, through social media pressure by fans, to back away from performing at the Inauguration; the cast member of "Hamilton" publicly lecturing Mike Pence from the stage.

When conservatives said, “Whiners! Crybabies! Get over it!” I couldn’t help silently agreeing.

Granted, this was a high-stakes election and many liberals and some Republicans believe that Trump is dangerous for our republic.

Still, the refusal to come to terms with an election loss, and relying on irrational explanations for the loss was unbecoming and illiberal. For example, I’m tired of the Democratic talking point that Clinton was the effective winner because she won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.

Whatever one thinks of the Electoral College, it was the law which decides the winner, something the Clinton Campaign itself acknowledged when it boasted of their “many paths to 270 electoral college votes” prior to the election.

I’m still a proud liberal who thinks many progressive policies are sound. But it’s the attitudes and tactics that are the problem – liberals’ sanctimony and their seeming conviction that they have a monopoly on truth and wisdom.

Such attitudes make liberals seem loopy; it was one of the many reasons that paved the way for a President Trump, and will continue to cause electoral damage.

Saritha Prabhu of Clarksville is a Tennessean columnist. Reach her at sprabhu43@gmail.com.