John Oliver is (Still) Part of the Problem
cliche or not, progressive condescension and self-righteousness are Donald Trump's most powerful resource
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I get it: nominating John Oliver as a symbol of liberalism’s failures was well-worn territory a decade ago. This argument has already been made, all the ideological fruit plucked. And the broader debate about liberal condescension as a profound political advantage for the right has percolated in its current form since the 2016 election and in a more general sense for longer than any of us have been alive. I hate to fight yesterday’s war, and I hate to bore you with arguments that have already been made. But at some point, when you see liberals share the same videos week after week of an annoying British man sneering down a camera lens to tell you how stupid everyone else is, you do have to ask if the American left-of-center has any sense at all of how much their project has been damaged by their reputation for patronizing self-righteousness. If the Trump era has proven anything, it’s just how wildly sensitive voters are to the perception that someone somewhere is judging them. That level of sensitivity to vague slights is stupid and the grievance usually disingenuous, but that’s politics, baby. And Oliver is such a pitch-perfect caricature of progressive self-regard - snarky, aloof, judgmental, incurious - that I sometimes wonder if his show is a brilliant op pulled off by the Heritage Foundation.
Take this latest episode of Last Week Tonight, about trans athletes in women’s sports. On substance, Oliver and I hardly disagree on trans issues at all. I too support trans rights and trans identities, I too think people should be able to use bathrooms consistent with their gender expression, I too think medical decisions about trans children should be made by those children, their parents, and their doctors. About the specific issue of trans women in sports, I confess that my default stance at this point is exhaustion; it’s just such an incredibly small bore issue, of relevance to a tiny minority of trans people, that I struggle to see it as something worthy of expending great political resources. This is particularly true given that the public genuinely is not on our side here. Hell, 45% of Democrats say that trans athletes should be “required to compete on teams that match their sex at birth.” One of the great weaknesses of contemporary liberalism is the absolute inability to take an L on any issue; scroll around on BlueSky and you’ll find, for example, vast throngs of progressives who are completely unwilling to admit that mass immigration of unskilled labor into the United States is deeply unpopular. I think the left’s control of our arts, culture, and ideas industries have left too many of us thinking that we can’t lose a culture war. But in the broad sense, we currently are.
In the beginning of the episode, Oliver plays around with a “Why are conservatives so obsessed with this minor issue?” approach, but of course that question goes both ways. It’s just not clear to me that the juice is worth the squeeze. It sucks to put what’s possible in front of what’s right, but that’s the heart of politics. Oliver points out that the women’s sports issue is being used as a wedge to attack trans rights more broadly, but again this logic goes the other way as well; if there’s such backlash concerning this particular issue, of practical relevance to a tiny number of trans people, shouldn’t we consider whether prioritizing it in our messaging is what’s best?
Still, were it up to me, would I allow trans girls and women to participate in women’s sports? Sure, yes. If we saw some sort of domination by trans athletes in those spaces, we could have a hard conversation about it. The reality is that we haven’t seen anything like that, so this is currently a controversy in search of a problem. But then, I’m a wild-eyed lefty who’s been exposed to people from sexual and gender minorities my entire life, and most people in this country are not. Which means supporters of trans rights have to do something that John Oliver trains them not to do: actually engage, argue, persuade, act in general as if there’s work to be done and that we can’t simply sit around feeling superior, chuckling to ourselves on our $15/month premium cable channel. The “gender critical” cohort has been making steady gains for years. What position are you in, exactly, to act as though their views can be so gleefully dismissed? Oliver describes trans rights as under assault, nation-wide. If that’s so, then this precisely the worst time to treat those rights as self-evidently correct and worthy of protection. You can’t have it both ways: if this is a crisis, you have to hustle and fight like it’s a crisis. You can’t expect to joke your way out of it.