The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

When Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior White House adviser, who helped pioneer much of the fake news that helped Trump to win, told Washington’s journalists to shut up, he was met with derision.64 Yet he was echoing a popular view in the heartland about an industry that has suffered an even steeper fall in its credibility than the political classes. If the US media is now the opposition party, as Bannon put it, where will the people stand? Again, Russia offers troubling signposts. When Putin won his thumping presidential victory in 2012 with more than two-thirds of the vote, he had little need of ballot-stuffing. Much like London’s vote against Brexit, or Washington’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton, more than half of Moscow voted against Putin. The gulf between America’s metropolitan elites and those outside of the cities is no less wide than that between Moscow and its vast hinterlands. Putin’s mastery of reality TV, an industry that is scripted by the Kremlin, and by its business acolytes, outweighs whatever cynicism he generates in the cities. Whether it is taking his shirt off to go hunting, or zooming onto the stage on a Harley and in Ray-Bans at the opening of the Winter Olympics, Putin’s shape-shifting appearances are calibrated for the Russian left-behinds. They call the Kremlin’s PR managers political technologists. Before taking office, Mr Trump was already America’s celebrity apprentice-in-chief. Political technology is as much his friend as his enemy. The counter-re...