When academic knowledge is on tap for the media, the result is not a fusion of the best of academia and the best of journalism but the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, we get the whiplash of superficial commentary: For two years, America was on the verge of authoritarianism; now it’s not. On the other hand, we get the determinism that haunts so much academic knowledge. When the contingencies of a day’s news cycle are overlaid with the laws of social science or whatever ancient formation is trending in the precincts of academic historiography, the political world can come to seem more static than it is. Toss in the partisan agendas of the media and academia, and the effects are as dizzying as they are deadening: a news cycle that’s said to reflect the universal laws of the political universe where the laws of the political universe change with every news cycle.
Under Obama, there was a fashionable theory, derived from political science, that the presidency is a weak institution. Where once upon a time journalists would talk of the “bully pulpit” or agenda-setting power of the Oval Office, academically informed commentators like Ezra Klein pooh-poohed the notion that a president’s words had much effect. Congress, not the president, had power in the American system. Those who argued otherwise were dismissed as Green Lanternists, credulous folk who thought the president had all the powers of a comic-book superhero. Obama’s defenders in the media often used this theory to parry the claims of Obama’s critics, particularly on the left, who thought Obama should push harder on health care, taxes, and the like.
Since Trump’s election, we’ve not heard much about the weakness of the presidency. All the things presidents were supposed to be unable to do — reshape the public, their parties, and the polity — journalists and pundits now believe a president can do. Through words alone. Everyone’s a Green Lanternist now. The institution of the presidency hasn’t changed. But its occupant has, and with that, the needs of the commentariat. Instead of defending a beleaguered and beloved president against his critics on the left, the task at hand is to oppose a president who’s almost universally reviled, at least by the media.