Was "Newsroom"s portrayal of the social system its real offense?

In two previous articles on Sorkin's "The Newsroom," Why did "The Newsroom" offend progressives? and "Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate", we noted that this parody of television news aroused considerable opposition, partly for criticizing news-as-entertainment rather than news-as-information. Although the overt theme was the undemocratic nature of movement conservatism and particularly the Tea Party ("The American Taliban"), most of the criticism found in Google searches seemed to be by an outraged left. The subtext of TNR's criticism of the present's domineering right was an implicit something which hit "the illiberal left" (Jonathan Chait) right where it lives. 

That something may have been a tectonic shift in the American social system. Social systems are no better than the public and civil culture under which they operate. Under the norms of civility, "actions in public" operate in a warm, tolerant, convivial climate. They honor the third right mentioned in the Declaration: the pursuit of happiness. Under the progressive norm of "struggle" against polymorphic wickedness, you have a fear society.

Tocqueville spoke of the "habits of the heart" (that shape our daily unconscious choices and actions) which made Democracy in America work in his time. In The Ordeal of Civility John Murray Cuddihy said that a society's true values are revealed in those manners we call civility. In a liberal society social customs are humane; have a sense of justice; are benignly tolerant. College students can have bull sessions—free-ranging discussions in which just about anything goes—without fear of being accused of microaggressions.

That tectonic shift may be shown in the change in popular music. The lyrics of our more civil past may look "sentimental" to the tough-minded mind-set of our bleak and ever more fearful present. The "warm, tolerant, convivial climate" strikes both the progressive and the alt-right as inauthentic, even nauseating.

"Moonlight Bay" resonated with the people we once were:

We were sailing along
On Moonlight Bay.
We could hear the voices ringing;
They seemed to say,
"You have stolen her heart"
"Now don't go 'way!"
As we sang Love's Old Sweet Song
On Moonlight Bay.

Imagine a song today which implies our human responsibility for those we attract. But just think of it—it implies a connection. Maybe it would lessen our desperate need for safe spaces.

Or a song having the range of "Silver threads among the gold":

Darling, I am growing old,
Silver threads among the gold,
Shine upon my brow today,
Life is fading fast away.
But, my darling, you will be,
Always young and fair to me,
Yes, my darling, you will be
Always young and fair to me.

The lyrics benignly encompass both youth and age, which they seem to calmly accept, as they seem to accept the prospect that the narrator will soon "go the way of all the earth."(1)

The Lawrence Welk show's Larry Hooper, a lanky, homely, likable feller, once gave a rueful rendition of "Somebody Stole My Gal":

Gee, but I'm lonesome, lonesome and blue.
I've found out something I never knew.
I know now what it means to be sad,
For I've lost the best gal I ever had;
She only left yesterday, Somebody stole her away.

Somebody stole my gal,
Somebody made off with my pal, ...
And gee, I know that she,
Would come to me
If she could see,
Her broken hearted lonesome pal,
Somebody stole my gal! ...

My old love
Sure is an angel, take it from me
And she's all the angel I want to see
Maybe she'll come back some day
All I can do now is pray.

That's what the prevailing voice once was, before the "me" generation. He doesn't blame her, or her new guy. His soul is large enough to encompass her, her "somebody," and the very human situation in which they find themselves. The whole situation, under the aspect of magnanimity of soul, is graced with meaning. He is not damaged, but yearning, and yearning is an affirmation of hope.

Reviewing "American Graffiti," the late film critic Roger Ebert noted the change in our music, as we discussed awhile back:

What characterizes a liberal society is yearning, because yearning is the entryway to ideals and aspirations; and because the dream is for all (see meliorism, above) it is pure and untainted. “The music was as innocent as the time,” Ebert wrote:

Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later.

The founding liberals thought in terms of a transformation of the whole world (see universalism, above). Thomas Paine proclaimed, “I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness.” The music of yearning had been replaced by a music of decadence and aggression, folly and baseness. For example, by the Rolling Stones:

You can't come back and think you are still mine / You're out of touch, my baby / My poor discarded baby / I said, baby, baby, baby, you're out of time.

“My solemn belief of your cause,” Paine added, “is, that it is hellish and damnable, and, under that conviction, every thinking man's heart must fail him.”

In January 2015, Jonathan Chait described aspects of our changed social culture. Elements include the belief of some progressives that speech may be censored if it creates a “hostile environment,” or constitutes a thought-crime. It is hard to imagine the above music able to survive alongside "the culture of taking offense" reported:

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the fuck up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs.

This might appear to be the sort of episode that would stoke the moral conscience of students on a progressive campus like Ann Arbor, and it was quickly agreed that an act of biased intimidation had taken place. But Mahmood was widely seen as the perpetrator rather than the victim. His column, published in the school’s conservative newspaper, had spoofed the culture of taking offense that pervades the campus. Mahmood satirically pretended to denounce “a white cis-gendered hetero upper-class man” who offered to help him up when he slipped, leading him to denounce “our barbaric attitude toward people of left-handydnyss.” The gentle tone of his mockery was closer to Charlie Brown than to Charlie Hebdo.

The Michigan Daily, where Mahmood also worked as a columnist and film critic, objected to the placement of his column in the conservative paper but hardly wanted his satirical column in its own pages. Mahmood later said that he was told by the editor that his column had created a “hostile environment,” in which at least one Daily staffer felt threatened, and that he must write a letter of apology to the staff. When he refused, the Daily fired him, and the subsequent vandalism of his apartment served to confirm his status as thought-criminal.

Chait's recent The ‘Shut It Down!’ Left and the War on the Liberal Mind is also recommended for further reading.


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(1) 1 Kings 2:2 KJV: I go the way of all the earth: be thou strong therefore ...