The party was great, but expect vengeance from the people Trump defeated

One of them turns up at every party, but really I felt that the American philosopher Peter Boghossian was laying it on too thickly. The man killed a mood. Let me explain. We were all in heavy party mood right after the American election. I am in Budapest, and the Hungarians are mad for Trump. The day after the election, I was – and I am not ashamed to admit it – finishing off 24-hours of bouncing around my apartment singing Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling, with video backup and appropriate dance moves. Then at six o’clock it was time to head across the river to a Danube Institute session of writers and philosophers – oh, what a feeling, Lionel, dancing, promises of champagne and pizza and a pack of conservatives — ready to talk about the Trump victory.

Which went well, with around 150 of us smiling and listening to happy writers and the rest talking about the triumph, until Speaker Number Six Boghossian picked up the mic: “I have a sobering message for the people here. If you think the Trump victory is going to make the enemies of civilisation, the enemies of cognitive liberty” — that means figuring out for yourself how you want to think — “the enemies of civility itself, any kind of basic freedom, to quote the famous poem, ‘Go quietly into the good night,’ I have a sobering message for you. You are a fool.”

Which was not enough for Boghossian, though it was as much as I wanted to hear during that star-spangled evening. “Shut up,” I thought, “this is a party.” But he went on: “I predict that we will see a ferociousness and a tenacity and a pathological vengeance from the people and the cronies that we have thrown out of office.”

And I knew he was right. I lowered my head. I knew it was true. I began to lose interest in the pizza. Boghossian went on: “Let’s take a look at the landscape. What does it look like and who holds the levers of power? Here is what we are fighting right now.”

“The most important battle is in the academies. All of our academies are controlled by woke maniacs. All of them. The overwhelming majority of college professors are in the far-Left camp.”

“The media landscape. The good thing about this, the positive news, and this is not Pollyanna optimism, the positive news is that the media has been damaged tremendously in this. The legacy media, I would not say that it is in tatters, but it has taken a blow.”

I raised my head at that, because I had noticed it myself. There is something now about the New York Times and the Washington Post that reminds me of the Paris-based International Herald-Tribune. Few of you will remember that title, with its roots in the 19^th century, once meant to be “the world’s first global newspaper.” Those of us who were lucky enough to be in Paris in the year of the student uprisings of 1968 remember it as the paper that everyone read, though not just in Paris, in every European capital. By 2013 the sad final shreds of the newspaper had vanished. So global and then so gone. I look at the New York Times and the Washington Post after this election and I see the ghost of the International Herald-Tribune shimmering behind them. The newspapers look old-fashioned, from another era when newspapers mattered.

I pulled my mind back from Paris to listen as Boghossian went on: “In the broader culture war, four or five things come to mind. One thing which is crazy is, you have normal crazy and then you have extra-crazy. Anything with ‘trans’ in it is extra-extra-crazy.”

What has come to the fore in the culture wars is freedom of speech: “Again, the same ideologies, same vicious ideologies, who control the organs of the media, the organs of what ought to be independent, these are the people who will double-down, these are the people who will come with a ferocious tenacity and part of the problem is that they have jobs for life. They are tenured. They are not going anywhere. And they look at the institutions to forward very specific messages to indoctrinate people.”

“The people who want to tell you what to think and what to believe, were just thrown out of office, and don’t you for a single second think that these people are going to be happy about that and say, ‘Well, that is really unfortunate, we lost.’ These people will come back with a ferocity and a tenacity that I do not think that we have seen in a long, long time.”

“So, I leave you with this message: now is not the time to rest on your laurels. Now is the time to work. Now is the time, right now, when we have momentum, to fight back, to put that final nail in the coffin of the divisive madness which has thrown society off a cliff.”

And that was it. Boghossian had said his bit. Everybody else went back to being cheerful, but it was Boghossian who said the things that stuck in my mind. Fight back, work, do not rest on your laurels, take the momentum. It has been a week since the election. That is enough dancing for now.