A news article in the New York Times the other day claimed that the newspaper is "trying to forge a stronger connection to the large bloc of voters who swept Mr. Trump to the presidency." I wrote that it was "an open question" whether the paper, or its editors, were actually even trying to do that.
One way, for sure, to fail at making that "connection" is to insert political asides into articles that are not related to politics — especially when those asides make unwarranted and sweeping assumptions about the political views of readers. For example, the arts section of the Times prominently features a review by Holland Carter of an exhibit at the Morgan Library. The exhibit is about the poet Emily Dickinson. Mr. Carter writes that the exhibit "instantly turns the Morgan into a pilgrimage site, a literary Lourdes, a place to come in contact with one aspect of American culture that truly can claim greatness, which we sure can use in an uh-oh political moment."
Later in the piece, Mr. Carter writes about the Civil War: "like Walt Whitman, who began working as the equivalent of a psychiatric nurse in a military hospital in Washington, Dickinson seems to have been caught up in the emergency-room atmosphere that gripped the nation, a mood probably not entirely different from the one found in a divided America now."
For the "large bloc of voters who swept Mr. Trump to the presidency," today isn't "an uh-oh political moment," but a moment of great promise — and a relief to be rid of President Obama.
Likewise, in asserting that the Civil War mood in America was "probably not entirely different from the one found in a divided America now," the word "probably" sure does a lot of work. As anxious and upset as Mr. Trump's opponents are today, it seems like a stretch to compare it to the grief and loss of the Civil War era, when 750,000 Americans died in the conflict at a time when the American population was about 31 million.
These political points aren't argued by the Times critic — they are just stated as kind of self-evidently shared assumptions.
If anyone is having an "uh-oh political moment" here, it is the Times itself, whose journalists seem so stuck in their mental bubble that they can't conceive of the possibility that any Times reader might be happy about the election's outcome or not view the current moment as one that is as dire as the Civil War.