Opinion: Are liberals helping Donald Trump by parodying him?

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, The Times’ letters editor, and it is Saturday, Jan. 7, 2016. There are less than two weeks until, well, you know. Let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion.

Opposing political factions have a nasty habit of pathologizing the behaviors of the other side so their differences are not just a matter of disagreement, but really a problem of one group standing for truth and sanity and the other suffering from some intellectual affliction or prejudice that warps judgment. This election, those of us on the political left have lamented the fake-news problem endemic among Donald Trump voters, as if the only reason a human could have brought himself to vote for the president elect was bad information.

Writing on The Times’ op-ed page, Stephen Marche has some news for liberals: Cut it with the sanctimony, because you’ve got your own post-truth problem too. Marche takes a critical look at late-night news satire shows:

The post-truth condition, in which Trumpism has flourished, has its roots in left-wing satire.

2016 was the year when the line between parody and reality blurred to the point of vanishing. Fake news spread through social media as swiftly as it did thoroughly. By the end of October, a PPP poll found that 40% of Donald Trump supporters in Florida thought Hillary Clinton was “an actual demon” — who could make up anything crazier than that? Post-fact life is funny but not ha-ha funny. Everything has become a joke and so nothing is anymore.…

In one sense, of course, political satire is the opposite of fake news. Satirists rip away the pretenses of journalism to reveal what they believe to be true. Fake news sites use the pretenses of journalism to spread what they know to be false.

Despite intentions, however, the effect is the same. Political satirists, and their audiences, have turned the news itself into a joke. No matter what the content of their politics, they have contributed to the post-factual state of American political discourse. It doesn’t matter what Sam Bee or John Oliver say; it matters that their comedy is the source for political information.

Satire, like fake news, creates a sense of community through rejection. It delights in tearing down institutions but is useless at constructing them. Jonathan Swift said that satire was a mirror in which viewers discovered everybody’s face but their own; its pleasure is the pleasure of othering. The act is inherently tribal as well as political, and social media exacerbates the tribalism.…

The greatest modern expression of American satire, Spy magazine, mocked Trump for its entire run. (Spy teased Trump for having small hands long before Marco Rubio did.) Their contempt only aided his manic self-promotion. The same is unquestionably true for the current Trump parodies on “Saturday Night Live.” In the New York Times, Alec Baldwin acknowledged that his performances of Trump run the risk of humanizing him. If only that were nothing more than a risk.

Parodying Trump is at best a distraction from his real politics; at worst it converts the whole of politics into a gag. The process has nothing to do with the performers or the writers or their choices. Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel — that has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-parody, and who has become president of the United States on the basis of that performance.

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Speaking of political camps, research shows they’re not interested in understanding each other. Three psychologists write of an experiment they conducted to determine how receptive liberals and conservatives might be to opposing views, and their findings are not encouraging: Nearly two-thirds of respondents on both sides chose to stay in their own bubbles, even when provided a cash incentive to break out and expose themselves to contrary opinions. “It’s a scary situation if, in this deeply partisan moment in U.S. history, the one thing both sides have in common is a lack of curiosity about what the other thinks,” the authors write. L.A. Times

Also on the topic of bubbles: Campuses are breaking apart into “safe spaces,” writes sociologist Frank Furedi. And by “safe spaces,” he means places where self-segregation is in full force, such as residence halls that exclude all but one group of students. The growing prevalence of “safe-space” activism is troubling for academia, Furedi writes: “When everyone retreats to their separate corners, that subverts the foundation on which a tolerant and liberal university is constituted.” L.A. Times

There’s more rain coming faster for California — and that’s a bad thing. With California getting hit by a potentially drought-busting, nearly statewide storm right now, the state’s parched denizens might hope for more of such “Pineapple Express” soakings. Climate change might make that a reality, but with higher temperatures drying up the ground more quickly and resulting in massive wildfires, a greater frequency of extreme rain events would mean more catastrophic mudslides. In short: Global warming will probably give California more storms that completely soak the state while making it less able to handle them. Pacific Standard

Besides, more precipitation doesn’t mean an end to conservation. Incomprehensible amounts of snow are falling on parts of the Sierra Nevada — probably as you read this — and much of the state faces flooding. So there’s plenty of water for us to go back to the way things were, right? Not so fast: “Despite all that December rain and snow, the year’s first official measurement found that the water in the crucial Sierra snowpack hovers at around two-thirds of the historical average for early January.” L.A. Times

Repealing Obamacare is a bad goal that’s proving hard to achieve. Life was simpler for Republicans when “repeal Obamacare” was just a slogan and a Democratic president was always standing by to veto whatever bill striking the healthcare law from the books passed out of Congress. But now that Republicans have firm control of the House and Senate and await Donald Trump’s inauguration, they’re expected to make good on their promise — and apparently they have no idea how to do so without harming millions of Americans. “Rather than stampeding ahead with a reckless and inhumane plan to help wealthy Americans at the expense of the sick and the poor, Republicans should focus instead on ways to make Obamacare work better,” writes The Times editorial board. L.A. Times

Reach me: paul.thornton@latimes.com