The post-election period has been rich in ironies, mostly at the expense of the media who remain blind to them through their inveterate self-righteousness. First and most spectacularly, perhaps, there was the outcry against Donald Trump’s asseveration, before November 8, that the election was “rigged” against him. The suggestion that Mrs. Clinton’s approaching victory—which at the time appeared to be a sure thing—would be illegitimate was universally denounced in the media as a crime against democracy. Then, after the shocking result, they turned on a dime and started claiming that Mr. Trump’s victory had itself been illegitimate, for any number of reasons—either on account of “voter suppression” or of his supposed “$2 billion worth of free media” or of the announcement by James Comey in the election’s final ten days of an fbi investigation into the Clinton Foundation or, if nothing else, because (as has been true throughout America’s constitutional history) the popular vote, won by Mrs. Clinton, was not the determinative factor in deciding who had actually won. In some quarters, Mr. Trump’s election was taken as evidence that democracy itself was much overrated.

If there was any fascism going forward, it was all theirs.

Then there was the irony of the violent reaction to defeat by mostly young supporters of Mrs. Clinton in cities across the country—many of them apparently under a similar misapprehension to that of a screaming seventeen-year-old girl in San Francisco seen holding up a sign in a Washington Post