I’ve written a little bit about my worries about how the extremism of the right, including the fatal flaw of team politics, may be reflected in the Democrats and the left as well – an abandonment of the free-for-all war of ideas in favor of cosseting those who’ve been harmed by the immoral and even illegal practices of the past. In other words, the repression of the tenets of a free and fair discussion, based on facts and ideas concerning true justice, sailing instead under the dubious flag of assertions of truth without proof or consideration. Andrew Sullivan has the same worries, but in the context of that venerable publication The New York Times. He writes about these worries in New York in the third part of his tripartite weekly diary entry:
But tribalism and the “social justice” movement mean the Times will be fighting a long uphill battle. Because it’s not only some PC journalists at the Times who want to shut down debate that makes them uncomfortable or “harms” people, it’s the readers. More and more, they want a Times that is not an institution devoted to dangerously free debate, but one that is enlisted in the eternal struggle against “patriarchy” and “white supremacy,” an opinion section that belongs to one tribe and one tribe alone, a paper that gives no quarter to Republicans, reflexively defends any Democrat, and preens with contempt for neoliberals. And the shift in revenue sources from advertising to subscriptions gives these reader sentiments real power and makes editing in a non-tribal way a constant struggle. The economic and political incentives are increasingly lined up against diversity of thought in journalism. And in some ways, advertisers are easier to resist than a mob of impassioned readers, especially those whipped up into a frenzy on social media.
We need some space for liberal democratic values in our culture. It’s being trampled in the academy and eviscerated on social media and desperately needs an institution like the Times to be its bulwark and refuge. In this climate, I’m afraid, the odds are against it — but that makes the imperative ever more vital. Hang in, James [Bennet]. Make a clearing in the woods. History will remember who did what in these illiberal times. And you have an institution and some essential principles to save.
In WaPo, I must confess I’m always a little surprised when someone as discredited as Marc Thiessen appears – but I appreciate that a multitude of voices should be published in national publications. Or, to be more precise, a multitude of viewpoints should be published in order to give readers and thinkers a chance to appreciate those other points of view. (I must admit I read Jennifer Rubin, another conservative voice in WaPo, with rather more enthusiasm – she may consider herself right wing, but her consistent criticism of Trump and the GOP is exactly the ambition any honest conservative should be pursuing presently.)
And, quite honestly, it also presents tactical possibilities. The last time I read Thiessen, for instance, I found him incredibly doctrinaire and lacking in critical faculties. In other words, he, and many of those like him, are not presenting what I consider honest coverage and opinions, but rather almost a team approach – they’ve agreed they’ll always present Trump always in a positive light, and either ignore his many negative qualities, or spin them as much as possible into a positive. As a writer, this presents opportunities to make “the other side” look bad to the shared readership.
I suppose if I were naive I’d ask how an intellectual can take such positions while still claiming to exercise intellectual faculties in an honest manner, but I’ve read too much history. People, from the least educated to the most educated, often indulge in self-delusion. Hell, I’m sure I do – and just as I’m not aware of those delusions, neither are other writers who think they’re presenting honest opinions. Thiessen and his ilk probably really believe they’re presenting insightful commentary, no matter how much it seems to me they’re missing great big Egyptian Pyramids of critical, negative points concerning Trump.
There’s plenty of precedent throughout history for this sort of thing – for example, the British academic penchant for Marxism at one time. The evidence of its failure as a social paradigm was becoming more and more apparent, yet they persisted. Even today you can find in British and American universities such self-delusion on subjects as varied as politics and evolutionary biology.
So I suppose my point is that we need that varied group of voices not to be fair, not to measure up to some artificial balance that qualifies a publication as “important” or “intellectual”, but to strip away the artifice, the self-delusion, to fill in the holes left behind, deliberately or blindly, so that readers can compare what they read to the reality they experience and read about, and try to make smarter decisions because of it. There’s real utility in the assembly of varied voices, not only in the ideas presented, but in how the various criticisms, side by side, strip away the fallacious cladding and expose the important core of this philosophy – or its hollow, collapsing void of that philosophy.
[EDIT 3/24/2018 Added missing word]
