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Javier E

Lexington - The paradox of the pandemic | United States | The Economist - 0 views

  • The best explanation for the recent implacability of American partisanship is that many pre-existing, not necessarily partisan, differences, concerning race, region, expertise and so forth, have become starkly aligned with partisan identity. Covid-19, a disease that disproportionately hurts urban-dwelling non-whites and demands rigorously science-based action has worked with the grain of that alignment
  • A survey by More in Common, a group that studies polarisation, finds that almost half say America is more united than it was before the pandemic. The portion that believes it is “very divided” has dropped from 62% to 22%. Over 90% of Americans believe “we’re all in it together”, compared with 63% before the virus hit.
  • The main explanation for this apparent contradiction is that politics is local. In America’s system, state and local governments are the front line against the pandemic.
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  • This suggests America is fundamentally the same country of concerned, good-hearted citizens it ever was. Even when its national politics is seized by demagogues, responsibility and accountability matter in everyday governance.
  • The unhappier flip-side is that this divergence helps explain why Americans can bear to put up with, and thereby sustain, such dreadful national politics. It plays a much smaller role in their lives than the apparent momentousness of its life-and-death issues might suggest. In the current catastrophe
Javier E

A Theory of the Case - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

  • I always thought that Trump’s election was quite unlikely because of a basic principle that had been validated in numerous previous elections: precisely the actions and positions which galvanized those levels of support on the hard right should have lost Trump more than enough in the middle of the electorate to rule out his election. But that didn’t happen. So why didn’t it happen?
  • The key though is that once Trump secured the Republican nomination, once he became the Republican and Hillary Clinton the Democrat, all the forces of asymmetric partisan polarization kicked into place and ensured that essentially all self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents fell into line and supported Trump. This two step process is the story of the 2016 election.
  • At least through election day and to a surprising degree during his almost six months in office, Trump has been able to maintain historically high levels of support from self-identified Republicans – until recently in the high 80s and 90s percentages. That’s equal to or above what any Republican president in modern history has been able to garner. That fact, right there, is why Donald Trump won the election. The big structural answer is asymmetric partisan political polarization. It allowed a divisive factional leader in the GOP to become a figure who united the GOP
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  • It wasn’t Clinton’s unpopularity that made Trump acceptable. It was partisan hyper-polarization that made someone who could reasonably be seen as a flawed candidate appear unacceptable in comparison to someone who, prior to the effects of that polarization kicking in, the great majority of the public recognized as manifestly unsuited to and unqualified for the job.
  • Not just any crazy person could accomplish what Trump did. Trump embodies what I’ve come to think of as a ‘dominationist’ politics which profoundly resonates with the base of the GOP and has an expanding resonance across the party. Party leaders made the judgment that since they couldn’t defeat Trump they should join him, hoping he would deliver on a policy agenda favoring money and using public policy to center risk on individuals. That hope has been entirely confirmed.
  • t this is the factor that is structural, responsible on its own for a substantial amount of Trump’s support, and because it is structural quite likely to endure into future elections.
clairemann

Georgia governor signs into law sweeping voting bill that curtails the use of drop boxe... - 0 views

  • Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed into law a sweeping voting measure that proponents said is necessary to shore up confidence in the state’s elections but that critics countered will lead to longer lines, partisan control of elections and more difficult procedures for voters trying to cast their ballots by mail.
  • President Donald Trump attacked without evidence the integrity of election results in six states he lost, including Georgia.
  • The 95-page law also strips authority from the secretary of state, making him a nonvoting member of the State Election Board, and allows lawmakers to initiate takeovers of local election boards — measures that critics said could allow partisan appointees to slow down or block election certification or target heavily Democratic jurisdictions, many of which are in the Atlanta area and are home to the state’s highest concentrations of Black and Brown voters.
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  • “Contrary to the hyper-partisan rhetoric you may have heard inside and outside this gold dome, the facts are that this new law will expand voting access in the Peach State,” the governor added, noting that every county in Georgia will now have expanded early voting on the weekends.
  • “It is like the Christmas tree of goodies in terms of voter suppression,” Sen. Jen Jordan, a Democrat, said on the Senate floor Thursday.
  • “This bill is absolutely about opportunities — but it ain’t about the opportunity to vote. It’s about the opportunity to keep control and keep power at any cost.”
  • “Make no mistake, this is democracy in reverse,” she said. “Some politicians did not approve of the choice made by voters in our hard-fought election.”
  • In fact, Georgia election officials did not find any significant fraud in the November vote, despite Trump’s repeated false claims of problems with the election and his attempts to get Kemp and other officials to halt the certification of Biden’s win.
katherineharron

Something *very* important for our politics happened on Tuesday - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • While the eyes of the world were focused on the impeachment efforts against President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Gov. Larry Hogan of neighboring Maryland did something extremely important in beginning the long process of unwinding our current political polarization.
  • The Republican governor announced that via executive order he had created an independent commission he will task with redrawing the state's congressional and legislative lines following the decennial reapportionment later this year.
  • "This commission is the first of its kind in the long history of our state," Hogan said in making the announcement. "Unlike the partisan, backdoor manner in which our state's political power brokers have conducted the state's redistricting process, we want to make sure that this time the people of Maryland are actually the ones drawing these lines—not the politicians or the party bosses."
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  • Only the most ardent political junkies closely follow the re-shuffling and re-drawing of legislative and congressional districts that follow the decennial census. (Guilty, your honor!)
  • In fact, like many things that the general public either knows nothing about or has a decided lack of interest in, how these lines are drawn and by whom has an outsized impact on the sort of government we have -- and what the motivations of our elected officials are.
  • For decades, the line-drawing process has fallen, in most states, to state legislators and governors. What that has meant, in the main, is that when Democrats control the state capitol and, therefore, the line-drawing process, they create districts that are as favorable as possible for their side.
  • The strategy of both sides has been simple: Pack as many of the opposition party's voters into as few districts in the state as possible while spreading out their own voters to make as many districts winnable for their side as they can. Innovations in redistricting software have made this slicing and dicing of people based on their party registration or past voting history an art form -- allowing the line-drawers to literally go street by street when it comes to crafting new districts.
  • Maps drawn over the past two decades -- by Democrats and Republicans -- in places like North Carolina, Texas and yes, Maryland -- have come under legal scrutiny for using political considerations as the sole motivator in creating legislative and congressional districts. Maps in which one party overreached have, occasionally, led to unpredictable results in which the party in power loses seats they expected to win because they tried to divide up their own voters among too many districts.
  • The vast majority of members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, represent what we would call "safe" districts -- meaning that their only chance of losing their job would be in a primary, not a general election.
  • In 1956, for example, less than 6 in 10 House incumbents won with 60% of the vote or more, according to Vital Statistics on Congress. By 2002, the first election after the 2001 nationwide redistricting, 85% of all House incumbents seeking reelection won with 60% or higher. In 2014 and 2016, that number hovered in the mid-to-high 70s before dipping to just 63% in the tumultuous 2018 midterm election.
  • The practical, political effect of this trend is simple: Members of Congress have little reason to demonstrate their ability to work across the partisan aisle and every reason to be as partisan and ideological as possible in hopes of staving off any sort of primary challenge.
  • Independent or bipartisan commissions to redraw the maps in states -- as Hogan is trying to do in Maryland -- work to reorient the incentive structure for members by creating districts that are far more competitive between the two parties in general elections.
  • The state's congressional districts have regularly changed hands between the parties, with Republicans winning two previously-held Democratic seats in the 2020 election. And generally speaking, three of the four districts in the state -- the exception being the Republican-friendly 4th in western Iowa -- are extremely competitive every two years. Check out the winning percentages for four incoming members of Congress in the state: 62%, 49%, 50% and 51.3%. In the state's 2nd District, the Republican candidate leads the Democrat candidate by six -- SIX! -- votes.
  • While bipartisan -- and independent -- line-drawing commissions are on the rise in recent years, the majority of states in the country still rely on politicians to draw lines.
Javier E

Trump spurs a Wild West of continuously worsening political rhetoric - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The Fox News/talk radio machine — part mob, part cult, part business racket — has come up against a variety of honorable, respected professionals, trying to testify honestly about the abuse of power
  • But the triumph of ad hominem arguments on the Trump right also has a deeper and darker meaning
  • Fox News is no longer content to spout pro-Trump propaganda. It must destroy Trump’s opponents, even if they are honorable people. Especially if they are honorable people. The goal is not to dispute their testimony — which, on the facts, seems indisputable — but to discredit them as witnesses and as human beings.
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  • Partisan extremes in the United States have become entirely consequentialist in their ethics. The overriding goal may be the end of Roe v. Wade — or its preservation. It may be passage of gun control legislation — or protection of the Second Amendment. In each case, the objective — always measured in saved lives — means everything.
  • But if the objective means everything, then how do we judge the character of leaders or the morality of political methods? If ending Roe, for example, is really all that matters, wouldn’t a corrupt or lying politician who opposes Roe always be better than the ideological alternative?
  • If political outcomes are truly all that matter, there is no way to draw necessary moral lines.
  • Why should we care? Because democracy is hard to sustain in the absence of certain values. Self-government requires ethical hierarchy — a belief that honor is better than dishonor, fairness is better than exploitation and truth is superior to lies
  • American freedom is not based on relativism; it is based on the belief that the dignity of human beings is a knowable, universal truth. And the success of that principle is demonstrated in the way we treat each other.
  • There are categorical commitments to respect and truthfulness that can’t be subordinated to partisan outcomes.
  • they point to an essential, post-Trump task: restoring a decayed moral environment.
zarinastone

Why Blue Places Have Been Hit Harder Economically Than Red Ones - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The coronavirus recession has been more severe in Democratic-leaning places than in Republican-leaning ones.
  • steeper job losses, higher unemployment and bigger drops in job postings
  • It turns out that most of this partisan gap in economic suffering is because of the different mix of jobs in red and blue places.
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  • The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths.
  • Furthermore, local economies are struggling in places where more people can work from home.
  • In other words, redder places had milder job losses, and the relationship is strong.
  • Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic.
  • So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living.
  • The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories). All other recent recessions have hit goods-related industries worse, which tend to be more concentrated in Republican-leaning places.
Javier E

Opinion | The Great American Crackup is underway - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The difference, Uscinski says, is “we have a president who has built a coalition by reaching out to conspiracy-minded people.”
  • Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami political scientist who studies conspiracy theories, notes that psychological measures of paranoia have been “entirely stable.” Conservatives are inherently no more conspiratorial than liberals; only low education (and, relatedly, income) predict such tendencies
  • The bad news: For the first time in our history, a president and a major political party have weaponized paranoia, to destabilizing effect.
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  • chological context.ADThe good news: Americans are no “crazier” — that is, no more paranoid or predisposed to conspiracy thinking — than in the past
  • “our political elites are amplifying the fringe more than we’ve seen” in modern times, while a president mounts a “grinding attack on factual evidence.” The result, he says, is “conspiracy theories and misinformation become yoked to partisanship in increasingly powerful ways.”
  • There has always been what the late historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics: witch hunts, Illuminati, Red Scares. William Jennings Bryan promoted conspiracy theories. Richard Nixon believed in them. But Trump is unique in promoting conspiracy thinking from the bully pulpit, and in building a system in which elites — Republican Party leaders — validate the paranoia.
  • Americans, by nature, are more distrustful of authority than citizens of other advanced democracies. “You always hear Americans say, ‘I know my rights,’ but you never hear an American say, ‘I know my responsibilities and obligations,’
  • The distrust is compounded by polarization of the political system: the collapse of local media (replaced by coastal national media); the growing tendency to live, work and worship among people of similar beliefs; the divisive effect of social media; and increased “sorting” of political parties into ideologically homogeneous blocs.
  • This has encouraged what Eitan Hersh of Tufts University describes as “political hobbyism,” in which partisans embrace political parties as they do hometown sports teams
  • Hersh explains the thinking: “I care about truth, but I care less about truth than about supporting the Patriots because the stakes are really low. … It’s a catharsis, camaraderie with our partisan peers.
  • “The science is very clear: People take cues from political leaders,” Nyhan says. Leaders typically rejected conspiracy theories, and the public followed. Now, Trump embraces them, and his followers concur — some out of partisan solidarity, others out of genuine belief.
  • “Human psychology has not changed,” Nyhan says. What’s changed is we’re discovering that “democratic systems don’t work well when political elites don’t deal in factual information.”
Javier E

Fearful calls flood election offices as Trump attacks mail-in voting, threatening parti... - 0 views

  • Intensifying the mistrust, experts said, are the power and reach of social media. They said the quest to turn minor irregularities into signs of political malintent — enabled by an information ecosystem that rewards outrage and partisan groupthink — poses among the greatest threats to the integrity of the Nov. 3 election.
  • “The amplification of these kinds of stories can have, in and of itself, a suppressive effect,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The events in Utah, she said, show the ripple effects of attacks by Trump and his allies on “legal, safe, secure voting methods.”
  • . But the most lasting consequence of the false and misleading narratives coursing through the Internet, often using real examples but exaggerating them to create the appearance of an alarming trend, could be a form of democratic backsliding in parts of the country where the widespread adoption of mail balloting has been shown to expand electoral participation.
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  • “Obviously, the effort to question and undermine vote by mail has worked very well,” said Justin Lee, Utah’s director of elections, faulting the “national discussion” for what he and others described as an unprecedented level of confusion threatening to derail a well-functioning system in a Republican-controlled state.
  • a powerful feedback loop has made it impossible to tune out these national controversies. One-off incidents documented by local media are flowing to partisan voices, who use their online megaphones to reframe the details as indictments of the entire balloting process.
  • The misleading narrative applied at the national level then filters back down to voters, causing them to distrust a system they have used for years.
  • Bongino, an influential conservative pundit closely aligned with Trump, shared the piece on Twitter to his nearly 2.5 million followers. “It’s only going to get worse,” he wrote on Facebook
  • The transformation of the Utah story — from a small-town technical mishap into purported proof of widespread voter fraud — illustrated to some experts the extent to which mainstream news reporting collides with the reach of social media sites and the agenda of influential political figures to stoke fear and reinforce the misconceptions of nervous voters.
  • A study released this month by Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society offered fresh evidence of the dangers posed by homegrown misinformation. For months, Trump has generated entire news cycles that serve to cast doubt about mail-in voting, which mainstream outlets have at times covered uncritically, the report found. The president’s influential allies have eagerly shared these and other stories with their vast online audiences, enhancing their reach and fomenting fresh doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 vote.
  • “With respect to mail-in voter fraud, the driver of the disinformation campaign has been Trump, as president, supported by his campaign and Republican elites,” said Yochai Benkler, who leads the center and co-wrote the report.
  • In these and other cases, Benkler said, misconceptions and hoaxes that take root in the White House come to frame reporting in mainstream and partisan news sources alike. Any development related to the process of voting becomes fodder in a competition for narrative control.
Javier E

Opinion | How Racist Is Trump's Republican Party? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Nonetheless, Stevens’s forthcoming book, “It Was All A Lie,” makes the case that President Trump is the natural outcome of a long chain of events going back to the 1964 election when Barry Goldwater ran for president as an opponent of the Civil Right Act passed earlier that year.
  • “I have no one to blame but myself,” he declares on the first page. “What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.”
  • What were the lies? That the Republican Party “espoused a core set of values: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party.”And what is the truth? The Republican Party is “just a white grievance party.”
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  • Race, Stevens writes,has defined the modern Republican Party. After Goldwater carried only southern states and received a record low of 7 percent of the black vote, the party faced a basic choice: do what was necessary to appeal to more nonwhite voters, or build a party to win with white voters. It chose the latter, and when most successfully executed, a race-based strategy was the foundation of many of the Republican Party’s biggest victories, from Nixon to Trump.
  • In fact, Stevens told me, “race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party:”With Trump, the Party has grown comfortable as a white grievance party. Is that racist? Yes, I think it is. Are 63 million plus people who supported Trump racist? No, absolutely not. But to support Trump is to make peace with white grievance and hate.
  • Stevens’s comment demonstrates the difficulty many analysts have pinning down the meaning of racism and the distinction — if there is one — between being a racist and voting for a racist
  • To further examine this complexity, I questioned a range of experts.
  • Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke and the author of “White Identity Politics,” put it this way:The use of these terms is complicated, messy, and without consensus. There are a number of important distinctions we can make. We think of ‘racial prejudice’ as an individual-level sense of hostility, animus, set of negative stereotypes, or other negative attitudes that one person has toward members of a group by way of their race. We refer to a person as racist when they have some degree of racial prejudice. For most Americans, this is generally what they think of when they hear the term racism or racist. A racist is a person who uses racial slurs directed at racial out-groups and thinks their own racial group is superior.
  • Davis argues that the debate has become clouded, that even though individual and group motives may not be racist, the outcomes achieved can be identical to the ones that racists would seek:My overall point is that we have forgotten what racism means. In doing so, we have focused attention on bigots and white nationalists and not held ordinary citizens accountable for beliefs that achieve the same ends.
  • Chloe Thurston, in turn, cited as specific examplesPresident Trump’s or Steve King’s comments about certain types of immigrants being unassimilable or not sufficiently American and suggesting that other (e.g. white) immigrants do not have those characteristics.
  • While both Trump and King, an anti-immigrant congressman from Iowa, “balk at the label ‘racist,’ she continued, “it is descriptively accurate and necessary from the standpoint of keeping track of the role and uses of racism in American society and politics.”
  • Like Davis, Thurston sought to address “the more difficult question” of “when it is legitimate to use that label for everyday behaviors.”Her answer:People can participate in and perpetuate racist systems without necessarily subscribing to those beliefs. People can recognize something they participate in or contribute to as racist but decide it’s not disqualifying. And people can design racist policies and systems. These are distinctive manifestations of racism but not all of them require us to know whether a person is expressly motivated by racism.
  • here are huge racial, partisan, gender and religious differences: whites say Trump is not racist 50-46; blacks say he is racist 80-11; Democrats 86-9 say yes, Republicans 91-8 say no; men 55-41 say no, women 59-36 say yes; white evangelicals say no 76-21, Catholics 50-48 say no; the unaffiliated say yes, 63-30.
  • Kam notes that she worries “about excessive use of these labels” because describing someone or some action as racist “can easily escalate conflict beyond the point of return.”
  • Eric Kaufmann voiced similar caution, noting that racism and racist are highly charged words, the deployment of which can in some cases prove damaging to liberals and the left. He cited the “unwillingness to talk about immigration for fear of being labeled racist,” giving free rein to populists who do address immigration “and thus get elected. Trump’s election is exhibit A.”
  • In addition, according to Kaufmann, thefear of being labeled racist may be pushing left parties toward immigration policies, or policies on affirmative action, reparations, etc., that make them unelectable. Finally, overuse of the word “racist” may lead to a “cry wolf” effect whereby real racists can hide due to exhaustion of public with norm over-policing.
  • None of the examples I cited, in Kaufmann’s view, “are racist” unless it could be explicitly demonstrated “in a survey that those espousing the policies were mainly motivated by racism.” If not, he said, the “principle of charity should apply.”
  • many whites see accusations of racism as disingenuous. They believe that Democrats in particular “play the race card” by calling people or beliefs racist as a political strategy, rather than as a sincere effort to combat racism.There is, in fact, a huge partisan divide over what is considered racist and what is not.
  • Three Harvard political scientists — Meredith Dost, Enos and Jennifer L. Hochschild — conducted a survey in September 2017 that asked 2,296 American adults to rank, on a five point scale ranging from racist to not racist, 10 statements. These statements included “wanting to wave the Confederate flag,” “saying immigrants commit too many crimes,” “agreeing that welfare recipients should have to take a job to receive benefits,” and “voting for Donald Trump.”
  • As the accompanying chart shows, the gulf between Democrats and Republicans was 20 percentage points or more on seven out of ten questions. At the extreme, 82 percent of “strong Republicans” said it was “not racist” to vote for Trump, compared with 22 percent of “strong Democrats.” who said it was, a 60-point difference.
  • With the 2020 election approaching, one of the most relevant questions before the electorate is whether voters agree with Stuart Stevens on whether Donald Trump is a racist.
  • The answer to that question, according to a July 2019 Quinnipiac University national poll, is that 51 percent say Trump is a racist; 45 percent say he is not.
  • Because of the wide variety of possible motivations, Kam wrote in her email, she “would hesitate to label an action as ‘racist’ — unless racial considerations seem to be the only or the massively determinative consideration at play, based upon statistical modeling or carefully calibrated experiments.”
  • What this boils down to is that racism is detected, determined and observed through partisan and ideological lenses.
  • Is the modern Republican Party built on race prejudice, otherwise known as racism?
carolinehayter

How Police, National Guard And Military Are Preparing For Election Day Tensions : NPR - 0 views

  • Milley told NPR's Morning Edition. "And if there is, it'll be handled appropriately by the courts and by the U.S. Congress. There's no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election. Zero. There is no role there."
    • carolinehayter
       
      And that's one of the (many) reasons Barrett's confirmation was so strongly opposed
  • Nov. 3 promises to be an Election Day unlike any other, and public safety entities say they're preparing for tensions and the possibility of violence.
  • Poll workers are usually the first line of defense in case of disputes between voters, though they may be backed up by private security guards. Some local election authorities say they'll be adding guards
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  • Most jurisdictions are not planning to post uniformed police at polling stations, because tradition and local laws keep officers at a distance to avoid an impression of voter intimidation.
  • Given this year's tensions, and the fact that the police themselves are a major issue in the election, the question of their presence at polling places has become a partisan flashpoint in some places.
  • Democrats in Miami complained about a uniformed police officer wearing a Trump face mask at an early-voting location, and he faces potential discipline by his department.
  • New Jersey is considering last-minute legislation to restrict the presence of officers at polling places, a debate that quickly acquired partisan overtones. A similar dispute broke out in North Carolina, where the Board of Elections issued a memo reminding uniformed police officers to stay away from polling places, and state Republicans objected.
  • "We want to respect the concern [about voter intimidation]," Newton says. But he says because voters have other ways to cast ballots, "it's not a valid issue, that someone has to face down a uniformed law enforcement officer to vote in North Carolina."
  • One unresolved question in Michigan is whether private citizens will be allowed to carry firearms openly around polling places. The state's open carry law is generally quite permissive, but Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson issued a directive saying visible guns would not be allowed at the polls or other election-related offices this year. But police chiefs have cast doubt on whether they have the legal grounds to enforce such an order, and it's also attracted a lawsuit.
  • Away from the polls, police departments are planning to have more officers on hand on Election Day, especially in cities that saw unrest over the summer.
  • Governors are in charge of their state Guard forces, but a president can "federalize" the Guard and take control from a governor. That has happened in rare occasions in the 1950s and '60s during school integration.
  • "From those lessons learned over the summer, we are planning for that to be a feature of peaceful protests," on Election Day, Brown said at a press conference last week.
  • National Guard soldiers around the nation will take part in security operations for the election — but only for cybersecurity, assisting state officials by trying to prevent foreign governments and others from interfering with the vote. The National Guard, like the active military, does not want to get involved in physical security at the polls, leaving that up to poll workers and if need be local police.
  • Military officials tell NPR they want to maintain their apolitical stance, and not get involved in partisan politics, saying uniformed soldiers at the polls would lead to charges the military favors one candidate over another.
  • Military officials don't anticipate any particular problems of violence at the polls themselves, but they do say that with the bitter campaign, street protests and the rise of armed groups, violence could occur after the election, regardless of who wins.
  • If violence erupts and local police are unable to handle it, a governor could activate Guard units
  • Chicago endured extensive looting and property damage over the summer, something police superintendent David Brown believes was coordinated by what he calls "agitators" embedded in legitimate protests.
  • And a president can invoke the Insurrection Act and send in active troops. That, too, is rare. In 1992, California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush to send in active troops to deal with protests after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles.
  • Defense Secretary Mark Esper in June publicly opposed using the Insurrection Act, saying Guard troops would make more sense since they come from the local communities they would protect. That angered the president, who sources say threatened to fire Esper but was talked out of such a move so close to the election.
  • President Trump has added to the election tensions by suggesting on numerous occasions that he might not accept the results of the vote, unless it is "fair." And that has led to speculation the president might try to hold onto power, and the military might be called on to remove him. Such talk is strongly dismissed by the nation's top military officer, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
clairemann

Opinion | How Amy Coney Barrett might know she's a political hack - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s recent remarks in Louisville, alongside Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
  • "My goal today is to convince you that this court is not composed of a bunch of partisan hacks,” Barrett said with a straight face. She continued, “Sometimes, I don’t like the results of my decisions. But it’s not my job to decide cases based on the outcome I want.”
  • The declaration might be a tad more credible if she had not chosen to appear in an overtly political setting.
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  • “I’m hard-pressed to imagine a worse place to give a speech about the court not being partisan than . . . at an event in which she was introduced by Senator McConnell. It’s either remarkably tone-deaf or it’s deliberate. Neither is encouraging.”
  • Barrett threw out an old cliche: “Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.” Fine, but when one’s judicial philosophy is designed to inevitably result in outcomes favorable to one political party, it’s fair to say that is a distinction without a difference.
  • “First, it asks us to ignore the outrageous, dishonorable and overtly partisan tactics that created the current conservative supermajority,” he tells me. “Second, it asks us to overlook the court’s startling lurch toward ‘shadow docket’ rulings issued in the dark of night, which (as Justice [Elena] Kagan recently observed) 'every day [becomes] more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.” Matz explains that Barrett’s speech also “fails to grapple with the fact that the court’s decision-making has skewed sharply to the right based solely on a change in personnel, as evidenced by the profoundly flawed decision issued last term gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.” Matz adds, “Finally, it misses the fact that several prominent voices on the court appear to have changed their tunes on signature issues (including national injunctions and the proper judicial role in reviewing immigration/asylum policy) since a new administration came into office.”
Javier E

When Everyone Is Right That Everyone Is Wrong - by David French - The French Press - 0 views

  • Beginning back in 2016, just as I was beginning to be shocked and angry at Trump’s relentless rise, I made a very conscious change in my social media and reading habits. I intentionally tried to follow and read roughly equal numbers of thoughtful people on the left and the right. 
  • Note I said “thoughtful.” I try to follow the best of both sides. And it was a transformative experience. Time and again, I’d see different people write compellingly about different outrages, and the stories and takes were all true. The injustices they described were all real. 
  • Let’s take these two truths, for example. My good friends (and former colleagues) at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have compiled a sobering list of 471 scholars who’ve faced threats of termination since 2015. 
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  • Here’s one partisan truth: “The left is responsible for 65 percent of attempted cancelations!”
  • Here’s another partisan truth: “The right is responsible for 60 percent of the physical threats!” 
  • Then, here’s the partisan argument: “Your problem is worse than my problem!” 
  • Online, this observation is called “both sides-ism,” and people hate it. They demand that you declare which side is worse, and then dedicate the lion’s share of your efforts to defeating the true threat. 
  • And those critics have a point. There are greater and lesser threats, and one of the hardest parts of my job is discerning the difference. Cancel culture is a long-term threat to America’s culture of free speech, but if Mike Pence had made a different choice on January 6, the entire republic could have faced an immediate, mortal threat. 
  • My friend Jonathan Rauch calls this distinction the difference between a heart attack and cancer. When a person is facing a heart attack, you focus your efforts on making it through the next hours and days. But that doesn’t mean you don’t also keep treating the cancer.
Javier E

Trump's January 6 Strategy and the Steve Bannon Indictment - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • At former President Trump’s direction, those partisans have adopted a no-cooperation strategy, pleading that the defeated ex-president should permanently enjoy the legal privileges of his former office.
  • That’s not a very smart legal strategy. But it’s not meant as a legal strategy. It’s a political strategy, intended, like the Chicago Seven’s strategy in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom all those years ago, to discredit a legal and constitutional system that the pro-Trump partisans despise.
  • The Trump partisans start with huge advantages that the Chicago Seven lacked: They have a large and growing segment of the voting public in their corner, and they are backed by this country’s most powerful media institutions, including the para-media of Facebook and other social platforms.
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  • Like the Chicago Seven, Bannon understands the political power of ridicule and contempt. He’s not coming to trial to play by somebody else’s rules. If he does eventually testify about the events of January 6, he won’t play by the rules then, either.
  • Permission seeking and permission granting were exactly how January 6 happened in the first place. Trump supporters were gradually radicalized through a series of escalating claims:
  • Now, in 2021–22, the project is to repeat that kind of kaleidoscopic shift of denial and justification
  • Their argument doesn’t have to make sense, because their constituency doesn’t care about it making sense. Their constituency cares about being given permission to disregard and despise the legal rules that once bound U.S. society. That’s the game, and that’s how Bannon & Co. will play the game.
  • Those trying to protect Trump from accountability for January 6 know what they are trying to accomplish and have built a large constituency in the country that supports them
  • always keep in mind the limits of criminal prosecution to deal with political wrongdoing. Many things are wrong without being illegal
  • The criminal law rightly demands overwhelming evidence. Convicting people unable to recognize they were doing wrong can be very difficult.
  • Mueller and the Trump Department of Justice had defined his job in a way that forbade him from looking at the stuff that mattered most: intelligence risks rather than criminal charges, and the financial transactions that cast light on the story, even if they did not break the law.
  • Michael Cohen testified a long time ago that Trump does not leave a paper trail. He does not speak direct orders. He signals what he wants, and then leaves it to his underlings to figure out for themselves how to please him. Trump likely followed those lifetime habits in the weeks leading to January 6.
  • to prevent the strategy from working, it’s important to anticipate it and be ready for it.
  • The fight to uphold law cannot be won by law itself, because the value of law in the face of violence is the very thing that’s being contested.
  • The fight ahead is an inescapably political fight, to be won by whichever side can assemble the larger and more mobilized coalition. The Trump side is very clear-eyed about that truth. The defenders of U.S. legality and democracy against Trump need to be equally aware.
Javier E

John Adams' Fear Has Come to Pass - by David French - 0 views

  • When I try to explain the aspirational genius of the American founding, I always refer to two documents
  • They’re by the famous “frenemies” of the American founding, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
  • Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The second is Adams’s very short Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, dated October 11, 1798.
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  • these documents define the American social compact—the mutual responsibilities of citizen and state—that define the American experiment.
  • Here’s the first pair, from the Declaration:
  • We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
  • The first sentence recognizes the inherent dignity of man as human beings created in the image of God. The second sentence, nearly as important, recognizes the unavoidable duty of government to recognize and protect that dignity. While the sole purpose of government isn’t to protect liberty, a government that fails to protect liberty fails in an essential function. 
  • Adams wrote to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts to outline the responsibilities of the citizens of the new republic.
  • The letter contains the famous declaration that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But I’m more interested in the two preceding sentences:
  • Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.
  • Put in plain English, this means that when public virtue fails, our constitutional government does not possess the power to preserve itself.
  • the American experiment depends upon both the government upholding its obligation to preserve liberty and the American people upholding theirs to exercise that liberty towards virtuous purposes. 
  • Citizen and state both have obligations, and if either side fails, it imperils the republic.
  • We see this reality play out in American history.
  • The seeds for the first great American crisis were sown in the original Constitution itself. By failing to end slavery and by failing to extend the Bill of Rights to protect citizens from the oppression of state and local governments, the early American government flatly failed to live up to the principles of the Declaration, and we paid the price in blood.
  • our nation seethes again today
  • The response to John Adams’s warning is not to arm the government with more power but to equip citizens with more virtue.
  • Its politics are gripped by deep hatred and abiding animosity, and its culture groans under the weight of human despair. Hatred rules our politics; anxiety, depression, and loneliness dominate our culture.
  • Those many cultural critics who look at the United States of America and declare that “something is wrong” are exactly right
  • here’s the difference—unlike the days when we could point to a specific source of government oppression, such as slavery or Jim Crow, the American government (though highly imperfect) currently protects individual liberty and associational freedoms to a degree we’ve never seen in American history.
  • Even after the Civil War, the quick end of Union occupation of the Confederacy enabled the creation of an apartheid substate in the South. Once again, the government failed to live up the core principles of the founding. It is by God’s grace that the Jim Crow regime ended primarily as the result of one of the Civil Rights Movement—one of the great Christian justice movements in history—and not as the result of another convulsive civil conflict.
  • But what can the government do about friendlessness? About anxiety? What can the government do to make sure that we are not—in Robert Putnam’s memorable phrase—“bowling alone?
  • that challenge is compounded by the fact that the most engaged American citizens are its most angry partisans.
  • And if you think that most-partisan cohort is seething with anger because they suffer from painful oppression, think again. The data is clear. As the More in Common project notes, the most polarized Americans are disproportionately white and college-educated on the left and disproportionately white and retired on the right. 
  • The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who’ve ever lived.
  • They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.
  • It’s simply an astonishing level of discontent in the midst of astonishing wealth and power.
  • maybe it’s not so astonishing, because accumulating wealth and power is not and never was the path to meaning and purpose.
  • much of both the right and left postliberal impulse is related to the first of John Adams’s two key sentences. If we don’t have a government “armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” then their solution is to increase the power of government. Arm it with more power. 
  • But when it comes to government, you’re never arming an “it,” you’re arming a “them”—a collection of human beings who suffer from all the same character defects and cultural maladies as the rest of us
  • As James Madison observed in Federalist 51 (the second-best Federalist Paper), “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Yet American postliberalism asks us to empower men and women who frequently don’t even pretend to be virtuous, who often glory in their vice, all for the “common good.” 
  • We still battle the legacy of past injustice and the present reality of lingering discrimination, but there’s just no comparison between the legal systems that destabilized America and the legal systems that exist today. 
  • how do we do that? The path past animosity and against despair can be as short and simple as the path from Twitter to the kitchen table
  • It’s shifting the focus from the infuriating thing you can’t control to the people you can love, to the institutions you can build.
  • in this present time, thanks to the steadily-expanding sphere of American liberty, we have more ability to unite—including for religious purposes—than at any time in American history. Yet we still bowl alone. We tweet alone. We rage alone, staring at screens and forming online tribes that provide an empty simulacrum of real relationships.
  • for all too many of us that feels empty, like our small actions are simply inadequate to address the giant concerns that dominate our minds
  • To do the big thing—to heal our land—we have to do the small things.
  • We need a frame shift. Do not think of doing the small things as abandoning the larger quest. See every family, every friendship, every healthy church, every functioning school board as indispensable to our continued American experiment. 
  • For those who think and obsess about politics, this shift from big to small is hard. It’s hard to think that how you love your friends might be more important to our nation than what you think of CRT
  • When our crisis is one of hatred, anxiety, and despair, don’t look to politics to heal our hearts. Our government can’t contend with “human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion.” Our social fabric is fraying. The social compact is crumbling. Our government is imperfect, but if this republic fractures, its people will be to blame. 
Javier E

Make Character Great Again - 0 views

  • One of the hallmarks of our current time is that simple truths can often sound like radical dissent. To declare that “lying is wrong” in response to a grotesque falsehood is to invite an avalanche of whataboutism. Say that “political violence is evil,” and you’ll quickly be challenged to take sides and declare whether right or left is worse.
  • It’s not that people disagree with those statements, exactly. It’s just that granting their full truth carries uncomfortable implications.
  • Here’s another simple truth: Character matters
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  • This transformation made Donald Trump’s presidency possible, and it is a grave mistake. Good character should never be optional in leaders, and strength of character is more important in difficult times.
  • As a wise retired federal judge once told me, when someone says “Yes, but” the only words that matter come after the “but.” The “yes” is appeasement; the “but” is belief.
  • We live in a time of partisan animosity so great that an October NBC News poll found that 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans “believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.”
  • In those circumstances, the quest for character becomes a form of luxury belief. It’s what you cling to in safer, more secure times
  • That same poll found that “two-thirds of reliable Democratic and Republican voters say they’d still support their party’s political candidate, even if that person had a moral failing that wasn’t consistent with their own values.”
  • the position of white Evangelicals, in particular, has totally transformed on the matter. Between 2011 and 2016, white Evangelicals went from the American demographic least likely to agree that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties” to the group most likely to agree with that statement.
  • Competence is quite often a key by-product of good character. Indeed, I’d say it’s an aspect of good character.
  • But it’s now wrong to simply assert that truth as self-evident. Millions of Americans disagree
  • Why are they wrong? The evidence is everywhere, if you know where to look. While bad policy can be extraordinarily consequential, our current political dysfunctions are mainly due to bad character.
  • Negative partisanship is now a central fact of American politics. Millions of Americans now support their political party not because they love its politicians or its policies, but because they hate and fear the other side.
  • Consider the challenge of mutual hatred
  • partisan Americans consistently misjudge their ideological adversaries. They rate them as far more extreme than they really are.
  • This is the political assertion that meets with perhaps the ultimate “yes, but” response. “Yes, but so does policy.” “Yes, but no one is perfect.” “Yes, but we need to fight fire with fire.”
  • Or consider the distrust of American institutions.
  • How many politicians raise money and gain power by stoking as much hatred as possible? How often are they exaggerating the threat of their opponents? How often are they engaged in outright lies?
  • Most of the Republicans in Congress followed suit
  • The instant a person becomes so convinced of their own excellence that they lose those qualities is the instant that their hubris can destroy their competence.
  • American institutions lose trust not just because they’re corrupt (an obvious sign of bad character), but also because they’re sloppy or inefficient, or just can’t accomplish the most necessary tasks.
  • Or think of the challenges to democracy itself.
  • The conspiracies that culminated in the violent attempted coup on January 6 were entirely the product of one of the most colossal character failures in the history of the United States. Donald Trump’s malicious lies and will to power were the obvious first causes of the riot
  • consider the cascading character failures that led to the attack.
  • Most of Trump’s staff folded
  • when they crack, all their policy ideas are but dust in the wind. On January 6, for example, America was only one more crack away—a Mike Pence “yes” to Trump’s scheme—from the worst constitutional crisis since 1861.
  • Almost the entire right-wing infotainment industry gave in
  • What ultimately stopped Trump? Character. It was the character of judges—including Federalist Society judges—who turned back dozens of election challenges
  • It was the character of members of Congress, including both Democratic and Republican leaders, who decided they would return to the House chamber and finish counting the electoral votes that would secure Joe Biden’s lawful electoral victory.
  • While I disagreed with Pence on countless occasions before January 6, he was at the eye of that hurricane, and he stood firm.
  • Bad character is a long-term threat. The smoking analogy is valid. But January 6 taught me that bad character can function as an immediate threat as well. Like a gun to the head.
  • the best lawyers, the best doctors, the best military officers, and the best corporate leaders combine a set of skills that include not just self-discipline and an inquisitive mind, but also an innate curiosity and openness that allows them to understand and absorb new information and competing ideas.
  • “The modern Republican Party is essentially a hostage crisis in which each wing could kill the party by bolting the coalition but only one wing is willing to do it and both sides know it.”
  • The MAGA wing will stay home if its demands aren’t met. The establishment, by contrast, dutifully marches to the polls, no matter who has the “R” by their name.
  • This has to change. It is not the case, for example, that a Republican Senate candidate is running “only” to be a vote, and not a leader. There is no such thing as “only” voting.
  • When you distrust or despise your enemy enough, character is often the first casualty of political combat. But if we kill character, we risk killing our country. We cannot survive the complete corruption of our political class.
Javier E

When the New York Times lost its way - 0 views

  • There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.
  • I think Sulzberger shares this analysis. In interviews and his own writings, including an essay earlier this year for the Columbia Journalism Review, he has defended “independent journalism”, or, as I understand him, fair-minded, truth-seeking journalism that aspires to be open and objective.
  • It’s good to hear the publisher speak up in defence of such values, some of which have fallen out of fashion not just with journalists at the Times and other mainstream publications but at some of the most prestigious schools of journalism.
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  • All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.
  • Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in
  • In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias
  • on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.
  • The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether
  • the internet knocked the industry off its foundations. Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes.
  • far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage:
  • the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.
  • One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down.
  • leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around
  • This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.
  • Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered
  • . I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.
  • As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred
  • This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified.
  • as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.
  • here have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions
  • The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.
  • As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change. He saw that as the gradual work of many years, but I think he is mistaken. To overcome the cultural and commercial pressures the Times faces, particularly given the severe test posed by another Trump candidacy and possible presidency, its publisher and senior editors will have to be bolder than that.
  • As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.
  • the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.
  • For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole.
  • It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe.
  • The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.
  • It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact.
  • It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other.
  • I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.
  • Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise.
  • Most important, the Times, probably more than any other American institution, could influence the way society approached debate and engagement with opposing views. If Times Opinion demonstrated the same kind of intellectual courage and curiosity that my colleagues at the Atlantic had shown, I hoped, the rest of the media would follow.
  • You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.
  • This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves.
  • The Atlantic did not aspire to the same role as the Times. It did not promise to serve up the news of the day without any bias. But it was to opinion journalism what the Times’s reporting was supposed to be to news: honest and open to the world.
  • Those were the glory days of the blog, and we hit on the idea of creating a living op-ed page, a collective of bloggers with different points of view but a shared intellectual honesty who would argue out the meaning of the news of the day
  • They were brilliant, gutsy writers, and their disagreements were deep enough that I used to joke that my main work as editor was to prevent fistfights.
  • Under its owner, David Bradley, my colleagues and I distilled our purpose as publishing big arguments about big ideas
  • we also began producing some of the most important work in American journalism: Nicholas Carr on whether Google was “making us stupid”; Hanna Rosin on “the end of men”; Taylor Branch on “the shame of college sports”; Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the case for reparations”; Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt on “the coddling of the American mind”.
  • I was starting to see some effects of the new campus politics within the Atlantic. A promising new editor had created a digital form for aspiring freelancers to fill out, and she wanted to ask them to disclose their racial and sexual identity. Why? Because, she said, if we were to write about the trans community, for example, we would ask a trans person to write the story
  • There was a good argument for that, I acknowledged, and it sometimes might be the right answer. But as I thought about the old people, auto workers and abortion opponents I had learned from, I told her there was also an argument for correspondents who brought an outsider’s ignorance, along with curiosity and empathy, to the story.
  • A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.
  • In the age of the internet it is hard even for a child to sustain an “innocent eye”, but the alternative for journalists remains as dangerous as ever, to become propagandists. America has more than enough of those already.
  • When I looked around the Opinion department, change was not what I perceived. Excellent writers and editors were doing excellent work. But the department’s journalism was consumed with politics and foreign affairs in an era when readers were also fascinated by changes in technology, business, science and culture.
  • Fairly quickly, though, I realised two things: first, that if I did my job as I thought it should be done, and as the Sulzbergers said they wanted me to do it, I would be too polarising internally ever to lead the newsroom; second, that I did not want that job, though no one but my wife believed me when I said that.
  • there was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were
  • On the right and left, America’s elites now talk within their tribes, and get angry or contemptuous on those occasions when they happen to overhear the other conclave. If they could be coaxed to agree what they were arguing about, and the rules by which they would argue about it, opinion journalism could serve a foundational need of the democracy by fostering diverse and inclusive debate. Who could be against that?
  • The large staff of op-ed editors contained only a couple of women. Although the 11 columnists were individually admirable, only two of them were women and only one was a person of colour
  • Not only did they all focus on politics and foreign affairs, but during the 2016 campaign, no columnist shared, in broad terms, the worldview of the ascendant progressives of the Democratic Party, incarnated by Bernie Sanders. And only two were conservative.
  • This last fact was of particular concern to the elder Sulzberger. He told me the Times needed more conservative voices, and that its own editorial line had become predictably left-wing. “Too many liberals,” read my notes about the Opinion line-up from a meeting I had with him and Mark Thompson, then the chief executive, as I was preparing to rejoin the paper. “Even conservatives are liberals’ idea of a conservative.” The last note I took from that meeting was: “Can’t ignore 150m conservative Americans.”
  • As I knew from my time at the Atlantic, this kind of structural transformation can be frightening and even infuriating for those understandably proud of things as they are. It is hard on everyone
  • experience at the Atlantic also taught me that pursuing new ways of doing journalism in pursuit of venerable institutional principles created enthusiasm for change. I expected that same dynamic to allay concerns at the Times.
  • If Opinion published a wider range of views, it would help frame a set of shared arguments that corresponded to, and drew upon, the set of shared facts coming from the newsroom.
  • New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times. But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them.
  • The Opinion department mocked the paper’s claim to value diversity. It did not have a single black editor
  • Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters.
  • Out of naivety or arrogance, I was slow to recognise that at the Times, unlike at the Atlantic, these values were no longer universally accepted, let alone esteemed
  • After the 9/11 attacks, as the bureau chief in Jerusalem, I spent a lot of time in the Gaza Strip interviewing Hamas leaders, recruiters and foot soldiers, trying to understand and describe their murderous ideology. Some readers complained that I was providing a platform for terrorists, but there was never any objection from within the Times.
  • Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.
  • Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head, at least when it comes to fellow Americans. Unlike the views of Hamas, the views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation
  • Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm.
  • After the profile of the Ohio man was published, media Twitter lit up with attacks on the article as “normalising” Nazism and white nationalism, and the Times convulsed internally. The Times wound up publishing a cringing editor’s note that hung the writer out to dry and approvingly quoted some of the criticism, including a tweet from a Washington Post opinion editor asking, “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies”?
  • the Times lacked the confidence to defend its own work
  • The editor’s note paraded the principle of publishing such pieces, saying it was important to “shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life”. But less light is what the readers got. As a reporter in the newsroom, you’d have to have been an idiot after that explosion to attempt such a profile
  • Empathetic reporting about Trump supporters became even more rare. It became a cliché among influential left-wing columnists and editors that blinkered political reporters interviewed a few Trump supporters in diners and came away suckered into thinking there was something besides racism that could explain anyone’s support for the man.
  • After a year spent publishing editorials attacking Trump and his policies, I thought it would be a demonstration of Timesian open-mindedness to give his supporters their say. Also, I thought the letters were interesting, so I turned over the entire editorial page to the Trump letters.
  • I wasn’t surprised that we got some criticism on Twitter. But I was astonished by the fury of my Times colleagues. I found myself facing an angry internal town hall, trying to justify what to me was an obvious journalistic decision
  • Didn’t he think other Times readers should understand the sources of Trump’s support? Didn’t he also see it was a wonderful thing that some Trump supporters did not just dismiss the Times as fake news, but still believed in it enough to respond thoughtfully to an invitation to share their views?
  • And if the Times could not bear to publish the views of Americans who supported Trump, why should it be surprised that those voters would not trust it?
  • Two years later, in 2020, Baquet acknowledged that in 2016 the Times had failed to take seriously the idea that Trump could become president partly because it failed to send its reporters out into America to listen to voters and understand “the turmoil in the country”. And, he continued, the Times still did not understand the views of many Americans
  • Speaking four months before we published the Cotton op-ed, he said that to argue that the views of such voters should not appear in the Times was “not journalistic”.
  • Conservative arguments in the Opinion pages reliably started uproars within the Times. Sometimes I would hear directly from colleagues who had the grace to confront me with their concerns; more often they would take to the company’s Slack channels or Twitter to advertise their distress in front of each other
  • This environment of enforced group-think, inside and outside the paper, was hard even on liberal opinion writers. One left-of-centre columnist told me that he was reluctant to appear in the New York office for fear of being accosted by colleagues.
  • An internal survey shortly after I left the paper found that barely half the staff, within an enterprise ostensibly devoted to telling the truth, agreed “there is a free exchange of views in this company” and “people are not afraid to say what they really think”.)
  • Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy.
  • The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious
  • Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias
  • By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”
  • sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.
  • The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it.
  • A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics. But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.
  • I began to think of myself not as a benighted veteran on a remote island, but as Rip Van Winkle. I had left one newspaper, had a pleasant dream for ten years, and returned to a place I barely recognised.
  • The new New York Times was the product of two shocks – sudden collapse, and then sudden success. The paper almost went bankrupt during the financial crisis, and the ensuing panic provoked a crisis of confidence among its leaders. Digital competitors like the HuffPost were gaining readers and winning plaudits within the media industry as innovative. They were the cool kids; Times folk were ink-stained wrinklies.
  • In its panic, the Times bought out experienced reporters and editors and began hiring journalists from publications like the HuffPost who were considered “digital natives” because they had never worked in print. This hiring quickly became easier, since most digital publications financed by venture capital turned out to be bad businesses
  • Though they might have lacked deep or varied reporting backgrounds, some of the Times’s new hires brought skills in video and audio; others were practised at marketing themselves – building their brands, as journalists now put it – in social media. Some were brilliant and fiercely honest, in keeping with the old aspirations of the paper.
  • critically, the Times abandoned its practice of acculturation, including those months-long assignments on Metro covering cops and crime or housing. Many new hires who never spent time in the streets went straight into senior writing and editing roles.
  • All these recruits arrived with their own notions of the purpose of the Times. To me, publishing conservatives helped fulfil the paper’s mission; to them, I think, it betrayed that mission.
  • then, to the shock and horror of the newsroom, Trump won the presidency. In his article for Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger cites the Times’s failure to take Trump’s chances seriously as an example of how “prematurely shutting down inquiry and debate” can allow “conventional wisdom to ossify in a way that blinds society.
  • Many Times staff members – scared, angry – assumed the Times was supposed to help lead the resistance. Anxious for growth, the Times’s marketing team implicitly endorsed that idea, too.
  • As the number of subscribers ballooned, the marketing department tracked their expectations, and came to a nuanced conclusion. More than 95% of Times subscribers described themselves as Democrats or independents, and a vast majority of them believed the Times was also liberal
  • A similar majority applauded that bias; it had become “a selling point”, reported one internal marketing memo. Yet at the same time, the marketers concluded, subscribers wanted to believe that the Times was independent.
  • As that memo argued, even if the Times was seen as politically to the left, it was critical to its brand also to be seen as broadening its readers’ horizons, and that required “a perception of independence”.
  • Readers could cancel their subscriptions if the Times challenged their worldview by reporting the truth without regard to politics. As a result, the Times’s long-term civic value was coming into conflict with the paper’s short-term shareholder value
  • The Times has every right to pursue the commercial strategy that makes it the most money. But leaning into a partisan audience creates a powerful dynamic. Nobody warned the new subscribers to the Times that it might disappoint them by reporting truths that conflicted with their expectations
  • When your product is “independent journalism”, that commercial strategy is tricky, because too much independence might alienate your audience, while too little can lead to charges of hypocrisy that strike at the heart of the brand.
  • It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism
  • The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.
  • there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out
  • The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?
  • Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of  free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it.
  • They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on
  • The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.
  • And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be
  • To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media
  • The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role.
  • The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand
  • What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.
  • By contrast, the old newsroom ideology seems cynical on its surface. It used to bug me that my editors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any person in power was a lie.
  • And the pursuit of objectivity can seem reptilian, even nihilistic, in its abjuration of a fixed position in moral contests. But the basis of that old newsroom approach was idealistic: the notion that power ultimately lies in truth and ideas, and that the citizens of a pluralistic democracy, not leaders of any sort, must be trusted to judge both.
  • Our role in Times Opinion, I used to urge my colleagues, was not to tell people what to think, but to help them fulfil their desire to think for themselves.
  • It seems to me that putting the pursuit of truth, rather than of justice, at the top of a publication’s hierarchy of values also better serves not just truth but justice, too
  • over the long term journalism that is not also sceptical of the advocates of any form of justice and the programmes they put forward, and that does not struggle honestly to understand and explain the sources of resistance,
  • will not assure that those programmes will work, and it also has no legitimate claim to the trust of reasonable people who see the world very differently. Rather than advance understanding and durable change, it provokes backlash.
  • The impatience within the newsroom with such old ways was intensified by the generational failure of the Times to hire and promote women and non-white people
  • Pay attention if you are white at the Times and you will hear black editors speak of hiring consultants at their own expense to figure out how to get white staff to respect them
  • As wave after wave of pain and outrage swept through the Times, over a headline that was not damning enough of Trump or someone’s obnoxious tweets, I came to think of the people who were fragile, the ones who were caught up in Slack or Twitter storms, as people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock.
  • Having concluded they had got ahead by working hard, it has been a revelation to them that their skin colour was not just part of the wallpaper of American life, but a source of power, protection and advancement.
  • I share the bewilderment that so many people could back Trump, given the things he says and does, and that makes me want to understand why they do: the breadth and diversity of his support suggests not just racism is at work. Yet these elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics.
  • The digital natives were nevertheless valuable, not only for their skills but also because they were excited for the Times to embrace its future. That made them important allies of the editorial and business leaders as they sought to shift the Times to digital journalism and to replace staff steeped in the ways of print. Partly for that reason, and partly out of fear, the leadership indulged internal attacks on Times journalism, despite pleas from me and others, to them and the company as a whole, that Times folk should treat each other with more respect
  • My colleagues and I in Opinion came in for a lot of the scorn, but we were not alone. Correspondents in the Washington bureau and political reporters would take a beating, too, when they were seen as committing sins like “false balance” because of the nuance in their stories.
  • My fellow editorial and commercial leaders were well aware of how the culture of the institution had changed. As delighted as they were by the Times’s digital transformation they were not blind to the ideological change that came with it. They were unhappy with the bullying and group-think; we often discussed such cultural problems in the weekly meetings of the executive committee, composed of the top editorial and business leaders, including the publisher. Inevitably, these bitch sessions would end with someone saying a version of: “Well, at some point we have to tell them this is what we believe in as a newspaper, and if they don’t like it they should work somewhere else.” It took me a couple of years to realise that this moment was never going to come.
  • There is a lot not to miss about the days when editors like Boyd could strike terror in young reporters like me and Purdum. But the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that editors now tremble before their reporters and even their interns. “I miss the old climate of fear,” Baquet used to say with a smile, in another of his barbed jokes.
  • I wish I’d pursued my point and talked myself out of the job. This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too)
  • The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.
  • The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism.
  • Editors in the newsroom did not touch opinionated copy, lest they be contaminated by it, and opinion journalists and editors kept largely to their own, distant floor within the Times building. Such fastidiousness could seem excessive, but it enforced an ethos that Times reporters owed their readers an unceasing struggle against bias in the news
  • But by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion. As at the cable news networks, the boundaries between commentary and news were disappearing, and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases
  • The Times newsroom had added more cultural critics, and, as Baquet noted, they were free to opine about politics.
  • Departments across the Times newsroom had also begun appointing their own “columnists”, without stipulating any rules that might distinguish them from columnists in Opinion
  • I checked to see if, since I left the Times, it had developed guidelines explaining the difference, if any, between a news columnist and opinion columnist. The paper’s spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, did not respond to the question.)
  • The internet rewards opinionated work and, as news editors felt increasing pressure to generate page views, they began not just hiring more opinion writers but also running their own versions of opinionated essays by outside voices – historically, the province of Opinion’s op-ed department.
  • Yet because the paper continued to honour the letter of its old principles, none of this work could be labelled “opinion” (it still isn’t). After all, it did not come from the Opinion department.
  • And so a newsroom technology columnist might call for, say, unionisation of the Silicon Valley workforce, as one did, or an outside writer might argue in the business section for reparations for slavery, as one did, and to the average reader their work would appear indistinguishable from Times news articles.
  • By similarly circular logic, the newsroom’s opinion journalism breaks another of the Times’s commitments to its readers. Because the newsroom officially does not do opinion – even though it openly hires and publishes opinion journalists – it feels free to ignore Opinion’s mandate to provide a diversity of views
  • When I was editorial-page editor, there were a couple of newsroom columnists whose politics were not obvious. But the other newsroom columnists, and the critics, read as passionate progressives.
  • I urged Baquet several times to add a conservative to the newsroom roster of cultural critics. That would serve the readers by diversifying the Times’s analysis of culture, where the paper’s left-wing bias had become most blatant, and it would show that the newsroom also believed in restoring the Times’s commitment to taking conservatives seriously. He said this was a good idea, but he never acted on it
  • I couldn’t help trying the idea out on one of the paper’s top cultural editors, too: he told me he did not think Times readers would be interested in that point of view.
  • opinion was spreading through the newsroom in other ways. News desks were urging reporters to write in the first person and to use more “voice”, but few newsroom editors had experience in handling that kind of journalism, and no one seemed certain where “voice” stopped and “opinion” began
  • The Times magazine, meanwhile, became a crusading progressive publication
  • Baquet liked to say the magazine was Switzerland, by which he meant that it sat between the newsroom and Opinion. But it reported only to the news side. Its work was not labelled as opinion and it was free to omit conservative viewpoints.
  • his creep of politics into the newsroom’s journalism helped the Times beat back some of its new challengers, at least those on the left
  • Competitors like Vox and the HuffPost were blending leftish politics with reporting and writing it up conversationally in the first person. Imitating their approach, along with hiring some of their staff, helped the Times repel them. But it came at a cost. The rise of opinion journalism over the past 15 years changed the newsroom’s coverage and its culture
  • The tiny redoubt of never-Trump conservatives in Opinion is swamped daily not only by the many progressives in that department but their reinforcements among the critics, columnists and magazine writers in the newsroom
  • They are generally excellent, but their homogeneity means Times readers are being served a very restricted range of views, some of them presented as straight news by a publication that still holds itself out as independent of any politics.
  • And because the critics, newsroom columnists and magazine writers are the newsroom’s most celebrated journalists, they have disproportionate influence over the paper’s culture.
  • By saying that it still holds itself to the old standard of strictly separating its news and opinion journalists, the paper leads its readers further into the trap of thinking that what they are reading is independent and impartial – and this misleads them about their country’s centre of political and cultural gravity.
  • And yet the Times insists to the public that nothing has changed.
  • “Even though each day’s opinion pieces are typically among our most popular journalism and our columnists are among our most trusted voices, we believe opinion is secondary to our primary mission of reporting and should represent only a portion of a healthy news diet,” Sulzberger wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review. “For that reason, we’ve long kept the Opinion department intentionally small – it represents well under a tenth of our journalistic staff – and ensured that its editorial decision-making is walled off from the newsroom.”
  • When I was editorial-page editor, Sulzberger, who declined to be interviewed on the record for this article, worried a great deal about the breakdown in the boundaries between news and opinion
  • He told me once that he would like to restructure the paper to have one editor oversee all its news reporters, another all its opinion journalists and a third all its service journalists, the ones who supply guidance on buying gizmos or travelling abroad. Each of these editors would report to him
  • That is the kind of action the Times needs to take now to confront its hypocrisy and begin restoring its independence.
  • The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise
  • It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work.
  • After I was chased out of the Times, Journal reporters and other staff attempted a similar assault on their opinion department. Some 280 of them signed a letter listing pieces they found offensive and demanding changes in how their opinion colleagues approached their work. “Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility,” shrugged the Journal’s editorial board in a note to readers after the letter was leaked. “The signers report to the news editors or other parts of the business.” The editorial added, in case anyone missed the point, “We are not the New York Times.” That was the end of it.
  • Unlike the publishers of the Journal, however, Sulzberger is in a bind, or at least perceives himself to be
  • The confusion within the Times over its role, and the rising tide of intolerance among the reporters, the engineers, the business staff, even the subscribers – these are all problems he inherited, in more ways than one. He seems to feel constrained in confronting the paper’s illiberalism by the very source of his authority
  • The paradox is that in previous generations the Sulzbergers’ control was the bulwark of the paper’s independence.
  • if he is going to instil the principles he believes in, he needs to stop worrying so much about his powers of persuasion, and start using the power he is so lucky to have.
  • Shortly after we published the op-ed that Wednesday afternoon, some reporters tweeted their opposition to Cotton’s argument. But the real action was in the Times’s Slack channels, where reporters and other staff began not just venting but organising. They turned to the union to draw up a workplace complaint about the op-ed.
  • The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.
  • This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s
  • Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”
  • That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest. The Times did not publish a correction or any note acknowledging the story had been changed.
  • Seeking to influence the outcome of a story you cover, particularly without disclosing that to the reader, violates basic principles I was raised on at the Times
  • s Rhoades Ha disputes my characterisation of the after-the-fact editing of the story about my resignation. She said the editors changed the story after it was published on the website in order to “refine” it and “add context”, and so the story did not merit a correction disclosing to the reader that changes had been made.
  • In retrospect what seems almost comical is that as the conflict over Cotton’s op-ed unfolded within the Times I acted as though it was on the level, as though the staff of the Times would have a good-faith debate about Cotton’s piece and the decision to publish it
  • Instead, people wanted to vent and achieve what they considered to be justice, whether through Twitter, Slack, the union or the news pages themselves
  • My colleagues in Opinion, together with the PR team, put together a series of connected tweets describing the purpose behind publishing Cotton’s op-ed. Rather than publish these tweets from the generic Times Opinion Twitter account, Sulzberger encouraged me to do it from my personal one, on the theory that this would humanise our defence. I doubted that would make any difference, but it was certainly my job to take responsibility. So I sent out the tweets, sticking my head in a Twitter bucket that clangs, occasionally, to this day
  • What is worth recalling now from the bedlam of the next two days? I suppose there might be lessons for someone interested in how not to manage a corporate crisis. I began making my own mistakes that Thursday. The union condemned our publication of Cotton, for supposedly putting journalists in danger, claiming that he had called on the military “to ‘detain’ and ‘subdue’ Americans protesting racism and police brutality” – again, a misrepresentation of his argument. The publisher called to tell me the company was experiencing its largest sick day in history; people were turning down job offers because of the op-ed, and, he said, some people were quitting. He had been expecting for some time that the union would seek a voice in editorial decision-making; he said he thought this was the moment the union was making its move. He had clearly changed his own mind about the value of publishing the Cotton op-ed.
  • I asked Dao to have our fact-checkers review the union’s claims. But then I went a step further: at the publisher’s request, I urged him to review the editing of the piece itself and come back to me with a list of steps we could have taken to make it better. Dao’s reflex – the correct one – was to defend the piece as published. He and three other editors of varying ages, genders and races had helped edit it; it had been fact-checked, as is all our work
  • This was my last failed attempt to have the debate within the Times that I had been seeking for four years, about why it was important to present Times readers with arguments like Cotton’s. The staff at the paper never wanted to have that debate. The Cotton uproar was the most extreme version of the internal reaction we faced whenever we published conservative arguments that were not simply anti-Trump. Yes, yes, of course we believe in the principle of publishing diverse views, my Times colleagues would say, but why this conservative? Why this argument?
  • I doubt these changes would have mattered, and to extract this list from Dao was to engage in precisely the hypocrisy I claimed to despise – that, in fact, I do despise. If Cotton needed to be held to such standards of politesse, so did everyone else. Headlines such as “Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-ed”, the headline of a subsequent piece, should also have been tranquillised.
  • As that miserable Thursday wore on, Sulzberger, Baquet and I held a series of Zoom meetings with reporters and editors from the newsroom who wanted to discuss the op-ed. Though a handful of the participants were there to posture, these were generally constructive conversations. A couple of people, including Baquet, even had the guts to speak up in favour of publishing the op-ed
  • Two moments stick out. At one point, in answer to a question, Sulzberger and Baquet both said they thought the op-ed – as the Times union and many journalists were saying – had in fact put journalists in danger. That was the first time I realised I might be coming to the end of the road.
  • The other was when a pop-culture reporter asked if I had read the op-ed before it was published. I said I had not. He immediately put his head down and started typing, and I should have paid attention rather than moving on to the next question. He was evidently sharing the news with the company over Slack.
  • Every job review I had at the Times urged me to step back from the daily coverage to focus on the long term. (Hilariously, one review, urging me to move faster in upending the Opinion department, instructed me to take risks and “ask for forgiveness not permission”.)
  • I learned when these meetings were over that there had been a new eruption in Slack. Times staff were saying that Rubenstein had been the sole editor of the op-ed. In response, Dao had gone into Slack to clarify to the entire company that he had also edited it himself. But when the Times posted the news article that evening, it reported, “The Op-Ed was edited by Adam Rubenstein” and made no mention of Dao’s statement
  • Early that morning, I got an email from Sam Dolnick, a Sulzberger cousin and a top editor at the paper, who said he felt “we” – he could have only meant me – owed the whole staff “an apology for appearing to place an abstract idea like open debate over the value of our colleagues’ lives, and their safety”. He was worried that I and my colleagues had unintentionally sent a message to other people at the Times that: “We don’t care about their full humanity and their security as much as we care about our ideas.”
  • “I know you don’t like it when I talk about principles at a moment like this,” I began. But I viewed the journalism I had been doing, at the Times and before that at the Atlantic, in very different terms from the ones Dolnick presumed. “I don’t think of our work as an abstraction without meaning for people’s lives – quite the opposite,” I continued. “The whole point – the reason I do this – is to have an impact on their lives to the good. I have always believed that putting ideas, including potentially dangerous one[s], out in the public is vital to ensuring they are debated and, if dangerous, discarded.” It was, I argued, in “edge cases like this that principles are tested”, and if my position was judged wrong then “I am out of step with the times.” But, I concluded, “I don’t think of us as some kind of debating society without implications for the real world and I’ve never been unmindful of my colleagues’ humanity.”
  • in the end, one thing he and I surely agree on is that I was, in fact, out of step with the Times. It may have raised me as a journalist – and invested so much in educating me to what were once its standards – but I did not belong there any more.
  • Finally, I came up with something that felt true. I told the meeting that I was sorry for the pain that my leadership of Opinion had caused. What a pathetic thing to say. I did not think to add, because I’d lost track of this truth myself by then, that opinion journalism that never causes pain is not journalism. It can’t hope to move society forward
  • As I look back at my notes of that awful day, I don’t regret what I said. Even during that meeting, I was still hoping the blow-up might at last give me the chance either to win support for what I had been asked to do, or to clarify once and for all that the rules for journalism had changed at the Times.
  • But no one wanted to talk about that. Nor did they want to hear about all the voices of vulnerable or underprivileged people we had been showcasing in Opinion, or the ambitious new journalism we were doing. Instead, my Times colleagues demanded to know things such as the names of every editor who had had a role in the Cotton piece. Having seen what happened to Rubenstein I refused to tell them. A Slack channel had been set up to solicit feedback in real time during the meeting, and it was filling with hate. The meeting ran long, and finally came to a close after 90 minutes.
  • I tried to insist, as did Dao, that the note make clear the Cotton piece was within our editorial bounds. Sulzberger said he felt the Times could afford to be “silent” on that question. In the end the note went far further in repudiating the piece than I anticipated, saying it should never have been published at all. The next morning I was told to resign.
  • It was a terrible moment for the country. By the traditional – and perverse – logic of journalism, that should also have made it an inspiring time to be a reporter, writer or editor. Journalists are supposed to run towards scenes that others are fleeing, towards hard truths others need to know, towards consequential ideas they would prefer to ignore.
  • But fear got all mixed up with anger inside the Times, too, along with a desire to act locally in solidarity with the national movement. That energy found a focus in the Cotton op-ed
  • the Times is not good at acknowledging mistakes. Indeed, one of my own, within the Times culture, was to take responsibility for any mistakes my department made, and even some it didn’t
  • To Sulzberger, the meltdown over Cotton’s op-ed and my departure in disgrace are explained and justified by a failure of editorial “process”. As he put it in an interview with the New Yorker this summer, after publishing his piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, Cotton’s piece was not “perfectly fact-checked” and the editors had not “thought about the headline and presentation”. He contrasted the execution of Cotton’s opinion piece with that of a months-long investigation the newsroom did of Donald Trump’s taxes (which was not “perfectly fact-checked”, as it happens – it required a correction). He did not explain why, if the Times was an independent publication, an op-ed making a mainstream conservative argument should have to meet such different standards from an op-ed making any other kind of argument, such as for the abolition of the police
  • “It’s not enough just to have the principle and wave it around,” he said. “You also have to execute on it.”
  • To me, extolling the virtue of independent journalism in the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review is how you wave a principle around. Publishing a piece like Cotton’s is how you execute on it.
  • As Sulzberger also wrote in the Review, “Independent journalism, especially in a pluralistic democracy, should err on the side of treating areas of serious political contest as open, unsettled, and in need of further inquiry.
  • If Sulzberger must insist on comparing the execution of the Cotton op-ed with that of the most ambitious of newsroom projects, let him compare it with something really important, the 1619 Project, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia.
  • Like Cotton’s piece, the 1619 Project was fact-checked and copy-edited (most of the Times newsroom does not fact-check or copy-edit articles, but the magazine does). But it nevertheless contained mistakes, as journalism often does. Some of these mistakes ignited a firestorm among historians and other readers.
  • And, like Cotton’s piece, the 1619 Project was presented in a way the Times later judged to be too provocative.
  • The Times declared that the 1619 Project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding”. That bold statement – a declaration of Times fact, not opinion, since it came from the newsroom – outraged many Americans who venerated 1776 as the founding. The Times later stealthily erased it from the digital version of the project, but was caught doing so by a writer for the publication Quillette. Sulzberger told me during the initial uproar that the top editors in the newsroom – not just Baquet but his deputy – had not reviewed the audacious statement of purpose, one of the biggest editorial claims the paper has ever made. They also, of course, did not edit all the pieces themselves, trusting the magazine’s editors to do that work.
  • If the 1619 Project and the Cotton op-ed shared the same supposed flaws and excited similar outrage, how come that one is lauded as a landmark success and the other is a sackable offence?
  • I am comparing them only to meet Sulzberger on his terms, in order to illuminate what he is trying to elide. What distinguished the Cotton piece was not an error, or strong language, or that I didn’t edit it personally. What distinguished that op-ed was not process. It was politics.
  • It is one thing for the Times to aggravate historians, or conservatives, or even old-school liberals who believe in open debate. It has become quite another for the Times to challenge some members of its own staff with ideas that might contradict their view of the world.
  • The lessons of the incident are not about how to write a headline but about how much the Times has changed – how digital technology, the paper’s new business model and the rise of new ideals among its staff have altered its understanding of the boundary between news and opinion, and of the relationship between truth and justice
  • Ejecting me was one way to avoid confronting the question of which values the Times is committed to. Waving around the word “process” is another.
  • As he asserts the independence of Times journalism, Sulzberger is finding it necessary to reach back several years to another piece I chose to run, for proof that the Times remains willing to publish views that might offend its staff. “We’ve published a column by the head of the part of the Taliban that kidnapped one of our own journalists,” he told the New Yorker. He is missing the real lesson of that piece, as well.
  • The case against that piece is that Haqqani, who remains on the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist list, may have killed Americans. It’s puzzling: in what moral universe can it be a point of pride to publish a piece by an enemy who may have American blood on his hands, and a matter of shame to publish a piece by an American senator arguing for American troops to protect Americans?
  • As Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, said on the Senate floor about the Times’s panic over the Cotton op-ed, listing some other debatable op-ed choices, “Vladimir Putin? No problem. Iranian propaganda? Sure. But nothing, nothing could have prepared them for 800 words from the junior senator from Arkansas.”
  • The Times’s staff members are not often troubled by obnoxious views when they are held by foreigners. This is an important reason the paper’s foreign coverage, at least of some regions, remains exceptional.
  • What seems most important and least understood about that episode is that it demonstrated in real time the value of the ideals that I poorly defended in the moment, ideals that not just the Times’s staff but many other college-educated Americans are abandoning.
  • After all, we ran the experiment; we published the piece. Was any Times journalist hurt? No. Nobody in the country was. In fact, though it is impossible to know the op-ed’s precise effect, polling showed that support for a military option dropped after the Times published the essay, as the Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, has written
  • If anything, in other words, publishing the piece stimulated debate that made it less likely Cotton’s position would prevail. The liberal, journalistic principle of open debate was vindicated in the very moment the Times was fleeing from it.
Javier E

Getting 'More Christians Into Politics' Is the Wrong Christian Goal - 0 views

  • If I could distill the anger about that essay down to a single sentence (besides simply, “Shut up!”) it would be this: “You talk about the problems in Christian conservatism too much. Talk about the Left more.” 
  • And I get it. I really do. In a deeply divided nation where millions of people have convinced themselves that the church is under unprecedented siege, you want Christians who possess a public platform to “defend the church.” There is a deep and profound human desire for advocacy.
  • Yet that’s not remotely the model of biblical discourse, especially of how believers talk to each other.
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  • As I wrote in my book, at my most partisan moment I once gave a speech in which I said words that shame me to this day. 
  • we forget a fundamental truth—our own maladies often make us unable to see the world clearly. Or, as Jesus said, “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” In so many ways, we’ve become the People of the Plank, blind to the pain we’ve inflicted on the public even as we try desperately to protect ourselves from them.
  • Early church fathers were far, far more concerned with the faith and virtue of the church than the maladies of the Romans. 
  • “I believe the two greatest threats to the United States are university leftists at home and jihadists abroad.”
  • In Iraq, the reality was so profoundly different that words can barely begin to describe all the distinctions
  • I didn’t exactly become post-partisan upon my return (that came later), but I gained the perspective that permitted me to start the process of pulling the plank from my own eye.
  • it’s opened my eyes to many truths that were new to me. Among them, the church should be focused much more on its own virtue than the virtue of the rest of the world.
  • In addition, if there were no grounds for Christians to live with a “spirit of fear” at the height of the Roman Empire, there are no grounds for us to live with a spirit of fear in our nation today. Yet fear seems to dominate Christian political activism—including fear of the left, of CRT, and sometimes even fear for the very existence of a free church in the United States of America.
  • sad experience with Christian leaders teaches us that their professed identity tells us little to nothing about their actual virtue, and virtue should be the guiding concern of Christians in politics, not identity. 
  • I now see that my young desire for “more Christians in politics” and “more respect for Christians in public life” was part of the plank in my eye. Indeed, it helped make me gullible and tribal.
  • I was often eager to critique secular cultures and slow to respond when my own narratives came under credible attack. 
  • While some of the most important fights for justice have been led by Christians—including the civil rights and pro-life movements—some of the most destructive political and cultural forces have been loudly and proudly led by Christians as well. 
  • In fact, two of the most destructive political and cultural movements of this new century—vaccine refusal that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and an effort to overturn an election that could have ruptured our republic—were disproportionately dominated by the most outspoken Christian voices.
  • Here’s what’s hard. Refusing to lie for a president. Refusing to yield to a mob. Resisting the fury of a furious time. And if Christians can’t succeed in that most basic, though often profoundly dangerous, task, then no, we don’t need more Christians in politics. We need more people who possess and demonstrate character and moral courage.
Javier E

The Density Divide and the Southernification of Rural America - 0 views

  • As those contrasts have faded, so have these distinct regional, rural identities. Everywhere it’s the same cloying pop country, the same aggressively oversized Ford F-150s, the same tumbledown Wal-Marts and Dollar Generals, the same eagle-heavy fashion, the same confused, aggrieved air of relentless material decline. Even the accents are more and more the same, trending toward a generalized Larry the Cable Guy twang.
  • America’s increasingly placeless, homogenous white rural culture isn’t a blend of all our various regional cultures. Rural Iowans and Minnesotans sound more like rural Missourians than the reverse.
  • Many large metropolitan areas grew faster over the past decade than the Bureau had previously projected, with eight of the nation's ten largest cities showing an increased growth rate compared to the 2000 to 2010 period. At the same time, most of rural America shrank in absolute as well as relative terms. A majority—52 percent—of the nation's counties actually reported a smaller raw population in 2020 than they had in 2010.
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  • The fundamental geographic division in American politics has traditionally been a sectional conflict setting the North against the South. The idioms of "red states" and "blue states" caught on widely after the 2000 presidential election because they could be applied to a regional divide—blue North, red South—that was already presumed to reflect the main axis of political debate and competition. But the partisan difference between large-metro and rural residents has now become much larger than the gap between northerners and southerners.
  • I call this widening gap between the partisan loyalties of urban and rural America “the density divide.” Hopkins is clearly correct that urban vs. rural has eclipsed North vs. South as the geographic embodiment of our partisan divisions. As the old adage goes, a chart speaks a thousand white papers.
  • I suspect that battle between North and South lives on both culturally and geographically. The North has drifted out of the countryside and concentrated itself into our cities. At the same time, America’s rural and exurban counties have slowly become more and more homogenously Southern. The South has risen again … in rural Maine?
  • One of the puzzles of the 2016 election, and the catastrophe of the Trump presidency, is how populist white nationalism finally prevailed at a time when Americans, taken altogether, were less racist than ever
  • My hunch is that rural white culture, which was once regionally varied and distinctive, became more uniform by becoming increasingly Southern. I call this the Southernification thesis.
  • In the Density Divide, I argued that the key to answering “Why did white ethnonationalism finally work to win the GOP nomination and then the White House when it didn’t even get close to working for Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul?” was that residential self-selection on ethnicity, personality, and education had made lower density parts of the country progressively more homogenously ethnocentric and socially conservative, which finally made it possible to unify and organize rural and exurban whites as a single constituency.
  • I think it’s an incomplete explanation without something like the Southernification thesis. Before it could be successfully organized politically, America’s increasingly ethnocentric non-urban white population needed to be consolidated first through the adoption of a relatively uniform ethnocentric white culture.
  • When I was a kid, the Atlanta Bravesþff somehow became “America’s Team.” Could it be that the media mogul who married Hanoi Jane took the critical first step in bringing non-urban white America together by beaming sanitized Southern culture into living rooms everywhere?
Javier E

Opinion | When the Right Ignores Its Sex Scandals - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Late last month, the Southern Baptist Convention settled a sex abuse lawsuit brought against a man named Paul Pressler for an undisclosed sum. The lawsuit was filed in 2017 and alleged that Pressler had raped a man named Duane Rollins for decades, with the rapes beginning when Rollins was only 14 years old.
  • Pressler is one of the most important American religious figures of the 20th century. He and his friend Paige Patterson, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, are two of the key architects of the so-called conservative resurgence within the S.B.C.
  • The conservative resurgence was a movement conceived in the 1960s and launched in the 1970s that sought to wrest control of the S.B.C. from more theologically liberal and moderate voices. It was a remarkable success. While many established denominations were liberalizing, the S.B.C. lurched to the right and exploded in growth, ultimately becoming the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
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  • Pressler and Patterson were heroes within the movement. Patterson led Baptist seminaries and became president of the convention. Pressler was a Texas state judge and a former president of the Council for National Policy, a powerful conservative Christian activist organization.
  • Both men are now disgraced. In 2018, the board of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary fired Patterson after it found that he’d grossly mishandled rape allegations — including writing in an email that he wanted to meet alone with a woman who had reported being raped to “break her down” — at both Southwestern and another Baptist seminary.
  • Pressler’s story is in some ways eerily similar to that of Harvey Weinstein. Both were powerful men so brazen about their misconduct that it was an “open secret” in their respective worlds. Yet they were also so powerful that an army of enablers coalesced around them, protecting them from the consequences of their actions.
  • The suit set off a sprawling investigation into S.B.C. sexual misconduct by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News. Their report, called “Abuse of Faith,” documented hundreds of sex abuse cases in the S.B.C. and led to the denomination commissioning an independent investigation of its handling of abuse.
  • The American right exists in a news environment that reports misconduct on the left or in left-wing institutions loudly and with granular detail. When Weinstein fell and that fall prompted the cascade of revelations that created the #MeToo moment, the right was overrun with commentary on the larger lessons of the episode, including scathing indictments of a Hollywood culture
  • the coverage, or lack thereof, of Pressler’s fall also helps explain why we’re so very polarized as a nation.
  • the bottom line is clear: For decades, survivors of sex abuse “were ignored, disbelieved or met with the constant refrain that the S.B.C. could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”
  • the coverage on the right also fit a cherished conservative narrative: that liberal sexual values such as those in Hollywood invariably lead to abuse.
  • stories such as Pressler’s complicate this narrative immensely. If both the advocates and enemies of the sexual revolution have their Harvey Weinsteins — that is, if both progressive and conservative institutions can enable abuse — then all that partisan moral clarity starts to disappear
  • We’re all left with the disturbing and humbling reality that whatever our ideology or theology, it doesn’t make us good people. The allegedly virtuous “us” commits the same sins as the presumptively villainous “them.”
  • How does a typical conservative activist deal with this reality? By pretending it doesn’t exist.
  • Shortly after the Pressler settlement was announced, I looked for statements or commentary or articles by the conservative stalwarts who cover left-wing misconduct with such zeal. The silence was deafening.
  • I’m reminded of the minimal right-wing coverage of Fox News’s historic defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, the largest known media defamation settlement of all time. I consistently meet conservatives who might know chapter and verse of any second-tier scandal in the “liberal media” but to this day have no clue that the right’s favorite news outlet broadcast some of the most expensive lies in history.
  • t’s more like a cultivated ignorance, in which news outlets and influencers and their audiences tacitly agree not to share facts that might complicate their partisan narratives.
  • the dynamic is even worse when stories of conservative abuse and misconduct break in the mainstream media. Conservative partisans can simply cry “media bias!” and rely on their followers to tune it all out. To those followers, a scandal isn’t real until people they trust say it’s real.
Javier E

We Have To End Republican Nihilism - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 1 views

  • There are two procedural issues on which, it seems to me, true conservatives should be outraged at Republicans. The first is the massive, unprecedented, destructive and radical use of a non-filibuster filibuster to make the Senate unable to pass anything significant without 60 votes, rather than 51 (or 50 with the veep). This is not conservative. It's a blatant attack on tradition in defense of pure partisanship.
  • Most Americans aren't fully aware that a filibuster today doesn't need even a few minutes of what we always thought of as filibustering. The filibusterers barely have to speak at all. They just have to signal their intent to, and the entire legislative process grinds to a halt. This gives a minority party a near-veto that should be solely the preserve of the president. That's an attack on our Constitution. Expose them, Mr President, as the revolutionaries they are. Mock them. Expose their laziness and obstructionism at a time when a huge majority wants compromise; and the country and the world need it.
  • The second is the outrageous ploy to threaten to destroy the country's credit rating every time there is a conflict over debt. This is a form of legislative terrorism. It is an attack on the entire country in defense of a single fanatical faction.
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  • we should be clear what using the debt ceiling as blackmail really is; it is not an attempt to cut spending, which is accomplished through budget legislation. It is a refusal to make good on the very decisions the Congress has already made on spending and taxation. It is the equivalent of not paying your rent as a way to protest the price you already signed up for. It's grotesquely irresponsible, and after the last election, reflects a near delusional amnesia and contempt for the voters.
  • When you see a political party that openly flaunts these attacks on the American constitutional balance and the country's credit for purely partisan reasons, you begin to see how deep the rot has gone. This is not a party worthy of any role in government. It's a destructive, self-interested faction, threatening the stability of this country's constitution and economy. Obama is absolutely right not to yield on this. This anti-conservative radicalism is anti-American, uncivil and unpatriotic.
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