The new New York Times hire Bret Stephens
The New York Times’ op-ed page’s latest right-wing hire, Bret Stephens, doesn’t like Donald Trump—but he loves Trump’s worst ideas.
Trump’s delusional rejection of scientific warnings about our ongoing global catastrophe? Stephens writes about “Global Warming as Mass Neurosis” (Wall Street Journal, 7/1/08), calling climate change a religion (Wall Street Journal, 11/29/11)
presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate.
The racist lenses through which Trump views the world? Stephens blames the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on what he calls “the disease of the Arab mind” (Wall Street Journal, 8/15/16), arguing that the “communal psychosis” of Palestinians disproves “comforting fictions about all people being basically good, or wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of empathy” (Wall Street Journal, 10/12/15).
In “Haiti, Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire: Who Cares?” (Wall Street Journal, 1/11/11), Stephens used those three mostly black nations to maintain that “colonialism may be the best thing that could happen to at least some countries in the postcolonial world”—due to “the depravity of the locals.”
Trump’s contempt for human rights and the rule of law? Stephens wrote “I Am Not Sorry the CIA Waterboarded” (Wall Street Journal, 12/15/14)—a column-length defense of torture, which is listed by the International Criminal Court as a crime against humanity alongside enslavement, extermination and rape.
So why, exactly, do we want to add this science-bashing, race-baiting, atrocity-advocating nonsense to our intellectual diet? Will it really “broaden reader horizons,” as Times public editor Liz Spayd (4/22/17) promised?
For Spayd, who’s supposed to keep tabs on the paper for us readers, the idea of looking for bias in Stephens’ work was faintly ridiculous: After his hiring was announced, she wrote, “readers and left-leaning critics…rummaged through his columns for proof that he is a climate change denier, a bigot or maybe a misogynist.” (The last charge related to Stephens’ facile, casually racist dismissal of campus rape statistics: “If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school?”—Wall Street Journal, 11/30/15.)
Spayd did acknowledge that she herself was “wary about some of his more inflammatory language,” but said it was “hard to tease apart objections to Stephens’ work from objections to hiring any conservative at all,” and declared she fully supported editorial page editor James “Bennet’s aim of hiring people who don’t conform to a liberal orthodoxy of thought.”
The orthodoxy on the New York Times op-ed page, though, isn’t “liberalism”; note that Stephens is the third representative of his ideological niche, the anti-Trump conservative, to currently have a home there. (Republicans who don’t approve of Trump are about 4 percent of the general public, but control 25 percent of the Times’ opinion space.)
What is glaringly missing from the paper’s opinion roster, as Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 4/20/17) pointed out, is anyone to the left of Hillary Clinton—surely a much larger portion of both the Times readership and the public at large than are right-wing #nevertrumpers.
To understand this anomaly—and the real reason that the New York Times would rather have a climate-denying bigot on its staff than a single single-payer advocate—it helps to go back to the beginning of the Times dynasty, as Times veteran John L. Hess did in Extra! (1/00):
How did [Adolph] Ochs, a virtual bankrupt from Chattanooga, persuade Wall Street to set him up with the moribund New York Times? Answer: The financiers were anxious to keep the paper alive as a Democratic voice against the populist Democratic candidate for president, William Jennings Bryan, who was stirring the masses with that speech about the Cross of Gold. Ochs bought a fine new suit, set up a fake bank account as reference, and persuaded J.P. Morgan and others to bankroll the purchase. His paper promptly pilloried Bryan, and Ochs marched with his staff in a businessmen’s parade against him.
Much has changed since 1896, but in 2017, the Times still defends establishment, business-oriented liberalism against the populist left. In part it does this by attacking the left directly—see the columns of Paul Krugman during the 2016 Democratic primaries (FAIR.org, 2/17/16)—but the more meaningful sustenance it gives to the liberal elite is its validation of them as the left-most pole of respectable discourse.
And that, in turn, requires that the neo-liberals have a right wing, and only a right wing, to argue with, and present themselves as a bastion against. It can’t be a bomb-throwing, take-no-prisoners right, as represented by Trump—the point is to preserve the liberal establishment, not to eradicate it—but it doesn’t pay for the right to be too polite, either.
After all, if it weren’t for the threat of the climate change-denying, torture-endorsing, stereotype-mongering Bret Stephenses of the world—what would the New York Times’ pro-business liberals have to threaten the genuine left with?
