
The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism - arto
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/andrew-sullivan-ny-times-abandons-liberalism-for-activism.html
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
>“Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”

This is a very dangerous sentiment. If you look at the movements for abolition
and Civil Rights, the most successful appeals were calling America to live up
to her founding ideals.

However, it seems that many people are trying to effect change not through
encouraging Americans to live up to their county’s ideals, but the shame them
and guilt-trip them into doing it.

The problem is that guilt is a very poor long-term motivator. Think of you
have a someone you are trying to do better. Are you more likely to succeed by
telling them how horrible they are and how they have always been horrible and
how their parents were horrible? Or do you tell them that they are a
fundamentally good person and that they should try to do better in this area
as well?

The shaming approach may feel for satisfying, but it is likely to create a
strong backlash and and problems down the line.

Think about it, there is no denying that America has been fabulously
successful for white people. Now do you tell white people that their success
was because of the ideals and open society, and they should cultivate them
more, or do you tell them that their success was due to oppression of
brown/black people? And if you tell them the later, what will you say when
others also come and agree with what you are saying and say that we should get
back to oppressing brown and black people in earnest, since that what our
success was built on?

~~~
krapp
>Now do you tell white people that their success was because of the ideals and
open society, and they should cultivate them more, or do you tell them that
their success was due to oppression of brown/black people?

Both are true. Part of cultivating the ideals and open society is being aware
of the artifacts of racial prejudice and privilege that still influence it.
One can accept that white privilege exists without interpreting it as a
blanket condemnation of all white people.

~~~
ultrablack
So what is the reason of Germanys success? Or Israels or the UK? Oppression of
black people?

~~~
AstralStorm
Reason for Germany success were the industries built for war with money and
resources taken off others. Combined with reasonable work ethic and being on
the right side of USA - Russia debate. (Which included things like Marshall
Plan.)

For a time, Italy was successful too, but they slipped. Why they slipped I'm
not fully clear on.

Israel got USA support and investment, including military. That's about it.
(You can repeat the same for e.g. South Korea, who are an even bigger success.
For now.)

UK was a success (for a time) based off a huge empire and consequent
innovation needed for war and to adapt for living in weird places, and to look
like they own the world and not like a dark smudge of coal. Big cultural
exports.

And lately it's only holding to its financial industry, boosted by the
position of middleman between EU and US. No idea what will happen to it now.
They cannot be industrial powerhouse anymore to rival China or Germany.

------
refurb
_It’s as if liberal editors reined in radical writers but couldn’t do so
coherently, and lost the plot at times._

This is a great way to describe it. I usually check the NYTimes front page a
few times a week. It’s really gone of the rails.

Headlines have gone from slightly biased journalism, to opinion pieces in
disguise and it looks like every NYT reporter is trying to outdo each other.

I’m not naive enough to believe that any news source is truly unbiased, but
the NYT appears to have given up any attempt to do so now.

~~~
forrestthewoods
NYTimes is no longer the "paper of record". It's dominated by opinion pieces.
Both explicit and implicit.

Go to NYTimes.com and count the links you see "above the fold". On my monitor
there are 7 non-opinion links. But there are 11, yes eleven!, opinion-section
articles.

If you want to read "news" and not "opinions" these days it's impossible.
Because flamebait opinions get all the clicks and generate all the revenue. I
don't blame them for their choices. But I don't respect them either.

:(

~~~
partialrecall
If the NYTs is no longer America's newspaper of record (in fact it was the
first newspaper that term was ever applied to, anywhere), I struggle to think
of what is. The other newspaper commonly cited as a newspaper of record in
America, the Washington Post, seems little better (or worse) than the NYTs.

In any event, I don't think the term was ever used to indicate a lack of
editorial bias. Certainly the NYTs has never qualified if that's the meaning
of the term.

~~~
partialrecall
_[Response to a deleted (but fairly reasonable) comment asserting the NYTs is
no longer the newspaper of record.]_

Was there ever one then? And if not, then what did the term ever mean?

Before you answer, please consider the case of Walter Duranty and the NYTs
covering up Soviet-lead genocide in Ukraine during the 1930s (the Holodomor, a
term many Americans have never heard before.) It wasn't until 1990 that the
NYTs came clean ([https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-
not...](https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-notebook-
trenchcoats-then-and-now.html)), more than half a century too late. Were they
the newspaper of record in the interim period?

~~~
forrestthewoods
I don't know enough about the history of journalism to give a satisfying
answer.

I consider "being the newspaper of record" to be an ideal. It is almost
certain that anyone striving for the ideal will fail at times. Do I think the
NYTimes ideals were lies when they written? No. I believe the organization
tried as a whole. Even if individually or collectively they fell short at
times.

But I don't think that is their ideal at this moment in time. Their new ideal
is one of activism. Which I personally find disappointing.

------
partialrecall
> _" The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means
> that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before
> us. You could say the same thing about the English common law, for example,
> or the use of the English language: no aspect of American life is untouched
> by it. You could say that about the Enlightenment. Or the climate. You could
> say that America’s unique existence as a frontier country bordered by
> lawlessness is felt even today in every mass shooting. You could cite the
> death of countless millions of Native Americans — by violence and disease —
> as something that defines all of us in America today. And in a way it does.
> "_

The way I see it, something as expansive as an entire country is doubtlessly a
hyperdimensional matter. From any particular point of view, you can only
glimpse one projection of that hyperdimensional mass. The projection you see
is factual (insofar as any human perception can be factual) but it's
nevertheless one of _many_ factual projections.

Consider if you were a flatlander looking at a 2d projection of a cylinder.
Depending on your perspective, that cylinder may appear to be a circle, or a
rectangle. Both projections capture factual information about the true form of
the object in question, but two flatlanders with different perspectives could
perceive radically different projections of the same cylinder and could have a
bitter dispute over who was right.

------
Jun8
It's a pity this submission was flagged very quickly. Agree or disagree, the
main idea underlined by the article is something that needs to be very much
discussed in the US. Sadly, platforms for this discussion have decreased
greatly to near nil. It also seems to be too much for HN.

~~~
ergl
It's hard not to flag this article when it brings comments as absurd as
calling the NYT neo-Marxist, the "Fox News of the left" or "far left" to HN.

If there is an interesting idea underlying the linked opinion piece, the
author is making a good job hiding it below cheap rhetoric.

~~~
ikjadoon
Thank you. This inarticulate author goes on a long rant about the critical
importance of word choice and non-sequiturs...

...and then jumps to a ridiculous, unfounded relationship that somehow a piece
about slavery = neo-Marxism. I had to read that sentence three times: "Surely
he meant to elaborate. Surely..."

People with double-agendas always fell on themselves.

------
rhegart
Nytimes is almost Fox News level bad, the comments and bigotry are just hidden
under more complex prose. The non opinion section of the WSJ is the best
source of news. Nytimes is a far left propaganda rag.

~~~
asah
I think NYT tried to remain neutral, and discovered the hard way that in 2019,
there's no middle ground, or rather, the middle ground gets no voice, which is
literally deadly for a media company.

I agree, WSJ seems to have swung back a little. Strange times!

------
lemmsjid
It’s interesting how this article is trying to convince us that the NYT’s
argument that racism has “touched” every aspect of US history should actually
be interpreted as the NYT is asserting that every aspect can solely be viewed
through that lens. I think this type of argumentative magnification and
reduction leads to a lot of overblown inter-partisinal argumentative
malpractice.

------
admiralspoo
In the internet era, opinion "journalism" tailored to certain kool aid
drinking demographics is what is profitable and expedient. It is not that much
different than supporting any advocacy organization with a membership fee and
weekly newsletter.

------
privateSFacct
I came to say what I see other commentators saying.

What sells is the bait, the piece that confirms your thinking rather than
challenges it.

A fair bit of education (see Yale / Harvard etc) is going down this path as
well, especially outside the sciences I think.

We are also getting more articles that never even attempt to explain what the
other viewpoint might be. I just read a super long article, some govt agency
apparently targeting a local dance crew - without detail or context of the
actual targeting of the crew (ie, a regulation calling them out by name?) or
comment from the agency (ie, responding to complaints? Motivated by hate of
dance? Targeting something else entirely).

------
time_is_scary
conservative andrew sullivan writes typical conservative opinion piece that
falls in line with his party's political line

HN treats it like it is some sort of objective, academic study

some commenters even use this opinion piece to complain that the NYT runs
opinion pieces

------
fromthestart
This has been true of most American "journalism" for at least a decade now.
Activist journalism has become so common that editorialization is just taken
as normal - I doubt that the average person even understands the degree to
which news is editorialized. It's next to impossible to find an objective
mainstream source these days - for both left and right leaning media.

Probably related to the modern polarization of the nation, though which is the
chicken and which is the egg is hard to say.

------
antiutopian
"But the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very
specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s
founding and culture, it is the definitive one." Well, the author does know
what liberalism is, but definitely does not know what Marxism is!

Marxism does have a good answer to the original question of the piece: "How
can an enduring “ideal” — like, say, freedom or equality — be “false” at one
point in history and true in another?" \- Marxists argue that ideas can be
progressive at one time, and become reactionary at a later stage of history.
Ideas do not determine history, but are in general a reflection of class
forces. When capitalism was progressive, in the founding days of the country,
the ideas that upheld the system of private ownership were progressive ideas!
The forces these ideas represent helped defeat monarchies and slavery. Today,
advocates of the free market play the opposite role, of holding society back,
because capitalism is in a deep crisis and socialism has become socially and
technologically possible.

~~~
ultrablack
Very strange claims. Citation please?

------
crooked-v
> All that rhetoric about liberty, progress, prosperity, toleration was a
> distraction in order to perpetrate those lies, and make white people feel
> better about themselves.

Well, quite a bit of it, yes. It takes some phenomenal doublethink to set out
'all men are created equal' as a basic principle during a war of independence,
then enshrine slavery in the rule of law when it comes time to write an actual
constitution.

