Can Europe Be Saved?

One will be forgiven for thinking that a Bret Stephens column will enlighten a foreign policy issue. After all, New York Times columnists are an array of mediocrities, so there must be at least one who is worth reading.

But then, it does not take two full Stephens paragraphs to read something that is so stupid that it might have been written by Tommy Friedman.

See if you can catch the glaring error. Or is it a Freudian slip:

Trump’s truculent brand of American nationalism is a terrible idea for many reasons, not least in the encouragement it gives to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to target weaker American allies.

Apparently, Stephens has a short memory. During the Trump administration, what with its truculent nationalism, Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine. He did not conduct a war in Ukraine. 

It’s Biden’s weak-kneed internationalism that incites autocrats like Putin to invade weaker countries. Even I can figure that one out.

While China has been relatively restrained, militarily, it has built up a formidable military force. And let’s not forget that Trump was not president-- Biden was-- when Hamas conducted its October 7 massacre. While Biden has been sucking up to the ayatollahs, these latter are producing every manner of mischief across the Middle East. 

That includes attacks by Iranian proxies against American troops and the efforts of Yemeni Houthis to hamper shipping through the Red Sea. After having removed the Houthis from the terrorist watch list, the Biden crowd has said that it was going to shut them down. As of now, they have not.

True enough, if only Stephens had rewritten his sentence to say that under the weak-kneed Joe Biden bad actors around the world have felt emboldened to attack American allies, he would have been on to something. Then again, he might have been banned from the pages of the New York Times.

If you did not choke on that sentence, Stephens begins his rehabilitation in the very next sentences:

But Trump is also the messenger of a warning Europeans desperately need to heed.

In a nutshell: Shape up.

Did you catch the problem in the last sentence?

In a better world, in a better newspaper and in a better analysis, an editor would have deleted, “Shape up” and replaced it with: “Man up.”

In our current cultural configuration you are certainly not allowed to replace the notion of shapeliness with manliness. And yet, what else was President Trump saying when he was inveighing against our European NATO allies for failing to spend money on their defense?

These countries have squandered resources on social welfare programs and have relied on America to pay for their defense. 

Lest we be too obvious, social welfare programs are motherly and charitable. Defense spending involves competitive striving. But it also involves winners and losers, a concept that the welfare queens of Europe cannot grasp.

Note how well my thesis suits the information that Stephens provides. He begins by pointing out that Europe has become economically stagnant:

In 1960 the E.U. 28 — the 27 countries currently in the European Union, plus Britain — accounted for 36.3 percent of global gross domestic product. By 2020 it had fallen to 22.4 percent. By the end of the century it is projected to fall to just under 10 percent.

Europe does not innovate, perhaps because the capital is being thrown at the poor, or perhaps because it abhors risk. We recognize that one of the two sexes is more risk averse. More empowered women seems to lead to more risk aversion.

Think of any leading-edge industry — artificial intelligence, microchips, software, robotics, genomics — and ask yourself (with a few honorable exceptions), where’s the European Microsoft, Nvidia or OpenAI?

And, of course, as Donald Trump has pointed out-- perhaps not in the most elegant way-- Europe no longer spends money on the military:

When the Cold War ended in 1990, the West German military fielded more than 500,000 troops and spent 2.5 percent of its G.D.P. on defense. As of last year, it was down to 181,000 troops and 1.57 percent. Britain’s Royal Navy, the most powerful in the world at the outset of World War II, can now deploy just 10 submarines and fewer than two dozen major surface warships, some of which are inactive.

In an all-out war, the British would exhaust their defense capabilities in about two months, according to a report to the House of Commons defense committee. The same would likely be true — if not much sooner — for every E.U. member-state apart from Poland, which aims to spend as much as 5 percent of its G.D.P. on defense next year.

European countries are incapable of defending themselves, and do not really care. They have Big Daddy America defending them. 

And, of course, Europe has a migrant problem. It has chosen to open its borders to hordes of Middle Eastern migrants, many of whom have brought crime with them. 

While native Europeans are not reproducing at replacement levels, the Muslim migrants are doing so. And these migrants do not favor European cultural values. They are more likely to become criminal gang members, as has happened in Sweden, than to assimilate:

Under a “medium migration” scenario estimated by Pew, by 2050 Britain will be nearly 17 percent Muslim, France 17.4 percent and Sweden 20.5 percent. Those wondering about the ascendence of far-right European parties, who are heavily favored to sweep this week’s elections in the E.U. Parliament and who are often sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, know this is a factor. And they need to be honest that the values of depressingly notable segments of these Muslim populations are fundamentally at odds with European traditions of moral tolerance and political liberalism.

Stephens bemoans the fact that these new migrants are opposed to political liberalism.

And they need to be honest that the values of depressingly notable segments of these Muslim populations are fundamentally at odds with European traditions of moral tolerance and political liberalism.

How forceful are European leaders willing to be in insisting that their values — including freedom of speech, women’s rights and gay rights — must be protected against the illiberal instincts of a growing share of their voters?

When he wrote those lines Stephens must have been having a bad hair day. He should understand that the migrant population does not want to assimilate. It does not want to buy into a culture that promotes gay rights and that places women in charge of their armies.

I suspect that the armies of Islam see these signs of cultural decadence and concludes that Europe is ripe for a takeover, by Islam. 

In a culture that is being girlified, what happens to manliness? Good question. As I have sometimes noted, it turns into a negative caricature of itself. When men are incapable of protecting and providing for women and children, a new form of manliness takes root. Some call it machismo. It lacks gentility and a sense of purpose. It makes conspicuous shows of faux masculinity by committing crime and by visiting abuse on non-men.

And besides, Stephens notwithstanding, there is no requirement that citizens of the West buy every piece of liberal democracy. You need not be a feminist to be a good American. You do need to speak the language, to respect the constitution and to conduct yourself with decorum and propriety. You have a right to believe whatever you want to believe.

Obviously, Donald Trump has seen a Europe mired in decadence and unwilling to admit its decline. For which writers like Stephens, after analyzing said failings, blame Donald Trump:

Trump’s ideas about NATO, his zero-sum attitudes about winning, his fondness for strongmen and his ignorance of and indifference to history are all, rightly, causes for European alarm. But people, and nations, succeed or fail to the extent that they refuse to hand over responsibility for their fates to others.

Columnists succeed or fail, not just by collecting information, but by being willing to analyze situations outside of their ideological comfort zone.

If you take the Stephens analysis as worthwhile, you would need also to assume that Donald Trump has seen the same facts and has offered a cogent solution. He has done so boisterously and aggressively, but the weak and ineffectual Europeans might not have been able to hear anything else.

Does Europe need another D Day, another invasion by the armies of the Anglosphere in order to grow a spine and to reject not only the internal decadence but also the reactionary fascism? 

I am sorry to say, on this anniversary of D Day, that Bret Stephens, a writer who is often intelligent and illuminating, managed to live up to his initials.

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Book Banning

One cannot but agree with Pamela Paul. Writing in the New York Times, columnist Paul takes out after those leftists who have gotten into the habit of banning books. It’s the latest in book burning-- preventing books from being published in the first place. If they are published, leftist scolds mount campaigns to deplatform authors, to assure that their books are not discussed or reviewed.

So, it’s a major totalitarian moment in American history. Paul is correct to call out its practitioners, but she does not ask whether the New York Times, her home base, is part of the problem or part of the solution.

As it happens the Times did cover the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential campaign. They dismissed it as so much disinformation. One does not recall their denouncing Twitter for canceling, not just the story, but the New York Post during said campaign. And one does not recall the Times denouncing the new disinformation standard that seems to have infected leftist media of late.

Be that as it may, Paul is calling out the book publishing industry for having caved into threats and intimidation coming largely from the political left.

The American publishing industry has long prided itself on publishing ideas and narratives that are worthy of our engagement, even if some people might consider them unsavory or dangerous, and for standing its ground on freedom of expression.

Whether about James Joyce’s Ulysses or D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover, the publishing industry has a long and proud history of standing tall and proud against censorship. 

That was yesterday. Today is today. As Paul says, publishing industry executives have found a new way to burn books. That is, by not publishing anything that might offend any leftist interest groups:

But that ground is getting shaky. Though the publishing industry would never condone book banning, a subtler form of repression is taking place in the literary world, restricting intellectual and artistic expression from behind closed doors, and often defending these restrictions with thoughtful-sounding rationales. As many top editors and publishing executives admit off the record, a real strain of self-censorship has emerged that many otherwise liberal-minded editors, agents and authors feel compelled to take part in.

Naturally, in the interest of being fair and balanced Paul remarks that some rightist political leaders have also promoted book banning. She does not, however, make the most elementary distinction, namely that while leftists want to ensure that books do not utter anything that contradicts their fanatical beliefs, rightists are more likely to want to limit the books that are taught to children at certain ages. Not publishing a book about transgenderism because the transgender lobby is on a massive campaign of mind control is not the same as saying that books containing pornographic images should not be taught to five year olds. 

Over the course of his long career, John Sargent, who was chief executive of Macmillan until last year and is widely respected in the industry for his staunch defense of freedom of expression, witnessed the growing forces of censorship — outside the industry, with overt book-banning efforts on the political right, but also within the industry, through self-censorship and fear of public outcry from those on the far left.

Generally speaking, publishers are more responsive to the radical left, so they have been known to ban books on ideological grounds. One must note that the young staffers at publishing houses are products of America's miseducation factories. They know very little and cannot bear to have to engage in debate:

In the face of those pressures, publishers have adopted a defensive crouch, taking pre-emptive measures to avoid controversy and criticism. Now, many books the left might object to never make it to bookshelves because a softer form of banishment happens earlier in the publishing process: scuttling a project for ideological reasons before a deal is signed, or defusing or eliminating “sensitive” material in the course of editing.

It is less about supposedly dangerous ideas than about offending the sensibility of someone who believes that his beliefs trump reality:

Though it has long been a practice to lawyer many books, sensitivity readers take matters to another level, weeding out anything that might potentially offend.

After publishers, the next line of offense in this totalitarian effort to control the American mind lies in what Paul calls the other gatekeepers of the book world. They do their best to consign a published book to critical oblivion. Among the books in question Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage, a report about transgenderism and the rage to mutilate children. 

Even when a potentially controversial book does find its way into print, other gatekeepers in the book world — the literary press, librarians, independent bookstores — may not review, acquire or sell it, limiting the book’s ability to succeed in the marketplace. Last year, when the American Booksellers Association included Abigail Shrier’s book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” in a mailing to member booksellers, a number of booksellers publicly castigated the group for promoting a book they considered transphobic. The association issued a lengthy apology and subsequently promised to revise its practices. The group’s board then backed away from its traditional support of free expression, emphasizing the importance of avoiding “harmful speech.”

As it happened, Shrier’s book received a staunch defense from people like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. This means that some people have been willing to stand up to the mob, to defend books that the mob hates. Somehow or other Paul forgot to mention those who have been defending free expression.

But Paul does emphasize that the urge to ban books is now mostly coming from the left.

A recent overview in Publishers Weekly about the state of free expression in the industry noted, “Many longtime book people have said what makes the present unprecedented is a new impetus to censor — and self-censor — coming from the left.”

And, of course, certain subjects have become strictly forbidden, on the grounds that you need to have suffering the right kind of oppression to discuss oppression.

In another instance, a white academic was denounced for cultural appropriation because trap feminism, the subject of her book “Bad and Boujee,” lay outside her own racial experience. The publisher subsequently withdrew the book. PEN America rightfully denounced the publisher’s decision, noting that it “detracts from public discourse and feeds into a climate where authors, editors and publishers are disincentivized to take risks.”

Paul does mention that some people on the right have tried to ban some books-- from school libraries. This is fair, even though no one on the right is saying that certain books not be published.

An added challenge is that all of this is happening against the backdrop of a recent spate of shameful book bans that comes largely from the right. According to the American Library Association, of the hundreds of attempts to remove books from schools and libraries in 2021, a vast majority were made in response to content related to race and sex — red meat for red states, with Texas and Florida ranking high among those determined to quash artistic freedom and limit reader access. Republican politicians, for so long forces of intolerance, are now deep in the book-banning business.

Limiting children’s access to inappropriate material is not the same as preventing books from being published at all.

Paul concludes that the left has no business any more denouncing the right for not wanting certain books in school curricula. Given that the radical left is leading the charge against books it finds disagreeable, it has no standing to attack the right:

For those on the illiberal left to conduct their own campaigns of censorship while bemoaning the book-burning impulses of the right is to violate the core tenets of liberalism. We’re better than this.

When Liberalism Becomes Illiberal

Two days ago I essayed to discuss Anne Applebaum’s Atlantic essay about the rising tide of radical leftism. The idiot theories of the radical left-- now called, for reasons that escape me, progressive-- have invaded social media and the educational establishment. Leftists have taken to indoctrinate children and just about everyone else in the theoretical blather that constitutes this warmed-over Marxism.

Now, The Economist has weighed in on the subject. Being a superbly serious magazine, it offers a superbly serious discussion of the topic. We note, however, that it commits the same absurd error that Applebaum commits, blaming the rise of academic and media illiberalism on Donald Trump. They should have paid more attention to some remarks by John McWhorter, to the effect that the radical right does not control either the media or the educational establishment or the legal profession or the bureaucracy. Blaming it on Trump makes you look unfair and unbalanced.

One notes also, with some chagrin, that these champions of liberalism seem to believe that liberalism, which used to be the province of the Democratic Party, is the only alternative to illiberalism. Whatever happened to conservative thinking in this intellectual morass? Liberalism promotes freedom, whether in free markets or in free expression. And yet, conservatives also champion freedom, only they distinguish free markets from a free for all. They believe that people should be free to play by the rules but not free to break the rules.

Failing to distinguish between these two freedoms turns the debate into an intellectual hash. Worse yet, conservatism promotes values that would make society cohere, while radical liberalism promotes a form of individuality that causes society to fragment. 

Anyway, the Economist presents its own definition of liberalism and its triumph in the West. 

SOMETHING HAS gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government. Yet a resurgent China sneers at liberalism for being selfish, decadent and unstable. At home, populists on the right and left rage at liberalism for its supposed elitism and privilege.

Today’s liberalism does not accept anything resembling human behavioral norms. It does not respect custom or norms or standards. In that way, it is more radical than liberal, but it is surely not conservative.

As noted, the magazine takes a mindless swipe at Trump. It’s a good reason not to subscribe:

The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.

Not a word about the liberal left that refused to accept Trump as a legitimate president and that spent four years trying to make it impossible for him to govern. Respect for tradition, for democratic decorum would have told Trump to stop contesting the 2020 election, but the left laid down the predicates during the Trump administration. 

Now, the American left, for failing to respect political norms, has become radicalized. It has been given control over the media and public education. It is flexing its muscles:

The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left. We describe this week how a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.

Clearly, the important point lies in the fact that a cohort of young people, chosen not for merit but for diversity, has come to inhabit the halls of media and pedagogical power. They reject the old standards, the ones that involved merit and achievement, because they never would have been credentialed under those standards. They feel like imposters because they did not earn their way. And they are horrified at the simple fact that most people are in on the con. So, the effort to force the public to grant them even more power and authority lies in their knowledge that they were promoted for reasons that had nothing to do with their achievement.

They do not believe in competition, because they would never have succeeded in fair competition, not in business, not in the professions and not in the media or the academy. At the least, their shrieking about diversity, Shelby Steele has been arguing for decades, makes it appear that they did not earn their way:

Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competition—by, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers. Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “equity”—the outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.

Case in point, the feeble minded professor named Ibram X. Kendi.

The Economist continues:

Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course. The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.

True enough, some of today’s liberals do champion free speech. We have made a point of presenting their views on this blog. But, those who could never compete in debate must consider that the debating process is rigged:

Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary. That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice. It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.

Then the magazine raises the issue of why classical liberalism is struggling around the world. It’s answers are less than satisfying. I will pass on their thoughts and point out that free markets today are being hobbled by activists, by bureaucrats, by regulators and by lawyers. Worse yet, free competition has become a relic in Silicon Valley, where tech oligarch have increasingly shut down debate and discussion, and have assumed monopoly control over products that more and more people are seeing as addictive substances.

In truth, the West is barely competitive in the free market these days. What showed it more clearly than our failure in Afghanistan. While we sent planeloads of feminist scholars to that country to teach its women the sexism behind urinals-- no kidding-- other countries were offering economic development.

If we no longer believe in capitalism, the world is going to look to those who do. If we allow our children to be addicted to videogames, the world is going to look to countries that exercise more authoritarian control over these mental opioids. If we insist that it doesn’t matter whether our military can win or lose, but that it is co-ed, the world will look to countries that have not bought into the radical nonsense.

Fighting Back against CRT, BLM and BLT

The nation is abuzz with talk about critical race theory. To be fair, it is Marxism for Dummies. It is not critical, because it never brooks any criticism of its own mindless musings. It makes race the only factor that has ever counted in America.  And it is not a theory, because it is too incoherent to have any theoretical heft.

Since it would never stand up to any scrutiny, it is imposed on children. In school they are being force fed CRT, because its practitioners cannot discuss or debate. Witness imbecile Ibram X. Kendi, whose works are now recommended for the United States Navy.

As for its provenance, a Marxist theory that divides the world into black and white-- easy to understand for the feeble minded-- and that sees blacks as the vanguard of a necessary revolution against the white capitalist order-- where have we heard that before?

In truth, it bears an uncanny resemblance to Black Liberation Theology, an offshoot of South American Liberation Theology, an unholy amalgam of Marxism and Catholicism, designed to overthrow the white Anglo-Saxon cultures that built North America and that made America and Canada far more prosperous than their Southern neighbors.

For the record, among America’s leading promoters of BLT is one Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Since America put Wright’s protege in the White House, BLT and BLM are basically the Obama legacy. 

BLM and BLT are the revolt of underachievers against overachievers. Where have we heard that before? Doesn't it bear an uncanny resemblance to the BHO notion that: you didn't build that.

These movements foment violence against whites, Asians and Jews-- and then blame it on white people. They happily excuse the underachievement of people of color and absolve them of all sins. For looting and pillaging through Manhattan, BLM supporters have been excused. That is, they will not be prosecuted.

Sadly, like the BLT promoted by Jeremiah Wright, these movements do not merely promote race hatred against America, against its symbols, against its founders, against its heroes. They tell the country that blacks are not loyal and patriotic, and thus are best not trusted. Obviously, this stokes antagonism and makes the goal of racial integration recede into the mist.

So, as Andrew Sullivan points out, (via Maggie's Farm) CRT is designed to brainwash children, to detach them from their roots in a great country and to infuse them with guilt. No one among the band of idiots promoting this theory has figured out that this will make children resentful and antagonistic:

The goal of education of children this young is to cement the notion at the most formative age that America is at its core an oppressive racist system uniquely designed to exploit, harm, abuse, and even kill the non-white. This can be conveyed in easy terms, by training kids to see themselves first and foremost as racial avatars, and by inculcating in them a sense of their destiny as members of the oppressed or oppressor classes in the zero-sum struggle for power that is American society in 2021.

Don’t work to achieve, because people of color have not gained as much success as Asians. Dare we say that the goal is therapeutic-- if you win others will feel bad about losing, so we must ban winning.

Worse yet, CRT proponents do not know how to think. They are trying to dumb the country down to their level:

For these reasons, CRT insists that what we have always understood as liberal education is, in fact, a lie, because liberalism assumes that we are all individuals, capable of reasoning with each other as equals, where, in fact, we are mere representatives of racial constructs which are part of a permanent struggle between the oppressors (white) and oppressed (non-white).

Sullivan identifies it as the liberal tradition, the tradition that fostered open debate and discussion. Since this tradition has now been identified as an instrument of white supremacy, it must also be overthrown. People who can’t think straight want to ban straight thought.

It is almost too stupid to consider, and would be ignored, were it not for the fact that it has invaded corporate America, the military and the school system.

The question is: what can a liberal society do when almost all of its educational, media, business and cultural elites have adopted an ideology that believes that liberal society needs to be dismantled? And the answer is: not much. Liberalism assumes that bad and noxious ideas will eventually be driven out by better ones. Banning illiberal ideologies like CRT makes us indistinguishable from the woke — who would ban any speech they didn’t like if they could get rid of the First Amendment (just look at what “liberals” are doing in Canada or Britain, for example, where they lock people up for resisting this ideology). Replacing CRT with crude, jingoistic versions of history or society is no answer either.

Sullivan believes that we should counter CRT with rational arguments. We are in sympathy with this approach. And yet, how do you argue rationally with people who disparage rational arguments. Better yet, who do not know how to argue rationally. And how do you present rational counterarguments when social media will ban you for disputing the current dogma?

It’s not just a culture war gambit. It’s a deep defense of our liberal inheritance. Once a generation grows up believing that there is no such thing as reason — just “white thinking” and “black thinking”; once it grows up believing that free speech is a device for oppression not liberation; once it sees our founding documents as cynical lies to perpetuate slavery and “white supremacy”; once it believes that no progress has ever been made in race relations, because the “systems” sustain unaltered “white supremacy” for ever, then we have detonated the foundations of a free society.

It is easy to give up. When all the major cultural powers in America — almost all media, every major corporation, every university, every industry, and, under Biden, the entire federal government — have succumbed to an ideology deeply hostile to Western civilization, and uses brutal tactics of smearing and firing and ostracizing to enforce its will, you can end up in despair.

But then, sad to have to say it, when your children are being brainwashed in school by people who are forcing them to think a certain way, you might also get angry. You might decide that you need to speak them in a language that the CRT crowd understands-- that being force.

Amazingly, the majority of the people in this country do not support CRT. And yet, the majority of people in this country did support BHO-- and most of them still love him. 

Sullivan seems overly optimistic if he thinks that America will overcome CRT with rational arguments. For the moment, we allow him his say:

But it’s important to remember: many of those people don’t really believe in this stuff; they’re just too frightened by a ruthless but tiny minority to do anything about it. And the American people as a whole do not buy this. A new YouGov poll found that Americans oppose CRT by a 58 - 38 percent margin, with a whopping 53 percent having a “very unfavorable” view of it. Yes, this is skewed because the subject has become ubiquitous on Fox News, and the MSM is doing all it can to downplay, dismiss or dissemble on the issue. But a full and wider campaign exposing it, protesting it, and defending liberal education will, I predict, win big majorities.

Clash of the Media Titans

The New York Times is having problems. It’s former executive editor Jill Abramson called out the paper for biased reporting on the Trump administration. Of course, we can dismiss Abramson’s opinion as that of a disgruntled fired employee. But, what to make of Ted Koppel’s similar critique, namely that the Times slants news coverage to make the Trump administration look bad?

The Times used to rule the journalistic roost. It used to be the international paper of record, the Bible of journalism. Naturally, the arrival of the internet has damaged the Times advertising base, causing the paper to need a bailout from a Mexican billionaire. And still, the mainstream media, led by the Times, and followed by major media outlets, even by CNN and MSNBC, still has the largest aggregate audience. In truth, many other media outlets take their cues from the Times.

One should add that New Corps’ Wall Street Journal is the most important newspaper to people in the know, but still, the Times has traditionally had more influence on the media at large.

So, when the Times runs a major hit piece on Rupert Murdoch and his media empire, we take notice. Since Murdoch has, by the accounting of Jeffrey Lord, eaten the Times’s lunch, it is not wrong to consider that the Times is fighting back by slandering and defaming its major competitor. All’s fair, if not in love and war, at least in journalism.

One notes that if you compare Fox News with the New York Times, the former makes far more profit than the latter. Fox News is a cash cow. The New York Times—at least until Donald Trump bailed it out—is on food stamps.

So, the Times wants to blame Murdoch for the failure of liberal democracy. Why not, you ask. The hit piece explains:

The right-wing populist wave that looked like a fleeting cultural phenomenon a few years ago has turned into the defining political movement of the times, disrupting the world order of the last half-century. The Murdoch empire did not cause this wave. But more than any single media company, it enabled it, promoted it and profited from it. Across the English-speaking world, the family’s outlets have helped elevate marginal demagogues, mainstream ethnonationalism and politicize the very notion of truth.  The results have been striking. It may not have been the family’s mission to destabilize democracies around the world, but that has been its most consequential legacy.

This paragraph contains so many inaccuracies that it is impossible to deal with all of them. If liberal democracy has been declining around the world, the influence of the illiberal Chinese regime is the first reason. The second reason is that when nations around the world look at American liberal democracy, they see judges and activists imposing crackpot ideas on the populace, like the transgender follies. They see a nation that cannot control its own borders and that is being invaded by peoples who will undermine it from within. They see activists judges tamping down innovation. They see the same foolish policies in Western Europe. They see an inability to confront Islamist terrorism… we could go on.

To blame it on Rupert Murdoch is the kind of typical demonization that has persuaded countries around the world, especially those that have already undergone their own cultural revolutions, that they do not want to buy what America is selling.

Lord concludes that Murdoch has supplanted the Sulzberger family. He has more influence on world affairs and is making a whole lot more money:

Long before the dawn of cable news, and long before Rupert Murdoch arrived in America to expand his Australian newspaper empire, The New York Times and the Sulzberger family that owned it ruled the media roost.

And now - they don’t. Because of Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper and television genius, the Sulzberger influence on the world and in America has been overshadowed by Murdoch's News Corporation and Fox News.

The America where attention was paid to Times columnists and their dominating left-wing world view has vanished - replaced by massive audiences listening in prime time these days to Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Breakfast is not about reading The Times - it’s about tuning in to Fox & Friends.

The Times hit job on the Murdochs and Fox News is furious that the President of the United States - on whom they spent volumes of print and cyber-ink insisting he would never win-calls not them but Rupert Murdoch and - oh the horror!!!! - Sean Hannity.

In short, what this voluminous Times hit piece is really all about is a primal scream of anger, rage and envy that its once-upon-a-time “Kingdom and Power” of liberalism is gone - and gone for good. The paper no longer gets to define what is “truth”, and it most assuredly is no longer “the bible.”

Whatever else lies ahead for the Murdochs and Fox News, it is very safe to say that this spittle-flecked Times hit job is in reality nothing more than a testament to just how effectively The Times monopoly and that of the larger Leftist State Media has been eviscerated- once and for all.

So, the Times can no longer compete in the matter of journalism. The internet has given people access to a far wider journalistic field. The wider the field, the more information available, the more difficult it is for the Times to keep peddling its slanted journalism.

True enough, the mainstream media still holds sway. Murdoch has merely provided a counterbalance. He has broken the monopoly control that the Times had on journalism. He was not alone. But, he took advantage of opportunities that the Times did not know how to monetize. The true story is that Donald Trump did save the Times from financial oblivion. 

Apparently, the business model of the Times has reduced the paper to tabloid journalism. It now keeps feeding its readers the negative stories that they seem to want. Unfortunately, being brought up on New York Times stories means not knowing how to think rationally.

What Became of American Liberalism?

American liberalism is no longer very liberal. It does not promote basic freedoms, like the freedom to lecture on a college campus. And it does not, Shelby Steele explains, have an economic agenda that might help America’s less fortunate to improve their lives. It has, in Steele's words, exhausted itself. It has no agenda beyond moral posturing.

American liberalism has become infested with what is now called virtue signaling. People join the cause because it appears to offer them a moral identity, moral legitimacy. Steel argues that they really want to shield themselves from the shame of being labeled a bigot.

One likes to think that Steele is right to say that this brand of illiberal liberalism has exhausted itself, that it is a shell of its former glory. It was sufficiently powerful to con people into voting for Barack Obama, but could not elect Hillary Clinton.

One reason, Steele suggests. is that today’s so-called liberals do not respect themselves. It’s the price of virtue signaling. They believe that they are so virtuous and that their cause is so just and their enemies so evil that they can do anything they want to advance it. Living in a cosmic narrative, a battle between absolute good and absolute evil... anything goes.

Steele compares the recent political protest against the Trump presidency to the early civil rights protests. He emphasizes the fact that those who marched in the 1950s and 1960s respected themselves.

In his words:

Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.

Sad to say it, but wearing a pussy hat is not a sign of self-respect. Resorting to acts of violence against bearers of unpopular ideas does not bespeak true liberalism.

The Vietnam War ushered in an era of American guilt. The guilt covered up the shame of a failed war. I made this version of the argument myself over two decades ago in my book, Saving Face: America and the Politics of Shame.

It took time for the failure of Vietnam to coalesce around white guilt. Of course, liberals wanted to blame white males, especially white conservative males. The military was a male institution and it was largely, even in the time of Vietnam, a white institution.

Since the policy had been initiated by John Kennedy and had been pursued by Kennedy’s vice president and his cabinet, it was necessary to shift the blame on to anyone but the elite guardian class called the best and the brightest. The dirty secret about Vietnam is that it was initiated and conducted by liberals. The Kennedy-Johnson administration escalated it. The Nixon administration de-escalated it. Most left-thinking young people at the time did everything in their power to avoid the fight.

Liberalism offered a new moral identity. To many it seemed preferable to identifying as an American. Why identify with the losing team when you can join those who occupy the moral high ground. Why identify with a losing fight when you can engage in a new fight for America’s hearts and minds.

In Steele’s words:

This liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity. It offered Americans moral esteem against the specter of American shame. This made for a liberalism devoted to the idea of American shamefulness. Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.

Rather than fight a foreign war against a real enemy, American liberals chose to fight a domestic war against prejudice. They were saying that they were too good and too virtuous to fight a war. They were: “too proud to fight.” They did not win any territory, but they did occupy the moral high ground. They insisted that their moral authority was more valid than the political or military or business authority of those who were in the real world building and producing.

Steele notes well that with guilt brings along a narrative. We are, as I have often noted, still living within this narrative:

America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.

Guilt for having transgressed followed by penance leads to more sins. We become mired in the narrative because it does not show us any way out.

America was not merely stigmatized as racist. People accepted the guilt of racism because it was better than thinking of themselves as losers, as having lost a war to the Vietcong and the Vietminh. They could proclaim their moral authority to be a higher authority, one that shows the way to Heaven and thus can be used to produce the Heavenly City on earth:

When America became stigmatized in the ’60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else. Subsequently the American left reconstituted itself as the keeper of America’s moral legitimacy. 

The effort to reconstitute the nation as a kingdom of justice—following the template laid down by a John Rawls— evaded all of the real problems that minority communities face. Remove all of the world’s bigotry and you can engage in endless moral preening, but you have still not created any wealth or any new jobs.

Steele explains:

Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now face. I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.

The lives of minority Americans are being sacrificed to the gods of multiculturalism. Liberalism has failed its constituency because it does not have an agenda for economic and social progress. Strike out against bigotry... is not an agenda.

In Steele’s words:

 But American liberalism never acknowledged that it was about white esteem rather than minority accomplishment. Four thousand shootings in Chicago last year, and the mayor announces that his will be a sanctuary city. This is moral esteem over reality; the self-congratulation of idealism. 

Out-of-control crime in a sanctuary city—it produces self-congratulatory moral posturing but does nothing for minority lives.