New York Times opinion section comes undone ahead of the 2020 election
Unhinged.
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And you thought the New York Times’s news division had problems.
The paper’s opinion section on Friday published a collection of essays titled, “What have we lost?”
Featuring all 15 New York Times opinion columnists, the collaboration asserts that its aim is to explain “what the past four years have cost America, and what’s at stake in this election.” However, rather than explore seriously and realistically the short- and long-term consequences of the Trump presidency, the project comes across more like a collective nervous breakdown, full of self-absorbed handwringing and wild-eyed proclamations about the future of the republic.
“Persuasion,” argues New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
“The conundrum for those of us trying to change minds is that the more urgently we shout, the less we’re heard,” he writes. “The challenge for opponents of Trump like myself is that our denunciations of the president sometimes backfire and help him.”
“Innocence,” says Frank Bruni.
“I’d seen us err,” he opines. “I’d watched us stray. Still I didn’t think that enough of us would indulge a would-be leader as proudly hateful, patently fraudulent and flamboyantly dishonest as Donald Trump.”
He adds, “We had episodes of ugliness, but this? No way. We were better than Trump. Except, it turned out, we weren’t.”
“Our word,” adds Roger Cohen.
“The Oval Office was once the focal point of the respect the United States commanded around the world; no longer,” he writes. “It has become impossible for democracies today to believe it is in their national interest to take Trump’s America seriously.”
There are additional supposed losses, including “naiveté, “generosity,” “a female president,” “pride,” and “apathy,” but you obviously get the point.
What shameful caterwauling. If ever there was a pure example of the obscene privilege of the elite, this appallingly self-indulgent collaboration by the New York Times is surely it.
Kristof, Bruni, and Cohen have a combined 181 years among them on this planet. That is to say nothing of the other columnists who participated in the New York Times project, including Gail Collins, 74, and Maureen Dowd, 68.
They lived through Abscam, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Waco massacre, Bill Clinton perjuring himself, the launch of the Forever Wars, the federal government’s culpability in the financial crisis, the Veterans Affairs scandal, the NSA spying scandal, and the extrajudicial droning of American citizens.
But it was not until this administration that the U.S. lost its “innocence,” its “persuasion,” its “pride,” and its standing as a democratic world power?
After all the suffering America has endured, it is the height of privilege to say this country is now irreversibly tarnished because an offensive, impulsive man is president. It is the height of privilege to know what we know about U.S. history and assert nevertheless that the past four years have been uniquely dark and damaging. Imagine being old enough to have lived through the assassinations of the Kennedys and leaders of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the Nixon presidency, the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention, and so on and actually suggest that the Trump administration is this lowest point in this country’s history. Imagine knowing even a little about chattel slavery, the American Civil War, the Indian Removal Act, and the illegal bombing campaign in Cambodia, and still assert, with a straight face, that America’s “innocence,” “apathy,” and “generosity” were not lost until Hillary Clinton blew a winnable election.
America has scars — even has gaping wounds. The greatness of this country is that it has the power and will to come back from these injuries; to make itself even better than before.
To believe that the 2016 election plunged America into unprecedented ugliness unlike anything this country has ever seen requires either a great deal of ignorance or severe delusion. Possibly both. It is absurd also to suggest that the Trump era, which is certainly not this country’s darkest, has irrevocably broken America.
This New York Times project looks more like a psychotic break than the pooled wisdom of professional columnists whose shared experiences span generations. Indeed, watching the paper’s opinion section perform in this manner ahead of the 2020 election is a lot like watching the reaction of a spoiled child being told “no” for the first time.
And that really gets to the heart of President Trump’s 2016 victory and the subsequent multi-year therapy session that has been taking place in the pages of the country’s most powerful newspapers. Trump’s victory was not just a political win. It was a repudiation of an entire worldview, the rejection of routine, tradition, and so-called expertise. People such as Kristof and Dowd have been trying ever since to cope as best they can.
The ahistorical lamentations featured in the New York Times’s “What have we lost?” project are neither insightful nor even particularly original. They are just the latest notes in a long, unbroken wail that began in November 2016.
What's been lost? Only the left's self-awareness, sense of perspective and proportion, and ability to grasp that not everyone agrees with them. They spent four years trying to crash an administration, but the problem is Orange McBadman. Uh huh.
Tremendous!