Im-Politic: Can Trumpism Without Trump Really Be a Thing?

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CCP Virus, conservatives, coronavirus, COVID 19, election 2024, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Mike Pence, Populism, Republicans, Ross Douthat, The New York Times, Tom Cotton, Trump, Wuhan virus

I might have gotten a little ahead of myself when a recent post speculated (optimistically) about the future of Trump-ism without Donald Trump. It’s not that I was wrong that nationalist populism will continue dominating the Republican Party instead of its decades-long belief in globalism, minimal government, and minimal taxes as economic cure-alls in particular. At least not yet.

Instead, reportedly, anyway, there’s a real chance that President Trump won’t pass from the scene if he does lose the White House. There’s even chatter that he might even run again in 2024! Given Mr. Trump’s personality, it’s clear I shouldn’t have overlooked his love of the spotlight. But as a recent column by The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat reminded me, there are solid reasons for viewing the President’s leadership as crucial to the future of the distinctive approach to foreign and domestic policy that he’s spearheaded.

I had written that TrumpWorld shouldn’t find it overly difficult to find a nationally competitive candidate (or candidates) who strongly supports the essentials of Trumpism yet possess the personal discipline to avoid the wild excesses that clearly wounded the President – perhaps mortally – throughout his term in office.

But Douthat noted how central Mr. Trump’s bluster and bombast have been to both creating his base and, just as important in electoral terms, turning them out. And lest we forget amid all the uncertainties about who will take the Oath of Office in January, the Trump vote this month was bigger in absolute terms than in 2016.

It’s still reasonable to argue that, given the advantages of incumbency, Mr. Trump’s style cost him more backing than it maintained or reenforced. But it’s just as reasonable to contend that the President was done in by a literal bolt from the blue — the CCP Virus. Or was a critical mass of voters ultimately convinced that, however much they liked or tolerated Trump-ian excesses during normal times, he was the wrong leader for a pandemic – and for similar future emergencies that couldn’t be ruled out?

If the President stays in the political arena, the big question facing him, supporters and sympathizers, and the nation, will be what, if any, lessons he learns from these last election results. So far, his claims that he actually won reelection indicate that the answer so far is “None.” And in terms of actual results, if he winds up triumphant, or if he loses and his successor’s term isn’t overall a major success, he could be proven right.

But to me, the safest bet for the time being is that the President’s election challenges will fail, that the reasons for his defeat will remain murky, and that the Biden administration’s first term record will fall in the middle ground between unalloyed triumph and unmitigated disaster.

As a result, the best strategy for Trumpers going forward would seem to be to try creating the best of all possible worlds – to find a leader, or leaders, able to thread the needle between Trumpian boisterousness and satisfactory levels of self-control.

The less successful the Biden administration is, the more of the former will be acceptable, and vice versa. But even so, looking at the landscape, it’s tough to identify prominent Republican politicians who can play to in-person and electronic crowds like the President. Conservative populists like Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio seem to check the main issues and the Responsible Adult boxes. So does Vice President Mike Pence. (Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton checks some of these boxes, but his approach to foreign policy has been highly interventionist, and he’s said little of note about using government more to help struggling families or nurture vital but still early-stage industries and technologies.)

But even though Pence was a long-time radio talk show host, I’ve seen no evidence that any of these figures can light up an audience like the President. Optimists can note that Hawley et al aren’t exactly household names, and therefore still have opportunities to create national brands. Pessimists can note that, although they’re all veterans of national politics (except relative newcomer Hawley)…they’re not exactly household names. Maybe that means that they simply lack the “Happy Warrior” gene to begin with?

So leaving aside the Biden factor, the ability of conservative populists to win nationally without Mr. Trump could indeed well hinge in part on whether and to what extent any conservative populists can replicate charisma comparable to the President’s. In particular, can they create or summon up an inner Regular Guy, or project some other persona that’s similarly effective and engaging?

Alternatively, the President could buck the odds and display some kind of a learning curve. The wide gap separating his performances during the first and last presidential debates this fall indicates that’s not out of the question. Much more certain – all parties concerned could benefit from some vigorous competition.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! A New Correction Coming from The New York Times?

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cancel culture, editing, fact check, Glad I Didn't Say That!, journalism, op-ed page, peaceful protests, Portland, protests, The New York Times, Tom Cotton

“[T]he published [op-ed] piece [by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton] presents as facts assertions about the role of ‘cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa in infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes’; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of thoseassertions, or removed them from the piece.”

– The New York Times, June 5, 2020

“Antifa, which stands for anti-fascist, is a radical, leaderless leftist

political movement that uses armed, violent protest as a method to

create what supporters say is a more just and equitable country.

They have a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest, including the

current protests in Portland.”

– The New York Times, August 7, 2020

(Sources: “Editor’s Note,” The New York Times, June 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html and “Abolish the Police? Those Who Survived the Chaos in Seattle Aren’t So Sure,” by Nellie Bowles, The New York Times, August 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/us/defund-police-seattle-protests.html . Thanks to “CTIronman.”)

 

Im-Politic: How The New York Times Op-Ed Page Really Blew It on Tom Cotton

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fact-checking, free speech, freedom of speech, globalization, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, MSM, op-ed page, opinion journalism, Paul M. Krugman, protests, Tom Cotton, Trade

Although pretty much everyone who’s thought about it agrees that The New York Times op-ed page has thoroughly bungled its handling of an article it recently published by Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, disagreement is rife over what the blunder was.

Because I’ve written several times for The Times‘ Op-Ed page and others, I’ve got two thoughts that I believe can usefully add to the mix. But first, it’s important to note that even The Times as a company can’t seem to agree on what went wrong.

At various times, various staffers in various of its departments (including ownership) have claimed that Cotton’s main argument (that President Trump should call in the U.S. military to restore order in cities where it’s broken down and/or where state and local authorities can’t or won’t respond inadequately)

>should never have run because it fell outside the bounds of responsible opinion;

>that it might constitute responsible opinion but that its publication at a time of major national tumult – and especially race-tinged tumult – was inappropriate, and even heightened dangers to Times and other reporters covering the George Floyd protests, and to African-American reporters in particular;

>that however controversial, the argument wasn’t out of bounds, but that the article wasn’t satisfactorily fact-checked;

>that it was indeed fact-checked as per usual; and

>that Cotton’s and other allegedly out of bounds views should be presented in the paper, but in hard news articles (where adequate context, scrutiny, and counter-arguments could be provided), rather than on the op-ed page (where regardless of whether it was fact-checked or not, publication per se created an aura of approval or legitimacy or prestige that was unwarranted. Here’s a good summary from The Times’ main national competitor, the Washington Post.

Moreover, if you’re not already confused enough, how about these two positions stated by the newspaper’s ownership – the first by publisher A.G. Sulzberger (presented in the above linked Post piece):

>“I believe in the principle of openness to a range of opinions, even those we may disagree with, and this piece was published in that spirit” and

and the second by his spokesperson:

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication. This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes, to include expanding our fact checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

At least these statements weren’t made on the same day.

And to top it all off, the article hasn’t been retracted or yanked from The Times‘ website.

Now for my two observations. The first involves the fact-checking issue.

As mentioned above, I’ve written frequently for The Times and other op-ed pages. And I can tell you from personal experience that fact-checking for outside contributors is spotty at best. I’ve been asked to provide cites for the specific data that my articles typically contain. But I have no reason to believe that anyone on the paper has looked through these numbers in detail – or at all.

That’s especially revealing because the trade and globalization subjects on which I’ve most often written are so obviously alien territories to the paper’s opinion staffers. But I’ve never knowingly presented a number or fact that I know is either inaccurate or misleading – or in which I haven’t had complete confidence.

More disturbing, one undoubted reason that my articles have been even superficially fact-checked is that they run counter both to the newspaper’s official stance generally favoring pre-Trump U.S. trade.policies, and to the unofficial but clear approval of such policies by The Times‘ straight news economics correspondents.

It’s unimaginable to me that anything like such requirements – including contextualizing – have been imposed on articles that conform with these official and unofficial Times‘ views. And I’m certain this is the case because flagrant errors have been so easy to spot.

One example: It’s become seemingly mandatory that articles favoring pre-Trump policies contend that 95 percent of the world’s population lives outside U.S. borders, and that therefore any deviation from so-called pro-free trade policies that ignores or slights the need to reach these potential consumers would be a catastrophic mistake. Never, ever pointed out: The vast majority of this 95 percent earns far too little to be significant customers for American-made products, or to become significant customers in the policy-relevant future. (I debunked the claim here.)

And as I’ve repeatedly shown on RealityChek – notably in the case of Nobel Prize winning economist Paul M. Krugman – serious fact-checking seems at least as rare when it comes to The Times‘ regular columnists.

So let’s please drop fact-checking as an excuse for challenging the legitimacy of running Cotton’s piece.

My second observation involves the broader debate set off by this fiasco (which resulted in the chief of the opinion pages resigning and the head of the op-ed page getting moved into another job). As with The Times internal deliberations, it’s been all over the place, too, but one central and explicit charge has been that even The Times‘ official waffling on the Cotton piece’s suitability amounts to troubling retreats from the ideals of journalistic objectivity and of free expression (which of course needs to comply with well established Constitutional limits, like prohibitions on speech and other forms of expression that are defamatory, or that posed dangers to children, or that ,’by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”).

To which my response is: Grow up. After all, The Times is a private company, and is under no obligation to publish all or even most ideological or philosophical comers on its opinion pages or anywhere else. It’s not a “public square.” Get a permit (if needed), and preach from a soap box on a street corner if you want one of those. 

True,the paper – which literally invented the op-ed page – avowedly conceived of the feature, in 1970, as an effort to:

“afford greater opportunity for exploration of issues and presentation of new insights and new ideas by writers and thinkers who have no institutional connection with The Times and whose views will very frequently be completely divergent from our own.”

Times editors added:

“In furtherance of our belief that the diverse voices of our society must be given the greatest possible opportunity to be heard, we are at the same time approximately doubling the weekday space devoted to letters from our readers.”

I personally believe that this commitment to maximum (legal) diversity has been admirable. But that’s far from claiming that the paper has any legal or moral obligation to seek such variety. So my only quarrel with The Times on these free speech issues is an insistence on transparency – and honesty. If Times management wants officially to turn the op-ed page into a megaphone for whatever set of viewpoints it likes, or against whatever group of opinions it dislikes, just do it, and announce the decision to your readers.

At the same time, if the paper wants to keep sitting on the fence, or groping in the dark, or simply doesn’t even yet know what it’s groping towards, that should be announced, too. Such a confession of broad fallibility has its ethical virtues, too. In fact, for the nation’s too-often high handed Mainstream Media, and its pretensions of omniscience and unimpeachable civic and intellectual integrity, nothing could be more refreshing – not to mention newsworthy.