https://www.thenation.com/article/why-is-the-op-ed-page-of-the-new-york-times-obsessed-with-college-kids/

Good article, though it's kind of short.

Honest question: what would any of you think of the claim "conservatives ideas are handled with kiddie gloves too often in the press"?

Maybe this would be a good time to ask, what is the point of an op-ed page? And why are progressives afraid of losing control of the narrative just because of something printed in a newspaper? Or is the New York Times a failed experiment in deftly blending the semblance of objective reporting with objective reality, as seen from the perspective of progressives? Can you really achieve both of these when it means hiring your ideological opponents in the interest of balance, and when said opponents are friggin nuts? Of course attempting to censor far right views on the op-ed page just means that whoever you pick instead will be lambasted as phony conservatives, and will probably be read by nobody at all (perhaps with the exception of progressives who want to feel like they have gotten to 'know' the other side).

I think the real problem that the New York Times and its readership have is the failure to come to terms with what shifting the Overton window rightward really means for the pretense of objective journalism.

Given how many recent complaints I’ve heard about the NYT’s conservative editorialists, from both the right and the left, a cynic might assume NYT intentionally hired stupid and controversial conservatives in order to poorly represent the side.

good luck hiring a conservative writer who isn’t stupid and controversial tho, lmao.

I don't want to censor these people from the op-ed pages, I just think they're stupid

Well I guess that's mildly interesting. Maybe more interesting would be the question of whether or not the NYT editorial board is stupid. Or there is the possibility raised by Jon`C, that they are in fact smart! Smart to the likely possibility that the conservative editorials are going to be stupid to you.

That said, I certainly hope that the NYT op-ed section doesn't devolve into a new version of Crossfire. I like my phony center-right NYT conservatives very much, thank you.

I didn’t say they were smart. I said they were stupid and controversial, and NYT hired them specifically because they wouldn’t write a reasonable sounding op ed.

Sorry, I think we are in agreement though. Meant: NYT = smart, according to the cynical plot you described.

Oh, I see.

But then I’m not sure how smart it is to teach your adherents a smattering of strawman arguments in lieu of good faith understanding. If they’re dumb it’s easy, they get to pretend to be fair and balanced while spiting the right. But what if they’re smart? Begging the question, if this is what they’re doing, then why are they doing it? Are they concerned that their readers might be swayed by an honest representation of conservatism? Is it some two minutes hate thing?

You know I've got to be honest, I don't know how useful it is to talk about an Overton window anymore. A lot of people seem to misunderstand what the Overton window is. The Overton window isn't just, say, how far "to the left" or "to the right" mainstream political discourse is (if it's even possible to talk about such a thing anymore). For instance, it's not the fact that the right or the left might be setting the terms of the debate on immigration policy or gun policy or something like that. The Overton window is the range of ideas that a body politic will be willing to entertain as reasonable. To my mind, it's not really useful to talk about the Overton window, because a result of the political polarization of American society is that there is no one Overton window anymore: rather, each political tribe has its own Overton window. Leftists dismiss as radical or reactionary many views that center-left liberals take to be reasonable, and center-left dismiss as unreasonable and absurd center-right views that they consider reasonable. If "the" Overton window (that is, if the one Overton window) expanded rightward, it would mean that the the public at large considered these new right-wing views to be reasonable. And that really doesn't seem to be the case.

I think all the complaints about the NYT's op-ed comes from two sources (primarily): discussions amongst elite journalists, who care about what the NYT does because of its outsized (but shrinking) influence in their industry, and among far-left and conservatives critics of the paper, who loathe the paper because it it's the paper of record, and because it represents the perspective of the liberal capitalist class, which isn't their own viewpoint. The NYT's op-ed board really couldn't be much less significant while also being so widely publicized: the op-ed writers of the paper don't actually have very much influence on public opinion and few of them are widely respected anymore, and the main benefit of their job is the prestige of being a NYT op-ed writer.

Complaining about the NYT's op-ed writers to me is like complaining about Ivy League college's admissions. It matters what legacy institutions do, and so they receive a lot of attention, especially negative attention, because it's easy to hate on legacy institutions. But it doesn't matter as much as people think, and it doesn't personally affect many of the people who get so worked up about it.

I don't see conservative views handled in the press at all. In the 2000s I thought that I could get a pretty good sense of what liberals thought and what conservatives thought on certain issues by reading and watching mainstream publications and news channels. Now most mainstream outlets present themselves as center-left news sources, and when they present conservative perspectives they present them in a highly editorialized fashion. If you really want to know what conservatives think, you have to go to conservative publications, but then you're not going to see conservatives defend their views (just as you don't generally see those on the left have to defend their positions).

I dunno, this thread is fairly representative of most views that I've seen. People on the left think that conservatives are either 1) dumb or 2) acting in bad faith. They're neither. They just disagree with you. That's what that looks like.

So do any actual defenses of American conservatism exist that I'm not aware of? Because I haven't seen any, and unless you can produce any I think what you just said is complete bull****.

Like, you seem to have noticed a trend. But I don't think you've questioned the reason for this trend.

It seems like you miss the day where you could imagine Republicans had this deep intellectual tradition, and since they've mostly become insane Trump morons with no fettering to reality, you're almost blaming the rest of the world for not taking them seriously.

Heh, what are you even asking me for? Go read the National Review, or the Weekly Standard, or City Journal, or the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, or Commentary, or, whatever other respectable conservative publication, and read sympathetically. "American conservatism" is a multivalent phenomenon. What would a "defense" of it look like? What would a "defense" of "the left" look like?

Dude, this is like you're "go to" way of disagreeing with someone, any it's *never* -- not once! -- been substantive or apt. I can assure you that every time, I've given some thought to the issue of why, so you can just stop posing this. I think there are multiple reasons for why our media has become this way, which includes trends that are happening within the publishing industry and journalism due to IT (basically, to be a successful publication these days, you have to pick a very specific demographic, stick to it and cater your content to it), and as well as demographic and economic trends, which I suspect are all mutually enforcing.



Not really, but I can tell you're pretty committed to misconstruing what I have to say to make it ridiculous. What I miss is when our public debates were at least somewhat moored to the policy debates that our politicians were having. Now almost all of our political discussions are highly moralistic culture war issues rather than debates over policy. It wasn't like that in the 2000s. Or, at least, there was less of it (obviously, those times were very far from perfect, to say the least).

Maybe people feel there's not much "debate" of substance occurring. If the Republicans want to cut taxes, maybe basically nobody has a perception that there's any benevolent, serious policy choice at stake, and interpret it as "them taking more from us".

I actually did treat it as a debate, so I went and read studies concerning the opinions of economists, who roughly said "there's no economic reason for the tax cut". So the debate in my mind was settled after 2 minutes of research. And I think most people know this on a gut level.

So, I don't get your point. By and large there is no policy debate, because there isn't really anything to debate.

Heh, that's not even true. Economists generally predict modest short-term GDP growth, although less growth than the GOP predicts. Maybe you should've looked for more than 2 minutes?



Uhhh

[Citation needed]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/12/20/tax-cuts-economists-see-modest-impact-corporate-tax-cuts-boost-spendingtrickle-down-money-shower/967099001/

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/14/577359530/the-gops-new-tax-plan-will-affect-everyone-but-will-it-grow-the-economy

Okay, economists predict a minor GDP increase, sure. But it seems what you basically just said is "a minor GDP increase short term is equivalent to the tax bill being economically justified". Because "economically justified" was my claim, not there would be zero economic benefits whatsoever.

The USA Today article is the only one I've ever seen that fails to comment on how drastically the bill will increase debt. In the words of one economist, reflecting the opinions of most:



Not to mention that literally every prediction is this:

https://itep.org/moodys-and-conservative-economists-agree-the-trump-corporate-tax-cut-is-not-helping-workers/



If you try to analyze the overall data and get a picture, the picture is a stark, clear one: this is a bill purposefully designed to benefit wealthy people. This isn't a debate anywhere in the business press, and your search for articles that confirm a weak bias doesn't change the very blatant and obvious truth here.

Maybe that's a claim you want to make now, but that's not the claim you made in your original post. Your original post was pretty vague, but there's certainly nothing to suggest that "there's no economic reason for the tax cut" is the same as "the costs don't outweigh the benefits". But we're getting into the weeds here.



Wait, what "isn't a debate"? What does it mean that there 'wasn't a debate about the fact that the bill was purposefully designed to benefit wealthy people'?

Is your point that the fact that the bill was designed with the exclusive interests of donors in mind means that public debate doesn't matter anyway, because whatever the public says about the bill inevitably will not influence how the bill turns out, because congressmen are going to vote the interests of their donors no matter what (and despite what) the public thinks about it?

Well, that's basically what I meant by "economically justifiable", that there's some cogent argument for why the bill makes sense for the country, and not just for a few wealthy benefactors. Which I think is a good baseline for how we should rate these things.



The primary effects of the GOP tax bill. Virtually everybody agrees the primary effect is an immediate large increase in stock buybacks, M&A and other crap that gives a small segment of the population a ton of money but does little to help the economy.



100% of every economist I've ever read on the topic understands this is the effect, and the impression is that, not only is the evidence sketchy that it will help workers, scratch that, there's significant debate about whether it will even help the economy, and a majority of economists seem to think that either a) it won't or b) any benefits are so marginal that the costs (massive debt increases) are more significant.



My point is that what you've pointed to as "debate" on this topic ignores that most of the effects of the bill are well understood and accepted. There is no serious debate, people are getting finicky over the details, but we know the GOP stated figures are massive lies, and it's absolute consensus who benefits massively from the bill, the only "debate" is about whether anyone else picks up any of the scraps along the way.

Uuuuuhh... I haven't pointed to anything as a "debate" on this topic. I'm genuinely confused, because there's so little consistency in your last post. Wait, are you high?

Look, I think we're talking past each other. I'm certainly not arguing that the state of American political discourse is in any way satisfactory. You might recall that this whole conversation started with me lamenting the fact that we don't have a real policy debate. But, to my mind, a real debate would mean getting finicky over the details. It would mean Democrats (not just in congress, but the public) mobilizing around certain issues, for example, a 25% corporate tax rate, instead of the 20% corporate tax rate that the Republicans initially proposed, and forcing Republicans to justify their policies to the public. Instead, Democrats mostly argued that the tax cut that most citizens would see was nothing compared to what the wealthy would get, which was kind of a awkward message, because it meant Nancy Pelosi, who's often seen as an out of touch elitist, telling people that the $1000 they were going to get in tax cuts was "paltry", when, to most people, it's a lot of money.

What you're lamenting can't possibly exist. The GOP tax bill isn't policy. You need to have one of the parties be a genuine party interested in grounding their ideas to have policy debates.

The point is: nobody who should know accepts the GOP's story about the bill. Everybody who should know recognizes who actually benefits. A vast majority of Americans oppose this.

So, there's nothing to debate here. We're all getting ****ed and there's nothing you can say or do to change that immutable fact about the state of affairs. The reality is blatant class war. Not policy debate. And I don't think anyone committed to the facts can deny this.

Just from how you're using the word, it's as if you think that the very existence of "a debate" on an issue hinges on whether the alternative to whatever you happen to think about the issue is defensible with argument. Kind of a weird way to conceive of what debate is. You're basically taking for granted that whatever "your gut" tells you is correct, and that anyone who disagrees with you is a revisionist.

Uh, sure it can?

This isn't about gut feelings at all. This is about the consensus of the opinions of professionals in the field. They do debate some issues regarding the GOP tax bill on some of the smaller issues. But, they don't have any singificant differing opinions on its large scale effects.

The large scale effects that a majority agrees upon is not debated. And this effect that they agree on amounts to a gift to the wealthy with little benefits to anyone else.

If you can't accept that the GOP's plan has basically no acceptance from the economics discipline, and that nobody seriously debates the effects, not even remotely than they did e.g. the Bush tax cuts, then you're stuck in a bygone era. What's worse, you don't even know what's wrong.

What's wrong isn't that people don't debate GOP policy is a good format anymore. What's wrong is, increasingly often, GOP law doesn't amount to policy, doesn't have any serious defense and isn't possible to debate because there's nothing of substance to debate.

Unless you know of any serious work done on the GOP tax bill, I think the things you lament are your broken, incorrect and fundamentally flawed methods of interpreting politics.

Nope. There is no substantive debate to be had about the primary effects of the GOP tax bill.

Not the issue.



I wasn't lamenting that we don't have a debate about the long-term effects of the GOP tax bill. I was lamenting that our political debate isn't centered around the concrete details of policy. Again, are you high? You're really not doing a good job connecting the dots today.

Well they aren't allowed to say "the GOP is waging class war", if that's what you mean. Otherwise I'm not clear what you're driving at. The details are talked about very plainly. They don't rise to forefront, sure, but saying cable news is stupid or something doesn't seem to matter.

What matters is Americans all grasped the essential meaning of the GOP tax bill, in good correspondance with the estimation of economists, and they didn't need a "debate" to arrive at the correct interpretation.

I'm really confused why you keep talking about debating the effects of the bill now that it's been passed, because I was talking about the debate that preceded it being passed. Again, before the bill was passed, did people disagree about what the corporate tax rate should be? Yes, they did. Even Republicans disagreed with each other. The debate I wish we had was a debate about what are the advantages and disadvantages of a 20% percent corporate tax rate, and is another number better? There are reasons why we didn't have that debate -- it's not entertaining, for starters, and wouldn't get much clicks or "engagement" on Twitter and Facebook. But that would've been a better one to have. You seem convinced that the best way to have a debate is to call Republicans capitalists and blame them for tax warfare, because "those are the facts". That does actually get clicks, but it basically makes parties unaccountable for their policies when they fail.

Maybe this is what you're not grasping. I'm not conceiving of debate as an effort to clarify what the content of the GOP tax bill is and what its effects are. I'm conceiving of debate as a public discussion about what its content should be, or really, what tax policy should be (since this is the example you brought up... whatever). What we want out of our democracy is for the public to have a role in shaping what our policies and our laws are. We don't have that, and that's really bad. If you don't have that, there's almost no point in having a democratic political system at all.

I mean, what is democratic politics, if it's not citizens discussing amongst themselves how to use the state as an instrument in order to address problems in society? It seems like if you accept that (albeit rather technocratic) definition of democracy, then you're going to want to put a premium on having a citizenry thats informed about the inner workings of government, and not about trifles like "Marco Rubio drinks water funny" or all silly palace intrigue happening within the White House.

I'm guessing Reid doesn't count the defences that Eversor listed because he doesn't agree with them.

In Reid's mind: unconvincing => lacking credibility

In order to have a substantive public debate about the Republican tax bill, you’d need to give the public context. That would be awkward because if most people knew the reasons and depths of why it benefits the rich - and no, their benefit is not just lower taxes - they’d recognize how destructive both parties have been to the public good.

The United States is not very democratic in practice.

I think that's right. That's what it would mean for journalists to hold the government accountable. Journalists have an exaggeration understanding of what it means to speak truth to power. It seems like every journalist in DC right now wants to be the politician who breaks the story that leads to Trump's impeachment. But holding government accountable ought to be something much more quotidian. What we really need from journalists is to explain to us what the implications of our government's legislation and policies are, and we ought to vote on the basis of that.

I guess I'm in the camp that thinks politics should be boring. Or at least I have been in these past few posts. I'm really indulging my technocratic tendencies. I don't think I actually believe any of this. :p

Oh, I agree. Except you're not grasping why politics are so ****ed in America. It's not in any capacity because we don't know what people want. Americans are polled to death, we know very accurately what Americans want. It's that nobody ever present on any ballot sheet has the intention of doing any of those things.

The American public has less say because some people very much want them to have less say.

Things are this way because they've been engineered to be this way.

Virtually everything Republicans actually do in congress (much different than their rhetoric) is deeply unpopular. They can't win in the arena of honest evaluation of their views.

Not that Democrats are good in this regard, it's that Republicans are a x2 exaggeration of every bad thing you can point to in Democrats.