lmao

I certainly agree with that. Its probably not an accident that the term is most commonly used these days by people who wish to malign a certain set of political views than an identity that people claim as their own.



And how does one do that? How do you tell people not to believe what they believe? We live in a democracy, which means citizens are free to believe whatever they want and say what they want. Democracy doesn't work if you're unwilling to tolerate other people having views you despise, which is why when democracies are in decline people say nonsense like this. Because people prefer to undermine the conditions that make democracy possible instead of participating in one.

Registering this as a non-response.

The same way you eliminate falsehoods elsewhere: patience, outreach, and educational reform. Centrism is accepted as a reasonable position because graduated binary politics are also promoted as a reasonable idea.

Democracy is perfectly compatible with contempt. On the contrary, it fails when people are taught that it’s okay to believe a stupid thing and never change.

Of course it is. That's what tolerance means: accepting that others are entitled to the rights of citizenship despite the fact that you might hate them and their beliefs. Tolerance is not the same thing as acceptance.

Given our current media environment, it's much, much easier to generate falsehoods than to take them out of circulation in the marketplace of ideas. Obviously our media isn't particularly conducive to patience or educating. It's difficult to see how this translates into a concrete, realistic program.

As an aside, this has me thinking of Ken Bone for some reason. The fact that there were still undecided voters by Oct 2016 is a pretty interesting phenomenon, perhaps more difficult to explain than Trump winning.

By getting NYT to stop hiring conservative thinkers, through he influence of argument and ideas.

Which, is, after all, a private company doing things with their own private platform. Nobody is advocating for any sort of legal apparatus to prevent these people from speaking. But rather, that individuals should make individual choices in their freedom of domain.



Beliefs don't exist in a vacuum.



Total anarchy of thought doesn't work and you know it. You don't assign professors randomly, you don't put policymakers in place randomly, you don't hire writers randomly.

If anything, democracy doesn't work more when people are misinformed about the issues. Polling of Americans show Americans are deeply confused about how our politics works. This isn't by accident, and hollow centrism is a culprit.



Undermining democracy is a better description for affirmative action of conservative ideas than it is anything I'm advocating for.

Yeah but sometimes the world is zero sum, and tolerating another person blocking you out so they can stamp their feet and scream insane bull**** isn't making the world any better.

It sounds like all you want is for affirmative action of conservative ideas, you want them not to stand because they have merit, but to stand because you think it corresponds with a narrative of freedom of expression. The marketplace of ideas can rule that an idea is utter garbage. I think, in fact, that's what the marketplace of ideas is deciding right now. About conservatism.

NYT is pretty good by US standards, but it's still candy. Good candy maybe, like a chocolate truffle. You'd have to be pretty demented to pass it up in favor of Fox News's marshmallow fluff. But it's definitely not designed to do anything other than sell subscriptions. And you definitely shouldn't get most of your calories from it.

https://newrepublic.com/article/121824/charles-murrays-people-anti-democratic-manifesto

Oh, actually, I take it back. There is a conservative thinker who seems ahead of his time: Charles Murray. Charles Murray thought three years ago that the only sensible plan forward for a conservative government is to start surreptitiously subverting democracy, using any and all means, even extra-legal or even plainly illegal ones. This is a truly visionary movement, he really did herald a new era of GOP thought.

It's a good idea, but it seems quite distant from how people are actually trying to get these conservative columnists fired. The real tactic being employed is much more coercive, and has to do with mobs making up stuff up about people on Twitter.

But really: does anyone really think that Bari Weiss is responsible for misinformation? It seems like what people really think she's responsible for is bad takes.



Sure, but you're likely greatly exaggerating the extent to which people's views are shaped by the media, rather than by personal relationships, family, local community, personal experiences, etc.



That's true, you don't assign those positions randomly. Unfortunately, you effectively do assign voting rights randomly, since a person is entitled to vote in their country based on nothing other than the mere happenstance circumstances that they are a citizen of their country.



Centrism is the culprit? I don't believe you actually think this. That would mean you think, for example, centrist Washington Post pieces falsely yet sympathetically describing Paul Ryan as a fiscal hawk do more to generate misinformation than Fox News and Infowars? Interesting theory; seems wrong.

Look, I share your concern on this. Democracy does require people to be informed, and Americans are woefully uninformed. Is centrism really at fault for this?You seem to be getting swept up into the hot takes that are coming up in response to this week's news about Paul Ryan and which will pass out of vogue in a week.



That's something I do believe you think.

I was gonna say "no, democracy doesn't require people to be informed, but it does require people to recognize and accept their own ignorance"

but then I remembered that a bunch of the US does direct democracy, putting propositions on general ballots. lol. y'all ****ed up.

Registering this as a non-response.

If we're gonna be okay with affirmative action for conservative ideas not undermining democracy, then I demand equal exposure for socialism (both central and market), communism, anarcho-syndicalism, fascism,...

I don't know how this conflicts with what I said. I mean certainly if you want a thorough understanding of the intricacies of trade policy there are better sources than NYT. But for analysis? And for big picture ideological stuff? Conservative talk from David Brooks about civic virtue might not have much purchase on the Republican base, but I think you'd be surprised how many elite, establishment conservatives genuinely believe in it.

Same here. I demand we have a fascist writing for NYT, no matter how poor their ideas are. They deserve to be heard and democracy will fail if we don't allow it.

it's almost like

almost like


the goal here isn't actually to acknowledge and spread broadly-held legitimate conservative political beliefs, but is instead to validate the opinions of complete idiots in order to sell more newspapers

That's kind of what I'm getting at. This media environment means that everyone has a say, and there's little to do to stop it. It doesn't matter much what should happen. There seems to be very little from stopping what is happening, which is the erosion of the center-left/center-right establishment monopoly on the public discussion.

Edit: what I said had almost nothing to do with what you were getting at.

Yeah, lots of Americans believe in fiscal conservatism because of "personal relationships, families, and experiences", and not because there's a large media and cultural apparatus surrounding them that repeats those lines at them daily.

Americans aren't really influenced by NYT conservatives, but they definitely are by Fox News.



anyone who believes in that kinda stuff i gotta question tbh

Well, there was that NYT article about the Seinfeld-watching Nazi who lives in the Midwest...

The center-left isn't eroding, if anything it's gained a bunch of people who used to be more centrist. The center-right is a sinkhole.

You basically have three factions in America: Trump fanatics, center-left neoliberals, and people to the left of center-left neoliberals. The center right is a void.

Related to my recent comments, I believe my takes recently have taken on a more sharply moralistic stance that I don't think has been good. So I'm trying to be less moralizing in how I speak about things. I hope you all appreciate that.

What you said is grade school idealism, viz. the US media is designed to promulgate some kind of national political discussion initiated by the political elites. But that's absolutely not true.

Example: Mitt Romney's leaked speech from 2008. That's the discussion the political elites were actually having. Prior to the leaks, were the conservative publications at all representative of your description? Were they continuing the discussion, in public, that the conservative political elites were having in private? No, absolutely not. Liberal publications did, but it doesn't count because they thought they were joking.

Your reasoning is flawed in two ways.

First, you assume the media has a profit motive to promote the stories that matter to the political elite, versus the stories that can attract or retain subscribers. This seems obviously false to me. Sometimes a profit motive results in good journalism, and we should celebrate it when it does happen. However, that is neither necessary nor sufficient for success.

Second, you've assumed the political elite have a good faith interest in sharing their discussions with the public. Which they clearly don't. See above.


It would be fantastic if things worked this way though!

You're not a conservative. How much Fox News would you have to watch before you started to agree with it? Is there any *amount* of Fox News you could watch where after a time you'd begin to find it persuasive? The sheer quantity that people are inundated in isn't what makes it persuasive. Maybe it plays into anxieties that people have by virtue of the speak of place they happen to live in, or because of various forms of cultural identification, or whatever else you can imagine, but it's not the quantity. Again, I suspect these cultural things are more closely related to things that happen "IRL" than you appear to give credit for.

peeeee much.


Fiscal conservative is more nebulous horse**** from the people who brought you centrism. I'm saying this as someone who, once, considered himself one of them.

Here's what fiscal conservative means: "I want the government to spend money wisely".

Well no ****, genius.

Yes, this is exactly my point about liberal/establishment media outlets paying ideological affirmative action for conservative pundits. The NYT et al. understand that there is literally nothing they can do to make their publications appealing to those kinds of people, so instead they're trying to graft bits and pieces of Fox News onto themselves in order to grow their subscriber base.

Which is also why it's not about giving a voice to other political views. There would never ever be equal representation of socialist views in a US newspaper, not even a scant trace of it. If the goal is to inform then there would be, but the goal isn't to inform. It's to confirm the biases of ~48% of the US public who today would never consider reading NYT.

Uh, Bernie? The Democratic Party still can't formulate a coherent message in large part because of the challenge that Bernie posed to the party establishment. The center-left has given up quite a bit of ground.



I think you're description of the center-right is probably wrong. First of all, the center-right east coast business elites haven't gone anywhere, even if they didn't vote for Trump themselves, or voted for him grudgingly. Nevermind it's a little weird you'd say this, given that the GOP is ascendant right now, despite the fact that there aren't (yet) any Trump congressmen who are incredibly enthusiastic about his agenda. Really, given the passing of the GOP tax bill, the center-right business elites are one of the few segments of society that can claim a massive political win in the past year. (And center-right social conservatives also can also claim numerous wins, given many of Trump's federal court appointments.)

The thing is, you don't even have to watch Fox News. If you don't engage much politically, but a couple people around you do, and those people watch Fox or read Breitbart, you're going to eventually pick up beliefs that reflect Fox or Breitbart. Political beliefs are sort of transitive. It might be hard for you to imagine since you're politically engaged, but there are people out there who never really read much news and only pick it up from other people, and those people in the right communities will only hear really conservative ideas.

In fact, "not being politically engaged", as in, not actually learning anything about politics is a pretty apt summary of most people I know who vote Republican. They don't engage critically but still pick up ideas around them.

So you're sort of right that it's "personal relationships" causing it, but the people most influential on you politically are probably tapped into some source which does reflect those same views. Fox News, but transitive.

Have you been to a church in America? I sit through services sometimes and I'm repeatedly surprised at how often they push political lines, especially things about taxation, Hollywood, science funding, you'd be surprised at how often something like a church pushes pro-Republican positions. And that influences the opinions of even apolitical churchgoers. That's how these ideas spread. It's just dumped into communities and works its way through.

That's also why I don't take the idea that there's a totally organic wing of "conservatives" all that seriously. Conservatism more than any other political view in America is a constructed position. If you're ever in America in a more rural place, try going to churches and see how these communities work for yourself.

Seeing as they hired Never Trumper WSJ columnists who were no longer fitting in with the WSJ editors because the paper has moved in a pro-Trump direction, I suspect they were trying to poach WSJ subscribers who loathe Trump. It's notable that they don't have a real pro-Trump columnist. I think that says something about who they see as their audience. But there also would likely be a backlash if they hired a Trumpy columnist.



Sure. The NYTs is an establishment legacy paper that primarily represents the attitudes of upper middle class New York professionals and it has close ties with capital. It's not going to present socialist views; they would cut against the sensibilities of the paper's primary susbscriber base.

I still think the center-life is a sizable force that has some teeth. I guess the difference is, I hardly see anyone except for centrists taking the center-right seriously, I don't see many on-the-ground real center-right people. I do, however, know some pretty strong pro-Clinton, anti-Bernie people.

I think Trump has kinda driven a wedge in the American right that's driven people either more moderate or more radical, in other words.



There are some powerful people who hold those views, I guess my thinking is something of a percentage of the total population. I don't think that sort of center-right view you're expressing here is a big proportion of the population compared to the three I mentioned.

Maybe I also don't see why east coast business elites should have more of a voice than anyone else. Seems like they're just a bunch of tools, why do they get a column but socialists don't? Unless, as Jon`C pointed out, the reason they have a voice has nothing to do with democracy.

This isn't really unique to the right. Wonder Woman, Ghostbusters remake, Black Panther, the political elements of the new Star Wars movies... I mean, it's a crude argument, but Hollywood movies are ways in which political views (in this case, center-left view she) are infiltrating aspects of society that until recently werent so political.

I've lived in rural communities, and one thing I know from it is that you shouldn't assume that people don't know that they're being sold something. People arent passive recipients of ideas.

It doesn't have anything to do with democracy. Socialists have their own socialist newspapers/publications to write for and to read. Not everyone gets to be in the NYT. It's a publicly traded company company that tries to reconcile its need to make a profit with its values and its awareness of itself as an important American institution with some level of civic responsibility.

I also think, in these discussions, the perception we have of politics is so limited it's hard to see how different things can be. The 1930's in America was horrid for material conditions, but it was a politically fascinating time. People were politically active, engaged, won elections, they e.g. wrote their own newspapers because they no longer trusted the business press. People actively learned about labor struggles, and cared and supported them.

This is the kind of thing I really want to see. Replacing the braindead, worthless discourse we have with something from the people, lively, inspired and out of control. People organizing to push for what they think should happen, with disregard for the sanctimonious writings of the experts.

It's been done before and can be done again. It's why I like history, it's hard to recognize the biases of your age when you're in it, but history can remind you that things can be different. People right now are pessimistic and afraid. But there's no reason that should be. The craziness of our current government can be taken advantage of to really good ends, but for the people to get what they want they need to act on it. And that's what I want.

I also think such a movement would lead naturally to a death knell of everything Republicans would support, because everything Republicans do in congress is antithetical to what Americans want to happen. And I think we're heading in a better direction, the American people are adopting a more adversarial, and as a consequence, a much healthier approach to politics.

The massive wave of teacher strikes in red America is a prime example of this. It's a fantastic ground swelling, of chaos happening under the feet of the Republican Party that threatens their sense of order and peace. It's a fantastic event, and should be page one news.

Oh yeah, those three movies and the audiences which adored them are a prime example of how big and influential the neoliberal center-left is.

I think most of the people who go to churches don't need to be sold it, they've already bought it, what church does is serve to reinforce it, it reassures them constantly not to doubt their faith in the Paul Ryans, ignore politics, and keep screaming about college campuses.

Might be true, but don't underestimate party identification. Even as some Republicans no longer believe what their party believes, they still strongly identify with the party, or at least despise the Democrats. You should be able to see yourself in this: you're someone who dislikes the Democratic Party, yet I suspect you see it as an imperative that Democrats win elections in 2018 and 2020, even if only to prevent Republicans from winning.



No one part of the GOP is very big. The GOP is a coalition party. Still, financial elites have historically enjoyed outsized influence in the party, given their relatively small size compared to other parts of the coalition.

I agree, they do what they do, the point is though that their "centrist" takes and laughable attempts to find "sensible conservatives", along with the reality of the Republican Party is a grand display of the gaping void that is conservative thought.

I guess it's just interesting to watch these people scramble to try and dress up conservative ideas, to try and affirm them and make them sound better so NYT can sell more subscriptions.

There are very good reasons for people to be pessimistic and afraid.

I think our own age is more like the 30s than you seem to. I'm sure politics then we're just as messy and disgusting and empty as our own time, even as there was also great things that make the time easy to romanticize now. But a lot of the things you mentioned are only more true now than they were then. For example, it's never been easier to start a media company. You can literally do it for free.

1880s, maybe.

Poverty and unemployment were drastically much higher than they ever were in the great recession, and malnutrition was a real concern for people. We even have family stories about my great grandfather having to chase off chicken thieves with a shotgun, hobos who couldn't find food elsewhere. But the spirit wasn't as negative then. People knew things were ****, but people also felt things were going to get better. Today people feel things can only get worse. They also had no faith in the business class, and developed an antagonism and distrust of the business class that birthed the solid labor union culture that defined the mid 20th century.

They had even more reason to be pessimistic and afraid, but weren't, and that optimism was a sign of strength. And I think part of that was that they just stripped away the influence of the media and created their own culture.