More Partisan Journalism, Please—Just the Honest Kind

To no one’s great surprise, the New York Times has endorsed Kamala Harris for president. The Washington Post isn’t endorsing anybody. The editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times quit in a snit when her owners told her she couldn’t endorse anybody. (The Los Angeles Times was going to endorse Harris.) The nice liberals in Hamtramck, Michigan, are miffed that the thousands of Muslim immigrants they sought to move to their community have the sort of political and social views one often finds among Muslim immigrants, and don’t much care for gay pride flags, and elected a Yemeni immigrant mayor who has just endorsed Donald Trump. 

(J.D. Vance et al. must be relieved: In Yemen, people don’t eat dogs—dogs eat people.)

I like endorsements. I like it when newspapers and magazines make endorsements, though sometimes it is more interesting when they withhold endorsements or when they play against type. National Review, for example, which was long edited by people who understood the difference between conservatism and merely voting Republican, has declined to endorse Republican presidential candidates more often than you might have expected and often has declined to make an endorsement in Republican presidential primaries—including in 1980, that hallmark year. Here at The Dispatch, where we discourage team spirit as a political force, there won’t be an endorsement for 2024—we do not publish many editorials in general and maintain a no-endorsement policy. 

“Newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers,” as Alexis de Tocqueville observed. In the heyday of print journalism, most newspapers either were explicitly partisan or had partisan roots—there’s a reason so many American newspapers had names such as the Sherman Daily Democrat and the Springfield Republican. Such names have limitations, of course: Back when it was arguably the nation’s leading libertarian (and even Libertarian) newspaper, the Orange County Register kept its neutral-sounding name. The Economist, which calls itself a newspaper even though it comes in what we would call a “magazine” format, has its roots in the periodicals published by the Anti-Corn Law League. (If ever I start a political party, I’m not going to call it Conservative or Whig or Classical Liberal or anything like that—I’m going to call it the Anti-Corn Law League. Take that,  ethanol bastards.) Parties and factions and associations make newspapers—for many, many years, they made the best newspapers. 

The idea of the “objective” and dispassionate newspaper is a relatively new one. You can get one earful of this stuff from me and the other earful from Jonah Goldberg, but I’ll stick to the short version: Beginning in the 19^th century, science became associated—for good reason—with great prestige, and figures active in many different fields began to look for ways to grab hold of some of that prestige and rub it all over themselves and their work. In the mid-19^th century, you get Karl Marx insisting that his ideas result from applying the principles of science to social affairs. Later in the 19^th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management,” first applied to factories and manufacturing processes, inspired political thinkers to dream up ways to apply the idea to politics and to society at large, producing the progressive mania for standardization and empiricism (including erroneous empiricism) that is still very much with us, along with the progressive pretense that their movement is beyond ideology and instead advocates only “what works.” 

These ideas really reached their apex in the United States in the years immediately after World War II, when the U.S. government’s successful and pride-inspiring mobilization of the entire nation in a moral crusade—along with the more or less mythical role of economic theorists in ending the Great Depression—created a kind of template for managing national and human affairs through a partnership among dispassionate scientists, rationally managed industrial works, and capable, public-minded administrators in a system subject to empirical review and guidance. (That is what corporatism really means.) Newspaper editors, ever vulnerable to voguish intellectualism, picked up the scientific pretense, too. The ascendance of television news and the treatment of the broadcast airwaves as a public trust ensured that aspirations toward “neutrality” and “objectivity” became a kind of official media ideology, even as the news was in real life dominated by dotty partisan crackpots such as Walter Cronkite. 

Objectivity is overrated. There is a lot of journalism out there that aims for objectivity but that is, in fact, bad and incompetent journalism. This is, or was, true of many small-town newspapers, which is one reason, among many, there are so few of them left. The drudgery of reading the absurdly boring (but simultaneously self-important) prose one encounters on the news pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post is a product of that same misbegotten pursuit of scientific-ish objectivity. And, of course, objectivity can be a cover for bias and advocacy, too: Seven out of every 10 “experts say” stories you’ve ever read in an American newspaper were carefully constructed to support a predetermined conclusion. By contrast, one may get more point-of-view from the explicitly partisan newspapers of the United Kingdom, Europe, or India, but one also gets a lot more news and information out of them—and a good deal more reading pleasure, too. The thing to aim for in journalism isn’t a false impression of science-y “objectivity” but excellence. To take one example: There never has been much doubt about what kind of politics they have over at Mother Jones, but, at its peak, the magazine did excellent investigatory work. There was a time when conservatives read Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic, etc., and when liberals read National Review or The American Spectator, because there was good and interesting stuff to read in them. 

And there was no “objectivity” at all. 

I don’t want to write a long history of Where Everything Went Wrong, but there was a time when partisan journalists cared more about being journalists than about being partisans, and when the political world, not yet straitened by neurotic tribalism, made room for complicated figures such as Nat Hentoff and Joan Didion. But we live in a time of neurotic political tribalism, which leads journalists to subordinate their professional obligations to their rootin’ interest in one team or another. The era of the honest partisan is, I fear, behind us, and, instead, we have entered a period in which partisan journalists act like they are running for Congress, fretting about the “constituency” they “represent.” I have lost count of how many times I have been told by somebody who doesn’t understand what I do for a living that I “don’t speak for anybody.” Of course I don’t. I’m not running for office. I don’t want your vote. I’m not your friend or your advocate or your tribune. I speak to, not for.

At The Dispatch, we forgo endorsements for reasons related to all that. I don’t think you can say the same for the Los Angeles Times or the Washington Post. The Los Angeles Times is owned by people who don’t know what a newspaper is for, and the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, every now and then the richest man in the world, who constantly raises in my mind one question: What is the point in having “F—K YOU!” money if you’re never willing to actually say “F—K YOU!”? Goodness knows what motivates Bezos these days—it’s not like he’s going to run out of whatever human-blood analog he feeds to Audrey II. 

There are all kinds of people with fat stacks of Silicon Valley gazillionaire money doing the dilettante thing in the American media. Every reporter who ever has complained about working for a publisher who only cares about making money has never worked for the kind who cares about everything except making money—the social climbers and would-be kingmakers and the bored divorcees of Very High Tech and all those people who were very good at selling real estate or computers or something and who think that this makes them equally good at everything else. You’d think that the kind of publisher who doesn’t have to worry too much about making money would be the kind who could do courageous and interesting things. But that isn’t often the case. 

That reminds me of … something! It’s right on the tip of my tongue. 

But, moving on … 

And Furthermore … 

I am not a huge Jeffrey Goldberg fan. I think he’s a punk. 

But I don’t think he makes things up. 

Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic—who once hired me as a staff writer and then fired me a few days later (before I’d even done any real work) because some nobodies you’ve never heard of complained that my words made them feel “unsafe”—has a story that, while not exactly a blockbuster, is an embarrassment for Donald Trump and his campaign. A few of the details: After promising to pay for a murdered U.S. soldier’s funeral, Trump balked when presented with the bill, saying “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f—ing Mexican,” and directed his people to refuse to pay; on another occasion, he complained: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had, people who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” 

The first item, I’m willing to believe. But the second item in particular has the savor of truth about it—because Trump is an ignoramus and, as such, probably does not know that Adolf Hitler’s senior military officers famously plotted against him, planning to remove him from power and to kill him if necessary. Claus von Stauffenberg personally planted a bomb intended to kill Hitler but failed to get the job done; other major conspirators against Hitler included Gen. Friedrich Olbricht and Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow; even Field Marshal Erwin Rommel gave his blessing to killing Hitler, though he did not personally participate in the assassination plot. 

So, Trump did have military and national-security leaders who had something in common with Hitler’s generals: They believed him to be a dangerous incompetent and a threat to the well-being of the country and its people. You know their names: Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, says Trump is a “fascist” who “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.” Mark Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of defense,  says Trump is a “threat to democracy.” Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton calls Trump “unfit to be president.” Former Vice President Mike Pence refuses to support Trump in 2024. Mark Milley, who served under Trump as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Trump is “a fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person in this country.” James Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general who served as secretary of defense under Trump, says he concurs with Milley’s judgment: “The threat is high,” he says. H.R. McMaster, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as national security adviser under Trump, calls Trump a man whose vanity caused him to “abandon his oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution.’” The list is long—and that’s just what’s been said in public. 

Trump has a well-documented record of personal cowardice and dishonesty. But Trump and his knee-walking enablers expect us to believe that these career military men—men with impressive records of service and courage—simply are sore at Trump because he fired them or wasn’t impressed with their performance. Funny thing: Trump insists that he is a man with an unmatched eye for talent, for attracting “the best people.” And he did have some good people serve in his administration—and the ones who knew him best and worked most closely with him are out there saying he is a fascist and would-be dictator who has no business being in the White House. 

Trump is, as everybody who pays any attention knows, a serial liar, one whose lies are echoed and amplified by other serial liars, including by figures such as Mark Meadows, a dishonorable man in whom the habit of dishonesty is embedded bone-deep. Meadows, a career Trump sycophant and the last chief of staff of Trump’s administration, has made quite an impression on a few of my Dispatch colleagues who have worked with him over the years: “He’s an eager and willing liar on matters large and small and has been for as long as I’ve known him,” says Dispatch Editor Steve Hayes. Meadows’ own publisher sued him over baloney claims about the 2024 election he put in a book and then denied when questioned under oath—that’s the guy out there saying Trump never said what he’s quoted as saying. 

Carrion-eating birds of a feather and all that. 

This is the guy Republicans have chosen. And there isn’t anything in The Atlantic piece that is very hard to believe. Trump and Meadows, on the other hand—how and why would anybody believe anything they say? Their contempt for the truth is almost as profound as their contempt for the rubes who give them their votes and their money. 

I hope I still make Jeffrey Goldberg feel unsafe—he damned well should. 

But I don’t think he makes stuff up. 

You will, from time to time, hear from people who cast doubt on one—or all—of those accounts. In nine cases out of 10, you will be hearing this from someone who either expects an appointment or who is no more than one degree of separation removed from someone expecting an appointment in the next Trump administration, should there be one. My advice: Don’t trust them. I have my doubts about people who worked for the Trump administration the last time around—I simply do not see how I could trust, or think of as honorable, someone who seeks to serve in a new Trump administration. 

I know I’ll hear from some friends about that last statement. Quod scripsi, scripsi. 

In fact: Quod scripsi, scribetis. In time. 

Words About Words

Well, no, not exactly. Headline: “Imprisoned climate protester speaks out.” Roger Hallam is, indeed, both imprisoned and a climate protester, but he isn’t imprisoned (in the United Kingdom) for being a climate protester. He is imprisoned under British public nuisance laws for disrupting traffic on the M25 motorway for four days. He may be a sous chef, too, for all I know, but “imprisoned sous chef” wouldn’t tell you what you need to know. 

And, since I keep getting requests to revisit “begging the question” every couple of weeks, here’s this from Slate:

In this fraught political moment, there are few things more jarring than the experience of watching Saturday Night Live in a swing state. In commercial breaks swollen with ominous attack ads, the country teeters on the brink: Liberal Kamala Harris lets killers go free, and Donald Trump is handing out tax breaks for his billionaire pals. But when the cameras go live in Studio 8H, the stakes plummet. We’re no longer facing the most consequential election of our lifetimes, a life-and-death battle where democracy and the country’s very existence hang in the balance. We’re watching a spectacle staged for our bemused enjoyment, a contest between faintly and not-so-faintly ridiculous figures in which the only real casualties are dignity and sense. It’s not a struggle. It’s a circus.

Emphasis mine. 

We should consider the possibility that SNL has the more accurate assessment, that we are not, in fact, facing an existential national crisis. Former game-show host Donald Trump is a poisonous buffoon and a would-be dictator, but, though he has the capacity to do a lot of lasting damage and to cause a lot of chaos, it probably is not the case that “democracy and the country’s very existence hang in the balance.” Very likely our ailing republic will limp along on its current path toward combining the least-attractive features of democracy with the least-useful qualities of soft authoritarianism. Even if things get very bad, which I think is a real possibility—e.g., it’s 2027, Trump has been impeached for a third time and finally convicted but refuses to leave office and is holed up in the White House surrounded by 15,000 armed J6 types—the country is unlikely to cease to exist. Words mean things. 

And from Slate, another piece that, as usual, isn’t quite true:

That case, Garland v. VanDerStok, is partly a cautionary tale about pride before the fall. Starting around 2017, online gun companies scaled up a new business model: selling kits directly to consumers with all the parts needed to assemble a functioning firearm. Customers could purchase the gun without a background check and put it together in as little as 20 minutes with the help of a YouTube video; the resulting firearm would have no serial number, rendering it untraceable by law enforcement.

Under U.S. law, selling somebody a complete firearm in parts is the same as selling them a firearm. That’s the whole question regarding current ATF regulations: How complete does a particular part (the frame or receiver) have to be before it counts as a gun? The answer will necessarily be arbitrary, but, whatever it ends up being, it should not be the ATF making the decision—it should be Congress. The laws should be made by the lawmakers. 

In Other News … 

In the New York Times, our old friend streitbare Demokratie, or “militant democracy.” 

There are four other strategies for fending off authoritarian threats from within. One of these is a far more muscular approach, known as militant or defensive democracy. Born in West Germany as a response to Europe’s democratic failures in the 1930s, the militant democracy approach empowers public authorities to wield the rule of law against antidemocratic forces. Haunted by the experience of Hitler’s rise to power via the ballot box, West German constitutional designers created legal and administrative procedures that allowed the state to restrict and even outlaw “anti-constitutional” speech, groups and parties. In the 1950s, these tools were used to ban both a Nazi successor party and the Communist Party. Today, German authorities are investigating the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

Obviously, there are significant drawbacks and risks to empowering public officials to bar candidates or parties from elections. Candidate disqualification distorts electoral competition and restricts voter choice. Worse, the tools of militant democracy are easily abused by politicians seeking to sideline their rivals, as has occurred with some frequency in Latin America.

Nevertheless, most contemporary democracies employ elements of militant democracy. In South Korea, the Constitutional Court banned the Unified Progressive Party in 2014 because it deemed the party’s pro-North Korean views to be antidemocratic. In Brazil, the Supreme Electoral Court has the authority to bar politicians convicted of corruption and other crimes from running for office, and a 2021 democracy protection law made it a crime — punishable by up to 12 years in prison — to attempt to overthrow a democratic government. Last year a former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who, like Mr. Trump, tried to discredit and then overturn an election, was barred from public office for eight years.

I would not like to emulate the German system, but I understand why they employ it. 

The United States already places real limits on democracy per se: The Bill of Rights, for instance, is a list of settled questions, “America’s Brief List of Very Important Things You Idiots Don’t Really Get to Vote On.” Federalism is another check on overweening government—and more federalism would be better. Anti-majoritarian features of our constitutional order—the Senate, the Electoral College, etc.—also limit democracy. American practice puts limits on what the state can do, even when a majority supports a particular policy. 

American practice is different from, say, German practice and the more general European practice, in important ways: For one thing, one of the limits on democracy we employ is liberalism, with non-negotiable freedoms. In much of Europe, the liberties themselves are up for grabs. In Austria, for example, the government can ban political books and put nonconforming booksellers in prison for dealing in verboten texts. Germany from time to time bans political parties and prohibits would-be candidates from standing for office. An important difference is that in the United States, the limits on democracy are constitutional and general, whereas in European practice often involves bureaucrats or jurists making case-by-case decisions about particular books, parties, or candidates. American practice limits the power of the state and its functionaries; European practice enlarges the power of the state and its functionaries. 

And maybe that works well enough if you have the political culture of Switzerland or Sweden or Denmark. In the United States, creating new powers to exclude candidates and parties simply means loading up a gun without much thought as to who is going to be holding that gun in four years or eight. 

The genius of the traditional American system is that it uses reliable human factors—such as ambition, jealousy, and competitiveness—as part of a system designed to police itself without the need for some committee somewhere to decide whether a man with bad ideas has ideas so bad that he should be prohibited from putting himself in front of the voters. (We did once have political parties to do some of that sort of thing, and that gatekeeping function is sorely missed.) The American political tradition hopes with John Adams for a virtuous and religious people but plans with James Madison for the ordinary kind. 

“Militant democracy” is a very dangerous idea in the current American context, which has a number of destructive features—partisan tribalism, political antinomianism, procedural maximalism—that would tend to make what works for many European countries into a political weapon that simply could not be wielded responsibly by American officeholders. The very instruments meant to keep out dangerous demagogues such as Donald Trump would end up being cudgels in the hands of dangerous demagogues such as Donald Trump. 

Economics for English Majors

This Wall Street Journal report on pensions for presidents and vice presidents is, as far as I know, entirely accurate and entirely beside the point. 

In other economics news: Behold, the “Trump trade.” Short on Treasury bonds, long and leveraged on equities. 

[Trump’s] policies have drawn higher estimates of government debt from economists. One nonpartisan group, for instance, has projected that Mr. Trump’s platform would lead to an additional $7.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt issuance over a decade — more than twice its estimate for Ms. Harris’s policies.

“Trump wins, you short bonds”—bet that their value will fall and yields will rise further—and “lever up” on stocks, said David Cervantes, the founder of Pinebrook Capital, an asset management firm. He is a believer in what has come to be called the “Trump trade” in finance: a bet that Mr. Trump’s assuming power would boost inflation and interest rates but might also juice corporate earnings in the near term.

The “Trump trade” is based on the assumption that Donald Trump will prove to be even more fiscally irresponsible than Kamala Harris and that he might even succeed in putting some of his irresponsibility into policy. The man who once called himself “the king of debt” does indeed love debt, almost as much as he loves the idea of being a king. Picture lots of spending and tax cuts designed to boost short-term economic activity, with the bill coming due … well, the man would be 82 years old at the end of a second term. 

And Furtherermore … 

Do read Joseph Sternberg in the Wall Street Journal on the Fed’s structural and intellectual problems. 

Elsewhere … 

You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here. 

You can buy my other books here. 

You can see my New York Post columns here. 

Please subscribe to The Dispatch if you haven’t. 

You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here. 

In Conclusion 

In case you missed the correction, it turns out those American college engineering students I was praising at the end of last week’s newsletter were, in fact, my absolute favorite kind of Americans: Canadians.