E-Pluribus | June 19, 2024
A judge pulls a newspaper editor into court; a liberal owns the 'Left Coast'; and is 'responsible conservativism' just a unicorn?
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Dan McCaleb: Tennessee Star editor headed to court after publishing school shooter’s journal writings
Does the First Amendment allow the government to tell newspaper editors what they may and may not publish? Dan McCaleb at The New York Post reports that we’re likely to hear at least one Tennessee judge’s take on that question in the near future.
The editor-in-chief of the Tennessee Star has been ordered to appear Monday before the judge overseeing the Nashville Covenant School mass shooting case after the Star published a series of stories detailing writings from the shooter’s journals.
Law enforcement has resisted the Star’s efforts through a lawsuit to release the journal publicly, including those writings identified by Metro Nashville Police as a manifesto.
Tennessee Chancery Court Judge l’Ashea Myles ordered Michael Patrick Leahy, who also serves as CEO of Star News Digital Media, publisher of The Tennessee Star and other news sites across the US, to appear for a show cause hearing Monday to determine whether The Star violated any court orders related to publishing news stories on the shooter’s writings.
[. . .]
Former acting US Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark wrote on X, after Leahy was ordered to appear in court, that the news outlet had a First Amendment right to publish the stories.
“This is what the free press is for,” Clark wrote. “It’s not designed to coddle the trans movement or keep secrets that could get people killed through ignorance. … (What’s) going on in America? It’s like a slice of the state judiciary across multiple States has lost its collective mind.”
Read it all here.
Nicholas Kristof: What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?
Yesterday’s Around Twitter (X) included some references to Nicholas Kristof’s recent essay at The New York Times pondering the responsibility of the political left for the now undeniably poor conditions in parts of West Coast America. Today we present some excerpts of Kristof’s ruminations (and limited mea culpa.)
As Democrats make their case to voters around the country this fall, one challenge is that some of the bluest parts of the country — cities on the West Coast — are a mess.
Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?
I’ll try to answer that question in a moment, but liberals like me do need to face the painful fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge, from San Diego to Seattle. I’m an Oregonian who bores people at cocktail parties by singing the praises of the West, but the truth is that too often we offer a version of progressivism that doesn’t result in progress.
[. . .]
[M]y take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes.
[. . .]
One of the passions of the left, drawing partly on Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist,” has been that if a policy leads to racial inequity, then it’s racist even if it wasn’t meant to be. But by that standard, West Coast progressivism abounds in racism.
We in the West impeded home construction in ways that made cities unaffordable, especially for people of color. We let increasing numbers of people struggle with homelessness, particularly Black and brown people. Black people in Portland are also murdered at higher rates than in cities more notorious for violence, and Seattle and Portland have some of the greatest racial disparities in arrests in the country.
I don’t actually agree with Kendi. I think intentions and framing can matter, but it’s absolutely true that good intentions are not enough. What matters is improving opportunities and quality of life, and the best path to do that is a relentless empiricism — which clashes with the West Coast’s indifference to the laws of economics.
The basic reason for homelessness on the West Coast is an enormous shortage of housing that drives up rents. California lacks about three million housing units, in part because it’s difficult to get permission to build.
[. . .]
Perhaps on the West Coast we have ideological purity because there isn’t much political competition. Republicans are irrelevant in much of the Far West, so they can’t hold Democrats’ feet to the fire — leading Democrats in turn to wander unchecked farther to the left. That’s not so true in the Northeast: A Republican, Charlie Baker, was until recently governor of Massachusetts, and Republicans are competitive statewide in Maine, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey.
Without opposition party oversight, problems aren’t always fixed expeditiously. For example, some blue states have well-intentioned laws meant to protect citizens from involuntary commitment to mental institutions — but these days, with drugs and untreated mental illness interacting to produce psychosis, such laws can crush the people they’re supposed to help.
Read it all.
Joseph Stieb: Responsible Conservatism Really Was a Thing for a While
At The Unpopulist, Joseph Stieb reviews David Austin Walsh’s book Taking America Back, a retrospective on 75 years of conservatism. While not finding all of Walsh’s arguments convincing, Stieb finds the book a welcome addition to the canon of American politics, especially given the state of conservatism in the age of Trump.
[David Austin Walsh’s book Taking America Back] seeks to debunk the narrative of anti-Trump conservatives and some of their liberal allies that Trump engineered a “hostile takeover” of the GOP and conservatism. According to the “Never Trump” narrative, responsible conservatives like Ronald Reagan and National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. distanced themselves from “lunatic fringe” forces like the John Birch Society and open racists and anti-Semites. Trump’s triumph, in this view, fundamentally changed the nature of the GOP and conservatism.
Echoing John Huntington’s 2021 book, Far-Right Vanguard, Walsh contends that the far right and mainstream were more intertwined than the hostile takeover story admits. He uses the term coined by Buckley to trace the rise of the “right-wing popular front,” a loose network of conservatives that included white nationalists, anti-Semites, extreme anti-New Dealers, and other kooks. Walsh contends that Buckley’s purge of extremists was halting and partial and that mainstream conservatives were more than happy to harness the energy of radicals in their quest to remake American politics. The crazies were always part of the coalition, and in the 2010s they took over the asylum completely, an outcome that Walsh and others have argued reflects the deep-seated radicalism of the modern right.
Taking America Back orients readers towards appreciating the importance of racist, illiberal, and anti-democratic forces in American political history. The writing is also much more engaging than most academic work.
But the book has significant problems. Most importantly, it defines responsible conservatism out of existence, leaping from the claim that mainstream conservatives never fully purged the far right to the idea that there was little meaningful difference between these groups. Claims like “in the early 2010s, conservatives and the far right were synonymous” speak to the overreach of this argument; Mitt Romney, after all, won the GOP nomination in 2012. There are of course important seeds in conservative history that eventually sprouted the rotten MAGA fruit, as Walsh documents. But a closer look at how Trump challenged the GOP and its establishment organs shows that he also dramatically altered these institutions, bringing the fringe to the center. This suggests that the “hostile takeover” thesis has some truth and that there was such a thing as responsible conservatism.
[. . .]
A more balanced version of Walsh’s argument might look like this: the lunatic fringe was not as fringe as mainstream conservatives like to believe, but the conservative movement and the GOP still made efforts to keep them from seizing the reins of power. They played a dangerous game, trying to maintain control while harnessing the voting strength of the “radical undercurrent” in the base with strategies such as Reagan’s 1980 appeal to states’ rights in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
But the fringe’s attempts to take over failed until the early 2010s, showing the resiliency of mainstream conservatism. Trump seized control of the party both because of longer-term historical forces like the global resurgence of nationalist populism and contingent factors such as the crowded GOP primary field and the choices of party elites. Upon winning the presidency, he challenged positions that had been dominant in conservatism for a half-century, including free trade and commitment to NATO, while bringing nativism, white nationalism, and conspiracism into the mainstream in unprecedented ways.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
Steve McGuire is less than impressed by the American Bar Association’s Task Force for American Democracy:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has responded to The Bulwark’s Cathy Young’s characterization of Ali’s recent essay on the decline of the West as conspiracy theorizing:
And finally, as the push for more nuclear power gains steam, Matt Yglesias finds yet another reason to support it: