No, I am not pro-Trump, but the New York Times is Undermining Democratic Culture

The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers.

The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.--The New York Times, Anonymous, September 5,

Many in the press and my fellow intelligentsia loathe President Trump so much that they have become cheerleaders for and enablers of manifestly irresponsible and destructive forms of political communication and, more important, political practice. To avoid misunderstanding, I am no friend of this President's personality, the policies he tries to pursue (nor most of the policies the senior official writing in the NYT says s/he thinks the Administration should pursue), or his impact on the world. I warned against the possibility and dangers of a President Trump while the conventional wisdom (and our Bayesian prognosticators) were still treating him as a joke, or lively entertainment, or a useful element in a ratings  driven business model.

There's the nub. Politically, Trump, who had no experience in public service, is a media creation of the New York tabloids, call-radio, and cable, then midnight comedy (twitter, The Apprentice, Fox, etc.), all the way to the Presidency. He is, in fact, a beneficiary of huge structural changes in the economics and control of our national media, in which news and entertainment are conflated and spectacle drives the media cycle. Our current media thrive on return visits driven by outrage, by anxiety, fear, and hurt. The maelstrom created by this permanently tempts the media into irresponsible behavior that is destabilizing our political life (recall).

The New York Times can serve the public and democratic culture, if it reports the news, not create news; if it facilitates informed discussion, not therapeutic confessionals; if it scrutinizes power, not become a subject of scrutiny.* While during the Bush years it was clearly too cozy to power, it now mistakes itself for the opposition. 

We are, today, in a fight to salvage the rule of law and democratic accountability; we have seen the U.S. government return to a nineteenth century spoils system where graft is open and endemic; most important, we see a gleeful cheer-leading of practices that in the name of protecting the borders, are "contortions of formal law," which as Jacob Levy put it, "authorize greater cruelty, arbitrariness, and lawlessness." This normalization of arbitrary rule dis-proportionally harms minorities. This is what I worried about when I argued in November 2016 that joining this administration would likely become an exercise in complicity with evil. 

The high ranking administration official is not criticizing these practices, but rather is proud of them: s/he hopes this "administration will succeed" and is fond of its "policies." Instead the official is de facto defending and asking for moral praise for the practice in which unaccountable bureaucrats can disregard the ordinary chain of command and legal authority and, on a "second track," run the government in light of their best (purportedly collective) judgment (officials are said to "insulate their operations from his whims"). President Trump's caprice and vileness is bad, but this official's response should not be encouraged; even if his/her intentions are noble, the effect of such practices will be, predictably, a complete breakdown of what the rule of law is supposed to be about in the American executive. Such bad practices will become entrenched and survive the Trump era.**

It's manifestly false that this was the only way the official's perspective could be shared with the readers of the Times. If the New York Times wanted to report (again) on the chaos and lack of loyalty in the Trump Administration it has, of course, the right to use anonymous sources including this particular high ranking official and run multiple stories on it (as it seems to do anyway). If such officials do not wish to serve this President they ought to resign. That is the honorable thing to do, and if it were more widespread, probably also the best way to undermine the Administration in a legal fashion (outside the ballot box). But to encourage high ranking officials to start using the editorial pages for self-serving confessionals that are at variance with their official position is to undermine further a culture of accountability. (And while there has been deterioration, that culture is not dead yet: many administration officials have been forced to resign.) This is to encourage a strange form of double-speak: they will be saying one thing as officials and another thing anonymously.

Of course, I understand that it is very tempting after the President has engaged in a war of words with our media, and ongoing campaign to discredit it, to fight back with any means possible. (And obviously, a war of words is preferable to actual violence/coup.) But that's precisely the trap the Times has fallen into here. If all our institutions fail to live up to their proper democratic functions, the end of the Trump Presidency will be a Pyrrhic victory, or worse.+  

 

*I am not harking back to a golden age. 

**I don't deny of course that, as Max Weber already predicted, that it is quite normal in political cultures for civil services to have their own interests and to press these against or frustrate the executive branch.

+I thank David Koepsell, Stef Rocknak, Eric Winsberg, Mark Yellin, Joshua Miller, Ori Belkind, and Scott Epstein for comments on a Facebook rant.

Comments

[ajkreider]

I agree with almost everything you say here - this is a road we manifestly do not want to go down. And the Dems will scream the loudest when the shoe is inevitably on the other foot.

However, I'm not sold that the honorable thing to do is for such people to resign, if they do not wish to serve the president. Their ultimate duty is not to the president, but the people, or the constitution, or the country - though they may serve at the pleasure of the president. The honorable thing to do is to be open and upfront about the errors they think the administration is making, and perhaps openly refuse to do, on principle, what they think is injurious to the country. Then may then, of course, be fired or asked to resign.

[eric Schliesser]

I think the piece is evidence that these people are subverting the cobstitution.