"During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote...."

"[T]he editing was very light... even when I took positions that made Times leadership very nervous.... [T]he columns themselves were published as I wrote them.... Then, step by step, all the things that made writing at the Times worthwhile for me were taken away.... [I]n 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive... toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument.... ... I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless....  [W]hat I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness, toward avoiding saying anything too directly in a way that might get some people (particularly on the right) riled up. I guess my question is, if those are the ground rules, why even bother having an opinion section?"

Writes Paul Krugman, in "Departing the New York Times/I left to stay true to my byline" (The Contrarian).

What's going on there? Who wants blandly written columns? That doesn't solve any problem I'm aware of.

"A campaign has been constructed around a mood, rather than the other way around. The mood is Obamacore..."

"... the outburst of brightness and positivity that took over pop culture upon the election of our first Black president in 2008, and that continued until the wheels fell off eight years later. This was the age of Glee, Taylor Swift’s 1989, and Hamilton, seemingly disparate art born out of the same impulse: the feeling of a new dawn, a generational shift, a national redemption.... ... Obamacore positioned itself as sensitive, non-threatening, and relatable. It was Aziz Ansari writing a book on modern dating alongside a Berkeley-trained sociologist, porn star James Deen talking about bacon, Louis C.K. playing a cop on Parks and Recreation.... The fandom that had sprung up around Obama’s presidential campaign expanded to embrace New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and later, Hillary Clinton. For a moment, bodies as hidebound as the Supreme Court and the papacy looked as if they might be rehabbed into vehicles for social justice.... This summer’s sudden reappearance of hope and positivity has spurred split reactions. Do you embrace your inner cringe, or try to tamp it down?... The optimistic case is that, against all odds, we seem to have heeded the lessons of Obamacore. Generation Z is willingly climbing the coconut tree."

Writes Nate Jones, in "That Feeling You Recognize? Obamacore. The 2008 election sparked a surge of positivity across pop culture. Now hindsight (and cringe) is setting in" (NY Magazine).

See also "100 Pieces of Pop Culture That Defined Obamacore/You know them when you see them — whether they were genius or, well, not," by Nate Jones (in NY Magazine). Just to select one:

"The extreme left may be morally no better than the extreme right. But in America the extreme left has almost no political power..."

"... while the extreme right controls one house of Congress and a number of states.... So, yes, let’s hold college presidents’ feet to the fire when they bungle on a major issue. And let’s denounce calls for violence wherever they come from. But let’s also focus on the biggest threat to our system of higher education, which is coming not from left-wing student activists but instead from right-wing politicians."

Writes Paul Krugman, in "The Biggest Threat to America’s Universities" (NYT).

Key word: "extreme."

The extremes on either side are perceived from the point where the observer is situated. Thus, to Krugman, "the extreme left has almost no political power."

"[T]he crypto ecosystem has basically evolved into exactly what it was supposed to replace: a system of financial intermediaries whose ability to operate depends..."

"... on their perceived trustworthiness. In which case, what is the point? Why should an industry that at best has simply reinvented conventional banking have any fundamental value? Furthermore, trust in conventional financial institutions rests in part on validation by Uncle Sam: The government supervises banks, regulates the risks they can take and guarantees many deposits, while crypto operates largely without oversight. So investors must rely on the honesty and competence of entrepreneurs; when they offer exceptionally good deals, investors must believe not just in their competence but in their genius. How has that been working out?"

Writes Paul Krugman in "Is This the End Game for Crypto?" (NYT).

Comments need to address the substance of the argument.

Just yesterday, I was observing that the topic of "tiny houses" had dropped out of present-day discourse.

I was commenting in off-blog life, so I can't prove to you that I'd noticed the absence of this particular thing. It's hard to notice all the things that are not being talked about. And sometimes you just notice if the talk resumes. 

But I did talk about it yesterday, and the topic has resumed. The NYT has: "95-Square-Foot Tokyo Apartment: ‘I Wouldn’t Live Anywhere Else’/Meet the young Japanese who have decided to live in a shoe box." 

"The problem may be that the Biden economy boomed *too much*, feeding inflation, and that it now needs to cool off, which may involve a recession (but hasn’t yet)."

"But the basic fact is that so far the Biden economy has added 9 million jobs. So it has been a jobs boom, whatever else you may say."

Said Paul Krugman, quoted in "NY Times columnist Paul Krugman blasted for touting ‘Biden boom’" (NY Post).

"The Covid pandemic caused many Americans to reconsider whether they really wanted or needed to keep working."

"Fear of infection or lack of child care kept some workers home, where they discovered that the financial rewards of their jobs weren’t enough to compensate for the costs of commuting and the unpleasantness of their work environment. Older workers, forced into unemployment, decided that they might as well take early retirement. And so on."

That's the myth of "the great resignation," recounted by Paul Krugman in "What Ever Happened to the Great Resignation?" (NYT).

Krugman shows that the great resignation did not happen and observes that's a reason for 1. higher interest rates and 2. more immigration.

Stelter's plaint would mean more if he'd face up to how badly CNN's Sanjay Gupta fared when he sat down with Joe Rogan.

CNN’s @brianstelter: People trusting Joe Rogan over “newsrooms like CNN” are “a problem that’s much bigger than Spotify” pic.twitter.com/3RnifScIzk

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 1, 2022

 

Background: "CNN praises Dr. Sanjay Gupta for interview with Joe Rogan, buries viral moments/Gupta admitted his CNN colleagues should not have referred to Rogan's COVID treatment as 'horse dewormer'" (NY Post, October 15, 2021). That's something I blogged at the time, here: "In trying to present Sanjay Gupta as a science-is-real hero for talking to Joe Rogan for 3 hours, CNN laid the groundwork for fact-checkers to draw attention to all the most damaging omissions." 

ADDED: Writing this post and searching my own archive for Sanjay Gupta, I turned up a post from January 7, 2009, when President-Elect Obama was considering Gupta for the position of Surgeon General. There was debate at the time about the way Gupta had treated the filmmaker Michael Moore about his movie "Sicko."

"Vance deleted his old Trump-insulting tweets. He made his pilgrimage of atonement to Mar-a-Loco. He groveled."

"And he explained all of this in terms of Trump’s admirable performance as president, which supposedly won him over. He was clearly watching a different movie than many of the rest of us were.... On Twitter he bizarrely lashed out at the Times columnist Paul Krugman as 'one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country,' then went after [Alec] Baldwin in a tactless way at a tactless time.... But he gets points for occasional honesty. Shortly after declaring his Senate candidacy on July 1, in an interview with Molly Ball for Time magazine, he acknowledged his past opposition to Trump and bluntly conceded that he needed 'to just suck it up and support him.' Suck it up he has — and how."

From "J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Hypocrisy" by Frank Bruni (NYT).

The tweet about Alec Baldwin was "Dear @jack let Trump back on. We need Alec Baldwin tweets."

"So Trump’s Suburban Lifestyle Dream is basically a walled village that the government built for whites, whose gates were slammed shut when others tried to enter."

"What is Biden proposing to remedy at least some of these injustices? Reasonable, significant, but hardly revolutionary stuff — things like expanding rental vouchers while cracking down on redlining and exclusionary zoning. Trump may claim that such policies would 'destroy suburbia,' but that only makes sense if you believe that the only alternative to bloody anarchy is a community that looks exactly like Levittown in 1955....  [T]he big difference between the parties now is that Biden and Harris are trying to make things better, trying to make us more like the country we’re supposed to be. Trump and Mike Pence, by contrast, are basically trying to make open racism great again."

Writes Paul Krugman in "Trump’s Racist, Statist Suburban Dream/Racial inequality wasn’t an accident. It was an ugly political choice" (NYT).

The second-highest-rated comment is from Phyliss Dalmatian of Wichita, Kansas:

Trump has turned the usual GOP dog whistle in a Tornado Siren. Blaring, omnipresent and undeniable. The Party Of, by and for White Males, with their stepford wives and perfect blue eyed children. That’s the myth, and the aspiration. Join us !

Except Johnny starts fires, bullies younger kids and has started stealing pain pills from relatives homes. And Sally has dreams of a glamorous life as a FOX spokesmodel, the epitome of GOP womanhood, before aging out. At 30. But, she’ll find a rich Husband before that, no problem.

Professor, to the very, very large majority of the GOP, not white people are an afterthought, at best. Takers, Moochers, Lazy, irresponsible, criminal, blah, blah blah.

Dream on, GOP. Your time is nearly done. You won’t be able to WIN, irregardless of vast and inventive Cheating.

Trump is your Epitaph. You own Him.

A wild fever dream from Wichita — replete with random capitalization, "irregardless," and raging contempt for white people. What's up with Kansas? I love the inclusion of the "Tornado Siren." Makes me want to conjure up some "Wizard of Oz" jokes. Maybe something with Toto and a Dalmation....

"It's my theory that American society exhibits many pathologies resulting from generations being perfectly aware that, when misfortune strikes, you are on your own."

"In other words we've become acculturated to a weak and stigmatized social safety net. Every situation becomes a zero-sum event. In those circumstances, we have to be wary of every new face, we have to arm ourselves to defend against crimes that we know the police can't prevent, we have to have AR-15s to be ready for the rebellion of the poor and nihilists we see looming just behind the Black Lives Matter protests, we have to protect our property values and our children from incursions of undesirables, and we have to hoard our advantages to meet yet-unimagined contingencies. Paranoia is the central thread of the pathology."

Says a top-rated comment on "The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America/The right has made irresponsible behavior a key principle" by Paul Krugman (NYT).

Krugman's idea is: "Many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account. This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call 'freedom' is actually absence of responsibility. Rational policy in a pandemic, however, is all about taking responsibility.... Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Republicans are selfish. We’d be doing much better if that were all there were to it. The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness...."

I looked up "sacralized" in the OED. It's a good word, based on "sacred," but making it clear that human beings have endowed something with sacred significance. Krugman used "sacralized" as a verb (in the past tense), and that's been around since its introduction — in sociological anthropology — since 1899. "Sacralized" as an adjective has been around since 1979, and the OED gives 2 historical examples, the second of which is a little surprising in its disrespect for minority religions:

1986 P. B. Clarke Black Paradise vi. 81 Rastafarians also present themselves..as a chosen race, along the same lines as the Jews; this, some may argue, is simply a sacralized form of racism.

If Republicans have sacralized selfishness, what have Democrats sacralized?

"I’ve been arguing that philosophers don’t need to believe in their arguments in order to make them. But what they do need to believe in is..."

"... the project of philosophical inquiry itself. A philosopher might offer up her argument in the absence of conviction but in the hopes of furthering the philosophical discussion around it. This is very different from someone who offers up a controversial claim in order to stir the pot of internet discourse, or enrage his opponents. While belief in one’s position can be laudable, it’s not the only laudable motive for doing philosophy. One can aim at truth even while reserving judgment on whether one has hit it this time."

Writes philosophy professor Alexandra Plakias in "Let People Change Their Minds" (OUPblog).

This got me thinking about an essay in The Atlantic that I was just reading: "Cool It, Krugman/The self-sabotaging rage of the New York Times columnist" by Sebastian Mallaby:

In [a 1993 essay], Krugman reflects on his approach to academic research and emphasizes his facility with simple mathematical models that necessarily incorporated “obviously unrealistic assumptions.” For example, his work on trade theory, which helped win him the Nobel Prize, assumed countries of precisely equal economic size. “Why, people will ask, should they be interested in a model with such silly assumptions?” Krugman writes. The answer, as he tells us, is that minimalism yielded insight. His contribution to economics, in his own estimation, was “ridiculous simplicity.”

It makes absolutely no sense?

I've seen a lot in my life - stuff I hope others don't.

Rarely am I in AWE.....

and BEWILDERED

This tweet.....

I can't stop looking at it.

It makes absolutely no sense to make something like this public. https://t.co/K7HdJDHITP

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) January 8, 2020

"There are so many people — among the intelligentsia, especially — who are absolutely immune to facts.”"

“People like Paul Krugman were saying that when Trump gets in, the economy is going to tank. No. The economy hit new highs. There are so many people, especially among the intelligentsia, who are absolutely immune to facts.” pic.twitter.com/NC7aL5X9jU

— Thomas Sowell (@ThomasSowell) November 5, 2019

"So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened."

Wrote Paul Krugman, as soon as he saw that Trump won the 2016 election, quoted in "Experts predicted economic Armageddon under Trump — where are they now?" by Charles Gasparino in the NY Post.

"[T]he hallmark of fanatical centrism is the determination to see America’s left and right as equally extreme, no matter what they actually propose."

"Thus, throughout the Obama years, centrists called for political leaders who would address their debt concerns with an approach that combined spending cuts with revenue increases, offer a market-based health care plan and invest in infrastructure, somehow never managing to acknowledge that there was one major figure proposing exactly that — President Barack Obama. And now, with Democrats taking a turn that is more progressive but hardly radical, centrist rhetoric has become downright hysterical. Medicare and Medicaid already cover more than a third of U.S. residents and pay more bills than private insurance. But Medicare for all, says Schultz, is 'not American.' Elizabeth Warren has proposed taxes on the wealthy that are squarely in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt; Bloomberg says that they would turn us into Venezuela. Where does the fanaticism of the centrists come from? Much of the explanation, I think, is sheer vanity. Both pundits and plutocrats like to imagine themselves as superior beings, standing above the political fray. They want to think of themselves as standing tall against extremism right and left. Yet the reality of American politics is asymmetric polarization: extremism on the right is a powerful political force, while extremism on the left isn’t. What’s a would-be courageous centrist to do? The answer, all too often, is to retreat into a fantasy world, almost as hermetic as the right-wing, Fox News bubble. In this fantasy world, social democrats like Harris or Warren are portrayed as the second coming of Hugo Chávez, so that taking what is actually a conservative position can be represented as a brave defense of moderation."

Writes Paul Krugman in "Attack of the Fanatical Centrists/Of obsessions, vanity and delusions of superiority" (NYT).

"The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right?"

"I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance. (Although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has ever implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.... [Despite] the constant effort to portray [AOC] as flaky and ignorant... on the tax issue she’s just saying what good economists say; and she definitely knows more economics than almost everyone in the G.O.P. caucus, not least because she doesn’t 'know' things that aren’t true."

Writes Paul Krugman in "The Economics of Soaking the Rich/What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot" (NYT).

From the comments there: "When top rates were high, 70-80 percent, executive salaries were lower, much lower. Why? Companies saw that if they raised executive salaries they would simply be shoveling most of that extra money to the government. They thought they had better uses for it, such as capital investment and better pay for workers. This is yet another way, an indirect way, in which low top rates encourage economic inequality, the bane of our society, today."

How can the NYT think this photograph is an illustration of "The Paranoid Style in G.O.P. Politics"?

The article, from 2 days ago, is "The Paranoid Style in G.O.P. Politics/Republicans are an authoritarian regime in waiting" by Paul Krugman. (The phrase "The Paranoid Style" is an invocation of the 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter.)

The photograph — which is a nice photograph by NYT photographer Damon Winter — shows anti-Kavanaugh protesters. The signs make that clear. Perhaps the idea is that "paranoid" Republicans characterize Democratic protesters as crazier than they really are. The only slightly "crazy" sign is the one that shows angry-face Kavanaugh wearing one of those hats that hold 2 beer cans with a tube feeding beer into the hat-wearers mouth. The protesters' faces look not crazy but — if I had to choose one word — concerned.

I haven't read a Paul Krugman column in a long time, but because the headline/photograph combination raised a question for me, I'm going to read to get my answer.

Krugman begins at a level that I consider rash. He calls Kavanaugh "a naked partisan who clearly lied under oath." This is why I don't read Krugman. It's red meat for readers who are hungry and know what they want. The Supreme Court's "moral authority" is "for the foreseeable future," "destroyed."

If there's one person who should not use the phrase "the foreseeable future," it's Krugman. It's alway a silly phrase. We're not psychics. We don't see into the future. But Krugman is famous for writing, the day after the 2016 election, that the financial markets will never recover from the election of Donald Trump. He should know he got burned and be careful.

Back to this new column. Krugman accuses Republicans — based on their performance during the Kavanaugh hearings — of "contempt for the truth" and "a rush to demonize any and all criticism." He sees Republicans as susceptible to "crazy conspiracy theories" because Kavanaugh accused the Democrats of making "a calculated and orchestrated political hit" and seeking "revenge" for Hillary Clinton's loss of the election. Kavanaugh's statement, according to Krugman,  was a "completely false, hysterical accusation." Completely false? That sounds... hysterical.

Trump made things worse, Krugman says, by "declaring, falsely (and with no evidence)" that some anti-Kavanaugh protesters were getting paid. How can Krugman know that the President has no evidence? How can Krugman know that it's false to say they were paid? Does Krugman have evidence conclusively proving that the protesters were all self-funding? I'd like to see an investigation into the inner workings of the protests, and I do think there shouldn't be accusations without evidence, but criticism of the accusers should model proper concern for evidence, or everyone seems to be putting partisan fervor above scrupulous adherence to the truth.

Midway through the column, Krugman shifts from saying that the GOP uses the "paranoid style" to the announcement: "the G.O.P. is an authoritarian regime in waiting." In Krugman's analysis, when those who hold government power use the paranoid style, it's evidence that they're going for authoritarianism. Krugman lists some things — evidence? —  "investigations," "scandals," "tax cheating," "self-dealing," "possible collusion with Russia," and then asks "Does anyone doubt that Trump would like to go full authoritarian, given the chance?"

Well, of course, many people doubt that Trump would like to go full authoritarian! Why did Krugman write a question in such an extreme form that any intelligent, fair person would have to answer yes? Is he paranoid?

I'm not quick to guess paranoid. I think it's more likely that he's angry, cynical, tired of losing, and aware of his readership. In other words, he's deeply entrenched in the very sort of political discourse he's hoping to critique. It's paranoid when they do it. Uh huh.

His last line is another look into the "foreseeable future": "If you aren’t terrified of where we might be in the very near future, you aren’t paying attention." Be scared! Be very afraid! Be terrified... of the way those other people are spreading fear!

And I still don't know why that's the right photograph. I can only guess that the idea is: Look at these very real, sincere faces. Surely, they paid their own expenses.

ADDED: With an eye out for paid protesters stories, I found "Trump apparently misunderstands ‘Fox & Friends’ joke, makes baffling tweet" (WaPo), which tries to understand a Trump tweet that says "The paid D.C. protesters are now ready to REALLY protest because they haven’t gotten their checks - in other words, they weren’t paid! Screamers in Congress, and outside, were far too obvious - less professional than anticipated by those paying (or not paying) the bills!" WaPo puzzles:

In a literal sense, it’s true that the protesters didn’t get checks, because as far as anyone knows they had not expected any payment. But Trump’s tweet seems to be an elaboration on the original fiction, rather than a retraction of it. As best we can discern, he’s saying the imaginary benefactors of imaginary paid protesters have skipped out on their imaginary obligations and left the imaginary paid protesters with imaginary unpaid wages.

It’s a weirdly specific scenario to conjure out of thin air. We can’t even find any fake news articles to support it....

Some Trumpsters theorized that Trump deliberately said something wrong to trick some protesters into admitting that they did get paid. But "the dominant theory" is that Trump heard Asra Nomani, a guest on “Fox & Friends,” say, "People have sent me lots of messages that they’re waiting for their check." Later, she said it was sarcasm, but whether it was a joke or not, Trump apparently didn't think it was a joke.

"Why Don’t All Jobs Matter?"

Paul Krugman asks, musing on Trump's stress on bringing back coal mining and manufacturing jobs.

In an ever-changing economy, jobs are always being lost: 75,000 Americans are fired or laid off every working day. And sometimes whole sectors go away as tastes or technology change....

While we can’t stop job losses from happening, however, we can limit the human damage when they do happen. We can guarantee health care and adequate retirement income for all....

I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to miners and industrial workers. Yes, their jobs matter. But all jobs matter.

Is there something different about coal mining and manufacturing jobs? Is it just politically useful (because conservatives can blame liberals and foreigners for the job losses? because these are jobs for, mostly, white men?)?

I'm a little surprised to see Krugman adopting the rhetorical format so recently seen in the much criticized "all lives matter" response to "black lives matter." Trump is essentially saying "mining and manufacturing jobs matter," and Krugman is responding "all jobs matter." The first speaker says there's a special problem here, and the second speaker — with the "all Xs matter" response — cancels out all the work of the first speaker. I'm not saying the second speaker is always wrong, just that the "black lives matter"/"all lives matter" sequence is so freshly critiqued that I'd choose different words if I wanted to enlarge the frame around a problem that someone else has taken pains to identify and get other people to care about.

By the way, I remember when Obama wanted to pay special attention to jobs that "fit with how [men] define themselves as men."

[F]rom Ron Suskind's new book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" (pp. 18-19)(boldface added):

“Look, these are guys,” [Obama] said. “A lot of them see health care, being nurse’s aides, as women’s work. They need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men.” ...

As the room chewed over the non-PC phrase “women’s work,” trying to square the senator’s point with their analytical models, [Alan] Krueger — who was chief economist at the Department of Labor in the mid-1990s at the tender age of thirty-four — sat there silently, thinking that in all his years of studying men and muscle, he had never used that term. But Obama was right. Krueger wondered how his latest research on happiness and well-being might take into account what Obama had put his finger on: that work is identity, that men like to build, to have something to show for their sweat and toil.

It depends on what the meaning of "the very same thing" is.

"If Hillary Clinton were in the White House, we would be doing the very same thing," said Marty Baron, the editor of the Washington Post.

IN THE COMMENTS: Diogenes of Sinope asks:

Do fish know they're wet? Do the media know their biases?

I think they know and simultaneously do not know. If they stepped outside of the ongoing process of running their business, pursuing their careers, and they had something to gain by utter truthtelling, they would admit that they have a liberal bias. But that's not where they are, and they must keep going. I don't know these people, but I would guess that their day-to-day level of self-awareness — their working mindset — really is that they are doing the very same thing, applying a methodology to whatever raw material comes their way. If the end result looks different, it is only because the raw material was different.

Another way to put that is the familiar quip: Reality has a liberal bias.