With the United States in a tailspin into fascism, the New York Times’ star columnists work ever harder to change the subject. The subject is never fascism. Anything but that! It’s always: What’s wrong with the left?
Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein have slightly different ways of doing this. But the very idea of their doing a “show” together reveals that their purpose is the same: Distract from the mainstream media’s catastrophic failure to perceive where the U.S. democracy stands from a historical perspective. Try to keep a conversation going about how the left, not the right, is to blame for what is happening in the U.S. today.
Douthat: I also think that there’s a way in which at the peak of progressive cultural power, there was a sense that progressives were censorious scolds who certainly didn’t like populists and conservatives, but seemed to not like a lot of people generally. Today, I feel like it’s almost — and this is, again, impressionistic — but do progressives like themselves?
Klein: You really want to put them on the couch. But the answer is no. [Laughs.]
Douthat: The answer is no, right? And in a way, that’s always been true — nothing like a self-hating liberal.
What kind of minds does this nonsense come from? And why is it in the New York Times? Neither of these two hacks is half as smart as he thinks he is.