POLITICS FEBRUARY 6, 2009
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When word broke last week that William Kristol’s weekly New York Times op-ed column was ending its run, the reaction in left-blogospheric quarters was downright exultant. “An era of phoning in misrepresentation comes to an end,” announced Brad DeLong. “Like Bo crushing Bosworth, Bill Kristol has been exposed,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates. “He spent a year embarrassing the nation’s most prestigious news outlet, wasting space on the most valuable media real estate in the country,” concluded Steve Benen.
The relief wasn’t limited to liberals inclined to view Kristol as a chronically inaccurate right-wing propagandist. “Even conservatives found his column galactically dull,” noted New York’s Jennifer Senior. “Unsurprising, dutiful recapitulations of Republican conventional wisdom.” Thus, when the Times finally got wise to his tricks, it was as if order had been restored to the universe. Essayistic pursuit of truth was back, and Pravda recitations of the party line were out.
But it’s worth interrupting the celebrations for a moment to ask just what is so wrong with a little propaganda. Kristol was criticized for shunning the responsibilities of a public intellectual and instead writing an amoral column that might have been drafted by a paid political operative of the sort Kristol used to be. I agree. And precisely because Kristol was so unwilling to engage in disinterested wisdom-seeking, his column was immensely useful.
Back in the Cold War, Washington employed a small army of analysts to tease out the truths buried in the original Pravda. Should a particular assertion be taken at face value? Be read as an indicator of unstated internal feuds? Be understood as a sneaky Communist diversion ploy? The analytical full court press wouldn’t have been deployed, had such people existed, on independent Comintern intellectuals--Muscovite versions of David Brooks or Ross Douthat or Kathleen Parker. It was worthwhile, though, when the agitprop came straight from the Central Committee.
Sure, there are other sources for right-wing propaganda. As Matthew Yglesias noted, the paper could “just republish Bill O’Reilly transcripts occasionally.” But that gives Kristol too little credit: He was a protagonist in GOP politics, rather than a measly media figure. There’s hardly any actual elected official or professional strategist who’s been as much of a movement player over the past two decades as Kristol. His columns functioned in a way similar to Bob Novak’s in his heyday: You read them to read the ideas his sources wanted you to read, not to absorb the author’s philosophical wisdom. Except these were better, because the insider source was the author himself.
In a Lit Crit 101 sort of way, Kristol’s columns provided the primary-source material for a fascinating exercise in close-reading. What does he really think? What does he want us to think? What do the uncertain answers to either of those questions say about the state of play in the inner circles of the Republican party? On those moments where Kristol’s public work offered hints at that last question--as during his fall crusade to let Sarah Palin loose or his subsequent broadsides against the McCain campaign faction that opposed such a strategy--his column proved more useful than a 15-inch news article.
Of course, that’s a very postmodern, post-fact, post-newspaper way of seeking information. But it’s an attitude that’s perfect for a bloggy age, when there’s a small army of folks out there ready to explicate a propagandist’s every word, and when even ordinary readers are more inclined against taking anything at face value. The online analyses of Kristol’s column were a treat, which is why the rhetoric employed by those dancing on his grave comes across as a bit strange. All that stuff about protecting “some of the nation’s most prestigious news outlets” from Kristol’s taint strikes me as a wee bit reverent, as if the Times were the Louvre and some charlatan were relegating the Mona Lisa to storage in order to hang “A Charge to Keep.” Given the anti-MSM triumphalism of our era, the implicit genuflecting before the Gray Lady seems downright endearing.
The Times will no doubt find a new conservative voice, someone who will likely do a better job of putting intellectual honesty before political expediency. The person may be plugged into GOP politics, but he or she will be a spectator more than a player, just like a proper Times columnist is supposed to be. As such, even with the microscopic interest that attaches itself to any work that appears in the op-ed page of record, it’ll be a lot less fun. Who wants to follow all those links about the contents of a column only to realize that, instead of revealing some tectonic shift within the Republican power structure, they reveal nothing more than one of George Will’s personal intellectual idiosyncrasies?
If the Times really wanted to get bloggy and multimedia and postmodern, they would hire Kristol back--and simultaneously assign some smart writer to report out the back story behind each Kristol column. The result would be one original column a week, plus one annotated exegesis about what it really means. At least one of the columns would make for riveting reading.
Michael Schaffer is the author of One Nation Under Dog.
28 comments
To understand Bill Kristol think of him as the contemporary equivalent of an anti-Communist liberal back in the fifties: Truman, Acheson, Jackson, Humphrey, JFK. Today's post sixties liberals, like the Michael Shaffer, regard him as a right winger because he doesn't share their anti-American, radical leftist, sixties style politics. But read what Bill K. has to say. There is little in there that the older generation of pro-American, pro-western liberals would disagree with. A “neo-conservative” is an old-fashioned liberal.
- bulbman1066
February 6, 2009 at 12:31am
Don't worry, I'm sure Kristol will pop up again very soon. You can't keep guys like him down.
- City of Evil
February 6, 2009 at 1:18am
This column would be a great defense of the Kristol column if it were written in 2005. What the Democratic party needs now isn't an insight into the mind of the GOP - if there is any such thing left - but serious intellectual competition. Kristol's column was worth than nothing for that role.
- Simon
February 6, 2009 at 1:46am
"The Times will no doubt find a new conservative voice, someone who will likely do a better job of putting intellectual honesty before political expediency." Since when was the NY Times interested in intellectual honesty?
- Mike
February 6, 2009 at 8:53am
By way do it in the New York Times? I check out anncoulter.com each wednesday to see what hateful bile she's spewing, if you're interested in analytical investigation, I'm sure Kristol will always end up at some public perch in which to check this "thoughts."
- mmathog
February 6, 2009 at 11:26am
The big question now that Bill Kristol has lost his prestigious NYT podium: will his economic-populism-fearing and Mike Huckabee-crippling strategy of picking Sarah Palin out of obscurity still work? Will Sarah still respect him? Can a Straussian succeed in fooling all of the people all of the time even after being let go from two of journalism's premier posts (Time magazine being the other one)in just over a year--and losing them because Machiavellian propaganda doesn't really work in the long run except perhaps on Zionism-worshipping evangelicals, which is what has kept so unprincipled a person as Kristol in a place of influence for so long? Foolish evangelicals! Devious Straussians! When will it all end? I'm practically eager to bolt from the Republican Party, except for the alternative.
- Zeke
February 6, 2009 at 1:35pm
Kristol is a conservative mouthpiece--just like Dowd or Krugman are for liberals.
- will
February 6, 2009 at 3:20pm
The key observation about Kristol's column is it was "galactically dull." I had no problem with his partisanship, and I can sift propaganda from fact. But why employ a mediocre writer whose observations are consistently banal? There are plenty of provocative and witty conservative columnists. Give them a turn and send him back to The Weekly Standard where standards are apparently pretty low.
- Larry Bachmann
February 6, 2009 at 3:57pm
I've never read anything this arrogantly dismissive that provides so little to back up its assertions. Does no one ever try to prove their points on this website without resorting to ad hominem attacks? Call him a propagandist twenty times and put an angry looking picture of him up and you seem consider your point well made. If you want an example of transparently propagandistic journalism look no further than your own article. Liberals can't take it that someone would disagree with them to their face and make some good points, so they try to isolate themselves among the like-minded and assume sinister intentions from any opposing ideas, especially those who base their asserions upon factual evidence. The truth is that you don't hate Bill Kristol because you know he is a propagandist for the cause of evil. You hate him because you fear that, with each op-ed in your "newspaper of record," he exposed your shallow, superficial intelligence.
- Warren
February 6, 2009 at 4:22pm
"Yes, he wrote pure partisan propaganda. That's what made it valuable." How is that different from Dowd or Krugman?
- JohnB
February 6, 2009 at 6:37pm
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- 1
February 6, 2009 at 10:42pm
I'm with Simon on this one. Kristol is out because he doesn't really offer a window on any relevant worldview at this point. It _was_ valuable. Whatever American conservatism comes to be reinvigorted over the next five or ten years, it's not going to draw much from the kinds of worldviews Kristol extolled.
- Joe C
February 7, 2009 at 12:45am
I've always thought that Bill Kristol was a very nice guy personally who is just cracked. I want to say to him, "Now Bill, if you don't take your meds we're going to have to give you a time out." And the notion of using analysis to figure out what he's really saying is just as cracked: for Kristol, it's all 100% real! David Brooks, on the other hand, I always listen to with exactly the kind of analysis you're talking about, and when I do, I get a much better sense about what bugs are up the mainstream conservative noses.
- Douglas Wilson
February 7, 2009 at 8:03am
I enjoyed reading William Kristol just as I enjoy reading David Brooks and George Will. I am a lifelong Democrat but not so partisan that I cannot listen to or read the views of someone who's opinion may differ from mine. When I read a publication from the right or the left and all their columnists espouse their publications view only I do not value it as much as I do a liberal media outlet having a few conservative writers or a right wing outlet having some liberal writers. It truly begins to become quite stale and not worth my time when I know exactly what the Huffington Post and National Review are going to say before I read them. Why bother to waste my time? However, if I know there will be something different instead of the same old pablum I am more inclined to read left and right wing publications. We hear every day about diversity. It's about time we welcome diversity of opinion and thought and realize that is what made our country so special.
- Mark Jeffery Koch
February 7, 2009 at 8:28am
Besides bulbman1066, I seem the only one here abouts who liked Kristol's columns. Let me for the 8,000th time throw down the same gauntlet. Everyone riffs hatefully on Kristol with the received wisdom that he was lousy. But no ever backs it up. Show me a column, just one, where "...Pravda recitations of the party line were..." in. The odd person once in a while points to something. I take the opposite view and argue for what is reasonably good about the particular column, and we generally agree that the column was not so bad as all that. What an unthinking herd of nay sayers the anti Kristolians are, hewing to their own party lines. "Pravda recititations" is so over the top and beyond the pale that it its own self refutation. Any takers, picker uppers of my gauntlet? I doubt it. God forbid you should have to move from easy declamatory generalization and actually get down to cases. Itzik Basman
- itzik basman
February 7, 2009 at 1:55pm
First of all, Kristol is not chronically wrong - the left is so comfortably cocooned in their own groupthink that they don't want any unnecessary opinions to get in the way. (Stop reading the bottom of the birdcage!) I remember when Bill suggested Iraq was winnable - how the left howled! But who was right? Hmmmm? And who is upset at having their groupthink disturbed? Hmmmm? The real issue here is objective study and analysis - it requires listening to ALL sides and investigating ALL sources of information. And if you're interested in having a news source that is diverse and comprehensive, you need all sides. But none of you can't take having an opposing point of view anywhere; which is why lefties always approve of dissenting voices that are silenced. But what else to expect from people that get all their information from a mix of the Daily Show, bumper stickers, and Michael Moore?
- j robinson
February 7, 2009 at 2:15pm
"nation's most prestigious news outlet," in the minds of an ever decreasingly few. When the fish wrap fails to show up on the front porch, they'll be the last to know. It's only, now, a matter of time. Shut the lights on the way out, Pinch. It's OK. It was Bush's fault
- Robert Yatto
February 7, 2009 at 2:20pm
Sorry--I find this quite unconvincing, at least as a justification for running a regular Kristol column. One really doesn't need a weekly reminder of how brain dead the Republican inner circle is--that has been evident for quite some time. And the post-modern deconstructive pieces--which I agree would be much more interesting than Kristol's own words--don't require wasting space on Kristol's own columns, since he spews his blather indiscriminantly across a variety of media. I am open to the proposition that a thoughtful and independent minded right critique of Obama and the Democratic-semi-controlled Congress could be useful. As would a thoughtful and independent serious left critique, which no one seems to be discussing, at least in relation to the NYT.
- The Wise Bard (Madison, WI)
February 7, 2009 at 3:07pm
Well I have to give this guy credit, he made laugh out loud. He's living in some weird alternative universe where real life doesn't matter. The New York Times is going bankrupt. Any sane person can see that. Their short term survival strategy is to hysterically pander to their liberal elitist base. Obviously this pleases the base, but unfortunately for them it won't pay the bills.
- Erick
February 7, 2009 at 6:37pm
He already had a magazine called the Weekly Standard. You can do the same close reading of his thoughts there. Or see his bullshit on Fox all the time.
- David
February 7, 2009 at 8:08pm
Times columnists come in two flavors; the insightful and truly influential, think of Tom Freidman or Bill Safire. Then there are Maureen Dowd and mot of the others, which I usually use to wrap digital dead fish. The newspaper biz is in a bad way; a number of former leading papers are going to go under this year. The Times won't do that, but it's selling it's birthright to Carlos Slim to put off the day of reckoning. The chances are excellent Kristol will have the last laugh, with the Old Gray Lady going down for the count within the next few years.
- Don
February 7, 2009 at 8:10pm
The bottom line: I don't have to pay for propaganda. Amd the spsce his column took up could be used in a more useful way. I don't always agree with The Times' op-ed columns, but most often I find them thoughtul and/or thought-provoking. Kristol was neither.
- Yaakov Elman
February 7, 2009 at 9:31pm
First the New York Times acted like a cheerleader for the Iraq War. Then, it wrote a scathing article about the disasterous foreign policy that it was. Next, it apologized for not doing its job as a skeptical source of information in the run up to the war. Finally, it returned to cheerleading for the war as if the previous two events never took place. Propaganda, complicity, apology, and back to propaganda is the path the NYTimes chose and and continues to use. The exception to this is whenever a democratic candidate is elected. Suddenly as if by magic the news media grows a pair and has enough tough questions for ten democratic presidents; this will fade with the idolizing of the next republican president. The profession of journalism has been determined to be personalities that know how to sound like a journalist while betraying Americans for whatever the going rate is. Ego is stroked for how well one manipulates, rather how well one informs. A comparable problem exists in economics, because capitalism, as we know it, cannot exist without deceit.
- purpleOnion
February 8, 2009 at 2:46am
Can't wait for the day Rupert Murdoch buys the NYT.
- c.e.kestner
February 8, 2009 at 6:46am
Typical liberal. Can't understand that the world doesn't revolve around (or fit to) your left-wing template. Hence accusing Kristol of a lack of intellectual honesty or of deep thought. Don't you understand the silliness of it, when that's what I see in your story? A total lack of thought, just the simple political attack that says, "Boy, you're dumb!" Back to you. The perfect example is the "stimulus package" of the left and this leftist president. To you, I'm sure it seems deeply mired in intellectual meaning and political value. But just in case you haven't figured out what most Americans have by now, "the Emperor has no clothes," and people aren't as dumb as you, mighty columnist!
- spk2moi
February 8, 2009 at 12:26pm
One thing I don't get: how did Kristol's stint as an editorial columnist embarrass the nation's most prestigious news outlet? So far as I know the National Enquirer never ran any of his columns. Just curious
- Fred Gill
February 8, 2009 at 2:31pm
I wrote the Times' Public Editor many times protesting Kristol's column for a very simple reason: he is a blight on a public discourse that is already poisoned by the gleeful lies and demagoguery of the right. But, more than that, to draw the line at Kristol was a way to protest the overall decline of responsible commentary at the Times, Maureen Dowd having long since descended into her own pathological obsessions, and David Brooks reduced to waging a losing fight with his conscience. Enough, enough, enough. After Jayson Blair and Judith "Little-Miss-Runamok" Miller, we were owed much much better than Bill Kristol.
- michael
February 8, 2009 at 7:32pm
I never minded the content and dishonesty as much as the "breathtaking banality of expression" as Fallows so aptly called it. Kristol's columns were just awful reads.
- Sebastian
February 9, 2009 at 5:23am