The New Republic

It's easy to see how The New York Times settled on John Tierney to
replace longtime columnist William Safire last winter. Tierney is a
veteran Timesman known for his wit and intellect. Many colleagues
believed his libertarian streak would produce a quirky,
iconoclastic take on the news. "He thinks outside the box, has a
very distinct worldview, and I think he'll be a lot of fun," Times
Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins told The Washington Post.
Collins seemed to suggest that, in a time of intense partisanship,
Tierney would be interesting because he doesn't fit comfortably
into either party.But, if Tierney's partisan sympathies have been fluid, his
libertarian ideology has made him utterly predictable. Already, he
has tallied seven columns lamenting the war on drugs, five bashing
big government energy plans, and four more promoting vouchers.
Other columns have savaged Amtrak and federalized airport security.
No government initiative, however marginal, is safe from Tierney's
withering gaze. (Here I submit to you all four Tierney columns
about privatizing space exploration.) And so, while it can take
years for the punishing, twice-weekly schedule to render most Times
columnists unreadable, Tierney has managed the feat in a matter of
months.

One of Tierney's most tedious stretches came just after Hurricane
Katrina. Tierney's first Katrina column blamed government flood
insurance for undermining people's incentives to protect
themselves, never mind that the prospect of drowning in a toxic
goulash should have been incentive enough. A second column bemoaned
the feds' dubious "one-size-fits-all strategy" for dealing with
hurricanes, as though fema had been forced to manufacture
evacuation plans the way the Soviets manufactured Volgas. Subsequent
columns rightly praised the performance of corporations like
Wal-Mart during the crisis, but then proposed outsourcing fema's
functions to said corporations. Finally, in his sixth Katrina
column in seven opportunities, titled "losing that new deal
religion," Tierney got right down to it: He had lost faith in
government.

Tierney's libertarianism is so rigid it can remind you of other
philosophies purporting to explain the world with a single axiom.
In many ways, Tierney's analytical style resembles that of a staff
writer at the Daily Worker. The only difference is that, where
Marxists emphasize one's relationship to the means of production,
Tierney highlights the degree to which an action advances the cause
of freedom. (Libertarians treat personal autonomy as sacrosanct and
embrace markets as the best way to promote it.) In neither case
would you need to read more than a few articles to know what the
writer thinks about pretty much anything.

As a national affairs columnist, Tierney must write about
politicians with some regularity. And, just as there is no more
cartoonish figure in all of Marxist literature than the capitalist,
there may be no more cartoonish figure in Tierney's imagination
than the politician. The politicians of Tierney's columns are
invariably corrupt, duplicitous, craven, and dim-witted--or, as he
puts it, forever "hectoring us with bogus arguments," "doling out
subsidies," "promis[ing] a cure for any problem in the news," and,
of course, "trying to sneak 100,000 wind turbines into everyone's
backyard but their own." Tellingly, Tierney rarely identifies
politicians by name; he refers to them as a class.

The shrewdest observers of human nature in newsprint, such as
Tierney's Times colleague David Brooks, understand that there are a
million forces operating on an individual at any given moment. Some
are personal--resentment, ambition, empathy, to name a few. Others
are impersonal--culture, history, biology. All of them make
monocausal explanations of human behavior hopeless. But this is
never a problem for Tierney. For him, apparently the only thing you
need to know about a person is what he does for a living.

Of course, a lot of columnists have prominent worldviews. What
distinguishes Tierney from his colleagues--including engaging
libertarians like Dave Barry and Slate's Jack Shafer--is that his
worldview orders almost every thought, even the apolitical ones.
Why did Lawrence Summers encounter trouble at Harvard? Because
Harvard's faculty is an entrenched bureaucracy insulated from
market forces. How should men think of marriage? As a job: "Devote
as much energy to knowing your wife as you would to an important
business client."

The most egregious example of this came in a January 14 column
ostensibly eulogizing Tierney's friend and former colleague, David
Rosenbaum, who was recently murdered. Tierney opened with a recent
Garrison Keillor suggestion that urban Democrats provide better
social services than anti-tax, suburban Republicans. As a way of
rebutting Keillor, Tierney then invoked ... his deceased friend.
"This week in Washington, a city run by Democrats with Keillor's
views on taxes and public services, the municipal ambulance service
has been making news for the help it didn't provide to David
Rosenbaum," Tierney wrote. "David was still alive and conscious
when a neighbor found him lying on the sidewalk and summoned help,
but it took 23 minutes for the city ambulance to arrive." Finally,
Tierney caught himself: "I do not mention these facts to make a
case against government-run ambulance services. That would be a
disservice to David. He abhorred argument by anecdote."

This particular column notwithstanding, Tierney is right: He doesn't
abuse anecdotes the way most journalists do. His abuses are much
worse. The standard reportorial technique is to lean on an anecdote
to establish a trend. So, to take one example, a typical journalist
might cite one or two nasa failures as evidence of a space program
in decline, whether or not that's really the case. Tierney uses
anecdotes to establish something slightly more ambitious: galactic
truth. In Tierney's hands, these one or two failures prove that
government is fundamentally ill-suited to the task of space
exploration, as he suggests in one column. Or take Dartanian
Sanders, whom Tierney met after the hurricane. "I've learned my
lesson from Katrina,'' Sanders told Tierney in one column. "The
lesson is to save money and be self-reliant. Counting on the
government in an emergency is like sending your kids to a candy
store where the guy is selling drugs." Well then, it's settled.

To be fair, it's easy to see how a permanent slot on an op-ed page
could make someone shrill. Tierney certainly isn't the first
columnist to come down with a case of Jerusalem syndrome. But, even
by the standards of the crusading columnist out to change the
world, Tierney has been a disappointment. Just consider his
priorities. Sure, it's a shame we don't have reliable train
service. But what about reliable health service? And, OK, I give,
the drug war is costly, irrational, counterproductive. It deserves
every bit of scorn Tierney heaps on it. But what about, you know,
the war war? These aren't topics you're likely to read about in a
John Tierney column. But, then, you've probably stopped reading him
anyway.

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