The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism

&gt;“Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”<p>This is a very dangerous sentiment. If you look at the movements for abolition and Civil Rights, the most successful appeals were calling America to live up to her founding ideals.<p>However, it seems that many people are trying to effect change not through encouraging Americans to live up to their county’s ideals, but the shame them and guilt-trip them into doing it.<p>The problem is that guilt is a very poor long-term motivator. Think of you have a someone you are trying to do better. Are you more likely to succeed by telling them how horrible they are and how they have always been horrible and how their parents were horrible? Or do you tell them that they are a fundamentally good person and that they should try to do better in this area as well?<p>The shaming approach may feel for satisfying, but it is likely to create a strong backlash and and problems down the line.<p>Think about it, there is no denying that America has been fabulously successful for white people. Now do you tell white people that their success was because of the ideals and open society, and they should cultivate them more, or do you tell them that their success was due to oppression of brown&#x2F;black people? And if you tell them the later, what will you say when others also come and agree with what you are saying and say that we should get back to oppressing brown and black people in earnest, since that what our success was built on?

<i>It’s as if liberal editors reined in radical writers but couldn’t do so coherently, and lost the plot at times.</i><p>This is a great way to describe it. I usually check the NYTimes front page a few times a week. It’s really gone of the rails.<p>Headlines have gone from slightly biased journalism, to opinion pieces in disguise and it looks like every NYT reporter is trying to outdo each other.<p>I’m not naive enough to believe that any news source is truly unbiased, but the NYT appears to have given up any attempt to do so now.

&gt; <i>&quot;The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before us. You could say the same thing about the English common law, for example, or the use of the English language: no aspect of American life is untouched by it. You could say that about the Enlightenment. Or the climate. You could say that America’s unique existence as a frontier country bordered by lawlessness is felt even today in every mass shooting. You could cite the death of countless millions of Native Americans — by violence and disease — as something that defines all of us in America today. And in a way it does. &quot;</i><p>The way I see it, something as expansive as an entire country is doubtlessly a hyperdimensional matter. From any particular point of view, you can only glimpse one projection of that hyperdimensional mass. The projection you see is factual (insofar as any human perception can be factual) but it&#x27;s nevertheless one of <i>many</i> factual projections.<p>Consider if you were a flatlander looking at a 2d projection of a cylinder. Depending on your perspective, that cylinder may appear to be a circle, or a rectangle. Both projections capture factual information about the true form of the object in question, but two flatlanders with different perspectives could perceive radically different projections of the same cylinder and could have a bitter dispute over who was right.

It&#x27;s a pity this submission was flagged very quickly. Agree or disagree, the main idea underlined by the article is something that needs to be very much discussed in the US. Sadly, platforms for this discussion have decreased greatly to near nil. It also seems to be too much for HN.

Nytimes is almost Fox News level bad, the comments and bigotry are just hidden under more complex prose. The non opinion section of the WSJ is the best source of news. Nytimes is a far left propaganda rag.

It’s interesting how this article is trying to convince us that the NYT’s argument that racism has “touched” every aspect of US history should actually be interpreted as the NYT is asserting that every aspect can solely be viewed through that lens. I think this type of argumentative magnification and reduction leads to a lot of overblown inter-partisinal argumentative malpractice.

In the internet era, opinion &quot;journalism&quot; tailored to certain kool aid drinking demographics is what is profitable and expedient. It is not that much different than supporting any advocacy organization with a membership fee and weekly newsletter.

I came to say what I see other commentators saying.<p>What sells is the bait, the piece that confirms your thinking rather than challenges it.<p>A fair bit of education (see Yale &#x2F; Harvard etc) is going down this path as well, especially outside the sciences I think.<p>We are also getting more articles that never even attempt to explain what the other viewpoint might be. I just read a super long article, some govt agency apparently targeting a local dance crew - without detail or context of the actual targeting of the crew (ie, a regulation calling them out by name?) or comment from the agency (ie, responding to complaints? Motivated by hate of dance? Targeting something else entirely).

conservative andrew sullivan writes typical conservative opinion piece that falls in line with his party&#x27;s political line<p>HN treats it like it is some sort of objective, academic study<p>some commenters even use this opinion piece to complain that the NYT runs opinion pieces

This has been true of most American &quot;journalism&quot; for at least a decade now. Activist journalism has become so common that editorialization is just taken as normal - I doubt that the average person even understands the degree to which news is editorialized. It&#x27;s next to impossible to find an objective mainstream source these days - for both left and right leaning media.<p>Probably related to the modern polarization of the nation, though which is the chicken and which is the egg is hard to say.

&quot;But the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one.&quot; Well, the author does know what liberalism is, but definitely does not know what Marxism is!<p>Marxism does have a good answer to the original question of the piece: &quot;How can an enduring “ideal” — like, say, freedom or equality — be “false” at one point in history and true in another?&quot; - Marxists argue that ideas can be progressive at one time, and become reactionary at a later stage of history. Ideas do not determine history, but are in general a reflection of class forces. When capitalism was progressive, in the founding days of the country, the ideas that upheld the system of private ownership were progressive ideas! The forces these ideas represent helped defeat monarchies and slavery. Today, advocates of the free market play the opposite role, of holding society back, because capitalism is in a deep crisis and socialism has become socially and technologically possible.

&gt; All that rhetoric about liberty, progress, prosperity, toleration was a distraction in order to perpetrate those lies, and make white people feel better about themselves.<p>Well, quite a bit of it, yes. It takes some phenomenal doublethink to set out &#x27;all men are created equal&#x27; as a basic principle during a war of independence, then enshrine slavery in the rule of law when it comes time to write an actual constitution.