The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Notebook: There was a hilarious piece by NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner in the Free Press on April 9 called “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” The piece, written, I think, with a straight face but with the effect of a Netflix comedy special, purports to expose a liberal bias at NPR, that “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America,” that there’s an “absence of viewpoint diversity,” and so on. I don’t know what it took him 25 years. I stopped listening to NPR 25 years ago for that same reason–not that I’m one to speak: the absence of viewpoint diversity on this site is one of its many fault lines, though The Conversation has corrected some of that (liberal though The Conversation remains by definition, since its writers are from the academy, and there is no such thing as a conservative academy, else it’s not an academy but, like Paris University’s scholastics in the late middle ages, a propaganda arm for reactionaries uninterested in free inquiry). But it’s still funny that anyone would complain about liberalism at NPR, for the obvious reason that no one this side of the Gulf Stream has ever thought it was anything different, but also for a less funny reason: NPR is essentially the only liberal-leaning organ on American radio today, in a universe entirely, crushingly, despairingly dominated not just by conservative-leaning voices, but by fathers, mothers, and Father-fucking Coughlins everywhere you attempt a listen. So yes: “In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex,” Berliner complains, and of course that’s a bit excessive, as everything surrounding transgender theology now tends to be (the Brits have it right, by the way: we need to slow down the rush to indulge every pimply teen’s lunge for hormone therapy once they experience gender disphoria, but we don;t have to be cruel or sadistic or demeaning about it, the way people like to be in DeSantistan). But then he complains about covering Gaza from an “intersectional” perspective, which he reduces to “Oppressor versus oppressed.” As opposed to what, exactly? Anyway: hilarity aside, he has his points (as did Jimmy Carter, when he complained of liberals: “If they get 95 percent of what they want, the can only remember the other 5 percent”) but to demand something else, even from NPR, in that universe of revanchist programming is a bit rich. That’s why I don’t sweat the gap in “viewpoint diversity” on this site. It’s a wonder the site exists at all. Look three inches beyond it in any direction and your eyes and ears are likely to be irradiated with red. Everything that moves here, everything that breathes, that speechifies, that pretends to report, is red. So if there are leanings here and there, but still the unquestioned principle of reporting accurately, fairly, justly, even if also with a more liberal conscience (liberalism being, in its essence, not an ideology and not a political stance but a manner of thinking that defies pigeonholing), I’m not sure I’d be in mourning a-la-Berliner. Sure NPR can be its own pastiche, and if I’m going to listen to a news source at all I’d rather listen to The Economist’s readers than to NPR, but I’d be in mourning if NPR changed its ways, or adopted more allegedly centrist ideologies, because centrism today, in the United States, with conservatism being the neo-fascism it’s become, is essentially a surrender to an illusion of centrism that is more correctly identified as a capitulation to another version of conservatism. Let’s not become William Buckleys just because Trumpism has turned all his acolytes into Coughlins, especially when, looking behind the presumptions of Buckley, he was no less of a racist, misogynist, homophobic prick than his brasher descendants. He just hid it better behind his patrician airs.

—P.T.

 

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Thus a more inclusive definition of Nixonland: it is the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans. The first group, enemies of Richard Nixon, are the spiritual heirs of Stevenson and Galbraith. They take it as an axiom that if Richard Nixon and the values associated with him triumph, America itself might end. The second group are the people who wrote those telegrams begging Dwight D. Eisenhower to keep their hero on the 1952 Republican ticket. They believe, as did Nixon, that if the enemies of Richard Nixon triumph—the Alger Hisses and Helen Gahagan Douglases, the Herblocks and hippies, the George McGoverns and all the rest—America might end. The DNC was right: an amazingly large segment of the population disliked and mistrusted Richard Nixon instinctively. What they did not acknowledge was that an amazingly large segment of the population also trusted him as their savior. “Nixonland” is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States. It would define it, in fact, for the next fifty years.

–From Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland (2008).

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