The cultural contradictions of liberal democracy

This is a very good summation from the editors of the New York Times, of what a survey of various scholars of authoritarianism reveals about the extent to which Donald Trump and Trumpism are moving the country from the democratic to the authoritarian end of the political spectrum. It lists twelve critical symptoms of creeping authoritarianism, and concludes that Trump’s regime already displays all twelve, to greater and lesser extents.

This is all obviously true, although it tends to be ignored or denied by our political culture and institutions, very much including the elite media, and very much including the New York Times in particular.

A question that more or less leaps to mind under the circumstances is, if the editorial board of the Times recognizes that Trump is an aspiring authoritarian dictator, who has already moved the political system to a measurable extent in that direction, why do these same editors continue to in so many ways treat Trump and Trumpism as simply politics as usual, by regularly publishing opinion pieces by Trump supporters, by allowing Trumpist fellow travelers like Ross Douthat to keep pretending that they are something other than what they so clearly are, by running straight news stories that stay completely within the classic Both Sides frame that all but explicitly denies that Trump is actually an authoritarian threat, and so forth?

The answer, I think, is twofold:

(1) Institutions are complicated social entities. The management of the New York Times is itself insufficiently authoritarian in its structure (ironic!) to maintain a consistent line in regard to all this, because the institution itself is internally conflicted on both the question of the extent to which Trump is a threat to liberal democracy, and what to do about that.

(2) Relatedly, elite media institutions are particularly prone to being unable to negotiate the paradox of tolerance in any sort of coherent or pragmatic way. The sanctity of “the marketplace of ideas” — absurd as this concept is when used as a rationale by a privately-owned newspaper to continue to publish fascist and fascist fellow travelers in its own pages, after its management openly recognizes the gathering authoritarian threat — still reigns supreme in highbrow American journalism.

So Trump is on the way to making the publication of much of the material that appears in the New York Times a criminal offense, but the New York Times continues to host Trumpers and Trumpist opinion, because as an institution it quite literally can’t help itself.