Curator

The Crisis of the Institutions, Is Heterodoxy Just Conservatism?

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THE CRISIS OF THE INSTITUTIONS

The usual idea with Curator is to find hidden-away pieces on unexpected themes. In a normal time, there might be a discussion of this essay on how we’ve gotten the Enlightenment all backwards or this one on the joys of the Dark Ages, but at the moment it’s all politics — or the media portrayal of politics.

On the one hand, the centrist institutions are having their moment of reckoning. I’ve written in Persuasion about how PEN America in the midst of open letters and boycotts found itself without a leg to stand on and canceled virtually the entirety of its spring calendar. The fundamental issue is that the institutions — eager to reform themselves, to oppose Trump, or to be with the times — moved further and further into the progressive camp, only to discover that they were subject to an impossible, ever-escalating set of demands. PEN tried to give the boycotters what they wanted — calling for a ceasefire in Gaza — and tried to turn down the volume on the discussion. “What, then, do you call a group of poets, essayists, and novelists? My suggestion? A schism of writers,” president Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote in a chatty letter on PEN’s site. But that of course wasn’t going to work — and PEN found itself duly castigated for promulgating “Zionist propaganda under the guise of neutrality.”

Of all the major liberal institutions, The New York Times actually has maybe been most successful at course-correcting. Joe Kahn’s blistering interview in Semafor is best understood as a sort of victory lap — with Kahn feeling it safe to declare that the Dean Baquet era, and the mood of 2020, is now behind The Times. “I think it went too far. It was overly simplistic,” Kahn said of the ‘join us for the mission’ sensibility of the late 2010s. “And I think the big push that you’re seeing us make to reestablish our norms and emphasize independent journalism and build a more resilient culture comes out of some of the excesses of that period.”

What prompted the interview with Kahn was a publicly-aired dust-up between the Biden administration and The New York Times, with Biden communications staff “seeing the Times falling short in a make-or-break moment for American democracy, stubbornly refusing to adjust its coverage as it strives for the appearance of impartial neutrality,” as Politico reported. “The frustration with the Times is sometimes so intense because the Times is failing at its important responsibility,” said Kate Berner, former deputy White House communications director.

But it was that framing that drove Kahn and other New York Times editors berserk. “They’re not being realistic about what we do for a living,” said New York Times Washington bureau chief Elizabeth Bumiller. Kahn, meanwhile, went further: “I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of….the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?”

Joe Kahn. Berserk.

As Walter Kirn put it on The Racket, saying of Kahn’s interview, “It was like hearing the coach of your losing high school football team suddenly say, ‘We’re going to go back to fundamentals. It’s all about blocking, tackling and running the ball.’ And in this case, the fundamentals are a somewhat adversarial relationship with the political party that’s in power at the moment, or any political party or government that might be in power.”

Which, in a way, seems like a reckless position for the newspaper-of-record to take — at a moment where Trump is leading in the polls and a second term seems imminent to prioritize instead the brass tacks of reporting. But, of course, Kahn is right, and the position of the White House staffers is a worrying indication of just how far afield the Biden team is in reading the mood of the country. They seem to be fixated on New York Times coverage — on articles on Biden’s age, for instance — without realizing that they have already secured the votes of The New York Times’ readership. What matters is communicating with all the people who view the Biden administration, alongside The New York Times, as an homogenous elitist bloc. The way out of that — which will take time — is for The Times and outlets like it to get back to their core function, regarding themselves as The Fourth Estate and as being, even in moments of political crisis, outside the binary of party politics.

If The New York Times is attempting to course-correct, NPR meanwhile seems to have hopelessly lost its way. That’s the point of Uri Berliner’s widely-reposted piece on NPR’s ideological conformity. He cites the manifesto of NPR CEO John Lansing, who in 2020 wrote, “The leaders in public media — starting with me — must be aware of how we ourselves have benefitted from white privilege in our careers….And we must commit ourselves — body and soul — to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

That meant an ethos of diversity as “the North Star” in NPR’s project of internal reform. As Berliner wrote: “Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system.”

The only problems were that the initiative didn’t actually bringing in any listeners — NPR lost nearly a third of its audience from 2020 to 2024 — and that NPR’s ideological homogeneity brought it far from its core mission as nationally representative public radio. “There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” Berliner wrote. “It’s almost like an assembly line.”

It’s the same phenomenon as across the media landscape — liberal institutions deliberately trying to wokeify themselves in the late 2010s only to realize that they were alienating audiences and making themselves (often deservedly) targets of conservative criticism. Time — even if it seems too late — to get back to basics.

IS ‘HETERODOXY’ JUST CONSERVATISM?

The people who have come out with flying colors from this period of the institutions’ crisis are the ‘Intellectual Dark Web,’ the ‘heterodox,’ or whatever you want to call them. They sounded the alarm about the liberal institutions’ slide into ideological conformity circa 2020, and many of them lost their public platforms as a result of it. At the moment the figures of the IDW appear to be thriving — The Free Press is somewhere close to its goal as an anti-New York Times; and the mainstream media has found itself reabsorbing some of the less-objectionable figures of the IDW, e.g. John McWhorter.

But the general reaction of the mainstream to the IDW’s prescience continues to be a bafflement towards and suspicion of the IDW — as manifested in a series of recent hit pieces.

In The Atlantic, Thomas Chatterton Williams profiles Walter Kirn as a strange beast prowling the wilds of Montana, who is “either a spokesperson for a forgotten America, a truth teller in a grim and timid time, or a recklessly contrarian apologist for Donald Trump and the more conspiratorially minded of his supporters.”

In The New Republic, Raina Lipsitz visits a festival for ‘Dissident Dialogues’ and concludes, “To the extent that Dissident Dialogues had a unifying theme, it was, ‘I have the right to say silly, false, and/or hateful things without alienating friends and colleagues or being mocked online.’”

In The New Yorker, Molly Fischer manages to misread all of Nellie Bowles’ new book, Morning After The Revolution, and reduces it to: “In 2021, she left the Times, and set out to report a forbidden truth — that the left can be somewhat goofy.”

In all three pieces, the reporter chooses to play an utterly mystified straight man, with no idea why their heterodox interlocutor would be acting up in the way that they do. For Fischer, Bowles’ book is just a “failed provocation” — Bowles looking at somewhat-extreme social media posts from 2020 and imagining things. For Lipsitz, it’s somehow a virtue that she had previously “heard of only a few speakers” in the event that she’s covering, and — unable to successfully peg the event’s organizer, former Mumford & Sons guitarist Winston Marshall, to right-wing extremism (he professes to detest extremism on both sides), she settles for his “personifying the extreme center”! For Williams, the problem with Kirn seems mostly to be that he doesn’t think about Trump enough — to Williams’ bewilderment he just doesn’t seem to want to talk about Trump during their interview — and that he has a tendency to get heated when lashing out against elites. “Yet once you begin to punch at everything, you’re bound to strike the wrong target sometimes,” Williams koan-ishly remarks. He is most taken with a moment at the 2023 Novitiate conference where Kirn “launched, seemingly out of nowhere, into a tirade” against Renée DiResta, a fellow panelist.

But the straight man persona wears thin. All three reporters simply aren’t paying attention. Fischer just ignores the mountain of reporting that went into Bowles’ book — and imagines that the breakdown of civic order in autonomous zones in Western cities (as Bowles assiduously documents) is a figment of social media. Lipsitz is determined to land random haymakers: either it’s that the topics at a festival (!) are “confused and disparate,” ranging from Lucretius to the Uyghur genocide, or, a few sentences later, it’s that there is no range of topics at all and “it is tough to expand ideological diversity when the majority of speakers and large swaths of the self-selected audience hold similar or identical views.” For her, “dissident dialogues” are just weird — Marshall likely would have been happier remaining a rock star, and UnHerd, which Marshall’s father helped fund, is a UK newspaper that “launched in 2017 to widespread ridicule.” Never mind that Marshall left music on his own terms and that UnHerd is an absorbing, independent-minded publication. And there is no attempt to think through why the conference might have been organized in the first place — that there may be a reigning group-think that conference organizers and participants are objecting to and that that creates a need for a looser, freer discourse.

Williams’ lack of curiosity is the most striking. Kirn had taken offense to the inclusion of DiResta on a panel on free expression given that DiResta is research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and it has long been a contention of Kirn and the ‘heterodox’ thinkers on his corner of the web that the Observatory is very much part of the architecture of controlling digital expression. For Williams, Kirn “can evince a conspiracy-sympathetic persona, directing fury at an abstract, sometimes straw-manned establishment,” but it seems never to occur to Williams that that fury might not just be a case of Kirn turning into a crank; that he might actually have a point. The establishment isn’t a ‘straw man.’ There really is an institutional group-think that is very hostile to and dismissive of dissident perspectives and that has condoned a series of underhanded maneuvers for keeping those dissenting voices out of public space.

Walter Kirn prowling the wilds of Montana

UnHerd — the same magazine that allegedly launched to “widespread ridicule” — has a thorough investigation of how one of those maneuvers essentially crippled its profitability. An organization called Global Disinformation Index, which monitors media sites for advertisers, placed UnHerd on a “dynamic exclusion list” for promoting “disinformation,” which in UnHerd’s case was “gender-critical beliefs” and critique of “LGBTQI+ narratives.” As UnHerd reported, “The GDI verdict means that we only received between 2% and 6% of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of our size.”

In a situation like UnHerd’s, the establishment is far from a straw man and the ‘disinformation industry’ that Kirn is so critical of far from an innocent actor. As Claire Melford, the founder of GDI, says, “We actually instantiate our definition of disinformation — the adversarial narrative topics — within the technology,” meaning that an ostensibly fact-checking organization is selecting which “narratives” are harmful and then using AI tools to restrict the reach of publications that it dislikes. Something like that — the underhanded stifling of a publication like UnHerd — should matter to anybody in journalism, but for reporters like Fischer, Lipsitz, and Williams, all of these problems are just strange gripes out on the lunatic fringe.

What is a concern with the IDW space — and underlies much of the critique of it — is the argument that the mainstream has reformed itself since 2020 and that the heterodox movement has outlived its use and now become more or less just an arm of the Republican Party. That’s what to some extent happened with Chris Rufo, and it’s a reasonable question to raise about The Free Press, The Racket, etc. As Freddie deBoer puts it, “The anti-woke are finding it difficult (as everyone does) to realize that they aren’t truth-telling outsiders but rather represent a point of view that’s very useful to the powerful; so many of them have postured as rebels for so long that they can’t look around and see that, indeed, the vibe has shifted, and in their direction.”

But that’s not quite right and credits the heterodox with more power than they have. Ironically, it’s pieces like those of Fischer, Lipsitz, and Williams that make it clear why the need for the heterodox remains. The mainstream’s approach is still a tight-lipped, eyebrow-raised dismissal and an almost complete failure to engage with the substance of the heterodox critique. With the parties, and media organs, once again closing ranks before an election, that need for independent, unconstrained thinking is never so important or so fragile.