Liz Spayd's Counterblast at the New York Times' Readers Over Bret Stephens' Column and What it Shows Us About Centrism

Liz Spayd answered the backlash from readers over the publication of Bret Stephens' climate denialist first column back in 2017 with an expression of support for a greater diversity of views on the opinion pages to be achieved by "busting up the mostly liberal echo chamber around here," and criticism of the Times' readers for not taking "at face value" Stephens' attack on climate science as honest skepticism.

Looking back at Spayd's piece her position strikes me as an object lesson in the centrism that is all too often confused with "liberal" or "left" views (when it is, in fact, classical conservatism adapted for twentieth century America).

It is very telling of this centrism that the Times' editorship's desire for a greater diversity of views led to the inclusion of a Stephens on its pages--the conservative center more easily looking right than left for its opinion and its insight; far more likely to extend a conciliatory hand toward the right than to the left; and when those to its left question its doing that, the center defending not just its conduct but the right to them, as it attacks the left for saying anything about the matter. Indeed, in answering the "liberals" who stood in for the left in this discussion, Ms. Spayd accused them of intolerance for other views--all very much in line with who is and who is not part of the "legitimate" conversation in the centrist's eyes. Put into the terminology of centrist political theory, the Times' left-leaning readers were a pack of "ideologues" and "extremists" behaving in an "uncivil" fashion--as a result of their doing what the "civil," "pluralistic," "pragmatic" politics by which centrists set such great store disallows by their remembering that in politics people are not always forthright about their meanings, intentions and goals, their actually paying attention to context, their thinking that actual physical reality is of any importance, and caring more about addressing a pressing real-world problem than "getting along." For in the view of centrists like those for whom Ms. Spayd spoke anyone legitimately part of the conversation ought to take a presumably legitimate Stephens "at his word," accepting his claim "that he has no intention of manufacturing facts and that he will be transparent with his audience about his ideas and intentions"--even though bad faith and outright lying have for decades been foundational to climate denialism, and Stephens' personal history generally and writing in that very column particularly raised alarms on that point, the more in as centrist media such as the Times have enabled denialist propaganda such as they suspected Stephens of at every turn, not least through the "both sidesism" into which Spayd's remarks at the very least played in a way all too familiar.

One may imagine from this that it is easier to stay within the bounds of "legitimate" discourse when one is getting their way (as the climate denialists have generally succeeded in doing), rather than those criticizing, let alone trying to change, the "status quo" (as those concerned about climate change are)--and they would indeed be right, centrist theorists drawing the boundaries of legitimacy in such a fashion as to make it impossible for any leftist to meet the standard (as it regards any structural criticism of society raising such matters as capitalism, class and power, the reliance of explicit social theory, among much, much else central to the leftist tradition all absolutely off-limits). By contrast the same rules have been far more accommodating to the right, and in practice the centrist less ardent about enforcing the rules against it, permitting it to assume the right to be "legitimate" unless proven otherwise (with this almost impossible to do to the satisfaction of a conservative, anti-leftist centrist, as Spayd's piece reminds one).

All of this is underlined by how situations in which the center defends the left to the right do not seem to come up the same way--though admittedly such a situation could hardly have done so when the Times, while having a veritable army of avowedly right-wing columnists (this was, after all, the place where Ross Douthat coined the term "woke capitalism," while the Claremont Institute's Christopher Caldwell writes for them too, etc., etc.), and its supposed "liberals" are often anything but (as with a certain "free-market Savonarola" who cheerled for war after war with famously vulgar, brutal and racist rhetoric), has no one writing for it on such a regular basis who is anywhere near as far to the left as its avowedly right-wing columnists (or even those who are not avowedly so, like the aforementioned free-market Savonarola) are far to the right.* And it would be a surprise were it otherwise given the recent quantitative assessment of the paper's front-page stories demonstrating its consistently favoring the concerns of the right--just as the conservative, and ever rightward-inclining, centrist can be counted upon to do when it really matters.