T he number of political commentators I read these days has shrunk considerably from a year or two ago. As I noted recently the presidential primary and election season and the first months of the new administration have been a huge wakeup call for me regarding some pundits whose work I no longer look at not because I disagree with them politically — I continue as before to read the views of those whose outlook on politics and much else are not mine — but because I’ve simply lost interest in what they have to say.
I can’t any longer take seriously those who normalize the abnormal rationalize the indecent and downplay the dangerous. If I want to read conservative opinion writers I’ll turn to real ones not craven sellouts. Nowadays when I want to know or write about a topic I’ll look at the writing of a smaller number of analysts people who’ve retained their independence moral probity and critical thinking faculties — those who haven’t allowed justifiable revulsion with the Left to blind them to what has happened to much of what not so long ago was called the Right who haven’t reduced matters of policy and ethics to a myopic binary choice of “you’re either with ’em or agin ’em.”
And so in addition to reading centrists and the stray well-spoken leftie (and maybe for comic relief a peek at Paul Krugman) I’ll be interested on the right in the thoughts of people like Bret Stephens and Pete Wehner at the New York Times; George Will and Jen Rubin at the Washington Post; and the boys at National Review (Williamson Goldberg French Nordlinger et al). They aren’t heroes they just remain what they’ve always been — thoughtful conservatives — while all around them erstwhile colleagues have turned often quite abruptly into yes-men who have not just acclimated to but often rubber-stamp the once-unthinkable.
Some of them have in fact had to summon the courage to remain resolute in their views in hostile environments. One is the aforementioned Stephens late of the Wall Street Journal where in February widely respected editorial features editor Mark Lasswell was unceremoniously fired over the phone in what the Atlantic called a “a victory for the pro-Trump faction on the editorial staff.” So much for diversity of opinion on the Right.
