I read the piece Dan Froomkin describes below and honestly thought it had to be an op-ed by someone like Ari Fleischer trying to sound “objective.” It was so weighted with “savvy” insiderism (and wrong savvy insiderism, in my opinion) that I literally rolled my eyes when I read it:
The March 4 edition of the New York Times’s daily politics newsletter was a masterpiece of amoral and irresponsible political relativism. Headlined “Republicans Sharpen Their Message on Ukraine,” and written by Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam — recently of Politico and Hotline, respectively – it exemplified how New York Times political reporters don’t seem to care whether what Republicans say is true, or fair. All they care about is whether it works.
The premise of the story was that after a “free-for-all” response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Republicans are coalescing around a new narrative: That the invasion was bad, but the real villain is Joe Biden.
Then came this astonishing paragraph:
Although some aspects of the Republican critique crumble upon closer inspection, the newly coordinated message is unifying the right after the fractious intramural debate over Putin. And with inflation soaring, linking Biden’s handling of the war in Ukraine to his domestic woes could prove to be a potent argument with voters in the fall.
The idea of “closer inspection” is dismissed as irrelevant, and the authors never come back to explain what parts of the message are, in fact, groundless and gratuitous.
They casually adopt the Republican framing of Biden’s “domestic woes” – just a day after a jobs report that indicated a roaring recovery is under way. (They are not alone in ignoring things that are good news for Biden.)
And they pass judgment not on the merits of the Republican narrative, but merely on its tactical effectiveness, to which they give a big thumbs-up.
Political and journalistic Twitter reacted with outrage. (See, for instance, the response to my tweet, including the quote tweets. Also see Hounshell’s response, and the response to that.)
The piece also inspired a fellow journalist, who wishes to remain anonymous, to speculate about what the New York Times politics newsletter would have reported after the 1929 stock market crash. I think it’s a brilliant parody:
BERLIN — Immediately after the U.S. stock market plunged, the political debate in the Reichstag was a free-for-all. The governing Social Democrats and their coalition allies — the conservative People’s Party and the Centre Party — aligned behind Chancellor Hermann Müller, exhibiting what was once considered a traditional show of unity in a crisis. But from the left and right, Communist and Nazi lawmakers portrayed Mr. Müller as weak and indecisive. In perhaps the strangest twist, the Nazi leader seemed to exult over the Wall Street crash, saying it foretold the coming collapse of global elites.
Now, Nazi leaders are fine-tuning their message.
The party leader, Adolf Hitler, will declare Friday that “Jews and Bolsheviks are to blame for America’s stock market crash, and Germany must free itself from both,” according to excerpts from a speech that the war veteran will deliver at a party retreat today in Munich.
Other Nazis have urged Mr. Hitler to keep his focus on criticism of Mr. Müller, tying the new economic turmoil to longstanding mismanagement of inflation and unemployment.
Twelve Nazi members of the Reichstag — all elected last year — have hammered the chancellor all week.
“We can only protect our economy by rebuilding the German military,” Nazi lawmakers from Prussia and Bavaria said in a statement. “People in our states cannot afford another bout of inflation, and cannot afford to be held hostage by Jewish bankers in New York and London and Communist agitators in Hamburg and St. Petersburg.”
Although some aspects of the Nazi critique crumble upon closer inspection, the newly coordinated message is unifying the far right after a fractious intramural debate over how to handle America and, to a lesser extent, Britain and France. And with inflation and joblessness already high, linking Mr. Müller’s handling of the stock market crash to his domestic woes could prove to be a potent argument with voters.
The danger, foreign policy experts say, is that a depression in the United States, given its vast wealth and industrial might, could have a contagion effect, taking down many other economies with it, including those of Western Europe and Japan, and unsettling a world that is still slowly recovering from the Great War of 1914-18.
“It’s like foreign policy is a blank screen on which we project all our internal divides,” said Hans-Georg Miller, co-editor of The Liberal Patriot, a website focused on the politics of national security. “As if the Americans are just props in our own political story.”
A fragile coalition
In focusing on American capitalism — and, in their view, its Jewish sponsors — the Nazis are aggravating divisions in Mr. Müller’s coalition that have emerged since the death last month of Gustav Stresemann, the widely admired centrist statesman who was very close to Mr. Müller, despite their political differences.
The Social Democrats recognize how fragile their Reichstag coalition is. They have to manage anger from their working-class base over painful budget cuts. The party’s left flank is demanding nationwide unemployment insurance, accident insurance for workers in dangerous jobs, and pensions for unemployed Germans starting at 60 — and is threatening to defect to the Communists if its demands aren’t met. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats’ coalition partners have wildly diverging agendas: the People’s Party wants to restore the power of Prussian elites, while the Centre Party’s priority is defending the prerogatives of the Catholic Church.
Senior Social Democrats in the Reichstag support legislation to prop up the Reichsmark, restrict stock speculation, issue new government bonds, and increase taxes on industrialists. Coalition partners, however, oppose such measures, noting that the Reichsbank has been formally independent from the government since 1925 and arguing that Germany cannot afford to take on any more debt. They are threatening to block any economic relief package the chancellor sends to the Reichstag unless unemployment benefits are reduced first.
Mr. Müller may have to relent. Other influential Social Democrats have signaled their support. “It just infuriates me to think that our economy is dependent on the American stock market,” a senior Social Democrat told the ring-wing paper Der Stürmer.
The case for ultra-nationalism
The Nazis say that Germany’s still-young democratic republic is already near the brink of collapse, and that political pluralism is a sign of cultural decadence and governmental dysfunction. Riding a wave of support from voters sympathetic to their populist message of restoring national greatness, the Nazis entered the Reichstag for the first time last year.
They are now pushing for even more aggressive moves, such as resuming military spending, remilitarizing the Rhineland, and even asserting territorial claims in Central Europe, although scholars say such actions could violate international law. And they are calling for a few-holds-barred crackdown on Jews, Communists and homosexuals, even as the Müller government argues that those groups are a punching bag and a distraction from Germany’s deep-seated economic and governance problems.
The Müller defense
The chancellor’s team says they’ve been aggressive — and they point to an unprecedented series of steps Germany has taken in a matter of days.
Right after the Wall Street crash, the Reichsbank opened new lines of liquidity, regulators suspended trading in volatile assets, and industrialists began building up their inventory. German banks have pulled Reichsmarks out of the United States. They’re even seizing financial assets held in Germany by associates of President Herbert Hoover.
“We are ensuring that the Wall Street crash does not jump across the Atlantic,” said a chancellery official who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record.
Mr. Müller’s officials liken their actions to gradually building a moat around the American economy.
“They’re not intended to max out at the beginning,” said the chancellery’s secretary. “They’re long-lasting and sustainable, and they’re intended to buffer the German economy.”
The problem Germany faces, current and former officials say, is one of timing. How long can Mr. Müller’s fragile coalition keep the economy stable in the face of a potential economic downturn? Can the economy be stabilized quickly enough — if at all — to insulate Germany from the aftershocks of the Wall Street crash? And how can the chancellery juggle all this without triggering another no-confidence vote in a Reichstag that is already deeply divided over foreign policy and high inflation and that is losing faith in democracy?
“Look, conceivably the Nazis win power as early as 1932, begin a genocidal campaign against vulnerable minorities, and then declare war on Britain and France and, later, the Soviet Union,” said a former Finance Ministry official. “But that’s highly speculative and world war wouldn’t possibly come as fast as an economic depression.”
That’s so on point it’s scary.
There’s a lot of this going on in the Times lately (looking at you David Leonhardt) and if you are on twitter you are very much aware of the reflexive defensiveness of the thin-skinned Big Foot reporters when it’s pointed out to them. They call this sort of boiler plate “analysis” objective but it just shows how wired the establishment press is for the GOP’s narratives.
The one they lazily fall back on is the same one they lazily fell back on with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden was stuck with Trump’s deal with the Taliban and on a short timetable refuses to escalate the war again and gets blamed in the press when the evacuation is not peaceful and orderly. The media lost their minds and it set Biden’s approval on a downward course ever since.
The GOP and their Dear Leader always leave a massive set of crises for Democrats to fix, whether it’s global financial meltdowns, wars, or pandemics and foreign policy in shambles, and because those problems are difficult, the Democrats have to pay the price when the Republicans blame them for it. Largely, thanks to the media which consistently plays this game.
The fact is that nobody on this planet can know how this Ukraine invasion is going to affect the election in the fall. There’s nothing more unpredictable than war on politics and anyone who says otherwise is getting way ahead of themselves.