The Politics of the Guardian Newspaper

For those inclining toward the left of today's very far rightward center the extreme narrowness of opinion the American news media ordinarily affords its viewers and readers--which is such that the newspaper of Thomas Friedman, Bret Stephens, David Brooks, "Abundance"-peddler Ezra Klein et. al. is often described as "liberal" in the American, liberal-means-left sense of the word without anyone laughing--may find the opinion pages in the U.S. edition of the Guardian newspaper a breath of fresh air, providing as they do space for views they would never see in any comparable American publication. Still, in considering the Guardian's "leftishness" one makes a profound mistake in failing to acknowledge its limits, and the ways in which they too testify to the tight bounds of the mainstream "discourse" in our time.

Consider, for example, the paper's broad orientation in regard to economic policy. Where it had long provided a rare platform from which to criticize the neoliberal orthodoxy of contemporary policymaking as such they flinched from doing so during Jeremy Corbyn's period as leader of the Labour Party, to which, in a display of contempt for its readership worthy of the Times, they became relentlessly hostile not just to Corbyn (with, whatever the arguments against Corbyn, the editorship of the Guardian evidently less interested in objective appraisal of their merits than their serviceability as excuses for their opposition), but to the criticism of neoliberalism, the "New Labour" that had stood for it, and all associated with them broadly. Indeed, it seems telling that the editors at this time provided Glen O'Hara a forum in which to make a short version of his case that the New Labour against which "Corbynism" represented a rebellion was "more left-wing than it's given credit for" on the web site of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change--and even buried a few words on Mr. Corbyn's behalf (one may imagine, a bit of cover against the charges that they were anti-Corbyn) at the bottom of a long tribute to Margaret Thatcher! Indeed, not long after the coup against Corbyn and his successor Keir Starmer's quick abandonment of his initial social democratic promises they provided a platform for the centrist Nick Cohen to sneer illiterately at the salience of neoliberalism as even a concept.

After all, it was one thing to let people shoot their mouths off about neoliberalism when it was securely in the saddle--another to do so when there was even the ghost of a chance of popular discontent with such policy finding expression in the Labour Party. Moreover, such displays of obsequiousness before things as they are, far from being exceptional, have been all too characteristic of the paper on the whole, as is to be seen in the respect that it accords those who may be termed spokespersons of the "status quo," and its withholding of like respect from said status quo's stauncher critics, in the same manner one sees in their more blatantly Establishment peers. Just compare their exceedingly sympathetic profile of Davos crowd court philosopher Steven Pinker with the piece that a former reporter for the paper that its editorship canceled a decade ago for making a quip on Twitter (curious, none of those "free speech absolutists" raced to his defense then) published in the magazine he launched himself after being thrown overboard, Current Affairs. Compare, too, the respect the Guardian accorded Jordan Peterson in his "Debate of the Century"(!) with pseudo-left court jester Slavoj Žižek with how the aforementioned ex-Guardian reporter treated Peterson in his own publication. Perhaps even more striking than that is the way in which those same editors afforded Douglas Coupland the space in which to publish twenty-five hundred words pouring abuse on Elon Musk's critics in his own appallingly illiterate fashion as they consistently respected Musk's claims to being a "free speech absolutist"--services for which Monsieur Musk would not seem to have been grateful to go by a Tweet in which he (consistent with the right's tendency to plead persecution by a "liberal media" even as that media bows and scrapes before them and persecutes their enemies) denounced the Guardian as "Strong candidate for most misanthropic publication on Earth!"

Of course, amid all this one may notice how packed the Guardian's pages are with sex, along particular lines, making very clear how seriously this publication takes the "centering of marginalized perspectives," and "decentering" of the conventional male perspective in this area of life as a political project, ecstatically celebrating every form of sexuality but one, which it subjects to relentless hostility that at times goes to unintentionally comic extremes--as when circa 2017 the Guardian just couldn't stop publishing pieces by the many, many, many ultra-feminist members of the staff registering their alarm at the supposedly imminent perils of heterosexual men having access to nonexistent then and still nonexistent now sex robots! (And their scorn for said men, of course.) All as, of course, they endlessly promote, without worrying overmuch about hard facts, the narratives of a growing "youth gender divide" and "masculinity in crisis" (entirely a matter of "outdated" male perspectives on gender and not anything else, such as a more general crisis of society, perish the thought, so say our invariably non-male "masculinity researchers"). Yup, woke gender politics is what you get here, such that I wonder if Musk, who has never been the most articulate of men, said "misanthropic" when he meant "misandrous," in which case many who do not ordinarily side with Musk might well have felt that, once you got past the malapropism, there was something in what he said after all on that one occasion.

In short, when it comes to the vast majority of the issues of the day the paper can be inconsistent at best--if many a time, again, an important outlet for views that cannot get a like platform anywhere else (a thing I do not belittle in this time in which the Washington Post's opinion page is being reinvented as the daily edition of Reason magazine, and Big Media shows its cowardice and intolerance at a headline-making level hourly), also frequently no better than the other papers that may be considered suitable points of comparison. Combining tepidity on the majority of really controversial "hard" issues with its utterly fire-breathing gender politics the paper not only fails progressives from the standpoint of its readiness to provide an alternate source of information and views, but reinforces the widespread (and for progressives, highly disadvantageous) misconception that the culture wars are the only real scene of political disagreement, and the identity politics so many find so insufferable what the left stands for, plain and simple. In truth there is nothing less left than the politics of subjectivity, difference and selfishness, of struggle across the lines of ethnicity and gender without end--with, indeed, Andrea Peters not long ago remarking how identity politics' "suppressing" awareness of "the reality of class conflict and blaming one layer of workers . . . white men" for the inequity in society that persons of that tendency are prepared to acknowledge amid worsening conditions for all produced the "frustration and disorientation" "fueling the growth of the far-right" that has brought the world to where it is now. In fact, it is the case that not only do those who bear the left's actual tradition keep saying so, but that the more literate and forthright members of the right admit as much, as Rod Dreher did in The American Conservative in the wake of the battle between the World Socialist Web Site and the New York Times over the latter's 1619 Project. As Mr. Dreher reminded his readers in a piece of classic understatement he is no socialist--but rather more than many a supposed progressive he displayed a clear grasp of the logic in those leftists' challenge to the 1619 Project's version of American history (a left burdened by identity politics incapable of "put[ting] together the kind of class-based political coalition that can win out over capital," a truth "[c]apitalists know" full well, hence their being "so heavily invested in 'diversity, inclusion and equity'"). Of course, the extent to which identity politics has--behind a progressive gloss that should have fooled no one but seems to have fooled nearly everyone--fulfilled the old function of the politics of identity as a weapon against those who would raise the politics of class is a feature and not a bug not just from the standpoint of capitalists as Dreher acknowledges, but many a supposed progressive as well, with all that implies about what one is to make of the Guardian's tendency in this respect.