The piece, written by Joseph Kahn, the paper’s new executive editor, appeared in what the Times calls “The Morning Newsletter.” Though this morning’s item concerned the country’s worst nightmare, it was only four paragraphs long. And it was hard to fathom. The subhead’s reference to the most serious “threats” to “representative government” “in decades” was perplexing, since any real threat to democracy would be deadly and single, not one among several competing threats. And there was no threat to American democracy decades ago, unless Kahn was referring to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which were threats of a whole different order than what he went on to claim were the perils faced by American democracy now.
These included “a deterioration in the integrity of constitutional democracy” (whatever that means), “manipulation of state election laws” (which turned out to have no effect on the upcoming election), “and a global trend toward autocracy in places where democratic institutions once seemed solid”—a “trend,” if that’s what it is, that does not pose a direct threat to America and that, anyway, Kahn never connects to specific countries. Kahn finished his alarm by inviting readers to continue to read “our coverage in a collection called Democracy Challenged.” Just make sure to stay on the lookout as you peruse the collection!
The most curious aspect of the Times’s crusade to save American democracy is how short-lived it was. One minute the paper was running articles declaring that the election of the right-wing Giorgia Meloni as Italy’s prime minister would plunge not just Italy but all of Western democracy into fascism, and the next—a few weeks later—it was publishing an article by the paper’s chief fashion critic exploring Meloni’s sartorial style: “The first female prime minister of Italy wears Armani.”
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