New York magazine published a piece today arguing that there’s really no need to hire conservatives at prestigious outlets anymore. His argument, which is a response to the recent firing of Kevin Williamson by the Atlantic, is premised on the idea that conservative ideas have become irrelevant in an age of Trumpian populism:

Trump has made the reality of the American right unmistakable: There is no mass constituency for the conservative policy agenda, only one for its paranoid warnings of national, cultural, and racial decline — and its authoritarian reassurances that a strong leader can restore what we’ve lost by taking it back from them. There is no civil way to defend the president’s defamatory claim that Americans who came here through the diversity visa lottery are all “horrendous” criminals. There is no good-faith argument for why Hillary Clinton should be in jail, and Joe Arpaio a free man; no rational case for why Trump actually won the popular vote in 2016. But those ideas have far more resonance with the conservative base than do Paul Ryan’s ambitions for the federal budget…

If the conservatives who are fit to print aren’t actually representative of the Republican worldview, then what do they offer their (predominately) liberal readers? If center-left publications are going to screen out ideas that are undeniably relevant — on the grounds that they violate their institutions’ bedrock values — why retain irrelevant perspectives that are so much in tension with those values?

“Irrelevant perspectives” seems like left-wing wish-casting to me. Trump may be more popular than Republicans in Congress but that doesn’t make them irrelevant. In any case, a desire to control the border, install conservatives on the Supreme Court, and cut taxes are all things that Republicans were doing and arguing for long before Trump threw his hat in the ring. When it comes to actual policy, it seems GOP policy is still pretty relevant. But the author’s suggestion is that rather than engage with the irrelevant right, the conversation should move toward the socialist left:

The far left has ideas that can be argued civilly, in good faith, without violating core liberal values. And those ideas are more responsive to the problems of our era than those of the NeverTrumpers. What’s more, by at least by one criterion, they’re actually more “mainstream”: While only 5 percent of American voters are anti-Trump Republicans, 6 percent are self-identified socialists.

There are a lot of interesting questions that currently divide liberals from the socialist left. And exploring those disagreements would almost certainly do more to challenge the average Atlantic reader intellectually than running Kevin Williamson’s latest diatribe against the shiftless poor people he grew up among (but proved himself better than).

Take the most fundamental question dividing left-liberals from socialists: Should the means of production be socialized? Many on the center-left regard this as a dead debate — one that Joseph Stalin settled decisively long ago.

It’s amazing to me that in the midst of watching the collapse of Venezuela into violence, hyperinflation, and dictatorship, there are writers here who think the forefront of American debate should be whether (or how fast) to follow their example. But sure enough, the author follows his argument with a list of debates he wishes were happening in the mainstream:

• Is the U.S. Constitution bad?

• Should “do no harm” be the first principle of American foreign policy?

• Should people be able to own ideas?

• Should prisons be abolished?

• Should workplaces be democracies?

• Should we eat the rich (to save their souls)?

The idea that “Is the U.S. Constitution bad?” is a more relevant question to Americans than “Should we control the border more closely?” tells us more about the author than about the American people. New York magazine could probably benefit from someone on staff who could pull the discussion back to where people are rather than the socialist views the author seems to think are more worthy of discussion.