I’ve subscribed to Harper’s, the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States, since I was in college. I’ve been charmed and intellectually challenged by its short anthologies of notable writings, polemical treatment of complex issues, and, before he retired from the publication in 2006, Lewis Henry Lapham II’s “Easy Chair” columns.
Lapham’s editorials were replete with historical and literary references that could only be fully understood by someone who’d been classically educated at Cambridge, Yale, or some similar place. I graduated from a perfectly respectable university – the University of California, Berkeley – but often would need to do additional research to understand his references. At a lecture Lapham gave in San Francisco many years ago I asked him whether he expected readers to understand the web of empirical and scholarly allusions he made in each essay.
“I don’t care whether they do or don’t,” he responded, implying that he was writing for people with sufficient knowledge to capably participate in sophisticated public dialogues; those were his preferred readers.
Harper’s has drifted from Lapham’s erudite era, into something that occasionally resembles the type of media mush that emanates from Breitbart News or Daily Kos. Over the past dozen years, Andrew Cockburn, a Harper’s regular whose writing is often on the edge of alarmist, has morphed into the opposite of Lapham, touting unreliable sources to shout his point. In “Turning Point,” the featured cover article in the January issue, Cockburn cites Candace Owens,
…a voice so influential in the world of right-wing social media that, according to a poll commissioned by the Washington Free Beacon, one in five young conservatives gets their news about Israel from her.
Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, has a mixed reputation related to fact-based reporting. Cockburn goes on to note that Owens promotes,
…anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—one controversy in a career marked by many, including claims that French president Emmanuel Macron obtained his office through the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind-control program and that his wife, Brigitte, was born a man (the Macrons have filed a defamation suit against Owens).
Owens asserted that the French and Israeli governments were involved in Charlie Kirk’s murder, with Turning Point USA members part of the plot. There’s no evidence to support those claims.
Though Cockburn acknowledges Owens’ suspect grasp on reality, he relies on her to prove his point that conservative American attitudes are changing towards Middle East politics. This opinion may be accurate. But how is a reader supposed to assess it when its formed, in part, based on a source who in the past might have been called “a crazy lady.” Further, by citing such an informant Cockburn is advancing and solidifying them as a reliable interpreter of what’s real.
Stephen Colbert coined “truthiness” in 2005, during the first episode of The Colbert Report, perhaps not coincidently roughly coinciding with Lapham’s retirement. The word describes “truth that comes from the gut, not books,” preferring what one wishes to be true over actual facts. Twenty years later the truth part of the term has eroded, leaving a kind of “thinness” to public discourse. The irony is that in this respect the political left and right have joined hands, with lefties like Cockburn undermining civic literacy in a similar, if less powerful, fashion as the Trump Administration’s attacks on the aforementioned Yale and similar institutions, and fabrications related to federal attacks on civilians in Minnesota.
In a turbulent sea of disinformation, life rafts of reality are essential, places to visit that can be depended on to be as true as possible. It’s always been the case that news, whether generated by The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, or The Potrero View needs to be consumed thoughtfully, sifted through an educated mind that strips propaganda fat from bone, misinterpreted sinew from muscle. When a venerable publication like Harper’s – whose largest financial backer is The J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, which supports freedom of expression, human rights, civil liberties and social justice – starts to evidence thinness, civil society is in the deepest of trouble.
Lapham, who died into 2024, may have thought each individual accountable for educating themselves to properly undertake intellectual thought and public discourse. Not everyone comes from his kind of privilege, with a father who was president of the Grace Line and Bankers Trust and a grandfather who served as mayor of San Francisco in the 1940s. Still, it’s hard to argue with the need for personal responsibility and political dialogue based on some knowledge of history and a generally accurate understanding of what’s actually going on.
Humans have been here before, as evidenced by such quotes as “Open your mind before your mouth,” by the ancient Greek comic playwright Aristophanes. The first step to reclaim empirical, educated, thinking is to recognize how far away we’ve drifted from it. Time to swim back.