Executing the Full New Yorker

Isaac Chotiner successfully profiles Ross Douthat; Jill Lepore unsuccessfully meditates on Elon Musk. Is The New Yorker the opiate of the educated liberal masses?

There was a nice profile of Ross Douthat in The New Yorker last month. Nice in the sense that the author, Isaac Chotiner, does well the job of such profiles, which is to efficiently and elegantly give a sense of who someone is and why they’re important. But nice, too, if I’m honest with myself, because Chotiner conveyed a sense of Douthat that harmonized with my own, which is that Douthat is an unusually appealing figure on the scene. He is an exceptional op-ed writer, a generally civilizing influence on the discourse, and by all accounts a decent and thoughtful person (I’ve met him once socially, and he seemed like a mensch). If there’s got to be a person with politics that differ dramatically from yours, he’s the guy you want it to be. When he’s god-emperor not only won’t he send you to the firing squad, he’ll bring you to court to serve as his close and honored advisor, charged with disagreeing with him candidly when you see him going astray, so that his exercise of total power will be leavened by humility.

This genial quality of Douthat’s is a bit of a joke in the piece itself. He is “Ross Douthat, liberal America’s favorite conservative …. conservative whisperer to liberals at the New York Times … such a creature of left-wing milieus, even if he is critical of them.” Etc.

He’s what David Brooks used to be, the conservative who liberals feel safe liking, the one who lets us feel capacious in our intellectual tolerance for other perspectives without having to engage too intensely with such perspectives in their darker, less sophisticated forms.

Michelle Goldberg, Douthat’s fellow Times columnist and podcast co-host, has a nice quote in the profile on this capacity of his to to wrap his conservatism in a coating that liberals find sweet enough to swallow: “He knows what the audience is, and so he tempers his views on sexual issues, where I think his views are probably more apocalyptic than comes through in his writing. He will try to make fairly dispassionate arguments about abortion rather than arguing that abortion is morally monstrous—even though I think that is the belief motivating him. He’s developed a sly distance that has allowed him to make his genuinely reactionary sentiments seem slightly ironic when they are actually sincere.”

That there has to be a conservative liberal whisperer at the Times, that this role has to be filled, is an unspoken premise of the profile. Unspoken too, and this would qualify as irony except that it’s so deep a cultural truth that it possibly transcends irony, is that if there’s any publication whose DNA is even more thoroughly coded than that of the Times to artfully neutralize the cognitive dissonance of liberals, it is surely the New Yorker (or maybe NPR). And this of course is what the profile of Douthat itself is doing! It is gently massaging the delicate psyches of its readers, all those educated liberals who know that they have to deal with the existence of conservative beliefs, that it would be irresponsible to just dismiss them out of hand, but who want such beliefs to be presented to them in a vessel that soothes at the same time that it prods.

(New Yorker writer) Louis Menand has a good essay, in his collection American Studies, that touches on how The New Yorker style developed over time to serve this function. Describing the characteristic voice of the magazine, which coalesced relatively early in its lifespan, Menand writes:

It was bemused, but not smug; intelligent, but never smart. ... whatever was knowing, allusive, or elliptical was amplified and clarified in the direction of perfect accessibility; whatever was suggestive, sensational, or offensive was carefully pruned of those excrescences. 

This style evolved, he argues, to mitigate the anxieties of readers who were both the beneficiaries of American commercialism and also the heirs to an old money WASP aesthetic that disdained commercialism. The ideal New Yorker readers, in particular, were those who provided the “creative and analytic intelligence” that helped make the modern capitalist system run. They were advertising execs, engineers, people in publishing, bankers, scientists, journalists, professors, and so on. Their structural class commitment was to the systems and ideologies of commerce that sustained them, but they desired to be, and to be seen as, creative and thoughtful. They wanted edge, but only so much. As Menand puts it, “they were genuinely insecure enough to require assurance that they would not be ‘out-browed’—that they would find their cultural experiences accessible and unthreatening, without being flavorless or incurious or prudish.”

The New Yorker reader of today isn't quite the same. He's less old money WASP and more Brooklyn “creative,” some version of what David Brooks called bourgeois bohemians, or “Bobos.” In important respects, though, the defining tension of his cultural experience is the same. He wants to be hip to what's going on in the world beyond his affluent and culturally homogenous bubble, whether its underground films and music or radical or reactionary politics, but he wants it presented to him in a way that doesn't overly disturb his sense that what he believes is basically right and that the systems and institutions in which he's invested will continue to flourish or at least persist.

From this perspective a profile of Ross Douthat is almost exemplary. He colors outside the lines not just in his faith—he is a serious Catholic—but in his “conspiracy adjacent” musings on UFOs and Jeffrey Epstein, his skepticism of big medicine, and (in a different direction) his deep engagement with critics of modernity like Rene Girard and Michel Foucault. I say “almost” exemplary because in the end Douthat is too easy a figure to reconcile. He already does the work of processing the wildness and threat for his liberal readers. This is what his New York Times column is. His readers don’t need The New Yorker to mediate him; he comes self-mediated.

A more fruitful subject, a figure who demands much more in the way of mediation and neutralization, would be someone like Elon Musk, the great creative-capitalist-god-destroyer of our era, master electric car-maker, Twitter raper, tunnel borer, space explorer, and neural linker. He is someone who refuses to obscure his vastness and power with the artful deployment of a self-effacing or do-gooding persona; his existence thus always risks being a reproach to those of us who follow the rules, in our small ways, and are rewarded for it, in small ways, and would like to believe that such a relationship between virtue and reward scales up to infinity.

Musk, as it happens, is also the subject of a recent essay in The New Yorker, this one by historian Jill Lepore, riffing on Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk. The title of the essay is “How Elon Musk Went from Superhero to Supervillain,” but the article is less about any meaningful shift in Musk’s character or behavior over time than it is about the challenge that his existence poses to the very form of the dichotomy. The question isn’t whether Musk is superhero or supervillain, but rather whether, in someone like him, they are the same.

Reading the profile brought to mind Gary Oldman’s great soliloquy, in The Fifth Element, in defense of the monstrous behavior of his supervillain character, Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg. He’s just abducted the virtuous monk trying to foil his evil plans, and feels compelled, as supervillains so often do, to explain to the monk why in fact he isn’t a supervillain at all. He is a purveyor and instantiation of creative destruction, and “life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder, chaos. … In reality, you and I are in the same business.”

The scene ends, satisfyingly but maybe also a bit cheaply, with Zorg choking on the almost obscenely lush cherry that he pops in his mouth at the conclusion of his speech. He’s saved by the monk, who gives him a hearty smack on the back to dislodge the cherry pit.

Unfortunately for us, living in the real world (I’m pretty sure), the supervillain doesn’t always get his comeuppance. The virtuous don’t always get the last word. This can be destabilizing, which is where a magazine like The New Yorker comes in. It’s there, structurally, to help us process and resolve that sense of unease we have around Musk, our fear that maybe in this case the supervillain will not only not get his comeuppance but—even more scary—maybe Zorg is right. Maybe the supervillain is in fact the superhero.

The Lepore review is an interesting failure on this front, one that ultimately doesn’t reassure us that Musk will sooner or later choke on the cherry, nor that the just will have the last word. It fails, I suspect, because she’s too discombobulated by the devil to give him his due before defanging him. She can’t master her own unease, which is a prerequisite for executing the full New Yorker. 

Instead, she throws the book at Musk. He’s not sufficiently reflective about his childhood growing up in apartheid South Africa. His father and grandfather were racist assholes. He likes dumb fart jokes and runs through wives like new models of Teslas. He’s a shitty father himself. He pals around with Ted Cruz, tokes up on Joe Rogan. He uses his Asperger’s as a shield against criticism. He doesn’t know what he’s doing with Twitter/X. He even misunderstands his own favorite book, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which isn’t, says Lepore, an invitation to boldly explore the universe and consciousness but rather a satire on the tyrants and imperialists who destroy things in their pursuit of wealth and mastery. In one dense, rather syntactically confusing paragraph, Lepore feels compelled to call on the combined intellect and wisdom of Montaigne, Mary Shelley, and Judith Shklar in order to undermine Isaacson’s case for Musk:

Isaacson is interested in how innovation happens. In addition to biographies of Franklin, Einstein, [Steve] Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci, he has also written about figures in the digital revolution and in gene editing. Isaacson puts innovation first: This man might be a monster, but look at what he built! Whereas Mary Shelley, for instance, put innovation second: The man who built this is a monster! The political theorist Judith Shklar once wrote an essay called “Putting Cruelty First.” Montaigne put cruelty first, identifying it as the worst thing people do; Machiavelli did not. As for “the usual excuse for our most unspeakable public acts,” the excuse “that they are necessary,” Shklar knew this to be nonsense. “Much of what passed under these names was merely princely wilfulness,” as Shklar put it. This is always the problem with princes.

Much of Lepore’s case against Musk is true, of course. He’s not a good boy. It is surely true, too, that most of the time it is self-serving nonsense when powerful people (or their courtiers in the media) rationalize their ruthlessness and cruelty. But Musk is discombobulating precisely because in his case it does not so obviously seem to be nonsense. His hypomania, ruthlessness, obsessive focus, and willingness to break rules and ignore custom—these all seem quite connected to his success as a businessman. And unlike Jobs, who gave us shiny, addictive tricorders, Musk helped make the electric car market viable. He’s advancing our capacity to operate in space. I doubt the Boring Company will succeed in revolutionizing mass transit, but it’s a worthy goal. As for Twitter/X, he’s clearly fucked it up, but … well, Thank God. Hasn’t he done us an immense service in fucking it up, even if it’s not quite what he wanted to achieve?

I’m far from a Musk fanboy. He seems far too psychologically damaged to be trusted, and for that reason I wouldn’t be surprised if by the time he dies the ledger of his accomplishments ends up in the red. But his evilgood greatness has to be reckoned with fully before we denigrate or diminish it, and in this case Lepore doesn’t manage to do that. It is even less the exemplary New Yorker piece than Chotiner’s profile of Douthat, which sticks the landing, albeit at a much lower degree of difficulty.

This matters, how close a New Yorker essay approaches the platonic form of New Yorker-ness, not simply as a matter of craftsmanship, but because what the magazine does, at its best, matters. The old line is that the duty of intellectuals is to speak truth to power, but I’ve long thought that that is an incomplete formulation. Speaking truth to power is certainly one of the honorable options available for the intellectual. Another is to strive to understand the world, as deeply or subtly or clearly as possible, consequences be damned. Another is to serve in the role that I’ve identified here with the New Yorker (at its best), which is not to speak truth to power but to strive to civilize and humanize power.

This is a tricky thing to do, but then again so is speaking truth to power, and in both cases a great deal depends on how clearly the intellectual understands the power to which she is speaking and the effective means with which to approach or subvert it. Fail in either of these tasks, I’d say, and one is more likely to flatter power, or flatter oneself, than in any way challenge or civilize or undermine it. In the case of Douthat, and Chotiner on Douthat, the literary means are successfully achieving a civilizing end. On the other side of our reading we are left with a better understanding of those with whom we disagree, and of those forces which threaten to upend our preferred equilibrium. Because we understand a bit better, because we’ve been prodded and then soothed, we are that much better prepared to deploy our power wisely (and we do have power, though we’re not always clear on what it is and how we’re exercising it). 

With Lepore on Musk, alas, the end is flattery. She’s not flattering Musk, of course, but nor is she speaking power to him in any way that I can imagine as meaningful or useful. The power she’s flattering is the class of people who read the New Yorker, those who provide the “creative and analytic intelligence” that makes the system run. She is flattering their biases and insecurities because, of course, she shares them; she is them. As am I. As are you. And we are not so bad, whatever the Elon Musks of the world say, but we need to be better.