The Atlantic’s firing of Kevin Williamson, perhaps the finest writer in America today, is an opportunity for the New York Times.
For a start, the Times’ hiring of Williamson would allow the nation’s top liberal broadsheet to separate itself from the now-evident intellectual limitations of one of its key contemporaries.
Where the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, says Williamson had to be fired because of his “callous and violent” belief that women who have abortions should be executed, the Times could say Williamson had to be hired because of the totality of his journalistic talent and the importance of measuring a journalist by that totality.
That conception of totality is the key issue here.
While Williamson’s abortion views are extreme and well outside the norm of either conservative thought or civil society (I find them repellent), they are but one facet of his range of viewpoints.
That matters because the object of opinion writing is supposed to be more than the cultivation of clicks. It is supposed to be the pursuit of challenged and informed minds. Indeed, that’s why the Founders were so absolute in their belief that freedom of speech be granted the most extraordinary of protection.
They recognized that one subjective restriction of speech would entertain a slippery slope of new restrictions. And that with time, a society of chilled minds would be the only victor.
Evidencing as much, there’s no question that Williamson’s ideas range far beyond that which got him fired: his views on abortion. For a few short days, the Atlantic recognized this truth. But then it surrendered to contemporary leftist orthodoxy: to those who believe that some views are more equal than others and that, at the margin, free speech is the preserve of the enlightened.
There would also be a symbolic power to the New York Times’ appointment of Williamson.
After all, the Times’ opinion section is headed up by none other than a former editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, James Bennet. And since joining the place which claims to offer “all the news that’s fit to print,” Bennet has striven to expand the Times’ reflection of compelling and yes, challenging, conservative thought.
The Atlantic has betrayed the central value of the Enlightenment: the mastery of freedom via the cultivation of controversy.
Yet liberalism’s most respected publication now has a unique opportunity to offer remedy.
Judged in his totality, Williamson is an exceptional journalist with many thoughts fit to print.
