Readers of The Scrapbook will remember New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, author of some of the most widely praised and dumbest columns ever written. Quindlen stepped down from the Times in 1995 in order to pursue a career as a writer of sentimental novels, and it has to be said she’s done well for herself.
Those who remember her as a Times columnist, however, will recall her distinctive and powerful combination of tired metaphors, glib phrasing, and artificial outrage, and especially her strong propensity to argue fiercely for points few of her readers would disagree with. The critic Lee Siegel, in a 1999 essay for the New Republic, called this propensity “the Quindlen Effect.” The object of her ire was often something “no sane Times reader would ever defend,” he wrote, but Quindlen would go on at length in a “surfeit of sentiment ringing with an absence of true feeling.”
Today’s New York Times is beset by the Quindlen Effect. The same is true, indeed possibly truer, of the Washington Post. Many of these newspapers’ columnists can’t stop denouncing a thing that 90 or 95 percent of their readers already oppose and/or loathe: the Trump administration and Donald Trump himself. This magazine, as readers will be aware, has not been reluctant to criticize the 45th president, but we’re also aware that there are other topics under the sun. We’re not sure how many recent columns by Paul Krugman, Charles Blow, and Gail Collins have neglected the theme of Trump’s all-around awfulness, but the number must be low. The Post’s E. J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson never stray far from the subject either.
Which brings us to the news that the Times has hired a new columnist, Michelle Alexander. We are not otherwise familiar with Alexander, a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar according to her byline, but her debut column isn’t promising. In it, she takes on the challenging and controversial topic of—how did you guess?—the awfulness of Donald Trump. Her cutesy thesis is that the “Resistance” is Trump himself. How’s that? Because Trump “resists” the river of progress. Pretty clever, huh?
One might wonder whether it matters, in the end, whether we consider ourselves members of the resistance or part of the revolutionary river. Can’t we be both?
The answer, I think, is yes and no. Yes, of course, we can and must resist the horrors of the current administration—thousands of lives depend on us doing what we can to mitigate the harm to our fellow humans and the planet we share. But the mindset of “the resistance” is slippery and dangerous.
We often wonder if Donald Trump’s bewildering rise to power didn’t owe itself in part to his ability to make his most impassioned adversaries believe they can thwart him by producing fifth-rate balderdash. Call it the Quindlen Multiplier Effect.
