Journalism's Era of Moral Unmooring

and sloppy thinking

“Moral wisdom.” Look at the topic, then try to guess in advance where this discussion will go. Headline this week in The Atlantic, for an essay from a writer with a covering-all-supposed-mainstream-bases employment history at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Republic:

I’m ambivalent about the death penalty — not because I hesitate to kill monsters, but because I don’t believe government never makes mistakes. But this discussion of Joe Biden’s death row commutations as an example of moral wisdom is…interesting. It works well as an example of the ways that people who make arguments for a living don’t hear themselves, a career-enhancing characteristic that lands writers at The Atlantic.

Elizabeth Bruenig, who wrote this piece about Joe Biden’s moral wisdom, is a democratic socialist who dropped out of a PhD program at Brown. You can find her described alongside her husband, Matt — “a socialist Ezra Klein” — in a 2018 profile that discusses their interest in societal mutuality and collective ownership. A nation should have a fund “owned collectively by society as a whole” to combat financial inequality; housing would be better for everyone if “the federal government would pay to build ten million homes over the next ten years.” You’ll notice in that linked profile the ideological bleed between the idea of mutuality and state management. Society should act together in a spirit of collaboration; for example, government should pay for houses. Top-down direction is societal collaboration.

The themes of mutuality and collaboration keep showing up. Take a moment to examine Bruenig’s despair, back in 2018, over the Trump era, as she described “a civic kind of going mad, where the veil is lifted from politics and what lies beneath makes participation in ordinary political life with a quiet mind impossible.” The trajectory, she thought, was very dark:

The entire 2016 episode has been, in some sense, an introspective journey into America’s own innermost parts, with Donald Trump’s victory prompting a nervous self-inventory of what we value, whether our institutions work and to what degree we ought to trust one another. The full contents of that inward odyssey have yet to unfold. But on the question of institutional functioning, the news is unequivocally grim.

Bruenig concluded that Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election — and remember while you roll your eyes that she was writing in 2018, the Schiff Apotheosis — “suggests that it just isn’t that hard, full stop, for anyone to tinker with our deliberative democratic process.” She finished with this conclusion: “You really don’t have the choices you ought to in American democracy, because of decisions made without your consent by people of wealth and power behind closed doors. It’s possible to continue to participate in a democracy after that. But not with a quiet mind.”

Line all of that up in your head before we go on, and remember what Elizabeth Bruenig cares about: Do our institutions work? Can we trust one another? Are we governed through the manifestation of our consent, making our own choices through a deliberative democratic process? Are we governed through a discussion, through mutuality and a good-faith exchange of competing views in a healthy democracy?

Now, here’s Bruenig this week, talking about the moral wisdom of Biden’s death row commutations:

Nevertheless, the moral wisdom of Biden’s decision is compelling to me. Biden’s legacy may be tied up in allegations of corruption and the evident cover-up of his waning health, but he has also secured a place in history as a president of certain mercies, all of which speak of the restraint a sovereign owes his people.

So the writer with the career argument about mutuality and democratic deliberation gratefully concludes that Joe Biden is our sovereign; we are his people, ruled by him, benefitting from his personal mercy. I read Bruenig’s sentence to my teenage daughter, as an in-home test, and she immediately caught the sovereignty problem. Which rules out a career in journalism.

Continuing, a bit deeper into Bruenig’s short essay:

The commutations will, then, effectively end the federal death penalty for a generation. “If you cannot end the death penalty legislatively, this is the way you end it in practice,” Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told me.

So our sovereign, Joe Biden, has largely ended the federal death penalty by fiat, which is good, because we haven’t been able to end it — well, you know, legislatively, by electing people who promise to end the death penalty, and then by their open legislative action in our name. It hasn’t happened through a, how would you say it, deliberative kind of democratic process, so Biden had to do it unilaterally, as our ruler. Which is great news, and a manifestation of moral wisdom.

Also, Donald Trump is a threat to Our Democracy.

2018: “You really don’t have the choices you ought to in American democracy, because of decisions made without your consent by people of wealth and power behind closed doors.”

Late 2024: Joe Biden, acting unilaterally to mostly end the federal death penalty by personal fiat, has wisely demonstrated “the restraint a sovereign owes his people.”

Sometimes decisions made without your consent behind closed doors are good, because process doesn’t matter when you get an outcome you prefer. As an idea in mainstream discourse, “Our Democracy” is…quite flexible. But you knew that.

Related, the White House issued a list of Biden’s death penalty commutations as a mere set of names, after which the New York Times added a very gentle list of their crimes, e.g.:

Thomas Steven Sanders, sentenced in 2014 in Louisiana. Convicted and sentenced to death for a kid­nap­ping result­ing in the death of a 12-year-old girl.

His kidnapping, you see, resulted in the death of a child. Somehow. She died, at some point, by unclear means. Omitted details: Sanders tracked the 12 year-old girl on a trip near the Grand Canyon with her mother. He shot the mother in the head on the side of the highway so he could take the girl, then kept the girl with him as he drove through several states, then shot her four times and cut her throat, then dumped her body in the woods. Does this merit commutation from a death sentence to life imprisonment? Not that anybody asked your opinion, or mine.

Once again, we’re having the appearance of debate without its substance. The people who’ve warned you that Trump is an autocrat who will exercise power unilaterally and without debate are enormously pleased that Joe Biden has exercised power unilaterally and without debate, while the things that actually happened and led to the imposition of the penalty now being brushed aside are described with anodyne vagueness. The federal death penalty has been largely ended for a generation — without public or legislative deliberation, without new laws, and with no one’s consent.

“Moral wisdom.”