I encourage my readers here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home to check out William Hogeland’s blog, “Hysteriography.” The blog is subtitled: “Hogeland’s Commentaries on the Relationships Among History, Politics, and Society.”
In a recent post entitled “Constitution Shmnonstitution,” Hogeland rails on The New York Times for failing to know that the Constitution says nothing about inalienable rights or equality. In fact, as Hogeland notes, these are principles that appear in the Declaration of Independence.
Hogeland thinks this error is more than just a simple mistake. Check out his piece to see why. But in the meantime, here is a taste:
So what’s the big hairy deal? Why am I knocking NYT and liberals who don’t their Constitution so much harder than I knock Christine O’Donnell for not knowing hers? Or, to put it the way David Tuttle (a cousin, and nice to hear from him even in this weird postmodernist manner) put it on my FB author page: Is the Times error so much worse than what David calls the Tea Party’s effort to deny separation of church and state?
Yeah. It’s a lot worse.
In two ways. One is that the Times is the Times — and they even call themselves The Times. Self-anointed, and anointed by us all, to have at minimum the bare facts (especially when they’re known to many tenth graders) and at maximum, and far more importantly in this case, the big-enough-picture, the thematic long view, and the care, to provide well-intentioned, open-minded, reasonably well-informed readers with cultural/historical perspective on issues of the day. What the piece got wrong isn’t minor, it’s huge, especially for a piece weighing in on how people have revered and laid claim to the Constitution. The difference between the Constitution and the Declaration on equality and the source of rights has been one of the most glaring American issues for lawyers, judges, historians, teachers, and history buffs and, one would have hoped, for anyone at the Times who sees him or herself as capable of providing the kind of sober background that is NYT (already plenty patronizing) stock-in-trade.
When they get wrong one of the most important and pressing phenomena in U.S. history, as a mere aside in the process of purportedly filling us in what’s behind the matters they presume to be perplexing us, what becomes horribly clear is that nobody at the Times is really steeped in (ha!) the most salient issues they’re covering. [UPDATE: Well, not literally “nobody.” Jesus, Hogeland, slow down and lighten up. I’ve written for the Times and had great editing there. But that makes me ask even more loudly about this error: WTF? The fact is I don’t think it is, in some sense, an error. Really, it reflects something we all actually believe. Wrongly. That inalienable rights and equality were sewn into our constitutional law by the founding fathers. The Times thinks it for us and we think it for the Times. But we think wrongly.] They presume they’re competent to cover those issues because, well, they’re The Times. And that’s just what the populist right says about the Times, and about all liberal claims to superior expertise. There are days — more and more of them — when it’s hard to say they’re wrong.
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