Political flat-earthers

Ian Williams, a journalist who is not always this obtuse, has a bizarrely ill-informed piece on Comment is Free decrying the New York Times for appointing a conservative columnist. Williams comments that "conservative newspapers rarely if ever allow a left or liberal voice unmoderated, unchallenged or unanchored on their pages - which probably accounts for the wails of horror from the American left at the news that the New York Times has engaged Bill Kristol as a regular columnist".

Williams's argument appears to be a conspiracy theory about Rupert Murdoch and an extended wail about Kristol. I have never met either man and I don't understand Williams's objections. It does appear to me that having a range of opinion among columnists is a good thing and that Kristol is a lucid writer, but evidently Williams sees more fundamental issues of principle that are obscure to me. So I'll content myself with pointing out his obvious errors.

1. As the Murdoch press is a particular target of Williams, it's worth pointing out that no newspaper in the UK has a broader spread of opinion regularly published than The Times. From my own experience, it's common for an article such as this to be followed immediately by an article such as this.

2. A.M. Rosenthal, the former executive editor of the New York Times, was not a "regular conduit for neoconservativism [sic]". He published the Pentagon Papers, which did grave damage to the credibility of US decision making in the Vietnam War. Rosenthal was, however, an outspoken supporter of Israel, which I suspect is what Williams has in mind - in which case he should not be so coy.

3. Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol's father, did not "coin neoconservativism [sic]". The term was invented by the socialist Michael Harrington and was intended to be abusive. Like many such epithets in history (e.g. "Methodism") a derogatory term was then adopted by its intended targets and drained of that connotation.

4. To describe the twin principles of neoconservatism as "that Israel could no wrong and the Soviet Union no right" is intellectually idle. For most of the past 15 years neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz have been strongly critical of Israeli policy (i.e. as too accommodating). Look at Commentary magazine throughout the 1990s and you will find fierce (and in my view seriously misguided) denunciations of Israel's political class for adopting what contributors dismissively called the "Oslo syndrome". Williams might retort that he meant neoconservatism was a hawkish pro-Likud stance, in which case he would still be wrong. Podhoretz's views on Israel are very different from a supposed neoconservative such as Daniel Bell (Irving Kristol's friend and associate for many decades), who has long been sympathetic to the Israeli peace movement. On this question and on many other aspects of foreign policy, only an ill-informed and uninquisitive writer (Johann Hari is another) would treat neoconservatism as an unvariegated and unchanging phenomenon.

5. Williams's account of the neconservative objection to the Soviet Union is absurd. That objection was that Communism was an illegitimate system and an immutable one. The second part of that criticism was patently false. The first, however, was far more perceptive than the alternative view advanced by Senator J. William Fulbright (the segregationist who would probably have become Secretary of State if George McGovern had won the Presidency in 1972) that "the broader purposes of our own policy and of world peace require us to live in the greatest attainable harmony with the Communist governments of the world". It was views such as Fulbright's that caused the split in the Democratic Party in the 1970s between followers of McGovern and those of Senator Henry Jackson.

6. It's a minor point, but one I shall not resist the temptation to point out, that Williams hasn't checked his historical facts when using flat-earthers as a metaphor. Columbus's voyage had nothing to do with debates on the shape of the earth. As Christine Garwood states in her recent account of the most notorious of crank ideas Flat Earth, 2007, p. 3: "[E]ducated medieval people did not believe the earth to be flat, and it was neither Columbus's intention nor the outcome of his voyage to demonstrate to doubters that it was a globe."

7. This is probably the CIF editors' doing rather than Williams's, but the link provided to the discussion board of the Flat Earth Society doesn't serve the purpose that they imagine. It is a spoof site, not a genuine case for flat-earthism. The genuine Flat Earth Society, more properly the International Flat Earth Research Society of America (located, as you might expect, in California), appears to have been in suspended animation since the death in the 1990s of its leader Charles Johnson, a true believer. Again, this is a minor point - but if you're going to make hyperbolic comparisons to reinforce your argument, it's as well to know what you're dealing with.