The Dismal Magazine

A few days ago I wrote a post referencing an article in The Economist about South Dakota.  For the most part, I was only talking about their calling South Dakota "neglected" and using that as the basis for silly jokes about lesser-known states.  But I also made a snide remark about The Economist's conservative standpoint.  When I first wrote that, I had started off on a rant about my long-running pet peeve with them, but I figured it was too off-topic and dropped it.

As I said, The Economist has a conservative, pro-capitalist point of view.  I'm liberal, and have more lukewarm feelings about capitalism.  But I've always appreciated that The Economist avoids many of the problems with conservative media outlets:

• portraying conservative politicians and parties as perfect and unfailing, rather than just promoting conservative ideals
• conflating religion and conservative policies (they were in favour of gay marriage before most liberal politicians would touch the issue)
• denying reality when it contradicts doctrine

So I've liked their writing, finding that an intelligent take on world events is welcome, even if it comes from a different philosophy than mine.

What has always bothered me, however, is the way they always find a way to back the most conservative option, regardless of their reasoning.  For instance, they may write articles acknowledging the reality of global warming, but then they seem to contradict that by endorsing a politician who's policies have no consideration for the environment.  Or they concede the need for corporate regulation, then oppose regulation when actual laws are proposed.  One ends up wondering if the intellectual moderation is all an act.  Though another possibility is that they know that a lot of their income comes from telling conservative Americans what they want to hear.


I bring all this up, because of a recent controversy over one of their book reviews.  It was for a book called, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism.  It has the thesis that capitalism, as we now know it, was forged by the American slave-based economy.  Obviously, I would expect that they would have a problem with that idea.  But I would expect that realistic and intelligent conservatives would do one of the following:

• make a counterargument against the idea that capitalism was influenced or created by slavery, or
• concede the point, but contend that a system's detestable origins do not make it an evil system

They took a stab at each of these, but in the end they did something that only the most far-right pundits would do: play the slavery-wasn't-that-bad card. They imply that slave-owners had a vested interest in keeping slaves healthy and treating them better.  Most shockingly, the review ends by claiming that the book is not objective, because all the blacks in this book about slavery are "victims."

To their credit, The Economist retracted the review and apologized.  And to their further credit, they have posted the review with their apology, rather than hide their mistake.  But this is one of those missteps that is hard to apologize for, since it has revealed something of the mindset at the magazine.  At least a few of their people thought this article was a reasonable thing to write.  That's the sort of incident that is hard to forget unless it comes with an explanation of how their perspective has changed and their behaviour will be different going forward.  Unless they do, I'm going to believe that there is no limit to how far they will go to court the conservative extremes.