By Chris Satullo

I know how Bari Weiss feels.

Well, not the part about being dismissed and scorned as a woman and a Jew. I am, after all, a Protestant white guy. Ah, privilege.

But the part about feeling exhausted by the challenges of finding an independent path through the thickets of American political dialogue – while those around you chant self-righteous groupthink? Yeah. That piece of her experience as an editor and columnist for the New York Times rings some bells for me.

Weiss quit her job this week, posting an online cri de coeur. It read in part:

The lessons that ought to have followed the [2016} election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views…The truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times.

The progressive Twitterati of course did not respond to her words by pondering them to extract any wise lessons. Instead, they are hyping every published mistake or ill-considered remark the woman ever made. Rather than getting mired in that tit-for-tat, I just want to suggest how my own experience backs up Weiss’ timely warning that journalism and progressive discourse might be running off the rails at the very moment the nation needs them to be at their best.

I was an editorial page editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1994 to 2007. In those roles, I tried to steer – and to nudge the paper’s opinion pages to steer – a path independent from the unsatisfying, incoherent ideologies of both right and left.

In that time, The Inquirer was both the first paper that had endorsed Bill Clinton to call for his resignation and the first (in 2001) to come out in favor of reparations for both slavery and Jim Crow. We supported both charter schools and a lawsuit asserting that Pennsylvania’s shortchanging of Philadelphia schools stemmed from systemic racism. We spoke up for both gay rights and religious freedom. I contend that these seemingly disparate stances were the product of clarity, rigor and guts, not confusion or currying favor.

Even though those years saw the rise of Fox News, right-wing talk radio and MoveOn.org, they were actually less unrelentingly nasty, partisan and locked-down than today. Until the very end of my run at the paper, Twitter didn’t exist; Facebook was still for college kids. Memes were not a thing.

But I still got it from all sides. 

I returned from lunch one day to learn that Rush Limbaugh that morning had scornfully read on air excerpts from a column I’d written about Abu Ghraib, urging his Dittoheads to call the paper to demand I be fired – which they did by the hundreds. Meanwhile, a prominent blogger on the left deemed me “the worst editorial page editor in America” for not adhering sufficiently to the purity of his own positions. One week, the Zionist Organization of America called me an anti-Semite even as Palestinian Media Watch termed me a tool of Zionist apartheid.

And I somewhat regularly looked up from my desk to see a delegation from the news staff, there to inform me that my efforts to give views contrary to their groupthink a foothold on the opinion pages had “embarrassed the paper.”

So one part of Bari Weiss’s letter struck me as naïve:

Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.

Of course it does. In fact, centrism – at least as I’m about to try to define it – always requires more bravery, honesty and intellectual rigor than simply nestling into the partisan certitudes of contemporary America’s hypocritical, flawed political poles.

Weiss’ comment put me on a quest to dig up a column I wrote long ago. Thanks, to Newspapers.com, I found it. Turns out, it dated way back to 1997. The good news, for me at least, was the piece seemed to hold up OK. The bad news: This was because, since the day it was written, the syndromes it described have not disappeared, but instead have gotten more dire.

Indulge me, please, as I do that most annoying of things, quote myself:

The assumption underlying most political coverage is this: Moderate is boring. Tepid. Hypocritical, expedient or, best case, confused. The middle is just muddle, the land of milquetoasts, the House of Waffles. To find the red meat – vigor, rigor, passion and principle – look to the margins, where the left and right stand, loud and proud…

Here’s the problem: This discussion gets trapped inside one of the most powerful metaphors in our intellectual vocabulary. We borrowed it from the French – and, alas, never gave it back.

The metaphor? Politics as a spectrum, a line running from conservative right to liberal left. We are addicted to this conceit … [but it has] a sneaky power to distort. A line has a beginning and an end; it’s defined by those two clear-cut points. Every other point on the line then gets seen as merely “in-between”…

Apply this metaphor to politics and you see what happens: All positions that do not conform to the orthodoxies of the ‘left’ or ‘right’ are viewed as mere stopping points on the way to those two destinations. They are never understood as systems with their own (perhaps superior) logic. Always a halfway house, never a home; a tactical accommodation, not a genuine insight.

The problem, as the estimable political journalist E.J. Dionne long ago noted, is that the right/left orthodoxies by which we tend to assess the “bravery” of political positions are themselves neither coherent nor brave. They are muddled bundles of false, lazy, “either/or” choices that frustrate and alienate the mass of Americans, who prefer nuanced, creative “both/and” solutions to problems.

America is an experiment based on powerful ideals that are intrinsically in tension: liberty and community; free enterprise and social justice; patriotism and inclusion; tradition and innovation, and on and on. When the nation does improve, it’s thanks to dynamic tension among those ideals – not in spite of it. So the goal should never be to abolish that tension, to exalt one ideal while banishing another (though this is a penchant of both left and right).

The task of every new generation is to find its own, fresh way of managing the tensions among our ideals, the balance that best meets the challenges of its moment. The sometimes glory of America is that, every once in a while, new voices previously excluded from the national dialogue claim their rightful place at the table. They provide fresh insights and moral energy; they force the rest of us to productively recalibrate the way we balance our competing ideals. Progress becomes possible, even amid pain and noise.

This is one of those moments. It’s exciting.

And we are already in danger of blowing it, thanks in part to the aggressive, alienating intolerance from the smugly woke that Bari Weiss decries. This intolerance, sadly, is an action that, with Newtownian inevitability, will bolster the Trumpist coalition and summon from it an ever darker, viler reaction of bigotry and paranoid anger.

I submit that it is in the center, the vital center, of American discourse – not on the self-righteous, intolerant, hypocritical, partisan poles – that the bravest, most creative, most useful, most lasting work typically gets done to forge the next needed recalibration of the tensions among American ideals.

This work can only be done by people who refuse to write off, to “cancel,” huge chunks of the American populace because they did or said something unenlightened.

It takes bravery to stick with people, to give them a chance to do better, when they disappoint or offend you. Cancel culture is not righteous activism for social justice. It is moral and intellectual cowardice.

It takes bravery to grasp that the positions you happen to hold are not the sum total of wisdom and virtue, to fight through the cognitive dissonance your brain churns up when someone points out your own blind spots, hypocrisies or faulty logic. 

Strutting about your silo, insisting that nobody but your cheering Twitter crew has anything worthwhile to say, is not integrity. It’s insecurity, weakness and a refusal to grow.

I admit there’s one part of the 1997 self that wrote the essay I quoted that is long gone.  I no longer look, as I once did, to the formal Republican party for any useful ideas, any revealing critique of my preferred views. It has tragically been reduced to a nest of hypocrites, a corrupt organization so consumed by clinging to power it is incapable of admitting error or having a new idea.

But acknowledging that is far different from claiming – as too many of today’s performatively woke tend to do as they seek to rule our dialogue about justice – that the experiences, feelings and ideas of anyone who ever even thought of voting for a Republican are of no consequence to the work at hand.

The voices of those long excluded surely must be welcomed and heard. But that doesn’t require us to exclude or silence others, wielding the word “privilege” as a weapon.  If we do that, the work of justice will not be as well-done or lasting as we hope. And the revenge of those so dismissed will be potent and ugly.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.