My father would not live any place where the New York Times couldn’t be delivered before 7:00 a.m. To him, the Times was “the newspaper of record,” the keeper of the first drafts of history. It had the reach and the resources to be anywhere history was being made, and the skills to report it accurately. He trusted it more than any other news source, including Walter Cronkite. Like my dad, I grew to associate the Times with serious journalism, the first place one goes for the straight story. Their news was always assumed to be objectively presented, with the facts front-and-center. Their op-ed writers were well-reasoned and erudite, even when I thought they were full of shit. But there was more. The Times became — for me, at least — a sort of guide to critical thinking. It helped teach me, at an impressionable age, to weigh the facts before forming an opinion. And many of my opinions — including deeply-held ones — were formed around facts I might have read
There is now ample evidence that people with democratic systems of government actually like them, and would just as soon keep them, flaws and all. There seems to be a strong backlash occurring in several European countries, a trend toward shoring up democracies threatened by toxic authoritarian forces. In Poland last year, then in France and Britain last week, actual voters — as opposed to deeply compromised opinion polls — gave a big middle finger to the fascists in their midst. I don’t pretend to understand the electoral systems of these countries — let alone their political currents — but I’m struck by the apparent connections between different elections in different countries, and what they might be saying to us. I’ve spoken before of Poland , where ten years of vicious minority rule was overturned at the ballot box. A ban on abortion was the galvanizing issue — sound familiar? — and it brought an overwhelming number of voters to the polls, many for the fir