New York Review of Books

Lefty Writer: Some Trump Backers Think ‘A Bullying White Man’ Should Succeed Obama
By Tom Johnson | September 7, 2015 | 8:53 PM EDT

The debate rages on as to whether Donald Trump represents the essence of the Republican party. Very broadly speaking, conservatives say he doesn’t and liberals say he does. One liberal, Michael Tomasky, claims that Trump, despite his left-of-center positions on several fiscal and economic issues, nonetheless embodies the “two qualities more than any others [that] have driven conservatism in our time.”

The first quality, wrote Tomasky in the September 24 issue of The New York Review of Books, “is cultural and racial resentment…The second is what we might call spectacle—the unrelenting push toward a rhetorical style ever more gladiatorial and ever more outraged…Trump is conservative resentment and spectacle made flesh.”

Lefty Writer: ‘Much Truth’ to Idea That ‘National Media’ Are ‘Primed to Take Down Hillary’
By Tom Johnson | June 7, 2015 | 5:20 PM EDT

Never mind the vast right-wing conspiracy, suggests Michael Tomasky in the June 25 New York Review of Books. What Hillary Clinton needs to concern herself with are 1) a possible vast mainstream-media conspiracy and 2) her and her husband’s propensity for shadiness and avarice.

In a nearly 3,800-word article that’s ostensibly a review of Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash but in classic NYRB fashion is more about issues related to the book in question, Tomasky delves into topics including Clinton Foundation fundraising practices; the Clintons’ whopping income from speechmaking; and how they should clean up their act regarding both so that they don’t impede Hillary’s presidential campaign.

Tomasky also analyzes, and largely endorses, the idea stated in early May by Politico’s Dylan Byers that “the national media have never been more primed to take down Hillary Clinton (and, by the same token, elevate a Republican candidate).” Tomasky specifies one extremely prominent northeastern liberal newspaper that’s “worth keeping an eye on” given its putative record of anti-Clinton reporting.

Lefty Writer Garry Wills Lauds Michelle Obama For Breaking the Right’s ‘Rules of Racial Discourse’
By Tom Johnson | May 27, 2015 | 8:46 PM EDT

Last Friday, author and historian Garry Wills, who blogs occasionally at the New York Review of Books site, praised Michelle Obama for challenging, in her recent Tuskegee University commencement address, conservatives’ complacency about race in America. Specifically, Wills approved of the first lady’s “breaking all of the four rules of racial discourse the right wing now wants to enforce.”

“The celebrators of rugged individualism will not allow successful blacks to reach back and help others up the ladder of achievement. That is just rewarding the ‘takers over the makers,’” wrote Wills. “But when we see or read the speech of Michelle Obama, stingy individualists melt down into their pooled little meannesses, and this tall black woman of achievement calls on us all to mount into the sky, following the Tuskegee Airmen. This is not playing the race card. It is playing the American card.”

Writer Garry Wills: Right-Wing, Anti-Francis Catholics ‘Are Not Used to Having a Pope Who Is a Christian’
By Tom Johnson | March 29, 2015 | 3:27 PM EDT

In a Sunday blog post on the New York Review of Books site, historian Wills, who’s written extensively about both the United States and Catholicism, rebuked conservative Catholics who’ve “suggested that [Pope Francis] is not truly Catholic,” asserting that such critics of the pope “are right to be in a panic. They are not used to having a pope who is a Christian. They call Francis a radical because he deplores the sequestration of great wealth for a rich few and deprivation of the many poor. But Francis is a moderate. Jesus was the radical.”

Wills, who is Catholic, noted that Francis is hugely popular among rank-and-file Catholics and commented that any “perception of great resistance to the pope in his own church” is “largely the product of noise. Extremists get more press coverage than blander types.”

Smart Take From New York Review of Books: Republicans Are Scary, Purist, Nativist, and Racist
By Clay Waters | February 11, 2015 | 9:56 AM EST

To understand the literary elite's simplistic grasp of politics, look to whom they get their opinions from: Veteran political contributor Elizabeth Drew, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, explained the Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate for the Review's February issue under the headline: "The Republicans: Divided and Scary." And purist. And nativist. And racist....

WashPost Waterfall of Gush Over 'Deep, Hopeless Intellectualism' of Leftist Rag on Books
By Tim Graham | November 8, 2013 | 6:33 AM EST

When The Washington Post headlines a story “A half-century of deep, hopeless intellectualism,” there’s a puff piece underneath. It’s not about Obama’s globe-trotting genius since the age of two. It’s a rave for The New York Review of Books, a leftist literary rag. (It's not The New York Times Book Review. This comes out about 20 times a year.)

Post writer Neely Tucker oozed all over “legendary editor Robert Silvers” and how “circulation is at an all-time high of 150,000.” Then came the "oh, so hopelessly smart" waterfall of gush: