The New York Times starkly revealed its disparate, biased, and hopelessly confused treatment of fascist and socialist ideologies in three stories on Saturday, with Trump indirectly lumped in with European fascist parties.
Reporter Jason Horowitz’s Rome byline was featured on Saturday’s front page, “In Italian Campaign, Gravity of Far Right Exerts Its Strongest Pull.” Horowitz threw out plenty of “far-right” and “hard right” labels to describe some of the unsavory populist parties emerging in Europe.
But on the same front page, White House correspondent Peter Baker also used “hard right” to describe the Trump administration’s policy moves, like “repealing environmental regulations, cutting taxes and increasing military spending” in his “White House Memo,” “Zig, Zag and Zig Again.”
While Mr. Trump has governed from the hard right for most of his presidency, he has at times confused some of his aides and allies with seemingly ad hoc, gut-driven proposals that conflict with Republican orthodoxy like seizing guns from the mentally ill without due process.
Meanwhile, another reporter celebrated a popular German socialist and knocked "trickle-down economics." The same edition contained praise for the (unlabeled) hard left, in Europe-based reporter Katrin Bennhold’s flattering profile of German activist Kevin Kuhnert. She also snuck in an opinionated liberal insult of free-market capitalism into her news story, “The 28-Year-Old Socialist Who Could End the Merkel Era.”
Mr. Kühnert was born in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. Capitalism had beaten communism. Trickle-down economics, already the default ideology on the right, was embraced by the left, too. Some say that is when the problems of social democracy began.
