In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, Joe Kahn’s predicament is sharper than his calm suggests, because the anthropology under attack in that passage is the anthropology his entire doctrine requires.
Start with the persuadable reader, the figure on whom Kahn has bet the institution. His independence doctrine assumes a citizen who weighs evidence and revises judgment: give that citizen fair, rigorous coverage and trust returns, polarization softens, the paper serves the Republic by informing individual reason. That citizen is liberalism’s atomistic actor, and Mearsheimer says he barely exists. If socialization and innate sentiment dominate reason, then readers come to the Times as tribe members, subscribe to belong, and trust or distrust the paper according to group alignment rather than accuracy. The half of the country that stopped believing the Times did not reason its way out and cannot be reasoned back; the distrust is a coalition marker, immune to improvements in fairness it will never examine. On this account Kahn’s central strategy, winning back the skeptical middle through demonstrated rigor, aims at a population that is mostly a theoretical construct. The doctrine treats trust as an epistemic problem. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says it is a membership problem, and membership does not respond to corrections policies.
Second, his own formation. The passage on value infusion reads like Kahn’s biography compressed. A wealthy Boston home under a forceful merchant father, Middlesex as a boarder, the Crimson presidency, Harvard twice, then four decades inside two great newspapers: the institutional ethos was installed early, through exactly the long, intense socialization Mearsheimer describes, before the critical faculties that might have evaluated it existed. What the guild calls his impeccable news judgment, the faculty treated as a refined instrument of reason, becomes on this account a socialized disposition, the internalized reflexes of a tribe, wearing reason’s costume. And the quality his colleagues name most, the reverence, the man so devoted to the mission of the Times that self-destruction seems impossible, is group attachment of the strongest kind, the willingness to subordinate self to collective that Mearsheimer puts at the center of human nature. Kahn is a profoundly tribal man whose tribe’s totem is the claim to stand above tribes. He did not choose the independence creed after surveying alternatives. He was formed in it, and his serenity in defending it is the serenity of a man defending home ground, which is what unchosen codes feel like from inside.
Third, the universalism, where Kahn’s own past supplies the evidence against his present. The Times under his leadership is a liberal universalist project in miniature: a global newsroom, hubs on three continents, one standard of truth applied to every society, the implicit claim that all the news fit to print is fit for everyone, everywhere, by the same measure. Mearsheimer’s argument predicts such projects founder on nationalism, on the refusal of bounded communities to accept a universal arbiter. Kahn lived that prediction. He spent his formative reporting years in China, and the Times’s great Chinese lesson came in 2012, when the paper’s exposure of elite wealth produced a permanent block rather than a Chinese readership grateful for universal truth. The party framed the journalism as one tribe’s weapon, the population by and large accepted the framing, and the wall has held ever since. The man running the world’s universalist newsroom carries firsthand knowledge that the universalism stops at the border of a determined national community. Whether he has let that knowledge travel from his China memories to his global strategy is a question his public statements never answer.
Fourth, the press-freedom fight, where the implications turn practical. Kahn frames the conflict with a hostile administration as the defense of a universal principle, the public’s right to know, secured by rights, courts, and norms. That framing is liberalism’s wager that principles stand above groups. Mearsheimer’s anthropology reframes the conflict as ordinary intergroup struggle: one elite coalition with a newspaper against another with the state, and the rights at issue holding only as long as the institutions enforcing them remain uncaptured by the rival side. On this account the Times’s reliance on the First Amendment bar is the great delusion in miniature, counting on parchment where the real currency is power, and the rational fallback is the realist one: alliances, leverage, and the cultivation of constituencies who will defend the paper out of attachment rather than principle. The subscriber base as a defensive coalition, not an audience.
Fifth, and here the frame turns generous, Kahn’s practice already obeys Mearsheimer even where his doctrine does not. Watch what he does rather than what he says. He runs the newsroom on cohesion logic: boundaries enforced, defectors disciplined, attacked colleagues defended by name, loyalty rewarded, the group’s honor code recited on every public occasion. That is tribal stewardship of a high order, the behavior of a leader who understands in his hands what his theory denies, that the institution survives through attachment and sacrifice rather than through the aggregated reason of its employees. The same holds for the company’s money. The bundle that now drives the business, the games, the recipes, the habit products, monetizes non-rational daily attachment, belonging in app form, and that revenue subsidizes the rationalist mission upstairs. The enterprise already runs on Mearsheimer’s fuel while flying liberalism’s flag.
If Mearsheimer is right, Kahn is a gifted tribal chieftain administering a successful tribe under a doctrine that misdescribes it, and the misdescription has one large practical cost. It directs the institution’s hope toward a persuadable public and a protective lattice of rights, two things the anthropology says are thin, while undervaluing the thing the anthropology says is thick, the fierce attachment of the paper’s own people and subscribers, which Kahn cultivates expertly and credits not at all.
