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, the central drama of Dean Baquet’s editorship reads as a confirmation of his anthropology, and the creed Baquet spent his career defending rests on a false picture of man.
Start with objectivity. Baquet inherited and defended the Times’s founding faith: that a trained journalist can stand apart from his attachments, weigh evidence, and follow facts wherever they lead. That faith presumes the atomistic reasoning individual Mearsheimer says does not exist. If socialization and innate sentiment shape moral judgment before reason gets a vote, then a newsroom of 1,700 people produces not a view from nowhere but the view of a tribe, the tribe of credentialed professionals socialized in the same dozen universities, the same cities, the same status hierarchy. Baquet sensed this. After 2016 he admitted the paper did not understand the country that elected Trump. Mearsheimer would say it could not. A group cannot reason its way past its own value infusion, because the values arrived before the reasoning did.
The 2020 crisis follows the same logic. When the Tom Cotton op-ed ran and the staff revolted, Baquet and James Bennet (b. 1966) tried argument. They appealed to the marketplace of ideas, the liberal individualist case for airing views one finds repugnant. The staff answered with group loyalty: the op-ed endangered our colleagues, our people. If Mearsheimer ranks reason below socialization, then Baquet brought the weakest weapon to that fight. The younger cohort arrived with a moral code already installed by family, campus, and peer group. He thought he was in a debate. He was in a contest between two socializations, his and theirs, and theirs had numbers, youth, and the future on its side. Bennet lost his job. Baquet kept his by yielding. The tribe disciplined its chiefs.
His own biography supports the thesis rather than the creed. Baquet’s moral formation came from a Creole family running a restaurant in New Orleans, from Catholic schooling, from the newsroom cultures of the States-Item and the Chicago Tribune. He became a great reporter through apprenticeship and absorption, the way Mearsheimer says all of us become what we are. Nobody reasons himself into news judgment. It gets socialized into you, like an accent.
Then there is universalism. Mearsheimer argues that liberalism’s faith in inalienable rights drives liberal states toward ambitious crusades abroad, and that these crusades fail because they collide with nationalism, the political expression of our tribal nature. The Times under Baquet ran a domestic version of the same program. The 1619 Project, the saturation coverage of Trump as a rights emergency, the framing of American politics as a struggle between universal values and atavism: these treat the paper’s moral vocabulary as everyone’s moral vocabulary. Half the country received that coverage the way Iraqis received democracy promotion, as one tribe’s values arriving under a universal flag. The paper’s crusades produced the same blowback abroad produces: deepened loyalty to the opposing group, and a market for rival media that serve the other tribe’s sentiments.
One more implication. If group attachment governs, then the Times’s subscriber model after 2016 socialized the paper a second time. Digital subscribers became the coalition the institution depends on, and coverage drifted toward what sustains that coalition’s attachment. Baquet resisted some of this. He held out against “liar” and “racist” as routine labels longer than his staff wanted. But resistance by one man against a group’s sentiment is exactly the fight Mearsheimer says individuals lose. He retired in 2022 with his reputation intact and his creed in ruins, an editor who believed in the reasoning individual and presided over a decade that proved the tribe runs the show.
Baquet was not a failed defender of objectivity. He was a man asked to enforce an ideal that misdescribes the species, including himself.
