Luke Ford

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) built the Muqaddimah around one engine, asabiyyah, the group feeling that binds men into a force capable of taking and holding power. Asabiyyah is born in the desert, in hardship and scarcity, where survival requires absolute mutual reliance, and it dies in the city, where luxury and security dissolve the need for it. From that engine he derived his famous cycle. A hardened group from the periphery, rich in solidarity, conquers the soft sedentary civilization. It rules. Rule brings wealth, wealth brings luxury, luxury dissolves the group feeling that won the throne, and within three or four generations, about a hundred and twenty years, the dynasty falls to the next hungry tribe out of the desert. He even sketched the generations. The founder builds glory through his own toil and knows what it cost. The second generation had contact with the founder and preserves the qualities by imitation. The third merely inherits the forms, relying on tradition. The fourth believes the glory is owed to it by birth, despises the toil that built it, and loses everything. Dynastic senility, he concluded, is natural and incurable, though it can be deferred by those who understand its causes.

The Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty is now in its fifth generation and its hundred-thirtieth year, which places it past Khaldun’s limit, and that makes the New York Times the test case the frame demands: either an exception that needs explaining or a dynasty whose decay has been masked by means Khaldun himself catalogued. The answer, worked through, turns out to be both, and Joseph Kahn stands at the exact point where the two answers meet.

Start with the founder, because the pattern opens classically. Adolph Ochs (1858-1935) came from the periphery in the full Khaldunian sense, a printer’s apprentice from Knoxville and Chattanooga, an outsider to New York and its press establishment, who took over a dying paper in 1896 with borrowed money and built its glory through toil he never forgot. He issued the dynasty’s creed at the founding, without fear or favor, and Khaldun would note the move at once, because he wrote that religion multiplies a dynasty’s power beyond its numbers: a group bound by creed as well as kinship fights with doubled solidarity. The credo functions as the dynasty’s religion to this day, recited at successions, invoked in crises, the da’wa that converts employees into believers.

The generations then ran their sequence. Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1891-1968), the son-in-law who governed through depression and world war, had contact with the founder and preserved the qualities. Orvil Dryfoos (1912-1963) held the throne briefly; Punch Sulzberger (1926-2012), the third generation proper, made the dynasty’s great honor-stand with the Pentagon Papers, tradition risen to the founder’s level for one decisive moment. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. was the fourth generation, the one Khaldun marks for destruction, and the era’s record shows the cycle straining: the strategic stumbles of the 2000s, the debt crisis that drove the family to a Mexican billionaire’s loan in 2009, the moment the dynasty stood a quarter-inch from the fate Khaldun assigns the fourth generation. It did not fall. And the fifth generation, A.G. Sulzberger (b. 1980), governs today a dominion richer and more powerful than at any point in the dynasty’s history. Khaldun’s schedule has been beaten by two generations, and the interesting question is the machinery.

The machinery comes in four parts, and every part is a device Khaldun himself identified as a deferral of senility.

The first is the trust. Khaldun’s fourth generation destroys the dynasty by cashing in the patrimony for luxury, and American press history ran his experiment a half-dozen times on schedule: the Binghams of Louisville collapsed in the third generation, the Chandlers of Los Angeles sold in the fourth, the Bancrofts surrendered Dow Jones in 2007, the Grahams sold Washington in 2013. Each fall came exactly as the Muqaddimah predicts, heirs multiplying, conviction diluting, the soft generation trading glory for liquidity. The Sulzberger trust is engineering aimed at this failure mode: the family cannot easily sell, the luxury exit is barred by document, and the heirs are chained to the patrimony whether their conviction survives or not. It is the rarest of things, a legal instrument that forbids the fourth-generation move.

The second is simulated desert. Khaldun is explicit that asabiyyah and its virtues are produced by hardship and cannot be produced by exhortation, which is why sedentary dynasties cannot regenerate themselves from within. The Sulzbergers’ answer is to manufacture hardship for the heirs: the apprenticeship system that sent A.G. to the Providence Journal and the Oregonian to labor in the provinces under his own byline, and that ran his cousins Sam Dolnick and David Perpich through years in the ranks before any elevation. The dynasty sends its princes to a constructed badawa, a desert of night cops shifts and city council meetings, to instill by simulation what the founder got from necessity. Whether simulated hardship produces real asabiyyah is the deepest open question in the dynasty’s design, but the intent is purely Khaldunian, and the fifth generation’s conduct under fire, of which more below, suggests the simulation took.

The third is the creed, already noted, doing the religion’s work of binding beyond kinship, with one modern refinement: the creed binds the employees as well as the family, converting a workforce into something closer to a faith community and lending the dynasty a solidarity it no longer needs to supply from its own blood.

The fourth is hired vigor, and here the frame reaches Kahn. Khaldun devoted some of his sharpest chapters to the clients and mercenaries, the mawali, the wazirs, the slave soldiers, whom dynasties import as their own kin grow soft or scarce. The executive editors of the Times are the dynasty’s wazirs in nearly perfect form: drawn from outside the blood, selected for vigor proven in the hard country, the foreign bureaus that function as the institution’s desert, given command of the realm’s whole fighting force, and never given the throne. Kahn’s formation reads like a wazir’s résumé composed for the purpose, the Dallas police beat, the Beijing years, the Pulitzers won in the field, decades of service before elevation. Khaldun’s warning about hired vigor was that it works and then it doesn’t: the clients eventually develop asabiyyah of their own and usurp, or the dynasty behind them hollows out entirely. The Times has constitutionalized against the first danger, the customary decade, the retirement norm, the wazir’s structural inability to own what he commands, and no executive editor has ever attempted the throne. The second danger cannot be ruled out by structure, and it is the heart of the mask thesis.

Because here is the cold reading. A dynasty whose vigor is supplied by hired men, while the family provides legitimacy, ceremony, and creed, is not an exception to Khaldun’s cycle. It is a known late stage of it. The Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad reigned for three centuries after their real power passed to Buyid and Seljuk soldiers, sacred figureheads above governments of hired swords, and Khaldun analyzed the arrangement at length: the caliphal solution, the dynasty surviving its own senility by exchanging rule for reign. On this reading the Sulzberger dynasty passed its Khaldunian death date around the fourth generation, when the family’s own operational capacity faltered and the debt crisis nearly took the house, and what persists since is the caliphate phase, a revered family supplying continuity and creed while the wazir class, of which Kahn is the current and ablest specimen, supplies the force. The reading is not a debunking. The Abbasid arrangement lasted longer than most dynasties’ entire lives, and a caliphate with good wazirs and an entrenched creed is among the most durable forms power takes. But it relocates the institution’s true vitality from the blood to the hired men, and it makes the quality of each generation’s wazirs, rather than each generation’s heirs, the variable on which everything turns.

The frame’s second assignment is the newsroom’s asabiyyah, and Khaldun handles it in two movements. Shared danger breeds group feeling; the Trump years were the institution’s desert raids, a decade of siege that re-toughened a softening tribe, fused the ranks, and bound the warriors with booty in the form of the subscription surge, spoils distributed after victories. But Khaldun also teaches that asabiyyah is plural, that houses contain rival solidarities, and that dynasties fall to groups whose group feeling is fresher than their own. The newsroom convulsions of the early 2020s read as a war of asabiyyahs: a younger cohort, formed in the genuine scarcity of the collapsing digital sector, carrying the fierce solidarity of a generation hardened together, moved on the soft institution from within and briefly held much of it. Kahn’s restoration, in Khaldunian terms, was the rallying of the old asabiyyah, institutional loyalty, the creed, the honor culture, against the newer one, and it prevailed when the rival tribe’s home territory, the insurgent media economy that fed and could receive them, turned to true desert, no longer hard country that breeds strength but waste that supports no one. A tribe whose hinterland dies must take service with the city it besieged. Many did.

Which sets up the question the frame was commissioned to ask. Khaldun is unsentimental about what happens to group feeling when the siege lifts: luxury and security dissolve it, always, and no creed or memo prevents the dissolution, because asabiyyah answers to conditions, not exhortation. A newsroom at peace, paid from bundle money, secure in a tower, its enemies defeated or departed, is hadara, sedentary life, and its solidarity will soften on Khaldun’s schedule whatever its leaders say at town halls. The institution’s group feeling is currently maintained by a sustaining external pressure, a hostile administration whose subpoenas and access wars supply the shared danger that does what the creed alone cannot. The cold Khaldunian forecast follows: the Times’s cohesion is rented from its enemies, the rent is paid in siege, and a long peace would do to the newsroom what no rival ever has. Leaders of guarded states have understood this since before the Muqaddimah, which is why the frame’s final, coldest implication must be stated: an institution whose internal order depends on external threat acquires an interest, unconscious and structural, in the threat’s continuation, and the keeper of such an institution should be watched, by others and by himself, for the moment when the trumpet that summons the garrison has become the instrument he cannot afford to put down.

The last Khaldunian question is the horizon. Dynasties fall to the periphery, to groups hardened in scarcity with asabiyyah the city cannot match, and the periphery is where he would tell us to look: the creator economy, the podcast networks, the new newsletter and video institutions, formations born in genuine hardship, bound by intense loyalties between makers and audiences, currently raiding the city’s edges and carrying off its talent and its young. Khaldun would find their group feeling impressive and their prospects undetermined, because raiders become dynasts only when they learn to hold cities, to build the boring apparatus of succession, standards, and continuity that converts conquest into rule. Whether any of them will is the next cycle’s question. The current cycle’s answer stands at the top of the Eighth Avenue tower: a fifth-generation caliphate, its creed intact, its desert simulated, its luxury fenced by trust law, and its sword carried, as the Muqaddimah says late dynasties’ swords always are, by a hired man of formidable vigor who can never, and would never, sit on the throne he defends.

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) published Systems of Survival in 1992, a Platonic dialogue hiding a hard thesis. Human livelihoods divide into two kinds, taking and trading, and each kind has evolved its own complete moral system, which she called syndromes. The commercial syndrome serves people who live by trading: shun force, come to voluntary agreements, be honest, collaborate with strangers, compete, respect contracts, innovate, be efficient, be thrifty, dissent for the sake of the task. The guardian syndrome serves people who live by protecting territory, the lineage of the hunter, the soldier, the government: shun trading, exert prowess, be obedient and disciplined, respect hierarchy, be loyal, adhere to tradition, be exclusive, be ostentatious, dispense largesse, deceive for the sake of the task, treasure honor. Her thesis is that each syndrome is internally coherent and functional, that neither is morally superior, and that the road to systemic corruption runs through mixing them. Take precepts from both and you breed what she called monstrous moral hybrids: police who trade (bribery), merchants who take (the Mafia), guardians running commerce (the Soviet economy), commerce buying guardians (the procurement scandal). Her practical counsel followed: institutions that must host both syndromes survive only through deliberate, knowledgeable segregation, a caste separation maintained by people who understand what they are keeping apart.

The New York Times Company is a textbook Jacobs case, because it hosts both syndromes at full strength under one roof, and the Kahn era is best understood as a period of self-conscious syndrome management.

The newsroom is a guardian order, and the fit is precept-by-precept. Shun trading: the foundational rule of the place is that coverage is never for sale, reporters take no gifts, accept no payments from subjects, trade no favorable mentions, and the historic name for the boundary, the separation of church and state, concedes the religious register of the thing. Exert prowess: the scoop is a raid, the investigation a campaign, and the institution honors its hunters. Discipline, obedience, hierarchy: the masthead is a chain of command and the desk system a regimental structure. Loyalty: the institution defends its own under fire and expects fidelity in return. Tradition: the credo of 1896 is recited like a regimental motto. Exclusivity: the hiring funnel is a vetting ritual, and membership confers caste. Ostentation and largesse: the Pulitzer wall, the prize submissions, the anniversary self-celebrations, guardian display in its classic form. Fortitude: the war correspondents and the security details. Honor above all: the institution’s strongest sentence, *we stand by our reporting*, is an honor formula, and its gravest crises are honor crises. The syndrome even illuminates the rule that seems to contradict it. Jacobs’s guardian deceives for the sake of the task, the spy and the undercover officer, yet the Times forbids its reporters nearly all deception, no false identities, no hidden recorders by default. The prohibition marks the newsroom as a priestly sub-type of guardian, one that renounces the syndrome’s license to deceive in exchange for a higher claim of purity, the guardian order that fights with clean hands because its authority is its weapon.

The other half of the company runs the commercial syndrome. Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, The Athletic, the advertising operation, the subscription machine under Meredith Kopit Levien (b. 1971): this is the trading world, and properly so. It collaborates with strangers, strikes deals, optimizes funnels, A/B tests, prices, bundles, competes, and innovates, and by the only measures that apply to commerce it has succeeded brilliantly, building the subscription business that made the company rich while the rest of the industry starved. Jacobs would insist on saying this without a sneer: the commercial syndrome is not the guardian syndrome’s corruption, it is a complete and honorable ethics of its own, and the people who run the Times’s trading floor practice it well.

The Jacobs problem is never either syndrome. It is the seams, and the company’s seams are where every ethics controversy of the era actually lives.

Take Wirecutter first, the cleanest specimen. A product review is a guardian act, disinterested judgment exercised on the reader’s behalf, protection from the merchant. Affiliate revenue is a commercial fact: the reviewer’s employer collects a commission on every purchase the review produces. The two are fused in a single page, the guardian’s voice wired to the merchant’s till, and Jacobs’s framework names what disclosure rhetoric obscures: this is a hybrid by construction, and its integrity depends on an internal wall, between the recommenders and the revenue, that the incentive gradient erodes every day. The drift shows in the product itself, the deals coverage, the Prime Day liveblogs, the guardian voice gradually conscripted into the festival of trading. Nothing scandalous has happened, which is the point; with hybrids nothing has to happen, the corruption arrives as a slope, not a cliff.

T Brand Studio, the native-advertising shop, is the bolder hybrid: commercial matter manufactured to wear the guardian’s uniform, paid content styled to resemble the report, managed by labels whose entire commercial value lies in being unobtrusive. Jacobs’s category for this is unkind and exact, the merchant in the guard’s livery, and the institution’s own discomfort shows in the elaborate typographic etiquette that surrounds it.

The Athletic supplies the newest case. Sports journalism is guardian work, and the company attached to it a sports-betting partnership, odds integration and a bookmaker’s money flowing through the same pages that cover the games being bet on. The newsroom drew internal lines, news staff segregated from betting content, and the lines are real, but Jacobs’s analysis says what the lines concede: the enterprise now holds a commercial stake in the activity its guardians cover, the referee’s employer has a concession stand at the stadium, and the arrangement is a hybrid whose costs will be invisible until the day a story about gambling’s damage to sport must run beside the partner’s odds widget.

Even the subscription model, the company’s great purification, reads as a syndrome exchange rather than an escape. Moving from advertising to subscriptions cleansed the old hybrid, the advertiser’s hand near the report, and created a subtler one. The subscriber who pays as a patron expects what patrons of guardians have always expected, loyalty, the syndrome’s own precept turned outward: I fund the legion, the legion fights for me. The Trump-era resistance subscriber was a patron, and the rage that greets unwelcome coverage is the rage of largesse betrayed. Joseph Kahn’s independence doctrine, in Jacobs’s terms, is the refusal of the patronage relation, the guardian insisting that the taxes buy protection of the realm and not service to the donor, and it is an expensive refusal because the commercial side’s revenue logic runs the other way.

Which brings the analysis to its structural finding. The New York Times survives its hybrids better than the rest of the industry for the reason Jacobs prescribed: caste separation, deliberately maintained. The newsroom answers to Kahn, the trading floor to Kopit Levien, the two chains of command meet only at the publisher, business staff hold no authority over the report, and the arrangement is enforced by people who can articulate what it is for. The comparative experiment ran in public in 2024: at The Washington Post and in Los Angeles, merchant princes who owned guardian institutions exercised direct command over them, the proprietor’s commercial person issuing guardian orders, and the institutions hemorrhaged trust and subscribers within days. Monstrous hybrid is a strong term, and Jacobs coined it for exactly that configuration. The Times’s constitutional separation of the syndromes, dynasty above, guardian and merchant below in parallel, is why it absorbed the same era’s pressures without the same collapse.

Jacobs would close with two warnings. The first is that guardian virtues corrupt in their own direction without any commercial help. Exclusivity curdles into caste arrogance, loyalty into cover-up, honor into vanity, tradition into blindness, ostentation into self-worship, and a guardian order as secure as Kahn’s newsroom is exposed to every one of these internal rots. The institution’s familiar sins, the certainty, the self-veneration, the slowness to admit error until the great rite forces it, are guardian pathologies, native to the syndrome, and no wall against commerce prevents them. The second warning cuts deeper. A guardian order that does not trade must be fed, and the feeding hand acquires, slowly and without conspiracy, the power of the purse. The bundle finances the report; the games and the recipes pay for the Baghdad bureau; the cathedral is maintained by the gift shop. Today the arrangement runs in the guardian’s favor, a publisher committed to the report and a commercial machine profitable enough to fund it without conditions. But the company’s center of gravity has been migrating for a decade, the typical new subscriber arrives for the puzzles, and the long-run Jacobs question about the Times is the question her dialogue asks about every guardian order on a merchant’s purse. The merchant’s money is clean, the merchant’s intentions are friendly, and the merchant keeps the accounts. Guardians who forget which syndrome holds the ledger have, in her telling, always discovered it eventually, and never on a date of their choosing.

One biographical coda. Joseph Kahn is the son of a merchant prince; Leo Kahn built supermarkets and co-founded an office-supply empire, commercial syndrome incarnate, optimistic, efficient, enterprising. The son took the fortune and crossed over, into boarding school, the Crimson, the foreign bureaus, the masthead, a life conducted within the guardian syndrome, trading nothing, holding territory, treasuring honor. Jacobs knew the pattern well; it is among the oldest in class history, the trader’s wealth purchasing the family’s passage into guardianship, the counting house endowing the priesthood. The Times’s current arrangement, a guardian order funded by commerce it declines to think about, has at its head a man whose own life is the same settlement, executed perfectly, one generation up.

Philip Selznick (1919-2010) published Leadership in Administration in 1957, a short book built on one distinction. An organization is a technical instrument, a tool for doing a job, expendable the moment a better tool appears. An institution is something else. An institution has been infused with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand. People prize it. The character, formed by history, determines what it can do, what it cannot do, and what would count as its betrayal. Selznick’s famous sentence carries the whole argument: to institutionalize is to infuse with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand.

The New York Times is the most heavily value-infused enterprise in American life outside the churches and the military. Nobody grieves when a logistics company changes its methods. People grieve when the Times changes its crossword. Subscribers carry the tote bag as an identity claim. Employees speak of the mission with a reverence that embarrasses outsiders. By Selznick’s test, the gap between what the organization technically does, assembling and selling information, and what people invest in it, is the measure of institutionalization, and at the Times the gap is a canyon. Which means the man who runs its newsroom holds the job Selznick spent the book defining: institutional leadership, a role he distinguished sharply from administrative management. The manager handles routine decisions, the allocation of resources against given goals. The leader handles critical decisions, the ones that form or threaten character, and his work consists of four functions: defining the institutional mission, embodying purpose in the structure, defending institutional integrity, and ordering internal conflict. Joseph Kahn’s tenure since June 2022 can be read as a Selznick casebook, function by function, and the reading explains both his successes and the one large question his stewardship has not answered.

Take mission definition first. Selznick insists that mission is not given; it must be defined and redefined by leadership against the pressures of the moment, and the definition must be specific enough to guide action. Kahn inherited a newsroom whose mission had blurred. The Trump years had offered the paper a new and intoxicating purpose, opposition, and a large faction of staff and subscribers had accepted it. Kahn’s first and most repeated act as leader has been a definition: the Times exists to report independently, for the persuadable as well as the converted, and it is not the resistance. He has said this in memos, in the Semafor interview of May 2024 where he refused on the record to make the paper an instrument of anti-Trump politics, at Princeton this spring, and in a vocabulary so compressed and repetitive, independent, ambitious, rigorous, fair, that the repetition is method. Selznick would recognize the method. He wrote that statesmanship includes the deliberate construction of socially integrating myths, the efficient communication of purpose in forms the rank and file can absorb. Kahn’s four adjectives are doctrine reduced to catechism, and the Ochs credo he and the publisher invoke, without fear or favor, is the founding myth doing its integrating work a hundred and thirty years on. The myth-tending extends to the building, the lobby wall of Pulitzers, the photographs of the old presses outside the conference rooms. Kahn conducts visitors past them. Selznick would call that the institutional embodiment of purpose performed as ritual.

Mission definition has two characteristic failures in Selznick’s scheme, and naming them shows what Kahn has steered between. The first is opportunism, the pursuit of short-run advantage in ways that compromise character. The opportunist path stood wide open in 2022: the Trump-era subscription surge had proved that rage pays, and a leader maximizing near-term revenue might have leaned the report toward the audience’s appetite. The second failure is utopianism, the flight into purposes so large and vague they cannot discipline action. That path stood open too, and half the industry took it: the mission inflated into saving democracy, a purpose under which any coverage decision can be justified and none can be evaluated. Kahn refused both. His insistence that the paper is not the resistance is anti-opportunism and anti-utopianism in a single sentence: it declines the profitable partisan identity and it shrinks the mission back to a concrete, criticizable task, getting the report right. Selznick’s leader is defined by exactly this, holding the mission specific against the twin temptations of expediency and grandeur.

The second function, embodying purpose in structure, Selznick considered the real test, because a purpose that lives only in speeches dies with the speaker. Policy must be built into the social structure of the enterprise, into recruitment, training, promotion, and the design of units, until the desired conduct becomes self-maintaining. Here Kahn’s record is substantial. The standards apparatus under Philip Corbett operates as a structural conscience, purpose embodied in a desk with veto power. The wall between news and opinion is purpose embodied in organization, two staffs, two chains of command, so that independence does not depend on anyone’s daily virtue. The social media guidelines tightened under Kahn convert a value, the editor’s restraint, into a rule with consequences. Promotion patterns do the quiet structural work: the editors who rose under Kahn, the Laceys and Ryans, are institutionalists by temperament, and Selznick wrote that the selection of personnel is among the most consequential of character-forming decisions, since every promotion teaches the organization what kind of person it rewards. Even the company’s acquisition strategy reads structurally: the commercial enterprises, the games, the product reviews, the sports site, were bought and kept as separate units rather than blended into the newsroom, which quarantines commercial logic away from the value-bearing core. Selznick devoted much of his earlier work to how structure protects or corrupts values; the Times under Kahn is an essay in protection by partition.

The third function, the defense of institutional integrity, is where Kahn’s tenure earns its chapter. Selznick’s subtlest concept sits here: the precarious value. A value is precarious when no powerful internal group’s self-interest secures it, when it survives only if leadership deliberately protects it. Independence at the Times is the textbook precarious value. The staff’s interest, for a large faction formed in movement culture, ran toward advocacy and the status it confers. The market’s interest ran toward partisan intensity, which sells. Even the audience’s stated interest, measured by the fury that greets unwelcome coverage, ran against it. No constituency inside or outside the building spontaneously defends independence; it persists only because the leadership elite, Kahn, Kingsbury on the opinion side, and the publisher above them, treats its defense as the core of the job. Selznick argued that precarious values require protected elites with the autonomy to guard them, a conclusion that sits uncomfortably with democratic instincts and describes the Times masthead exactly. The critical decisions of Kahn’s tenure are all integrity defenses. The February 2023 memo answering the trans-coverage letter, rebuking staff who joined an external campaign against their own colleagues, was a character-defining choice: it established that the institution, and not its most mobilized faction, judges the report. The Biden-age coverage of 2024, sustained against White House pressure and subscriber rage, was integrity defense conducted in public, the paper demonstrating that it would cost itself comfort on its own side of the aisle. The 2025 defense of the Mamdani admissions story against internal and external attack ran the same pattern. Each episode, examined singly, looks like crisis management. Read through Selznick they are one continuous act, the protection of a precarious value by a leader who has correctly identified its precariousness.

The fourth function, the ordering of internal conflict, Selznick treats as the management of rival interests so that no faction’s victory deforms the whole. Kahn’s newsroom contains a permanent conflict between the guild of institutionalists and the residue of the movement generation, and his ordering of it has been neither suppression nor surrender. The movement faction lost its veto, the lesson of 2023, but kept its place; nobody was purged for signing the letter. The discipline restored a boundary, participation in campaigns against colleagues, while leaving the underlying disagreement about coverage alive and arguable inside the institution’s procedures. Selznick would approve the form: internal conflict ordered into channels the institution can survive, rather than resolved by the destruction of one side.

Selznick’s framework also supplies the concept for what Kahn inherited. His predecessor era had practiced what Selznick, in the TVA study that made his name, called cooptation: the absorption of potentially threatening elements into the structure to neutralize the threat. The Times of the 2010s coopted the digital insurgency, hiring its writers, adopting its forms, and Selznick’s analysis predicts the price, which the paper duly paid: the coopted do not merely join, they shape. The newsroom’s character drifted toward the movement culture of its new members, and the crises of 2020 were the bill arriving. Kahn’s tenure, in this light, is the post-cooptation correction, the reassertion of institutional character over the character of the absorbed. The frame thus gives the whole arc one vocabulary: cooptation, drift, integrity crisis, restoration.

Now the unanswered question, because Selznick supplies that too. His hardest test of leadership is not whether the leader defends values but whether he institutionalizes the defense, embeds it so deeply in structure and personnel that it no longer needs him. A value protected by a man is precarious still; a value protected by an institution has been secured. Some of Kahn’s work passes this test, the standards desk, the guidelines, the promotion pattern. But the core of the restoration has run on personal authority backed by the publisher, on memos signed Joe, on a particular man’s willingness to absorb fury without flinching. The Selznick question for the Times is what happens at succession. If the next executive editor inherits a structure in which independence enforces itself, Kahn will have completed the institutional leader’s full assignment. If the next editor inherits only the memory of a steady predecessor, then independence at the Times remains what it was in 2022, a precarious value awaiting its next guardian, and Kahn will have been a superb officer of the institution rather than its architect. Selznick’s book gives the criterion and history will supply the data, on the customary schedule, about a decade from now.

Selznick knew that the defense of institutional character shades, in time, into the worship of the institution, survival displacing purpose, the organism living in order to live. The Times’s deepest occupational hazard is exactly this self-veneration, the conviction of its own indispensability, and a steward as reverential as Kahn, the inside man devoted beyond the possibility of self-destruction, is constitutionally unlikely to see it. The man Selznick’s categories praise on every page is, by those same categories, the man least equipped to ask whether the church he keeps so faithfully has begun to confuse its candles with its God.

Albert Hirschman (1915-2012) published Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in 1970, and the book’s machinery fits in a paragraph. When an organization deteriorates, its members and customers have two recuperative responses. They can exit, taking their business or their labor elsewhere, the market’s response. Or they can use voice, complaining, agitating, organizing from within, the political response. The two interact. Voice carries force in proportion to the credibility of exit: the member who can walk gets listened to. And easy exit undermines voice from the other direction, because the most quality-sensitive members leave first, draining the organization of exactly the people with the standards and energy to reform it. The third term, loyalty, governs the choice between the two. Loyalty delays exit, holds the quality-conscious inside, and converts what would have been departures into argument. Management, for its part, is not a passive object of these forces; it designs the costs of exit and the channels of voice, and it yields to whichever response threatens it more.

Apply the machinery to the New York Times newsroom from 2020 to 2026 and the period’s politics, which read as a morality play in most tellings, resolve into a tight model with one variable doing most of the work. The variable is the labor market.

Start at peak voice. In the summer of 2020 the Times staff rose against the Tom Cotton op-ed in a coordinated public campaign, and management capitulated within days: the editorial page editor, James Bennet, was gone by the weekend. The episode is usually narrated in moral or generational terms. Hirschman’s terms explain the outcome better. Voice prevailed because it was backed by credible exit. The digital-media sector was hiring; BuzzFeed News, Vice, Vox, and the venture-funded constellation offered landing spots; Substack had just demonstrated that a writer with a following could convert it to income overnight. A newsroom revolt in that market was a strike with strike funds. Management, facing voice that could plausibly become mass exit, yielded to the more threatening response, exactly as the model predicts. The same calculation ran through the McNeil affair the following winter and the broader Slack-uprising era: every act of internal voice carried an implicit exit threat, and the threat was real.

Now run the exits through the machinery, because Hirschman’s subtlest point sits here. The conspicuous departures of 2020, Bari Weiss from the Times, Andrew Sullivan from New York, Glenn Greenwald from the Intercept, were exits of the connoisseur type, the quality-sensitive leaving first, where the quality dimension at issue was ideological breadth. And Hirschman tells you precisely what such exits cost the organization: they remove its internal reformers. After Weiss walked, who inside the Opinion section made her argument? The departure of the heterodox flank did not strengthen the institution’s center; it stripped the internal opposition of its most effective voices and left the field to the faction whose members stayed. Exit silenced the critique that voice had been carrying. Hirschman built a special concept for organizations that benefit from this dynamic, the lazy monopoly, the dominant firm that quietly welcomes the exit of its most demanding members because their departure purchases internal peace. The Times of 2020 and 2021 behaved as a lazy monopoly in exactly his sense: it let its most troublesome critics go, on both flanks, and bought quiet with the loss.

Then the variable moved. Between 2022 and 2024 the digital-media sector that had underwritten staff leverage collapsed: BuzzFeed News shut in 2023, Vice went bankrupt, the Messenger burned through its capital and died in a year, the Washington Post bled money and bought out hundreds. Substack matured into a stratified market where stars with portable audiences prospered and everyone else discovered that a newsletter is a small business with one employee and no health insurance. The exit option, for the ordinary Times journalist, simply evaporated. There is no rival paying Times salaries at Times scale. And with exit gone, Hirschman’s interaction term took over: voice without a credible exit threat is petition, and petitions can be answered with memos.

This is the structural fact beneath Joseph Kahn’s restoration. Kahn took the chair in June 2022 with a doctrine, independence, and a manner, the unflappable steward. Then the February 2023 trans-coverage letter, the closest thing his tenure has produced to a reprise of 2020, met a rebuke instead of a capitulation, and the signatories absorbed the rebuke and stayed, because the alternative to staying was leaving journalism. Same institution, same kind of revolt, opposite outcome, and the moral and generational variables had barely moved in three years. What moved was the labor market. Management yields to the more threatening response; by 2023 voice had been decoupled from exit, and a decoupled voice does not threaten. Kahn’s discipline succeeded on terrain that the sector’s collapse prepared for him. The steady nerve was his. The leverage was Hirschman’s.

Loyalty, the third term, explains the rest of the quiet. Hirschman observed that loyalty rises with the severity of initiation, and the Times has the most severe initiation in American journalism: years of credentialing, a brutal hiring funnel, the conferral of an identity that operates socially like a title. Members who paid that entrance fee do not exit lightly, and loyalty of that kind does double work in the model. It holds the quality-conscious inside, where their dissatisfaction becomes voice rather than departure, and it inclines the voice toward forms the institution can survive. Kahn’s era has also channeled the voice, a managerial art Hirschman explicitly anticipated: organizations design their voice channels, and the Times steered staff grievance away from coverage politics and into the NewsGuild, where it emerged as the December 2022 walkout, a one-day strike about compensation. Contract voice is voice the institution can price. Coverage voice claims a share of editorial sovereignty, which is the one asset the masthead will not negotiate. The redirection of newsroom energy from the second channel to the first ranks among the least noticed and most consequential achievements of the Kahn restoration.

The model also runs on the reader side, and there it returns a warning. Readers exercised voice all decade, the comment-section fury, the cancel-my-subscription campaigns over the Biden-age coverage and a dozen other offenses, and Kahn made refusal of reader voice on coverage a point of public doctrine. He could afford the refusal because reader exit had been dampened by the bundle. The subscriber who came for Wordle and the recipes does not cancel over a White House story; the journalism is one strand in a cable of habits. Hirschman would note the cost hiding in the comfort. Exit and voice are not nuisances to be engineered away; they are the organization’s information system, the signals through which it learns it is deteriorating. An institution that has muffled reader exit through bundling, devalued staff voice through the labor market, and trained itself to discount reader voice as activist pressure has insulated its management from nearly every feedback channel Hirschman thought kept organizations honest. Insulation enables independence, which is the doctrine’s promise. Insulation also enables undetected decline, which is the lazy monopoly’s fate. The same blocked signals that freed Kahn to be brave would hide it from him if the report went bad.

The frame’s last gift is its prediction. Kahn’s regime rests on converted structure and unconverted hearts: the movement faction lost its leverage, not its convictions. On Hirschman’s logic the discipline holds exactly as long as the exit market stays dead, and the exit market is showing signs of life. The Free Press sold for a nine-figure sum in 2025 and its founder, the Times’s most famous exit, now runs a broadcast news division with hiring power. Podcast and video money is assembling rival payrolls. Whatever the AI upheaval does to media economics, it will not leave the labor market where 2023 left it. The day a well-funded sector again offers Times journalists somewhere to go, every internal voice re-arms with an exit threat, and the masthead’s calculations revert toward the summer of 2020. The model says the restoration is not a settlement. It is a position, held while the opposing army lacks a paymaster, and the test of whether Kahn built loyalty or merely enjoyed blocked exits arrives with the next hiring boom. Hirschman’s machinery, having explained the past six years with one moving variable, hands the next executive editor the variable to watch.

Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) published The English Constitution in 1867 to explain why the textbook account of British government was wrong. The textbooks described a balance of Crown, Lords, and Commons. Bagehot said the working constitution divided along a different line, between the dignified parts, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population, and the efficient parts, those by which it in fact works and rules. The monarchy was dignified: it supplied continuity, legitimacy, intelligibility, and awe. The cabinet was efficient: it governed. The genius of the arrangement lay in the division. The masses gave their reverence to the Queen, and that reverence licensed the unglamorous men who actually ruled to rule. A republic, he wrote, had insinuated itself beneath the folds of a monarchy. And the arrangement had a maintenance requirement he stated in the book’s most famous sentence: the monarchy’s mystery is its life, and we must not let in daylight upon magic.

The New York Times Company is the last great constitutional monarchy in American media. The Ochs-Sulzberger family is the dignified part. The dynasty is in its fifth generation since Adolph Ochs (1858-1935) bought the paper in 1896 and issued the credo, without fear or favor, that functions as the realm’s coronation oath. The family reigns through an entrenchment device Bagehot would have admired, the dual-class share structure and the family trust, which together ensure that the public shareholders who supply the capital cannot depose the crown. Bagehot’s line inverts: at the Times, a monarchy has insinuated itself beneath the folds of a public company. Investors hold Class A stock and the rituals of quarterly capitalism proceed, while sovereignty sits where it has sat for a hundred and thirty years, in a family.

The efficient part is the government the crown appoints: the executive editor over the newsroom, the editorial page editor over Opinion, the chief executive over the business. The Times constitution, like the Victorian one, thus has its premier, and since June 2022 the premiership of the realm’s core territory, the report, has belonged to Joseph Kahn. Read his position constitutionally and its precise nature comes clear in a way no organizational chart conveys. Kahn governs. He commands the newsroom, sets doctrine, disciplines the estates, fights the foreign wars with hostile administrations. But he reigns over nothing. His power is held at pleasure, conferred by a memo from the sovereign and revocable by the same instrument, and the customary decade of an executive editor’s tenure resembles nothing so much as the life of a ministry, long enough to govern, short enough that the crown never fades behind its servant.

The succession rituals make the monarchy visible to anyone watching for it. When Kahn’s appointment came in April 2022, the newsroom joked about white smoke over Eighth Avenue, and the joke knew something: the form of the event was the announcement of a new government by a hereditary head of state. The sovereign’s memo performed the coronation liturgy, praising the new premier’s impeccable judgment and brave and principled leadership, the language not of a hiring but of an anointing. The outgoing premier, Dean Baquet (b. 1956), departed at the traditional age into a dignified sinecure, the realm’s equivalent of the Lords. Every transition since the mid-century has followed the form, and the form does Bagehot’s work: it dramatizes continuity, reminds the realm where legitimacy lives, and transfers the efficient power without disturbing the dignified surface.

Bagehot’s catalogue of the dignified part’s functions reads, item by item, as a description of what the Sulzbergers do for the Times. Intelligible government first: a family on the throne, he wrote, is an interesting idea that brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life. The mass of readers cannot evaluate editing philosophies, but they can understand a family that has kept a promise for five generations, and the family is therefore the brand’s guarantee in a way no hired executive could be. The humanizing apprenticeship of A.G. Sulzberger (b. 1980), his years as a working reporter in Providence and Portland before his elevation, served the same function as a prince’s military service, the heir submitting to the common discipline before assuming the throne. The cousins, Sam Dolnick and David Perpich, raised through the ranks beside him, are the princes of the blood, and the company’s practice of making heirs earn commoner credentials before promotion is dynastic statecraft of a high order. Continuity second, and this function has grown more valuable as the rest of the industry demonstrated its absence: every rival masthead has changed sovereigns within living memory, and the Times’s 130-year dynasty is the only continuity story left in the trade. The mystic element third. The Gray Lady, the credo, the lobby wall, the newspaper of record, these constitute a cult, and the family sits at its center as custodian rather than celebrant, which is the correct royal posture. And the moral headship last: Bagehot observed that the English had come to regard the Crown as the head of their morality, and the publisher’s office holds exactly that position in the realm of the Times, the place from which doctrine issues, the keeper of the credo, the conscience above the government.

Bagehot gave the constitutional monarch three rights, to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn, and the formula describes A.G. Sulzberger’s practice. He does not edit stories; the sovereign does not draft legislation. He consults, in the standing conversations with his premiers. He encourages, in the public celebrations of the newsroom’s ambitious and courageous work. And he warns, through the distinctive instrument he has made his own, the doctrinal essay: the long 2023 statement on journalistic independence and its successors are the crown’s warnings to the realm and the world, the sovereign defining the constitution’s spirit while leaving its administration to the government. The arrangement gives Kahn what every premier of a well-run constitutional monarchy enjoys, borrowed majesty. When Kahn disciplines the newsroom or refuses the resistance role, he acts under doctrine the crown has promulgated, and the crown’s legitimacy flows through him. His habitual institutional we is constitutionally exact: he speaks as the sovereign’s government, and attacks on his decisions break against the throne behind him.

The frame also explains the constitution’s recorded crises, which are precisely the moments the division of parts failed. The firing of Jill Abramson in 2014 was the crown governing in daylight, the sovereign of that era dismissing a premier visibly, personally, and messily, and the realm took the kind of damage Bagehot predicts when magic admits daylight: the mystique faltered, the family looked like management, and the succession lore still carries the scar. The lesson was evidently learned, because the two transitions since have been bloodless ceremonies. The deeper teaching of Bagehot, that the dignified part must never be seen to do efficient work, now operates at the Times as settled convention: the family’s interventions, whatever they are, occur behind the arras, and the public record shows only doctrine, ceremony, and the occasional warning essay.

Comparative constitutionalism sharpens the picture, because the industry has run the controlled experiment. The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos (b. 1964) and the Los Angeles Times under Patrick Soon-Shiong (b. 1952) are absolute monarchies, new-money thrones without a dignified-efficient division, and in the autumn of 2024 both sovereigns governed directly, killing endorsements by personal command. Daylight flooded in; the magic died on the spot; subscribers departed in six figures and newsroom legitimacy has not recovered. The episode is Bagehot’s whole argument staged as contemporary events: reverence cannot survive the sight of the sovereign’s hand on the controls, and a press monarchy that lacks the constitutional division will be ruined by its own crown. The Times’s stability through the same period, holding a harder line under heavier fire, is the dividend of the 1867 design. The dynasty reigned, the premier governed, and the realm absorbed blows that broke its absolutist neighbors.

Two questions remain that the frame raises and cannot settle. The first is Bagehot’s standing worry about hereditary systems: the throne is only as sound as the generation occupying it, and entrenchment that protects a wise dynasty protects a foolish one identically. The fifth generation has so far governed its constitution shrewdly, choosing premiers well and keeping daylight out. Whether the sixth will, no structure can guarantee, and the trust that makes the family undeposable makes a bad heir undeposable too. The second question is Kahn’s, and it is the premier’s eternal question. A ministry holds office while it holds the sovereign’s confidence, and confidence is weather. The premiership explains the strange combination his observers keep noting, the total command and the total self-effacement: a constitutional premier wields the realm’s whole efficient power on the strict condition that he never mistake it for his own. Kahn’s unquotability, his institutional pronoun, his refusal of celebrity, are the manners of a man who understands his constitution perfectly. The editors who forgot it, and the history of the paper holds several, discovered what every Victorian premier knew, that the magic belongs to the crown, and the crown lends it only to servants who never claim it.

One last extension, beyond the building. Bagehot’s categories describe not only the Times’s internal constitution but its position in the larger one. For a substantial fraction of the American professional class, The New York Times is a dignified institution of the Republic: it solemnizes marriages in the Vows pages, buries the dead in the obituaries, sets the day’s common text on the front page, supplies the crossword that orders the morning. These are reverence functions, and they generate the loyalty that the news report alone never could. The paper of record is a dignified title, and the realm Kahn governs draws its deepest strength from ceremonies that have nothing to do with news. Bagehot would have seen it at a glance: the institution survives its controversies for the same reason the monarchy survived its ministries, because the people’s attachment was never to the government, but to the crown.

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.

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.