'Just what the autocracy doctor ordered': Expert rips NY Times for running anti-voting op-ed

04 July 2024

On the 4th of July, the New York Times opinion section chose to publish an op-ed from a Michigan resident making his case to not vote in the 2024 election. One democracy expert slammed the national paper of record for its decision to run the essay.

The column, which is titled, "Why I Don't Vote. And Why Maybe You Shouldn't Either," is by Matthew Walther, who is a contributing editor to The American Conservative. With a noticeable tone of considerable disgust, Walther describes the term "civic duty" — which voting rights advocates often use when making the case to participate in the electoral process — as "off-putting."

"If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, civic duty is surely the first. Some version of the civic-duty line is trotted out by the sort of do-gooder who hands out voter registration forms to strangers — an activity I find as off-putting as I would an invitation to sit down and fill out a handgun permit," he wrote.

Journalist Stephen Wolf posted an excerpt of the essay to his X/Twitter account with the text: "This is what the New York Times chose to publish on Independence Day just one week after the Supreme Court ruled that Republican presidents are above the law."

While quote-tweeting Wolf's post, History professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat — an expert on democracy and authoritarian governments around the world — admonished the national paper of record for its decision to publish Walther's column.

"This is just very sad and frankly just what the Autocracy Doctor ordered," she tweeted. "Not voting is a vote to let others decide your fate, and we know that many elections are decided by relatively few votes. The goal of many autocracies is 'demobilization': people detaching from politics so they don't resist."

The backlash the Times has received over Walther's op-ed comes after the paper was excoriated by supporters of President Joe Biden for its editorial calling on him to drop out — while notably remaining absent on the continued candidacy of former President Donald Trump despite his 34 felony convictions. Earlier this year, a Times journalist speaking anonymously to Politico confided to the publication that the paper's publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, had an axe to grind against Biden for so far declining to do an exclusive sit-down interview with the Times.

"All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,” the Times reporter said. “It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently trolled the Times' editorial board by running an editorial of its own with a title almost exactly replicating the title of the Times' editorial, except switching out Biden's name for Trump's.

"[T]he debate about the debate is misplaced. The only person who should withdraw from the race is Trump," the paper argued. "Trump told more than 30 lies during the debate to go with the more than 30,000 mistruths told during his four years as president. He dodged the CNN moderators’ questions, took no responsibility for his actions, and blamed others, mainly Biden, for everything that is wrong in the world."

If 2016 and 2020 are proper indicators, it's likely the 2024 election will be decided by just tens of thousands of votes across five or six battleground states — including Walther's home state of Michigan. The combined Electoral College votes from Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin gave Trump the 270-vote majority to win the presidency in 2016. He won those three states by fewer than 80,000 total combined votes. Biden's 2020 electoral vote majority was decided by less than 45,000 total votes spread across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.

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