In Which the Blogger Burns His Bridges with the Los Angeles Times

To their credit, they ran what I wrote. [1]

In one of his many fantastical short stories, the Argentine fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges describes "a certain Chinese encyclopedia," the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which divides the world's animals into the following categories:

1. Those that belong to the emperor.
2. Embalmed ones.
3. Those that are trained.
4. Suckling pigs.
5. Mermaids.
6. Fabulous ones.
7. Stray dogs.
8. Those included in the present classification.
9. Those that tremble as if they were mad.
10. Innumerable ones.
11. Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush.
12. Others.
13. Those that have just broken a flower vase.
14. Those that from a long way off look like flies.

Exactly! That's how The Times is asking me to describe the American left, by using a taxonomy that's internally incoherent. "Is the American left now a movement of economic issues and nationalism, of identity politics and social justice, or something else?" Is "economic issues" counter-posed to "social justice," by which I am supposed to presume them opposites? I choose not to choose. Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?

What do The Times' editors mean by "nationalism"? I tried to read their minds, and the only thing I can come up with is that perhaps they mean something like "isolationism" or "protectionism" -- that any left-leaning approach to economics tends toward either of these terms. If I am right in my surmise, well, then, liberals, the Los Angeles Times has just insulted you, because "isolationism" and "protectionism" are slurs that precious few Americans, except very few on the Buchananite right, would willingly claim. I may be working myself into a lather over nothing here, because perhaps that's not implied in the question. But what is? I stared at this question for over an hour trying to make sense of it, and ended up simply scratching my head. Blew right through my deadline. Sorry, editors!

Anyone else see the problem here? How else does this question simply make no sense? The editors obviously mean something by "identity politics and social justice." But identity politics is another phrase that tends in the direction of a slur -- it tends to describe people dumbly voting based merely on their sex or their race, something that is impossible, it's supposed, for white men to do -- while social justice is something to which most citizens would say they at least aspire. But again, this bizarre question seems to lump them together as a common pole -- against the opposite of that meaningless pair "nationalism" and "economic issues."

I've tried out the question on a few smart friends, and all of them responded with dumbfounded silence. If I were a freshman composition teacher, I'd give The Times a D-minus for logical incoherence and ask it to start over. Is there anyone to the left side of center for whom this question even makes sense? If so, let me know in the comments. I'm honestly baffled. The thought that no one responsible for this feature was able to stop short and notice the question makes no sense is a little disconcerting -- and suggests perhaps that The Times has no one to the left of center on its opinion staff, which is more disconcerting still.

What would you have done in my place?