Thread by @ezraklein

I use it as the lede of my media piece today, but if you've never read the Atlantic's 1939 "I Married A Jew," it's time to fix that. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

The author's husband, though lovely, “has the Jewish hypersensitivity toward all criticism of his race.” She tries “to see things from the Nazis’ point of view and to find excuses for the things they do,” only to be met by the “hurt confusion of my husband.”

“Our hottest argument concerns the question whether there exists such a thing as a Jewish problem.”

But on the bright side, “It is only when Ben is surrounded by his family that he lapses into Jewish ways, and then, no doubt, because of his early Jewish training."

The point I use it for in the piece is: There have always been boundaries around acceptable discourse, and the media has always been involved, in a complex and often unacknowledged way, in both enforcing and contesting them.

Those boundaries, thankfully, change over time. They're changing now.

BUT: that doesn't mean they narrow. It means they shift. Ideas that were dismissed two decades ago become legitimate. Ideas that were championed two decades ago become abhorrent.

Two decades ago, an article like Cotton’s could easily be published, an essay arguing for abolishing prisons or police would languish in the submissions pile, and “Black Lives Matter” would be covered as controversial.

Today, Black Lives Matter is closer to consensus, abolishing prisons is a debate, and there’s a fight to classify Cotton’s proposal to deploy troops against US citizens as deviant.

The idea space is just as large as it’s been in the past — perhaps larger — but it is in flux.

There's a bunch of social, economic, and demographic reasons behind the way things are changing right now, and I try to track them here. And the contest is more public than it's been in the past. But we've never had a static idea space. This isn't new. vox.com/2020/6/10/2128…