This is a brave and thought-provoking column by my colleague Michelle Goldberg. But I have some problems with her premise that pre-Trump, "to understand national politics, you had to understand certain conservative ideas" nytimes.com/2018/03/30/opi…
In the area I know best, economics, that was true in the 1970s -- but it has become less and less true over time. At this point, I'd say it's reversed: in order to understand conservative ideas, you have to understand the politics 2/
Take the fixation on tax cuts as a magical elixir for the economy. Yes, this is a conservative idea that drives policy. But it's an intellectual zombie: it should have been killed by evidence long ago, and the hits keep coming 3/ npr.org/2018/02/08/584…
Yet supply-side economics still shambles along, eating politicians' brains. Why? Because the doctrine serves the interests of the GOP's paymasters. That is, the politics drive the ideas -- which is also why conservatives are still saying the same things they said 30 years ago 4/
This is also why viewing Washington as an arena of contending think tanks is actually false equivalence. Center-left institutions like EPI, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and so on really do research: they have an agenda, but care about facts 5/
But the major right-leaning think tanks aren't in that business. The Heritage Foundation is a spectacular example: its hackery and inability to get basic facts right mean that nothing it says can or should be taken seriously 6/ archives.cjr.org/united_states_…
The point is that all this happened long before Trump -- which means that the attempt to offer "balance" essentially requires intellectually shortchanging readers. Economics surely has more good researchers who are also conservative than many subjects. But even so ... 7/
you just can't find honest, informed defenses of many ideas that are GOP doctrine. So news orgs have a choice: give hacks equal representation with real experts, or present an "unbalanced" picture that acknowledges that some things just aren't true. 8/
