43. The Struggle To Be Fair.

 

It's terribly hard to be fair to Tea Partiers, I know, but Theda Skocpol and Chrystia Freeland have apparently managed to do it, Skocpol in an academic study of their views and Freeland in an International Herald Tribune piece (7-8-11) grateful to Skocpol and her graduate students for their "careful parsing" of the Partiers' thinking. The thinking, it turns out, does not lead to the contradictions commentators have noted, like accepting Social Security payments while opposing Big Government programs. It's more careful, and opposes those programs only when they favor "people who don't work" — in their term, "freeloaders."

That's the Tea Partiers' main concern, and it accounts for their rebuff, at the polls, of the New York State Republicans who thought their main concern was the Big Brother state. The Tea Party had "fixed on an issue" they had neglected.

"Fixed" on an issue. The word tells us they made it their number one priority. But that's not what they were doing in the IHT headline for Freeland's piece. There they were "fixated." "A movement fixated on 'freeloaders.'" That tells us that they were preoccupied obsessively with the issue, that they were attached to it, yes, but in an immature or neurotic way.  The headline writer has slipped into unfairness.

The word "fixated" does not appear anywhere in Freeland's piece, nor does she suggest anything it suggests. If there were any put-down words in it she has weeded them out. I see her (and Scopcol, and her graduate students) struggling to be fair to the Tea Party right to the end. I know it's a struggle the NYT and the IHT are engaged in mightily. And this could be such a little slip.  Maybe little smacks in this direction were what the headline writer's mind defaulted to, maybe he (or she) was prejudiced, but on the other hand maybe he was essentially fair-minded and just needed two more spaces for a good fit, maybe he was tired.  In any case he thwarted the Post's effort to be fair.  The fact that sometimes our fairest and best newspapers can't carry that effort to very end shows how hard the job is.