As I wrote for TRNN back in February, mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos is now completing the full ideological take over of the US’s second-most influential newspaper’s opinion section. But, like all good right-wing takeovers, it’s important for those engaging in said right-wing takeover that you not think of it as right-wing, or them as agents of right-wing ideology but, instead, above such petty, small-minded, and worldly matters. They are not only not right-wing—they really, really need you to know they exist above and outside of ideology.
On Wednesday, the Washington Post named the Economist’s Washington correspondent Adam O’Neal as its next opinion editor. In his announcement on Twitter, O’Neal parroted his new boss’ words from last February almost verbatim, telling Post readers in a chummy front-facing camera announcement that:
[Washington Post opinion page writers and editors are] going to be stalwart advocates of free markets and personal liberties. We’ll be unapologetically patriotic too. Our philosophy will be rooted in fundamental optimism about the future of this country. What we won’t be are people who lecture you about ideology or demand you think certain ways about policy.
(This phrasing is copy and pasted from Bezos’ announcement five months ago that the Post opinion section will work in “support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”)
To recap: Post opinion section writers will be “stalwart advocates of free markets” and be “unapologetically patriotic” but also not “lecture [us] about ideology.” The obvious flaw in this plan, of course, is that advocating for “free markets,” e.g. capitalism and patriotism, e.g. advocating for US supremacy, is very much an ideological position.. One may think they are inarguably cool and self-evidently awesome but they, nonetheless, are ideological conceits requiring ideological production and reproduction.
Despite the second-richest person in the world and his new mercenary mouthpiece’s implied claims to the contrary, “free markets” and “patriotism” are not organic features of reality like gravity or the cosmological constant, but ideological constructs. And requiring opinion writers embrace these ideological constructs, as slippery and vague as they may be, is an ideological litmus test for writing for Bezos’ publication. The Post opinion page revamp is thus an explicitly right-wing project designed to advance the ideologies of capitalism and US hegemony.
In a country of 330 million self-perceived free-thinking rebels––including, most gratingly, all of our mega-billionaires––all ideological formations must therefore present as edgy and subversive, as speaking truth to the powerful, even those openly marionetting for the world’s second-richest person.
So the question is: why is someone working for Toyota, walking around a Toyota car lot wearing a Toyota polo shirt walking up to me on the showroom floor and giving me a speech about how they don’t like cars, car companies, or driving? Why are right-wingers so concerned about not being perceived as such, but instead presenting themselves as post-ideological arbiters of “open debate” indifferent to the very thing they’ve been hired to do?
There are many reasons—some cynical, some psychological—but before we detail these, let’s examine the long, strange history of right-wing media personalities suspiciously insisting to their audiences, over and over again, that they are, in fact, ideology-free truth-tellers. It’s a subject I’ve long been fascinated with, having done two podcast episodes on this and related topics. Since the 1990s, it’s been a consistent feature of conservatives to lay claim to post-ideology. Bill O’Relly insisted he wasn’t conservative or Republican. “I’m not a political guy in the sense that I embrace an ideology… I’m an independent thinker, I’m an independent voter, I’m a registered Independent,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2003. “I basically look at the world from the point of view of let’s solve the problem, right? Whatever the problem is, let’s find the best solution to it. And if the solution is on the left, I grab it. If it’s on the right, I grab it.”
Glenn Beck made this his whole schtick as well. “You’ve lived your whole life in a responsible way,” the former Fox News huckster told his audience in 2009 while promoting the GOP’s Tea Party rebrand. “You’ve been concerned about this country through the last administration, in this administration. If you’re like most people, both administrations, it’s not about politics, you actually believe in something, and you thought for a while there, your politicians did as well.”
It’s not about going after Democrats, it’s about going after both parties. But then Beck, like O’Rielly and dozens before them, invariably proceeded to go after Democrats 98% of the time. It’s a popular posture. Everyone from Bill Maher to Andrew Yang to Bari Weiss to Republican Senator Rand Paul—who wrote a book called “Taking a Stand: Moving Beyond Partisan Politics to Unite America,” in which he claimed to go “beyond the left-right paradigm kind of thinking,”—has embraced this branding: I don’t do ideology, they consistently remind us, I’m a political actor unmoored from your oppressive labels—a maverick, a rogue, an independent iconoclast.
The most infamous recent example of this phenomenon is Elon Musk who—while openly promoting white nationalist bile on social media, bashing minorities, trans people and women, doing nazi salutes during Trump’s inauguration––continued to insist he wasn’t right or left wing, but instead a secret third thing. “I’m probably left of center on social issues and right of center on economic issues,” the sage-like enlightened centrist Musk claimed in late 2023, right before he dumped $250 million into successfully reelecting Donald Trump.
Obviously, the type of right-wing of each right-winger who claims They Don’t Do Ideology varies. There are differences between Fox News MAGA nationalism, Musk’s internet-addled neonazism, Maher’s glibertarian Zionism, Yang’s Silicon Valley techno-authorianism, neoconservatism, and what will likely be Jeff Bezos’ preferred flavor of right-wing—Club for Growth Republicanism promoting low taxes and generic Bush-era patriotism. But the new Washington Post op-ed section will no doubt be welcoming to all of the above while excluding those on the left, e.g. those who think “free markets” and “patriotism” are fraught concepts worthy of critique rather than mantras to mindlessly embrace or, at the very least, empty buzzwords that are the intellectual equivalent of Gerber apple-chicken pouches.
Interestingly, this is not, for the most part, a pathology on the left. I am a leftist, I write for left-wing outlets. I say so openly. Just the same, liberals are almost always openly liberal, openly Democrats. They wear their ideological preferences on their sleeve. Of course they’re ideological, because to do politics at all is inherently ideological. To be human is to be ideological. To deny this obvious fact, outside of being, say, a ‘neutral’ reporter who has to fake neutrality for professional reasons, isn’t just dishonest, it’s insulting to everyone’s intelligence.
Alas, being conservative is to be on the side of the establishment, of the powerful, of the billionaire class who O’Neal is literally parroting. It’s both inherent in the American cultural self-image, but also a necessary component of media branding, to perceive one’s self and one’s media project as not on the side of power. In a country of 330 million self-perceived free-thinking rebels—including, most gratingly, all of our mega-billionaires—all ideological formations must therefore present as edgy and subversive, as speaking truth to the powerful, even those openly marionetting for the world’s second-richest person.
It’s impossible to conceive of someone worth $250 billion taking over a publication and re-making it into his own image and telling the public, “I am a very rich person who wants to produce content that reinforces the ideology that permitted and continues to permit my obscene wealth and power.” This would be cartoonishly evil and undermine the efficiency of said ideological output. So, instead, we must continue to play this bizarre game where open promoters of right-wing ideology, of oligarchical power and control, of US global hegemony, are presented as free-thinkers allergic to ideology rather than public relations agents working on behalf of the most banal and ubiquitous of ideologies—American conservatism—in open service of their corporate and billionaire patrons.
As monied control over our media and the platforms required for their distribution grows tighter and tighter, this post-ideological “open debate” schtick grows more and more tedious and insulting to everyone’s intelligence. Advocating for “free markets” is obviously ideological. Promoting American “patriotism” is obviously ideological. If the super-rich are going to use media and social media as their ideological play toys, to promote their preferred worldview, the least they can do is have the decency to be honest about this fact, rather than smothering their right-wing rebrands in faux neutral, above-the-fray smarm.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.