I have seen the Future, and it works

Lincoln Steffens was a muckraking journalist at the end of the nineteenth century.  It's said that he was THE muckraking journalist, the one that defined the genre.  He was also the son of priviledge, scion of a San Francisco business empire.

He was also a devout leftist.  In 1921, he went to Moscow to observe the new Soviet Union.  Despite seeing obvious troubles, he managed to blame everyone but Lenin, and on his return to the Western Hemisphere wrote I have seen the Future, and it works.

Sadly, he wasn't the last leftie journalist to get seduced by the totalitarian dream.  Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his whitewashing of Stalin's targeted famine in the Ukraine.  Edgar Snow (Saturday Evening Post), Brooks Atkinson (New York Times), and Theodore White (Time) all agreed with Harvard History professor John Fairbank that Mao was the best thing to ever happen to China.  The New York Times' Herbert Matthews whitewash interviews with Fidel Castro are notorious.

It wasn't just the Reds, either.  Steffans himself spoke for many journalists when he called Mussolini the "Divine Dictator", "as powerful as an elemental force."  The trope of the journalist, besotted by a smiling tyrant, is cliche.  It is so common as to be boring.  Thomas Friedman is simply the latest in a long, sad line of such.  His latest screed is boringly predictable, even by the low standards of the Times:

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who admires what a "one-party autocracy" such as China's can accomplish when it is "led by a reasonably enlightened group of people," likewise praises the one-child policy in his 2008 book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, where he says it "probably saved China from a population calamity" and hopes the current regime will show the same dictatorial fervor in pursuit of "net-zero buildings."

Joseph Fouche, in a comment at Isegoria's, hits center mass (and inspired this post):

Considering that Russia and China have gone from Red to Brown in the last 20 years and look no worse for wear, Fascism is the new hotness. It’s even better when the changeover is highlighted by a strategically placed touch of Green. When you hear Tom Friedman and others come back from China breathless about their wind power, solar power, and other “green industries”, they’re two breaths away from saying, “I have seen the future and it works.”

Red and Brown are the new Green.    I've said repeatedly that Europe's transition from fascist to "trans-national" socialist required but a half step sideways, and will require only that half step back.  For proof, you don't need to look across the Atlantic; you only need to examine the New York Times newsroom. 

Still boring.  Still here.