In November 2010, the New York Times published a puff piece on the Brecht Forum, a club in New York where, to hear the Times tell it, cuddly Marxists hang out and play. “In a city known for cynicism, the Brecht, which survives on donations, is a surprisingly open and idealistic place,” the reporter wrote. The piece came in for a fair amount of ridicule. “Try to imagine,” Newsbusters dryly noted, “the Times getting so cozy among a group of mainstream Republicans, much less Tea Party supporters.”
I thought of that story when I was perusing the Times’s “Caucus” blog today and saw the following teaser to a Times Magazine piece on Paul Ryan and Austrian economics:
In a column in this week’s New York Times Magazine, Adam Davidson writes, will Friedrich von Hayek be the Tea Party’s Karl Marx?
Ahem. First of all, the magazine piece, which is already online, does not ask that question at all. Karl Marx isn’t mentioned in the article—so this isn’t the fault of Adam Davidson, who wrote a pretty fair snapshot of Hayek and the right. Since the blog item was just a teaser to another story, it had no author listed. So I will just ask a few questions here.
