Opinion

Conservatives
Think the Market Always
Gets It Right.

Conservatives
Think the Market Always
Gets It Right.

It Doesn’t.

It Doesn’t.

By Bret Stephens

On its face, there’s nothing necessarily political about the mantra that the customer is always right. It can buck up the patience of an exasperated shopkeeper dealing with a finicky patron or push complacent manufacturers to think harder about evolving consumer tastes. It fosters a service culture that, as visitors to the United States often remark, is notable for its niceness.

But the idea that the customer is always right also contains a worldview, a kind of market fundamentalism that typifies much of the American right today. The more pervasive it becomes, the more pernicious it gets — and the more it diminishes the very values conservatives claim to hold dear.

When are customers “always right”? When they want the beige interior not the black one, or the subway tiles for the downstairs bathroom but not the upstairs one, or the sauce on the side — that is, anywhere within the broad spectrum of personal preference that typify most consumer choices.

The problem starts when our decisions aren’t merely subjective — that is, when questions of truth, moral or factual, are involved. This is a particular concern when it comes to two beleaguered American institutions that have come to grief in recent years by bowing too often to the demands of their customers: universities and the news media.

Don’t Tell My Friends, But… New York Times Opinion columnists burst
bubbles, overturn conventional wisdom and question the assumptions — both
big and small — of the people they usually agree with.
New York Times Opinion columnists burst
bubbles, overturn conventional wisdom and
question the assumptions — both big and
small — of the people they usually agree with.

A Little Hypocrisy Is Healthy

A Little Hypocrisy Is Healthy

Lydia Polgreen

A.I. Is Actually Our Friend

A.I. Is Actually
Our Friend

David Brooks

Cats Are Better Than Dogs

Cats Are Better Than Dogs

Pamela Paul

Beyond ‘Born That Way’

Beyond ‘Born That Way’

Charles M. Blow

It’s Better to Be Good
Than Right

It’s Better to Be Good
Than Right

David French

Don’t Hate On the D.M.V.

Don’t Hate On the D.M.V.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Natural Childbirth Isn’t Best

Natural Childbirth Isn’t Best

Michelle Goldberg

We’re Less Divided Than
You Think

We’re Less Divided Than You Think

Zeynep Tufekci

There was a time when being a college student meant that you willingly submitted to the rules, expectations and judgments of a professor or a department. You didn’t get to grade your teachers at the end of the term: What mattered to the university was their opinion of you, not yours of them. The relationship was unabashedly hierarchical. As a student, you were presumed ignorant, but teachable. You paid the university for the opportunity to become a little less ignorant.

Much of this has been overturned in recent years. Students today, whose parents often pay fortunes for their education, are treated like valuable customers, not lowly apprentices. University curriculums have moved away from core requirements — the idea that there are things all educated people ought to have read, understood and discussed together — to a kind of mix-and-match set of offerings. Liberal arts have endured frequent budgetary cuts for not being seen to have practical benefits — that is, skills that are valued in the job market.

The result has been the hollowing out of higher ed. Professors cater to students with higher grades and diminished expectations. At Yale, nearly four out of five grades are in the “A” range. At Princeton, studying Latin or Greek is no longer a requirement for classics majors. During the recent student protests, I kept wondering: Where did these kids get their sense of total certitude? Part of it is youthful idealism, and part of it stems from ideological currents in elite academia. But an equal part is the substitution of critical thinking with the ceaseless affirmation of emotional choice created when the “customer is always right” maxim is applied to education.

As for news media, here too there was a time when Walter Cronkite could end his program by saying, “And that’s the way it is…”, and be largely believed. His authority derived from the accuracy and quality of his reports. But his audience also understood that the news wasn’t simply what they wanted it to be. Facts shaped opinions, not the other way around.

That’s a bygone world. Conservatives, including me, long complained that “mainstream media” too often present a left-tilting slant on the news. But the right’s answer hasn’t been to seek or create news media that provides straighter news or a better balance of opinion. It’s been to turn the tables.

This has proved immensely profitable, especially on cable TV, radio airwaves and now podcasts. It has given previously disaffected consumers a much wider range of options for where they obtain their news, or at least the version of it that does the least to contradict their beliefs. But what it has produced isn’t a better-informed country. It’s a land of cacophony, confusion and conspiracy theories. When market forces provide you with alternative cushions or chocolates, the world is better for it. When those same forces provide you with alternative facts, it isn’t.

Can we reverse the trend?

In “Memoirs of Hadrian,” the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar has her Roman emperor-protagonist observe: “There is more than one kind of wisdom, and all are essential in the world; it is no bad thing that they should alternate.” The wisdom of customers, crowds and markets has a lot to recommend it. But there’s also a wisdom rooted in knowledge, expertise and experience that collectively goes by the name of authority. It’s time to restore it.

What if higher education responded to plummeting public confidence by demanding a whole lot more of their students, especially through extensive core requirements? Or if professors gave grades that reflected actual performance? Or if administrators responded to rules-breaking through summary expulsions? What if the news media, also facing declining levels of trust, stopped catering to their least literate readers, stopped caring about their angriest ones, stopped publishing dumbed-down versions of news, and stopped acting as if journalism is just another form of entertainment?

Maybe moves like these would spell the death of academia and the news media. I think it would help save them both. The words today’s consumers almost never hear — “You are wrong” — are sometimes the ones that, unknowingly, they most yearn for.