On today’s 190th anniversary of the founding of The New York Sun, we find ourselves thinking of a distinction drawn by its late 19th century editor, Charles Dana. The distinction — which Dana touched on in “The Art of Newspaper Making” — was between political despotism and social despotism.*  It seems to us that in America’s zeal for constitutional combat a big failure of the press has been to protect adequately against social despotism.

It’s not the laws — what Dana thought of as political despotism — that bedevil us most, though they are overbearing enough. It’s the unlegislated pressure to conform — in Dana’s thinking, social despotism — to the ideas and opinions that are favored by the left that poisons civil life. What appears to be at risk is not America’s hardware  — its police and courts — but its software, the cultural code of live-and-let-live.

It can be more difficult these days to name the areas untouched by dogma than to point to those that are still free. Climate change zealots sound as if the invasive species they would most like to see eliminated is homo sapiens. A new school of historians sees America as a force for evil, even as a rising generation of journalists dispenses with the traditional ideal of objectivity in favor of whatever subjectivities are in vogue.

The notion of a border is itself disparaged, even as blue — meaning governed by Democrats — cities realize the folly of calling themselves sanctuaries. The cause of civil rights is misused to aggravate racial wounds rather than heal them. Efforts to protect transgender persons from discrimination appear to have given way to shaming those who are reluctant to let parents guide their own children through their awakening to gender.

Dana spoke of newspapers flourishing in an environment free of all despotism, hailing, in contrast with Europe, “the great social freedom that exists in this country, where every intellectual plant grows vigorously and bears its fruit without hindrance from any quarter.” Now critics fear, our poetry editor, Joseph Bottum, writes, a “bastard puritanism in the Woke movement” that is applying the censoriousness that sometimes attached to scripture to social mores. 

In America today, in any event, there is no shortage of publications, but less diversity of thought in much of the press. As such our press is failing — or has become part of the problem, by enforcing the new social despotism as opposed to standing as the last line of defense against it. Its purpose has become inverted. It might be that our constitutional protections against political despotism have invited attack on the less well-defended social flank. 

We see this as an opportunity for a new generation of newspapers. This is why we pay attention in these columns to the principles to which the Sun has given voice and which were so well articulated by Thomas W. Dewart, who owned the Sun until 1950, when its banner was acquired by the World-Telegram — “constitutional government, sound money, reasonable protection for American industry, economy in public expenditures.”

“Preservation of the rights and responsibilities of the several states,” was on Dewart’s list, along with “free enterprise, good citizenship, equality before the law.” The Sun, he wrote “opposed indecency and rascality, public and private. It has fought Populism, Socialism, Communism, government extravagance, the encroachments of bureaucracy and that form of governmental paternalism which eats into the marrow of private initiative and industry.”

Were Dewart — or Dana — alive today, we have little doubt that they would add to the list that form of despotism that seeks to ruin the careers and livelihoods of Americans, or anyone else, through a form of social pressure beyond the reach of the law. They would oppose the instinct of cancellation and propound the ideals of inclusion and respect and burnish the nameplate of the Sun with the logo that has stood for nearly two centuries, “It shines for all.” 

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* “A country where there is anything approaching to despotism, either politically or socially, is not suited to the growth of newspapers,” Dana declared.