“ The comments were poorly phrased, but the appropriate response would have been a clarification and an apology. Hysterical moralism is non-partisan; both the left and the right in the United States are subject to moral panics, storms of self-dramatizing indignation and puritanical censorship. Witch trials, tarring and feathering of those who transgress the perceived moral limits of the community, the humiliation of culprits against morality by placing them in the pillory: liberal as well as conservative Americans find something deeply and timelessly satisfying in these displays of communal righteousness. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the tyranny of opinion and the terrible pressure on Americans to conform; Juan Williams now knows what de Tocqueville was talking about.
Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy, CFR on Juan Williams’ firing from NPR.
