Politics & Power Quote by Rich Lowry

Lowry is doing two things at once: praising dissent as a civic feature while quietly policing its borders. On the surface, he’s offering a chest-thumping endorsement of press freedom during wartime - the kind of reassurance meant to blunt the accusation that critics are being muzzled. The examples are carefully chosen. The New Yorker and The Nation function as shorthand for elite liberal skepticism: recognizable, influential, and, crucially, non-threatening to the system. By citing them, he can gesture toward pluralism without granting the anti-war case any actual legitimacy. Dissent is permitted; it’s also framed as a lifestyle option for certain magazines.

The phrase “anti-American articles” is the tell. It’s a label that smuggles in a moral verdict. You can print them, he implies, but they’re still “anti-American,” not merely anti-war, anti-policy, or anti-administration. That word choice keeps patriotism as the default setting and recasts criticism as deviance that must be tolerated rather than engaged. The “and that’s fine” reads like a parental permission slip: you can speak, but I’m the one granting the imprimatur.

Context matters: post-9/11 war politics were a minefield where “free debate” coexisted with soft blacklists, cable-news pile-ons, and the career cost of being labeled insufficiently loyal. Lowry’s intent is to assert that the marketplace of ideas is healthy, which doubles as a defense of the war effort: if the conversation is open, then the national project remains confident, not coercive. It’s a celebration of the First Amendment that also reassures readers they’re still the home team.