The ascent of Bari Weiss, who Paramount announced on Monday will be editor-in-chief of CBS News, at first glance seems like a media story. But it’s really a story about American politics and the two major parties. There is a new kind of “moderate” Republican, perhaps best exemplified by Weiss. And this kind of Republican is poised to keep gaining power and shifting the country to the right in harmful and destructive ways, even if they never have the political power of more explicitly pro-Trump conservatives.
For most of my lifetime, the Republican Party was informally divided into a more moderate wing and a more conservative one. (I say “more moderate” rather than simply “moderate” because the old true moderates—senators like Lowell Weicker and John Heinz—are long gone.) George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain exemplified this “more moderate” bloc. These Republicans took some very right-wing stances, but even so, they were to the left of figures such as Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, who emphasized their fierce opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights and openly promoted the idea of America as a Judeo-Christian, male-led society. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tried, at times successfully, to chart a middle ground between these two factions and be embraced by both.
The H.W. Bush-McCain-Romney wing was already losing steam when Donald Trump started running for president in 2015. These Republicans didn’t really have a strong agenda. They favored cutting corporate taxes and rolling back of liberal programs like Medicaid … just at a more gradual rate than the party’s right wing. The one area they really differed from the party’s right wing was they had more favorable views towards immigration and greater inclusion of women and people of color in American society.
So Trump easily vanquished them. As his 2016 campaign showed, very few Republican voters were enthusiastic about greater multiculturalism, and many were ardently opposed. By the end of 2020, after Trump had won two Republican primaries and one presidential election, it was clear that figures like Romney had little room in the party. Trump hadn’t been that religious or socially conservative before 2015, but he aligned with the right wing of the party and helped it win a decisive victory over the center-right.
Many Romney-ish Republicans, such as Bill Kristol, simply became independents or Democrats. But the Democratic Party of the 2020s, with its strong progressive tilt on both economic and social issues, wasn’t ideal for many Americans with some conservative leanings.
Enter a new brand of conservatism. Weiss and her allies don’t generally identify as conservative or Republican. (She has described herself as “politically homeless.”) They aren’t conservative Christians opposed to gay marriage, abortion, and immigration. In fact, Weiss is married to a woman. So they are to the left of where the average Trump voter is. Therefore, their views on social issues are palatable in the urban, coastal, elite settings where many of them live. At the same time, unlike the Romney Republicans, they do have an agenda that is both distinct from the rest of the party and more adapted to the 2020s. The Free Press, the publication Weiss founded, is obsessed with left-wing students and professors at elite colleges, diversity initiatives, pro-Palestinian activism, “cancel culture,” and other causes and people that they put under the frame of wokeness.
It’s not that prior Republicans and conservatives didn’t care about these issues. But it’s unique having an outlet so focused on, say, the comments of the interim president of Columbia University, as the Free Press was earlier this year. Weiss correctly recognized that many of the people in institutions geographically located in Blue America (elite universities, foundations, major news organizations) don’t love Trump’s personality but probably agree with him on policy, especially on these hot-button cultural issues, more than the progressive activists who’ve gained growing power within the Democratic Party. So Weiss has been a central figure in legitimizing and spreading this kind of conservatism.
And it’s everywhere now. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos reportedly became a fan of Weiss and the Free Press before he decided to shift his paper’s opinion pages to the right. Bill Maher casts the Democratic left wing as almost as radical as Trump. Elon Musk and others in tech and Silicon Valley who have either distanced themselves from the Democratic Party or embraced Trump often sound like Weiss, highlighting alleged abuses by Democrats that they claim have forced them to align with the right.
Maher still describes himself as a Democratic-leaning. And that’s an important part of this new conservatism—it has drawn rhetorical support from people in both parties. The ideal issue for a political party is one that unites its base while splitting the other party. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, affirmative action, liberal professors and other targets of the Free Press are largely opposed by Republicans but also by many moderate Democrats. So Weiss and her ilk are very useful to the Republican Party, even if they don’t formally align with it.
With CBS under more conservative ownership in the person of David Ellison and the hiring of Weiss and other center-right figures, this form of politics will gain even more power. I doubt Weiss will fire reporters who voted for Kamala Harris or mandate positive coverage if Trump does something extreme. Rather, her influence is likely to be more subtle. For starters, reporters will probably be more gun-shy about pitching stories that make Israel look bad or emphasize racial inequality.
That’s why this kind of conservatism is so dangerous. It’s easy to cast Trump as anti-democratic and hostile to racial diversity because he openly takes those positions almost every day. It’s much harder to take on institutions and people such as Weiss who invoke ideas like the “free press” while actually advancing a right-wing agenda. MAGA conservatism is probably never going to consistently win 50 percent of Americans. But MAGA conservatism combined with Weiss conservatism, a version that is more polite and subtle, could be more successful.
So the important story is not CBS News, because network news is declining and Americans have hundreds of other places to get political information. What’s important is the rise of Bari Weiss conservatives, who are putting a respectable sheen on Trump and MAGA’s autocratic aims. Polite Trumpism may not be as radical or obnoxious as the real kind, but it will still destroy America as we know it.
