The NYT has always gathered the zeitgeist of highly affluent and artsy new Yorkers, who tend to be highly invested in maintaining their status quo. They may not be right wing by principle, but they get there a lot on some subjects by talking to lots of bankers and financiers.

Correct.

The upper crust of Manhattan is filled with left of center people who think taxes on the rich are too low, but they themselves aren't rich (because Manhattan is expensive and they spend/save all their income) and that Trump is bad because he raised their taxes when he capped SALT.

I have friends here who semi-jokingly call me a republican for being more center-left than them & not wanting to watch John Oliver, while they own $10M of rental properties & don't think they are rich. The kind of upper class folks who have laid off numerous people in their career without a hint of remorse, but also think the social safety net is too weak. People who vote for AOC but plan to move to FL for tax purposes. Etc.

Basically the Loro Piana $500 ballcap demographic.

This is your NYT reader.

I guess 'maintaining status quo' is to me a conservative / right wing thing. I'm recollecting for example in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent a critique of the NYT being very pro-establishment, pro-government. But I guess that critique itself is from an extreme.

Robotbeat, I'm thinking more like 60 years ago.

Maybe you're thinking about NY Post?

20 years ago, when I was right-wing myself (in College Republicans, etc), the AM radio I listened to and people I talked to all thought NYT was very left-wing ("liberal").

Liberalism wasn’t a question of left or right 10+ years ago.

I don’t know what you mean. “Liberal” was in scare-quotes because that’s just the word that rightwing talk radio used to describe anyone on the left (or even center), and they said the word with disgust.

Yes, I know libertarians call themselves “classical liberals” and the left uses “neoliberal” as a similar epithet for anyone more centrist than themselves, but that was the connotation of the word.

I meant that this happened in the past 10 years. “Liberal” wasn’t associated almost solely to “left”. It was generally accepted. This “classical liberal” euphemism, in its current meaning, is also kinda new, and almost everybody who uses this nowadays is not associated to liberalism at all.

Well in rightwing talk radio land, “liberal” has meant “left wing” since at least the 1990s, probably earlier.