The Times, however, does know who the person is, which also changes the position the newspaper occupies in this democracy. The Op-Ed section is separate from the news operation, but, in protecting the identity of the person who wrote the Op-Ed, the paper forfeits the job of holding power to account. An anonymous Op-Ed is a very rare thing. The editors at the Times faced a tough choice. They evidently concluded that the information contained in the piece was important enough to justify sidestepping normal journalistic practices and principles. I don’t doubt the editors’ serious intentions, though I happen to disagree—the content of the Op-Ed does not strike me as newsworthy. But that’s not the point. The thing about autocracies, or budding autocracies, is that they present citizens with only bad choices. At a certain point, one has to stop trying to find the right solution and has to look, instead, for a course of action that avoids complicity. By publishing the anonymous Op-Ed, the Times became complicit in its own corruption.