The strangest thing about the calamity that last week struck my old magazine, The New Republic, is this: It wasn't about politics. When I was coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, TNR was known for its intramural ideological brawls. 'There was a singular lack of office politics,' wrote Hendrik Hertzberg, who edited the magazine for part of that time, in TNR 's 100th-anniversary issue. 'What we had instead was politics politics'-ongoing feuds about the Cold War, race, the Middle East, and liberalism itself.
Yet the struggle that last week resulted in the ouster of Editor Frank Foer and Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier and the resignation of most of the magazine's senior staff wasn't about political differences. To be sure, it stemmed from a profound difference about how to practice journalism. But ideologically, owner Chris Hughes and the editorial staff largely saw eye-to-eye, something that was often not the case between 1974 and 2010, when Marty Peretz wrote most of the checks.
Ironically, that may have been part of the problem. Under Marty, TNR's role as a liberal magazine that was frequently at odds with other liberals made it ideologically contentious and ideologically distinct. Inside the magazine, these heresies often sparked conflict. In retrospect, some of them- TNR's crusade for military intervention in Bosnia-look laudable. Others-the magazine's support for war with Iraq and its decision to publish an excerpt of The Bell Curve-look awful. But like TNR's brand of liberalism or loathe it, it was idiosyncratic. And that idiosyncrasy played a big role in Marty's willingness to lose money on the magazine year after year. If TNR went down, there would still be lots of great political journalism. But nothing would replace its peculiar ideological voice.
In recent years, that became less true because TNR became less ideologically distinct. And I suspect that helps explain what happened last week. Chris Hughes has more money than Marty ever did. But he was less willing to lose it because he views TNR not as a collection of causes but as a media property. If you see TNR as a crusading publication in the tradition of Partisan Review and Dissent, it makes sense to subsidize its losses. If you see it as a less successful BuzzFeed, it does not.
The fact that in recent years TNR lost much of its ideological distinctiveness is not the fault of Frank Foer or the other talented editors and writers who followed him out the door. By the time Marty sold the magazine, the kind of contrarian liberalism it had espoused in previous decades was out of date. Frank responded by eliminating unsigned editorials and trying to turn TNR into ' The New Yorker of Washington'-a magazine defined less by the singularity of its political vision than by the quality of its reporting and writing. He executed that transition well. But the interesting question is why he had to. What is it about today's political climate that has made TNR 's brand of left-baiting liberalism obsolete?
The key factor, I think, has been the shift of American public-policy discourse to the right. As mainstream Democrats have grown more centrist and mainstream Republicans have grown more radical, it has become virtually impossible to craft a provocative, credible form of liberalism that lies somewhere between the two.
The clearest example lies in foreign policy. In the 1980s, TNR positioned itself between a Reagan administration whose anti-communism it considered dangerous and a Democratic Party it didn't consider anti-communist enough.
That search for a third way had deep historical roots. Although too young to have witnessed the heyday of the Old Left in the 1930s, Marty still nursed a grudge against those progressives who had apologized for Stalin. Long after anyone except for a few octogenarian anti-anti-communists on the Upper West Side still cared, TNR kept trying to prove that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been Soviet spies.
TNR's historical indignation toward the Old Left was nourished in the 1980s by battles with the remnants of the New Left born during Vietnam. The magazine avoided the crackpot revisionism of Norman Podhoretz and other neoconservatives who insisted that, absent a failure of American will, Vietnam could have been won. But neither did TNR believe Vietnam had discredited the Cold War. While critical of Ronald Reagan, the magazine still believed he was right to seek ways of pressuring the Soviet empire. That led TNR to editorialize against the nuclear freeze and in favor of Reagan's missile deployments in Western Europe and aid to the Nicaraguan Contras-all stances that placed it at odds with most of the intellectual left, and with some of the magazine's own writers.
Even when the Cold War ended, TNR's battle with the left over the legacy of Vietnam continued.
Even when the Cold War ended, TNR's battle with the left over the legacy of Vietnam continued. In 1990, most respectable liberals, and most Democratic politicians, opposed the Gulf War. TNR, by contrast, joined with George H.W. Bush and the GOP to support it. That decision owed something to the magazine's passionate (or obsessive, depending on your perspective) support for Israel. But TNR's hawkishness was about more than Zion. In the mid-1990s, when many liberals saw the Balkans as another Vietnam, TNR was maniacal-and eloquent-in its support for humanitarian war there. As in the Reagan era, TNR's hawkishness did not make it a clone of the right. (Many conservatives opposed the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and even those who supported them offered national-interest rationales rather than humanitarian ones.) But in insisting that there were foreign enemies-be they Leonid Brezhnev or Slobodan Milosevic-who posed a greater threat to global decency than did the 101st Airborne, TNR was doffing its cap to a core argument of the American right.
Posted by Unknown on Monday, December 8, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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