Not that anyone asked, but I never held and/or enjoyed any office or position of honor, trust or profit at The New Republic, whether under the regime of racist Marty Peretz or otherwise. Therefore, I do not have to say that I am in no position to criticize those who did hold such positions. My positioning is just fine, thank you.
I’d also like to point out that Marty Peretz bought the magazine in 1974 when I was 4 or 5 years old. Yet, there are plenty of people roughly my age or only slightly older who are behaving as if The New Republic had the most sterling and honorable reputation when they were growing up and then entering the workplace.
No one my age really has the right to argue that it was a good magazine gone bad. The truth is that people overlooked the racism of Peretz because he wasn’t racist against them and it therefore wasn’t anything to resign over.
I hate to harp on this controversy, but it’s bugging the crap out of me that people keep talking about the magazine as some kind of venerable institution. It has had its good points (mainly the book reviews and a lot of talented reporters) over my lifetime, but it was marred by its ownership up until the moment that Peretz finally cut his ties to it.
And, I might add, most of its editors prior to Foer weren’t “liberal” in any ordinary sense of that word.
Peretz spoke for no one and did not even pretend to speak for anyone , so it was easy to ignore him.
Your last graf (alone) has point.
And, I might add, most of its editors prior to Foer weren’t “liberal” in any ordinary sense of that word.
How long was Foer there during his first stint at TNR? Also, too, Hughes bought it in March of 2012. So Peretz had control, one way or another, until that time.
Inside Baseball.
If we suppose that TNR was some venerable and influential institution advocating for cultural and political goodness, what does one make of the cultural and political disaster in America today?
Failure.
Under Peretz, it was the hardest of hardline pro-Israel publications. I read it for a time, but could not countenance the pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian line. That is not liberal. That is neo-liberal. And neo-liberal is functionally equivalent to conservative in some areas.
It’s a TNR funeral/wake. When all the bad is erased and any possible good is inflated. Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, etc. were wise, brilliant, magnanimous leaders, and beloved by all between their deaths and being stuck in the ground. Kissinger, Cheney, etc. will get the same treatment.
The problem is clearly that TNR wasn’t The Nation.
But then, The Nation really isn’t The Nation, either.
I don’t know what’s funnier:
1) The way we are all supposed to don sackcloth and ashes and wail in the streets about the demise of this venerable HUNDRED YEAR OLD liberal institution but that holding things they wrote and argued in the recent past is ridiculous because jeez that was a long time ago its old news you people need to get over that and stop holding petty grudges.
2) The near-total lack of counter-examples to TNR’s shittiness. TNR’s critics can effortlessly rattle off a dozen or more low points of the Peretz era (Bell Curve, Glass, Shalit, Welfare Reform, A Fighting Faith, etc.), but for some reason I’m not seeing a whole lot of examples of all the bold, important, world-changing things that TNR did to promote liberal policies and move the liberal agenda forward and justify its claim to be a really important voice for liberal advocacy that liberals should mourn the loss of. The only one I can think of is Sullivan’s early work on legalizing gay marriage. We’re supposed to look beyond the No Exit article and thaat Pro-Contra editorial because of all the good work TNR was doing, but actual, influential examples of that good work are pretty thin on the ground.
3) How TNR’s apologists are starting to sound like an inverted take on that famous speech from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. "OK, apart from supporting Iraq War II and the Bush v. Gore decision and publishing Stephen Glass and Ruth Shalit and supporting NAFTA and Welfare Reform and publishing the Bell Curve and Peter Beinart’s ‘A Fighting Faith’ and starting the careers of Fred Barnes and Charles Krauthammer and Mickey Kaus and those Camille Paglia cover articles that Sullivan published and the all-white staff and oh yeah The Spine, what evidence do you have that TNR hasn’t always been a stalwart liberal magazine and a bastion of intellectual integrity?"
(And speaking of The Spine, where are the online archives of that? They’re as important a part of TNR’s storied heritage as anything else, so why aren’t they available so we can all enjoy TNR’s celebrated willingness to break liberal shibboleths and unflinchingly examine hard truths?)
4) The way some TNR defenders try to focus on the recently-relaunched Foer-led incarnation of the magazine which has apparently been doing good work, instead of the depredations of the previous Peretz decades. Well, that’s nice, but that makes the story "zillionaire backer makes big changes at four year old arts & politics magazine", which is barely a story. If you’re gong to make a big deal out of TNR’s century-long run as a VENERABLE LIBERAL TOUCHSTONE, then you have to own all the negatives that go along with that.
5) The way that TNR’s writers and staffers and editors and contributors had no problem associating themselves with the magazine during the Peretz decades, but only when Perfect Gentleman Frederick Foer got dicked around by his bosses did they feel the need to revolt. Asshole Harvard zillionaire who lucked into his fortune and has a penchant for firing editors is replaced by a slightly different asshole Harvard zillionaire who lucked into his fortune and has a penchant for firing editors, and that’s the thing that crosses the line in the sand. Not the suffocating racism or the plagiarism or the fabulism or the warmongering – no, that was all cool. But some guy stood up and used some internet buzzwords at a meeting, and everybody marches out the door en masse, arms locked, singing "Solidarity Forver".
6) Finally, how so many of TNR’s boosters are lamenting the transformation of the BELOVED CULTURAL INSTITUTION into a yet another farm of online clickbait listicles are doing so from the virtual pages of places like Slate and New York, where their articles run alongside tons of clickbait articles about celebrity feuds and movie trailers. John Chait’s "Eulogy" article run right alongside clickable links encouraging you to read about how "Kim Kardashian Thinks Her Ass Is a Work of Art" and "The 30 Most Important Sex Scenes in Movie History".
Did you know Robert Byrd was a Klan member?
This is why the Democratic Party must be destroyed.
Joe Lieberman is the only real liberal.
I think people are lamenting the fact that TNR engaged issues at more than a bullet point level or a “Crossfire” screaming match and few places do that.
Sure, the Bell Curve was awful. But being published in TNR led to about a decades worth of scholarship showing WHY it was awful.
If I want to read things I agree with, I’ll read the bloggers I agree with. What I liked about TNR was that they engaged a lot of different from a lot of different angles.
Because it’s good to waste a decade of research, scholarship, and publication space to debunk a crap that should never have made it past any publication other than a tabloid? Then you must have appreciated all the anti-vaccines Moms for sparking all the time and cost required to prove no link between autism and vaccines. A shame some kids have contracted diseases because their parents declined those vaccines.
Get off the bullshit. You ought to be embarrassed that you took the time to write this stupidity.
They don’t really mean liberal, they mean part of the establishment.
The new guy disrespected the establishment.
And it’s not his place to think he can do that.
Who is the new guy? Foer or Holmes?
Hughes
Until I saw The New Republic in the Johnathan Chait/McCaughey era (never knew who was editor), my previous reading of it had been during the time when Gilbert Harrison was editor in the 1960s. I was stunned at how different it was. The current version was pretty close to being a Republican apologist, not meriting the word “liberal” at all.
Harrison was “liberal” in the 1960s in the same way that Hubert Humphrey was liberal and substantially to the left of liberal Max Ascoli’s The Reporter, the first liberal magazine I read (pro-Vietnam War, pro-Civil Rights, pro-War on Poverty, ceased publication in 1968 with an attack on the counter-culture). But Ascoli exposed the China lobby in the 1950s, and Harrison’s New Republic had numerous good articles. Neither The Reporter nor The New Republic were racists apologists in those days–quite the contrary. But Commentary had not made its neo-conservative turn then either.
The New Republic is “venerable” only because it celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. And The Nation celebrates its 149th anniversary.
The ordinary sense of the word liberal shifted in 1968; the demise of The Reporter was symptomatic of that shift.
Apparently during the 1970s, Marty Peretz and Norman Podhoretz decided to try to stamp out liberalism. In general there was “end of liberalism” turn in the late 1970s, best stated by Theodore Lowi’s book of that title. No doubt the GOP effectiveness of implementing the Lewis Powell memo owed some to this zeitgeist.
Again, there is liberal and their is Left. To use 1968 as an example: Humphrey was “liberal”; Hayden was “Left”.
As the country lurched rightwards in the ’80s, the New Republic tended to move that way, too. But I always found it to be more of a Gary Hart sort of place, rather than a Joe Lieberman sort of place (at least excluding the Israeli stuff).
“But I always found it to be more of a Gary Hart sort of place, rather than a Joe Lieberman sort of place.”
Not sure if serious….
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/07/elec04.prez.lieberman.newrepublic/
Argh. Liberal and left-leaning aren’t the same thing. The “Left” is relative to where a country’s center is. “Liberal” is an embrace of freedom of thought and action.
TNR engaged in debates within itself and with other publications. It did so without Buzzfeed ten bullet pointed lists or The New Yorker’s cartoons.
It was substantive. And the fuck if I can find much substantive journalism today. You may not have liked the substance all the time, because at times it could be egregious. And it was Neo-Liberal as much as it was “liberal” but it was one of the few magazines that published actual scholars writing about current events.
Why the fuck must we agree with everything in order to value it? Isn’t what we ultimately believe in strong enough to encounter dissent? Shouldn’t we test our presumptions against contrary assumptions and facts?
Gloating over the death of The New Republic is just another episode in the current longest running trend in politics: Epistemic Closure.
It doesn’t have The New Yorker’s cartoons?! That is some SERIOUS journalism.
And we must have more serious debate, among serious white males, debating their widely-varied slightly left-of-center to slightly right-of-center* white views in a serious, pro-Israel way.
Certainly, the internet doesn’t offer such a range of opinions, because Buzzfeed has lists.
*did I use those correctly? I’m not very used to being so SERIOUS.
Dana Milbank is feeling downright nasty.
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