Wednesday, December 10, 2014

What The Demise Of The New Republic Really Means

The mass resignations that, for now, have spelled the end of The New Republic have a message for progressives everywhere.  And a somewhat counter-intuitive one, given last month's election results.

For my part, my initial reaction to this news made me feel a little bit like the dancer in "A Chorus Line" who, upon hearing that her former acting teacher had died, cried because she felt "nothing."  Because I felt that I should feel something.  When I was growing up, my parents did not subscribe to many magazines, and most of the ones they did subscribe to were concerned with news and politics.  The New Republic was one of those.  But what I liked about it was its mix of liberal think-pieces on then-current policy debates and articles, including reviews of films and plays (even if their critic for both, Stanley Kaufmann, disliked almost everything on Broadway simply because he hated Broadway).  In hindsight, it seems fair to say that TNR nurtured the mixed interests I have in politics and culture that (I hope) is reflected in this blog.

So I can't fault Ross Douthat, in his most recent New York Times column, for mourning the loss of that mix that TNR has provided for over a century.  Likewise, I join him in missing the synthesis of ideas that policy journals like TNR have added to our political debates for decades.  Douthat is correct in identifying this loss as being partially a consequence of the Internet age.  In a world where every writer is also his or her own editor and publisher, nobody's thinking is corrected and blended to produce a joint perspective that is stronger and more accurate than any of its individual parts.  In musical terms, the Internet is a chorus in which every singer is trying to be a soloist.  It may be a great experience for each of the singers, but not so much for the audience.

But I am forced to part company with Douthat at the point where he asserts that TNR, "unlike many liberal outlets, in its finest years it published, employed and even occasionally was edited by people on the right of center — something some of us particularly appreciated."  He, of course, is free to regard that as an asset, just as David Greenberg in Slate is free to mourn its loss as depriving liberalism of a useful in-house voice of criticism.  For there is an enormous and significant difference between thoughtful self-criticism and rampant self-flagellation.  It is one thing to make occasional course corrections, and another to spend every moment envying the course that the other boat is taking.

And the latter tendency is what TNR began to succumb to when Martin Peretz bought in in 1974.  Peretz was and is pro-Israeli to the point at which every political issue discussed in the magazine was filtered through that particular policy lens--usually under the guise of debates about American military resolve, first in the Cold War era, and then in the post 9/11 world.  This matched Peretz's own views on Israeli politics, more Likud than Labor.  Over time, the strength of truly liberal voices in the magazine were diminished, with the calm reasoning of Michael Kinsley being replaced by the ravings of Mickey Kaus.  Kaus is an especially egregious example of the I'm-a-Democrat-who-likes-sounding-like-a-Republican-because-it gets-me-published type that TNR began to feature in the Peretz era.  He now writes for The Daily Caller, which should make one wonder if he wasn't really a Republican all along.

Which brings me to the reason why TNR's death, assuming that it is final, leaves me feeling nothing.  Its philosophical castration at the hands of Peretz mirrors the decline and fall of the liberal movement in America.  Thanks to the extent to which liberalism has been co-opted by the Martin Peretzes of the world, liberals as a group have become too defensive, too self-doubting, and ultimately too week to say anything to the rest of America except "Me too, but ... ."  And even the "but" never gets past debating quibbles rather than anything of substance.

And all this, in the end, to do what?  To align yourself with some of the worst bigots in history, including Peretz himself.  His idea of Israeli foreign policy is wiping out every Arab, a goal as amoral as it is impossible.  But Peretz's bigotry doesn't stop there; it overflows into American domestic policy.  If you have a strong stomach, you can get the full flavor of it here.

So if this, in fact, is the end of The New Republic, I'm afraid I won't cry.  The only thing that might make me cry would be if progressives don't find the backbone to replace TNR with a journal--or an Internet alternative--worthy of the principles that give birth to TNR in the first place.

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