The New Republic began circulation in 1914, and continues to be published as of 2016. In
the context of American periodicals that focus on politics and culture,
however, this impressive longevity is not the benchmark: The Atlantic was first published in 1857, The Nation in 1865, and Harpers
in 1850. TNR is marginally older than
The New Yorker, which was founded in
1925, and a senior cousin to various post-WWII magazines such as Dissent (1954), Commentary (1945) and The New
York Review of Books (1963).
So far there has not been a detailed,
comparative historical account of the rarefied milieu of American political
magazines. Such a study would be of great interest. The existing literature
that comes close to filling this gap comes in the form of the memoirs of
editors and contributors of these various periodicals. From these reflections we
gain a mixture of historical fact and historical myth. Intellectual but
non-academic, published either weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, associated with
the newsstands of New York and Washington, read by America’s intelligentsia over coffee and
before tennis: political magazines are not just institutions of opinion and
commentary, but one of the most visible markers of status in the world of U.S.
politics. Or so the fact-myth hybrid goes.
What in particular this longed-for
historical study of American periodicals would deliver us is a sober analysis
of how TNR fared throughout the 20th century in influencing the
political and intellectual landscape of America. What was its influence, for
example, in comparison to The New Yorker?
And how did the two collaborate to create a certain climate of accepted
opinion? Circulation numbers and subscriber base might give one a numerical
shorthand, but hardly a satisfactory picture. On the other hand, anecdotes of
famous politicians and broadcasters highlighting a story from its pages might produce
impressionist insights rather than an accurate portrait. Not having any of
these stories or numbers at my fingertips let me start with the most recent
event that made many realise TNR’s
influence: its mass editorial shake-up at the tail end of 2014.
Captured in relentless detail by Ryan
Lizza on The New Yorker website, TNR endured an internal rupturing
resulting in the resignation of at least two-thirds of its senior editors,
contributing editors, and major writers. The rupture had been prepped
immaculately from the day it had been bought by Facebook co-founder Chris
Hughes in 2012, who upon purchasing the magazine forced editorial changes,
attempting to boost circulation by importing staff from Yahoo (Guy Vidra,
Yahoo’s former Head of News, became chief executive). When the decision to sack
TNR’s editor Franklin Foer became widely known, Hughes witnessed much to his surprise the protest resignation of
‘nine of the magazine’s eleven active senior writers; the legal-affairs editor;
the digital-media editor; six culture writers and editors and thirty-six out of
thirty-eight contributing editors’. From the outside,
the fallout was flattering to TNR in
that many saw it as the end of an era. Its name, and the names on its masthead,
spoke for more than simply a magazine of opinion and commentary: it spoke for a much-vaunted institution, one
of the last vestiges of long-form journalism and in-depth analysis of politics
and the arts. Even voices critical of the magazine’s politics were saddened by
its breakdown.
But the passing of an era has not
resulted in the shutting down of the magazine, even as it more recently went
through another ownership-swap. In February 2016, Hughes relinquished his grip on TNR. It is now owned by Win McCormack, a
progressive publisher from Oregon, who also functions as its editor-in-chief.
The magazine looks now to maintain several of the changes that Hughes ushered
in, most prominently the pace of its publication, which is now monthly (TNR was variously a weekly or bi-weekly
for most of its history), and the structure and size of the magazine itself. I suspect though that McCormack’s
replacing of Hughes will not mean much to the old guard who departed two years
ago. As far as they are concerned, TNR
may as well have folded back in 2014. Even though 2016 saw TNR continue publication as a monthly, most readers of an older
generation no doubt regard its new incarnation as irrevocably inferior to its
old one.
Is
this fair?
In
sum The ‘New’ New Republic ought not
to offend any mainstream, left-leaning sensibilities, whether political or cultural. There is no doubt that with the
departure of so many of its seasoned contributors (some in particular I’ll
touch on), TNR is not the same as its
pre-2012 form: its reviews of books in particular are shorter, its capacity for
first-hand reporting is no doubt limited, the intellectual heft of its new
editorial base considerably lighter. All of this is true. But these markers are
visible because the recent past is, well, recent. We know what the old TNR was, and can’t help but make
comparisons between the old and the new. Hopefully, as the new TNR continues to get published, it’ll
stop being compared to its forebears, and instead be measured on its own. As a
younger person with a shorter historical memory, this task is easier for me.
TNR of old was cleanly divided into two sections: the front of the
book and the back of the book. The front was politics; the back culture. In
politics, TNR was ostensibly liberal but in reality very hospitable to
neoconservatives; in culture it represented seriousness and published long
essays, often written by prestigious academics. In politics, TNR was at the beck-and-call of its
owner-cum-editor, Marty Peretz, from 1974 till 2007. In culture, TNR was at the
beck-and-call of its literary editor Leon Wielseltier, from 1983 till 2014. The
two sides of the magazine respected the other’s autonomy, but weren’t
completely separate. In the wake of the exodus of figures like Wiesletier, many
on the left were sad to see the back of the book go, but not its front. TNR was
aggressive in its support of Israel’s military escapades, light on Reagan’s Iran-Contra
scandal, supported the invasion of Iraq, and was even edited by the Thatcherite
conservative Andrew Sullivan in the 90s, during which time it published pieces
on the IQ deficiencies of African-Americans.
But that same left had nothing but
respect for the back of the book under Wieseltier’s tenure. Wieseltier himself
did re-enact many of the magazine’s conservative political opinions, but
nonetheless gave TNR a distinctively tough intellectual reputation. Essays and
reviews on literature, poetry, philosophy, religion, theatre and film that ran
to thousands of words and demanded serious attention were the norm during his
time as literary editor. Fashioning himself as an anachronistic man-of-letters
untouched by post-modern or contemporary continental theory, Wieseltier, with
his shock of white hair and air of casual profundity, became in many cases the
public image of TNR. Leftist writers
such as Eric Alterman and George Scialabba, completely unsympathetic to TNRs politics, maintain to this day that
Wielsetier was a brilliant editor, showing a genius for recruiting and
mentoring excellent writers in different fields.
It is perhaps the absence of
Wieseltier now that marks the most significant shift in TNRs prospects.
Wieseltier was, if you like, a heavyweight in the context of political
magazines in America. TNR now, among
other things, lacks an equivalently muscular showrunner to lend it an aura of
seriousness. But from my perspective, Wieseltier no longer being at TNR also has its positive effects. For
one thing, the man was in a senior editorial position for over thirty years.
And readers have always had to approach Wieseltier’s voice dialectically:
brilliant here, moronic there. Another word alongside ‘heavyweight’ used to
describe Wieseltier is sententious, or you can take your pick among portentous,
overwrought, melodramatic etc. He had a regular column in TNR titled ‘Washington Diaries’, a one-page offering of thoughts on
whatever he was thinking about that week. Scialabba’s opinion on Wieseltier’s
opinions comes close to my own: ‘Rarely has so much verbal ingenuity been
expended to so little point, except perhaps in fulfillment of some imagined
moral obligation to sound intelligent’ . No one’s perfect I guess. TNR
certainly wasn’t perfect while Wielseiter was there, and won’t be made so
imperfect as to be unreadable now that he’s not.
Politically, the magazine will
probably maintain something of a centrist position, hopefully with more
contributors leaning left than right. In this respect, TNR will not outrun its recent, or indeed long-term, history. Since
its founding over a century ago, TNR
has been all over the shop in terms of its ideology. It was hungry for the
First World War, reticent to enter the second one, supported the New Deal, enjoyed
a brief Stalinist phrase, and by the time Marty Peretz took it over the 70s it
was comfortably lodged in the centre. According to Eric Alterman, Peretz made
his devotion to Israel his intense focus in running the magazine. This demanded
that he not only provide neo-conservatives privileged access to his pages, but
also that he use the prestige of the magazine to brow-beat dissenting leftist
voices. Dwight Macdonald wrote sardonically in reviewing William Buckley’s National Review upon its first few issues
that ‘We have long needed a good conservative magazine’, immediately followed
up in brackets with ‘We have also needed a good liberal magazine’. Clearly
political semantics saw heavy blows in the regime under Peretz. How TNR saw itself during Peretz’s ownership
was no doubt split among its editors and contributors. Now that it has been
handed a clean slate as it were, it is in a position to fashion for itself a
new identity, and maintain a consistent ideological theme (and no more
reactionaries).
In a recent issue Alan Wolfe – one of
the few regular contributors to the old version who continues to write for it –
made the suggestion that the Democratic Party, in light of the rise of Trumpism, should seek as broad a coalition as possible. Wolfe proposes
this modestly as an alternative to the tendency among Democrats, and the left
more broadly, to lodge its hopes with any one particular group as the agent of
change. Is TNR in the right place to
be an effective organ that appeals to that broad coalition? TNRs new brand of editors and contributors
will be the chief means of assessing the quality of this appeal. Senior editors
Jeet Heer and Brian Buetler have had their by-lines in the most recent issues
in 2016, and their politely progressive tone reveals the potential nature of TNRs future output. Writing about the
general state of U.S. politics in 2016, Heer and Beutler, along with managing
editor Laura Reston, exude inoffensiveness in their diagnosis and cause no
undue mental labour on the part of the reader in terms of literary style.
Heer
in particular, having come on board TNRs ship at the start of 2015, exemplifies
in my opinion the general tone of the magazine today. With essays spreading
across pop culture (‘Stop Making Superhero Movies for Grownups’, 2016),
literature (‘Professor Bellow’, 2016) and politics (‘An Oligarch in Populists
Clothing’, 2016), Heer is by turns dense and breezy in his analysis, assuredly
progressive in outlook and magnanimous in judgement. His is a style unlikely to
enter the canon of great political writing. And that may ultimately be a
positive. TNR of old had a ‘snarky
wit and verbal edge’ that made it ‘at once irresistible and insufferable’. It
hired great minds – Anthony Grafton, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Cass Sunstein, Richard Rorty – to write long and
intricate essays on intellectual affairs. But the cost of having a heavyweight
pedigree was the production of a boisterous arrogance. Brilliance often confers
entitlement and erodes modesty. Heer and his fellow editors are marshalling a
much more circumspect corps of writers. With no pretences to greatness, it can
eschew the obligation to condescend to those who don’t measure up.
This
circumspection also lends itself to the length of its essays. The reviews of
non-fiction books appear at about half the length that they were under the old
regime. One can see this most clearly in the case of Alan Wolfe’s recent
review-essays, which run to around two-and-a-half thousand words as opposed to
the ones he penned in the 90s and 00s which would often exceed six thousand
words, and occasionally threatened to reach ten thousand. But the magazine does
publish lengthy pieces. Looking at the dozen-odd issues of TNR published in 2016, all of them contain at least two pieces
which reach the five thousand word mark; the largest one being Siddhartha Deb’s
profile of Indian Prime Minister Modi (‘Unmasking Modi,’ 2016), which runs to
nearly ten thousand words. This is small fry though compared to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, where
review-essays often run to fifteen-to-twenty thousand words. This may all sound
a bit prosaic and more than a little bean-counter-ish, but in the same way that
heavy tomes convey gravitas when slammed on the table, the prestige of
intelligentsia-driven magazines is often conveyed by the length and density of
their essays. And according to historian Russell Jacoby, The New York Review of Books does in fact make quite a satisfying
thud when thrown on the table.
As a rule it might be said that TNR
now and in the future does not require passionate defence because it doesn’t arouse
much passion at all. So be it. If it continues to publish the likes of Bill
McKibben on climate change (‘Recalculating
the Climate Math’, 2016) and Sven Birkerts on culture (‘Werner Dreams of Electric Sheep’, 2016),
I’ll be happy to read and learn from it. I think TNR will not be a heavyweight compared to The New Yorker, which continues to publish dense essays by a whole
fleet of wised-up critics. A healthier comparison might be with The Nation. Upon McCormack’s taking over
of TNR, The Nation editorialized that it looked forward to resuming their
long-standing rivalry. Whereas The New Yorker sells itself as a general
culture magazine, The Nation and TNR were always explicitly political
enterprises. By necessity this narrows their appeal. But the U.S. in the 20th
century has seen an array of so-called ‘little magazines’ whose influences
endure in the political culture to this day (the sentimental favourite often
being Dwight Macdonald’s Politics,
1944-1949).
There is one more concern I have more
broadly, that includes TNR as a
potential factor. This is the salience of long-form commentary in an atmosphere
increasingly dominated by short-form click bait, memes, tweets and Facebook
posts.
This concern has long been on
Wieseltier’s mind, and he continues in his post-TNR career to explore it. His angle in particular has been on the
contracting nature of the human attention span. Deep reading, reflective
thinking: to Wieseltier this was what TNR
in part stood for during his time as literary editor. Since his departure from
that post, the landscape, and his vocabulary, has only gotten bleaker. ‘We are
waging a war on time: the goal of our culture now is to abolish time’,
Wieseltier said recently in a conversation with Harvard president Drew Faust. One
need not share Wieseltier’s Judaic upbringing, with its emphasis on scholarly
concentration and eidetic memory, to find truth in this doom-laden
pronouncement. While one cannot firmly stipulate that the fate of deep reading
and reflective thinking is sealed shut, one cannot afford to be too relaxed
about it either. The classicist Eric
Havelock once declared that ‘thought means the pause, the postponement, the
extension of range to take in the apparently useless’; and in a sense
the periodical brought out on a weekly or bi-weekly basis forms a respite from
the daily and hourly discharge of news and information. It offers an
opportunity to take in precisely the broader field of fact and interpretation that the 24-hours
cycle excludes.
The other magazines I mentioned at
the outset - The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books etc., plus
periodicals across the Atlantic such as the
London Review of Books – share with TNR
a history of long-form intellectual journalism that looks quaint in today’s
fast-paced media landscape. Online content can – and does – offer sanctuaries
of sustained attention for those who want political analysis to go deeper. But
I hold that rather than being generated in the Internet-age, these sanctuaries
are more often than not carry-ons from institutions that preceded the current
digital-media platforms. One can read The
New Yorker online, but I doubt that one can find any website emerging in
the last ten years that is equivalent in quality to The New Yorker. The quality of writing one finds on the blog of the London Review of Books is reflective of
the fact that this publication maintains the standards and principles that
defined it in an age when print was dominant. I’m referring here to the
existence of editors and fact-checkers, and the general disciplining effect of writing
within an institution.
It’s
exactly the prestige of institutions like The
New Yorker and The New Republic
and many others (I haven’t touched on the publications in my home country of
Australia) that guarantees at least their short-term survival. Online
publications are identical to pre-online ones in one respect: they are not read
simply for purposes of information and knowledge, but because they are markers
of identity and status. Brand recognition is a factor even in high-brow
pursuits such as long-form journalism. And the fact that the brands in question
have long and distinguished histories elevates them in the status-seeking game
in comparison to newer kids on the block. This explains why TNR, while it feels like its entering a
fresh phase in its history, would be foolish to dissociate itself from that
history. When your business is printing opinions, being over a century old
grants you a certain authority in a world where everyone has one.
*
Alterman, E 2007 ‘My Marty Peretz
Problem – And Ours’, The American
Prospect, vol. 18, no. 7, pp.24-28
Do We Need to Rescue the Humanities? 2016, The Aspen Institute, 1 July, viewed October 29
2016, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQy5Y4FxYEo>
Havelock, E.A 1950, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, The
Beacon Press, Boston
Lizza, R 2014, ‘Inside the Collapse
of the New Republic’, The New Yorker,
viewed October 15 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-collapse-new-republic
Jacoby, R 2014, ‘The Graying of the
NYRB’, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Macdonald, D 1957, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Farrar,
Strauss and Cudahy, New York
Scialabba, G 2009, ‘Only Words’, The Nation, vol. 288, no. 18, pp.32-36
Scialabba, G 2015, ‘People Who
Influence Influential People Are the Most Influential People in the World’, The Baffler, No. 27, http://thebaffler.com/salvos/influential-people, viewed October 30, 2016
Wolfe, A., 2016, ‘Shut Up and Drive’,
New Republic, vol. 247, no. 6, pp.74-75
Comments