Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Glaukon: I think this gets it right. I do think that: "[The] substantial investigative journalism... was overwhelmed by their cheap superficial and pernicious garbage, and as often as not tonally indistinguishable by their fake investigative journalism hit pieces.... The balance never appeared great..." And I do think that there is every reason to think that Chris Hughes's money and whatever legacy value the TNR brand has will be at least as productively deployed by the young and very smart Gabriel Snyder as by Franklin Foer.

Artaphernes: A number of people assure me that Franklin Foer is a great editor. But, somehow, I can't see much--other than a demonstrated willingness to go the extra mile to suck up to the various and manifold bigotries of Martin Peretz and company.

Pokymarkhos: Certainly putting TNR's future in Gabriel's hands is a much better bet than was putting it in Andrew Sullivan's hands or, indeed, in Martin Peretz's.

Kephalos: There remain more substantive worries. There is Ezra Klein's:

Ezra Klein: Even the liberal New Republic needs to change: What made the New Republic was how restlessly, relentlessly idiosyncratic[ally it]... drove new ideologies and new ideas to the fore. They were worse at covering policy than their digital successors, but probably better at thinking.... They saw their role as telling their audience what to think, and they expected a readership in the low six or high five figures, not the mid-eight figures.... Something is being lost in the transition from policy magazines to policy web sites, and it's still an open question how much of it can be regained.

Glaukon: To this I say: I want specifics. Unfogged's commentariat: (i) mentions Stanley Kauffman's movie reviews; (ii) has some who like the back-of-the-book balanced by those who say (accurately) that "the vaunted back of the book has been plagued for the past few decades by rigid ideological policing and petty grudges; (iii) likes Michael Lewis on Morry Taylor and on the 1996 Republican primary; (iv) respects the cut and thrust of debate week for week [in] Kinsley's TRB columns from the 80s and Chait's merciless skewering of supply-siders; (v) welcomed that it was a forum that would publish things like Tom Geohagen's "Abolish The Senate" and "I'm not ashamed at having taken seriously and engaged with themes like Kaus' End of Equality"; (vi) like "Michael Crowley on the anguish of the House Democrats" (a search of the New Republic's website for "Michael Crowley House democrats reports that it returns no results; I can find the 1200 word http://www.newrepublic.com/article/the-hill-0), but I am not impressed. None of these strike me as thinking particularly. They all strike me as the kind of thing that when done well is very good to have, and that http://vox.com and its peers today do better.

Polymarkhos: But Unfogged's commentariat (admittedly, mostly Knecht Ruprecht) also sees, over a quarter of a century:

1. Ryan Lizza on George Allen's racism (5000 words) http://www.newrepublic.com/full-access?destination=node/65427
2. Jonathan Chait on the Netroots (9000 words) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/the-lefts-new-machine-how-the-netroots-became-the-most-importantmass-movement-us-politicsj
3. Jonathan Chait on Bush hatred (4500 words) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/mad-about-you
4. Jonathan Cohn's early-2004 profile of Howard Dean (2500 words) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/moral-center
5. Andrew Sullivan's 1989 piece on gay marriage (1800 words) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/79054/here-comes-the-groom
6. Spencer Ackerman and John B. Judis's "The First Casualty" (9000 words) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/the-first-casualty

Glaukon: That's supposed to be a lot?

Kephalos: I suppose that if you want to say that the *Old New Republic *was a national treasure because it provided a place where Spencer Ackerman could publish, gain an audience for, and afford to write 10000-word highly-passionate highly-informed and -informative world-class rants about the moral and practical collapse of American foreign policy, than argue away; and that Franklin Foer is an excellent editor because he cherishes cranky, talented, passionate people and provides them with space where they can write long-form pieces telling their readers what they should think--well, then, argue away. But I don't think you are going to get very far.

Glaukon: The problem was that the Old New Republic was not especially good in "telling its potential readers how to think".

Artaphernes: Not to mention that when it did tell readers what to think, the subtext was always that one should be willing to go the extra mile to indulge and to suck up to the various and manifold bigotries of Martin Peretz and company...

Glaukon: In fact, Corey Robin quotes Alfred Kazin to the effect that the front-of-the-book of the Peretz New Republic*--even in its best Hertzberg and second-best Kinsley incarnations--was rather bad at telling readers what to think:

As things go now, I cannot imagine ever appearing outside the literary section.... What I read in the front of the book is informative, saucy, in tone terribly sure of itself. It gives me no general enlightenment on the moral and intellectual crisis underlying the crisis of the week, above all no inspiration. There is no discernible social ideal behind all the clever counter-punching. Washington is more beautiful and imposing than it has ever been, is a wonderful town to look at—-if you overlook Anacostia and Shaw.... The many clever people in and out of government are not “intellectuals” in the old sense--thinkers with a sense of prophecy--but “experts,” no-nonsense minds that can chill me....

I wish I conld think of TNR as moving beyond post-leftist crowing—-beyond a certain parvenu smugness, an excessive familiarity with the inside track and the inside dope, and, above all, beyond that devouring interest in other journalists that confines so many commentaries out of Washington to triviality. I wish I could think of TNR as moving beyond the bristling, snappv, reactive common-sense of the disenchanted liberal. There are worlds within worlds, even in Washington, that are [not] apparent... to the wearilv clever, easily exasperated, heirs and guardians of the liberal democracy that is the one tradition we seem to have left.

Thrasymakhos: And at its worst? The Kinsley Old New Republic was mostly snark, #slatepitch avant-le-lettre, and a strong desire to find some clever contrarian reason to agree with Reagan. And the Hertzberg Old New Republic--listen to Hertzberg talk about the 1986 "The Case for the Contras":

Things could get heated, as they did—to take a paradigmatic example—when we debated what to say about how the United States should treat Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime. The subsequent lede, titled “The Case for the Contras,” was published in the issue of March 24, 1986. It was an unqualified endorsement of the Reagan administration’s policy of trying to overthrow the Sandinistas by any means necessary, starting with military aid to the Contra guerrillas. The motives it attributed to critics of the Reagan policy were limited to isolationism, defeatism, willful blindness, and selective “scrupulousness” about the sovereignty of “states ruled by pro-Soviet Leninists.”...

The author of “The Case for the Contras” was Charles Krauthammer, the future Irving Kristol Award–winning, Bradley Prize–winning, William F. Buckley Award–winning (and, to be fair, Pulitzer Prize–winning) hero of conservative intellectuals and Fox News dittoheads alike. None of that could have been predicted when Charles joined The New Republic.... We had both been rendered jobless by... the defeat of the Carter-Mondale ticket at the hands of Reagan and Bush. Charles had been a speechwriter for Vice President Mondale.... Charles... was an admirer of Canada’s gentle welfare state... might vote for Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal Party, or even the New Democrats, the Canadian affiliate of the Socialist International.... Editorials like Charles’s hymn to the Contras helped birth the “even the liberal New Republic" meme, but it wasn’t as if Marty, back then, had set out to stack the staff with right-wingers. He hired Charles because... Charles was both a liberal and a come-what-may supporter of Israel. Charles took years to make the full transition to foreign policy neoconservatism, and years more to buy most of the rest of the Republican program. (He still believes in evolution, though, bless his soul.) Similarly, Marty hired Fred Barnes to be a straight political reporter.... Few of us could have imagined that he might morph into a Fox News stalwart and a founding editor of The Weekly Standard...

Kephalos: But Ezra Klein is correct in identifying this as a hole in our current public-intellectual ecology.

Thrasyakhos: So do something about it, Ezra! You have a platform: http://vox.com. Figure out how to set things up so that you will publish the next decade's equivalent of (1)-(6) above!

Artaphernes: Do I once again have to point out that that an organization and people whose core competence is a willingness to go the extra mile to suck up to the bigotries of Martin Peretz is not the place to go if you want more of (1)-(6)?

Glaukon: And I do think we should give the Unfogged commentariat another word on this: "One of the better pieces on the Intelligent Design trial? And, uh, other stuff that I don't remember?"

Kephalos: There is also the:

STATEMENT BY FORMER NEW REPUBLIC EDITORS AND WRITERS

As former editors and writers for The New Republic, we write to express our dismay and sorrow at its destruction in all but name.

From its founding in 1914, The New Republic has been the flagship and forum of American liberalism. Its reporting and commentary on politics, society, and arts and letters have nurtured a broad liberal spirit in our national life. The magazine’s present owner and managers claim they are giving it new relevance while remaining true to its century-old mission. Instead, they seem determined to strip it of the intellectual, literary, and political commitments that have been its essence and meaning. Their pronouncements suggest that they hold those commitments in contempt. READ MOAR

Glaukon: I do not think it was wise for the authors of this statement to recruit Andrew Sullivan--who tried harder than any man alive to remove from the New Republic its intellectual and political commitments to nurturing a broad liberal spirit--to sign it. And I do think that the signers of this need to--but do not--reckon with Max Fisher:

Max Fisher: The New Republic and the Beltway Media's Race Problem: Hughes' predecessor, Marty Peretz, did much worse.... In the years of Peretz's ownership... [he] issue[d] rants that were breathtaking in their overt racism... blacks and Latinos... Muslims and Arabs.... The overwhelmingly white writers and editors who worked for Peretz knew his work was monstrous, and often struggled over the morality of accepting his money (as did I, during my brief internship there). But none ever resigned en masse.... His worst screeds... were reserved for Muslims and Arabs, whom he famously argued should all be stripped of free speech rights:

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imaam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

On the 'higher standards of civilization' that 'we' (that most telling pronoun) hold....

I actually believe that Arabs are feigning outrage when they protest what they call American (or Israeli) 'atrocities.' They are not shocked at all by what in truth must seem to them not atrocious at all. It is routine in their cultures. That comparison shouldn't comfort us as Americans. We have higher standards of civilization than they do. But the mutilation of bodies and beheadings of people picked up at random in Iraq does not scandalize the people of Iraq unless victims are believers in their own sect or members of their own clan. And the truth is that we are less and less shocked by the mass death-happenings in the world of Islam. Yes, that's the bitter truth. Frankly, even I--cynic that I am--was shocked in the beginning by the sectarian bloodshed in Iraq. But I am no longer surprised. And neither are you.

And no one resigned--including me.... Though I was unpaid, I eagerly accepted the resume-boosting prestige that came from working there. And, like the rest of the staff, I did it knowing it meant turning a blind eye to Peretz's frequent screeds... fully aware that they were... damaging to the minority families who had to live in a society that was that much more intolerant because Peretz enjoyed a platform that legitimized his views....

Peretz's rants were so easy to ignore: their many victims were, if you worked at The New Republic or a similar publication, comfortably out of sight. Any injury they suffered was easy to overlook. The fact that these editors felt such pain for Foer and Wieseltier highlights just how little pain they felt for Peretz's non-white targets. None could muster the same outrage, the same public denunciations, the same grand gesture on behalf of the black, Latino, Arab, and Muslim communities whose frequent public degradation they--we--tolerated for years.

Among black journalists on Twitter, there's... been some awe at the outrage that DC media has mustered.... The fact that there are two parallel conversations among journalists about this magazine, almost totally separated by race, further demonstrates the degree to which Washington's elite political publications are often not by, for, or about people of color.... A publication that buoyed anti-black, anti-Latino, anti-Arab, Islamophobic racism was tolerable. A publication that fired two beloved white men was not."

Artaphernes: Finally! Somebody else!

Polymarkhos: And I would add that the excellent Digby suggests that if the Old New Republic has claims to being a voice and a cause that override the neoliberal logic that requires finding a way of producing something that the market is willing to pay for, its would-be preservers should have written very different things in its pages over the past generation:

Digby: Hullabaloo: Here we have a venerable Village institution.... As has happened in villages, towns and cities all over the nation for the past several decades, new owners have come in and they've decided to change what the company does and move it to another place.... It happens every day in this country to people who have far fewer resources and fewer chances of recovering from the blow....

Elite liberals have sounded a lot like those people from Bryan, Ohio.... Just like those small town folk, they identify with the company, they live the traditions, it's part of who they are. And it's understandable and human to feel that way. But I couldn't help but think back to an editorial from 2011 about Occupy Wall Street. They stipulated that Wall Street has been very bad and should be rebuked. But they felt that OWS was terribly ill-mannered and failed to understand what liberalism, and perhaps more importantly, capitalism, was all about.... Matthew Yglesias responded by pointing out that TNR's editors seemed not to have noticed that average Americans were in deep economic distress:

[I]t’s worth reflecting on the idea that the instinct toward ideological police actions represented by TNR’s editorial has had a malign influence on American politics for years. Liberalism, in its triumphant years, represented the ‘vital center’ of American politics. The silence of further-left voices over the past decade has merely served to marginalize liberalism, creating an atmosphere in which center-left technocrat Barack Obama can be tarred as a radical socialist. The fact of the matter is that the American economy isn’t working for average Americans, and hasn’t been for some time. Meanwhile, the corporate executive class has gotten quite adept at standing in solidarity against effective regulation of the financial system, against solutions to our environmental problems, and against progressive taxes.

This week those editors got a taste of what their vaunted modern capitalist America is all about. A baby billionaire product of Wall Street's inexplicable value system bought the place for his own amusement. And then decided, as his CEO has been quoted saying recently, to 'break some shit.' And so he did. Fortunately for the people who are no longer employed at TNR, they will all likely end up working somewhere else doing what they do and being successful.... But a lot of Americans who have suffered this experience are not so lucky.... One can at least hope that some of those editors who were so disdainful of the impulse that led people to take to the streets and protest this ongoing, painful economic dislocation might have a little more empathy now.

After all, it can happen to anyone. Even The Liberal New Republic.

Sokrates: So let us take it as established that the sins of the Old New Republic were many and mighty...

Thrasymakos: ...as they were...

Sokrates: And let us take it as established that the Old New Republic was not very good at "telling people what they should think" in the Alfred Kazin sense of providing general enlightenment, taking a position on the moral and intellectual crisis, and providing inspiration; instead, merely being: "informative, saucy, in tone terribly sure of itself"...

Artaphernes: ...not to mention demonstrating week-by-week and issue-by-issue that going the extra mile to suck up to the manifold bigotries of Martin Peretz and company was no biggie...

Sokrates: But we are not, here and now, neoliberals. We do not believe that the logic of the market ought to rule. We do see a potential gap--a lack of a place that will nurture the writing of and then publicize the "tell people what they should think" arguments of Ryan Lizza on George Allen's racism, Jonathan Chait on the Netroots, Jonathan Chait on Bush hatred, Jonathan Cohn's early-2004 profile of Howard Dean, Andrew Sullivan's 1989 piece on gay marriage, and Spencer Ackerman and John B. Judis's "The First Casualty". So what is to be done?

Polymarkhos: Frank Foer and company appear to think that business should continue as usual, with Chris Hughes cast as the role of Fennyman in Shakespeare in Love: "ALLEYN (roars): Who are you? FENNYMAN (bleating): I--I am the money! ALLEYN: Then you may remain. So long as you remain silent. Pay attention. And you will see how genius creates a legend. FENNYMAN (respectfully): Thank you, sir."

Glaukon: Chris Hughes, unsurprisingly, disagrees, and thinks that the very sharp Gabriel Snyder has a better chance of taking his stake and even playing in the same league as http://vox.com, http://nytimes.com/theupshot, the Washington Monthly, and the American Prospect, where editors and writers...

Artaphernes: ...have not been chosen based on their willingness to go the extra mile to suck up to the manifold bigotries of Marty Peretz and company. Thank you.

Polymarkhos: Put that way--bet on Gabriel Snyder, or bet on Franklin Foer--and it does not look like a contest. Chances of success either way are not great.

Phryne: I am probably not the only one who has a hard time figuring out what Chris Hughes's vision is--what he wants Gabriel Snyder to do. Let's listen to Chris:

Chris Hughes: Crafting a sustainable New Republic: I didn’t buy the New Republic to be the conservator of a small print magazine whose long-term influence and survival were at risk. I came to... creat[e]... a sustainable business so that our journalism, values and voice--the things that make us singular--could survive.... At the heart of the conflict of the past few days is a divergent view... will survive. In one view, it is a ‘public trust’ and not a business... a charity... and that may be the right path for certain institutions.... I believe we owe it to ourselves and to this institution to aim to become a sustainable business....

The current choice is clear: Either walk away mourning a certain death or set to work building its future. That means we have to embrace some change.... Unless we experiment now, today’s young people will not even recognize the New Republic’s name nor care about its voice.... If we had wanted to chase traffic with listicles and slide shows, we would have. Instead, I have spent the last two and a half years supporting an institution whose mission I believe in and investing millions of dollars into its singular journalism.... If you really care about an institution and want to make it strong for the ages, you don’t walk out. You roll up your sleeves, you redouble your commitment to those ideals in a changing world, and you fight. This 100-year-old story is worth fighting for.

Polymarkhos: To me that seems fairly clear. Chris Hughes does not want to run a Buzzfeed clone. Chris Hughes also does not want to run a very small print magazine that has impact only when one of Ezra Klein's people at http://vox.com approves of something in it and writes up a 500-word precis.

Phryne: The only strategy that makes sense is to do your work and issue it at every conceivable possible length. The one-sentence version. The 300-word paragraph weblog post. The 800-word op-ed. The 2000-word explainer. The 7000-word longform. And as you ride the flow crest of the now you build the stock of durable arguments that you want to refer to again and again as reference points and monuments for understanding.

Glaukhon: And issue it through every conceivable channel?

Phryne: Yes.

Kephalos: But couldn't Franklin Foer have ringmastered all of that? He is supposed to be a very good editor, even though he was originally chosen to edit the Old New Republic because...

Artaphernes: You want me to say it? OK: because he was willing to go the extra mile to suck up to the manifold bigotries of Martin Peretz and company.

Glaukon: If you take Dylan Matthews's Vox Sentences http://www.vox.com/2014/10/18/7000531/vox-sentences as your guide for a market test, only 2 out of 175 links last week went to the Old New Republic--to Brian Buetler for his 1000 words on John Boehner's Dingbat Immigration Kabuki, and to Noam Scheiber for how the rise of the sharing economy is a great case for the welfare state. That's not enough mindshare to make Chris Hughes--or, indeed, anyone--happy.

Thrasymakhos: Chris Hughes is willing to throw his money to Gabriel Snyder to try to create a profitable something in this space. If he fails, what do we lose? The Old New Republic was always a worse Public Interest than the Public Interest was and than the National Interest now is, a worse Nation than the Nation, a worse Washington Monthly than the Washington Monthly, a worse American Prospect than the American Prospect. It was world-class in snark, #slatepitches-avant-le-letter, and "Even the liberal New Republic"--and in telling many, many members of the left, over and over again, whether they were union workers, African-Americans, feminists, Arabs, Muslims, that their voices didn't matter. What are we giving up in order for Chris Hughes to make this bet on Gabriel Snyder? I don't see it.

Kephalos: We are giving up the long historical tradition of intellectual activism and engagement of the Old New Republic.

Polymarkhos: Are we? Let me quote Jeet Heer:

[Old] New Republic nostalgists (a position I have some sympathy for) are trying to have it both ways, which is a problem. [Old] New Republic nostalgists say "the magazine is a public trust, a venerable and vulnerable institution, deserves protection." But if the [Old] New Republic is to be protected because it is a trust and a venerable institution, then its history via race and gender is worth exploring. And when you raise the race/gender history of [O]TNR, the immediate answer is: "that was 20 years ago, has nothing to do with magazine now". So as always, [O]TNR's venerable history is selectively deployed, only to defend magazine but not hold it responsible for its past.... Let's be blunt: even if the [Old] New Republic had never excerpted The Bell Curve as a cover story, the magazine would have a dire history on racism....

From its inception in 1914, TNR was the magazine for Harvard graduates (Croly, Lippmann) who wanted to lead the progressive coalition. With the rise of the new social movements of the 1960s, there was a society-wide push for inclusiveness on gender and race lines.... What distinguished Peretz's [O]TNR is that it resisted this new push for inclusiveness, both ideologically and in its hiring practices.... This [ideological] push against inclusiveness and its attendant hiring practices explains the core problem of [O]TNR on racism: its indifference to black voices...

Sokrates: If I may sum up, the case we have for the Old New Republic is that it provided a space where Spencer Ackerman, Jonathan Chait, Jonathan Cohn, John Judis, Ryan Lizza, and Andrew Sullivan could write http://www.newrepublic.com/full-access?destination=node/65427, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/the-lefts-new-machine-how-the-netroots-became-the-most-importantmass-movement-us-politics, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/mad-about-you, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/moral-center, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/79054/here-comes-the-groom, and http://www.newrepublic.com/article/the-first-casualty. Those are all articles that meet Alfred Kazin's charge to provide landmarks and monuments that provide "general enlightenment on the... crisis underlying the crisis of the week... inspiration... [and a] social ideal". And the fear is that whatever emerges from Chris Hughes's and Gabriel Snyder's New New Republic will not. It seems to me that the advocates of the Old New Republic need to provide more examples--examples more recent than Jonathan Chait's 2007 article on the netroots--of such work if they are to justify their position that it is better to keep things as they were last week than for Chris Hughes to make his bet on Gabriel Snyder. If the advocates cannot bring more such forward, then I think the last line should belong to the estimable Duncan Black:

Duncan Black: This Venerable Institution: Like BooMan says... exactly when was The New Republic some sort of venerable institution? Not in my lifetime. To the extent that good people are losing their jobs (though everyone seems to ignore the fact that other than Foer and Wieseltier, they quit) well, I'm sorry about that, and if they fail to find new career possibilities then bummer for them. Though, again, they did quit. Maybe with good reason, but still!

But otherwise we're just left with this idea that we must lament the fact that [O]TNR went from having one truly odious boss that everyone pretended wasn't odious to having a new boss that for whatever reasons (maybe good ones!) many of the current staff don't want to work for. Life sucks sometimes. But, venerable institution? I guess if you just ignore all the bad stuff over the last 40 years.