Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...Two years after Carter published his book, I joined the New Republic as a summer intern. I was thrilled. I had been reading the magazine since high school, and idolized its most prominent writers: Michael Kinsley, Hendrik Hertzberg, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lewis, Michael Kelly, and, yes, Leon Wieseltier, who last month was accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen of his former colleagues. If someone had made TNR writers into baseball cards, by age 15 I would have had a complete set.... I’d spent years mimicking TNR.... I had the right sort of clips.... As a white man graduating from an Ivy League school, I also had the right sort of identity. It was difficult to disentangle the two. And I didn’t really try.... because the magazine afforded me extraordinary opportunity. Soon, I was not only working alongside people I revered, I was being given the chance to ascend to their level....

At some level, I knew the answer. White men from fancy schools advanced quickly at the New Republic because that’s who the owner and editor in chief, Marty Peretz, liked surrounding himself with. He ignored women almost entirely. There were barely any African Americans on staff.... TNR published an excerpt of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s book, The Bell Curve.... Marty felt a particular hostility to affirmative action. The irony—which I didn’t dwell on at the time—was that the magazine was itself a hothouse of racial and sexual preference... never stated formally.... To borrow Ta-Nehisi Coates’s metaphor, my race, gender, and class provided me a “tailwind.” I was running hard. But without that tailwind, it’s unlikely I would have become the magazine’s editor at age 28....

Carter['s]... affirmative action... remedied historic injustices. Mine perpetuated them.... Affirmative action enabled... Wieseltier’s sexual harassment... Leon’s sexual harassment reinforced... affirmative action. Men ran the magazine, and Leon’s behavior helped keep it that way. To ascend at TNR, you had to be a protégé of either Marty or Leon’s... writing things they considered smart. For women, by contrast, mentorship was far trickier. Marty wasn’t an option. Leon was, but his mentorship often involved sexualization. If you accepted it, you gained a supporter but compromised yourself. If you spurned it, you became invisible to the magazine’s two most powerful men.

I’d like to say that when I became editor, I fundamentally changed all this. But I did not.... Had I challenged that culture more emphatically, I would probably not have become editor in the first place.... A series of moral compromises. From my time as a junior editor, I was handed pieces to edit—generally written or commissioned by Marty—that made sweeping, hostile generalizations about Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims. I would cut as much as I felt I could get away with, and soften or nuance the rest. But I didn’t refuse to edit the pieces at all, since that would have imperiled my relationship with my mentors. (In fact, when I began writing more critically about Israeli policy after leaving the magazine, my relationships with both Marty and Leon swiftly declined.)...

When Marty fired Michael Kelly (who later became editor of The Atlantic), in part because Kelly was critical of Marty’s friend and former student, Al Gore, I considered resigning. But I feared I’d never find another job I enjoyed as much. Two years later, I was editor myself.... Those concessions created the template for my response to my former colleague Sarah Wildman when, in 2002, she told me about Leon’s inappropriate sexual advances. I believed her.... I also knew that I lacked authority over Leon.... So I called Marty—who spent most of his time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York—and asked him to come to Washington to tell Leon that his behavior was unacceptable. (Marty has told Vox that I never reported the incident to him and that he doesn’t “remember Sarah Wildman.” Leon did not respond to my request for comment.)

Marty, Leon, and I met at the Willard Hotel. When I confronted him, Leon—who had a gift for intimidation—reacted ferociously. “Is this some kind of intervention?” he roared. Marty didn’t push back. That was it.... I could have threatened to resign.... I might have shifted the power dynamic, and forced Marty into taking some action that punished Leon and validated Sarah, which might have begun to erode the impunity that made Leon’s behavior possible. But I did not. By 2002, I had already made a series of moral compromises in order to stay at TNR, and in ways I didn’t fully realize, each laid the foundation for the next.

I don’t know know whether my experience is typical of men who are complicit in institutions that tolerate sexual harassment. What I do know is that the affirmative action I enjoyed, and the sexual harassment Sarah suffered, were connected. I was given extraordinary opportunity at TNR, in large measure, because talented women like Sarah Wildman were not. In this regard, I suspect, I have something in common with the supporters of Donald Trump. It’s not pleasant to realize that the bygone age you romanticize—the age when America was still great—was great for you, or people like you, because others were denied a fair shot....

A lot of white American men look at Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, and mass immigration, and the global competition for jobs, and the taking down of Confederate monuments, and even the revolt against sexual harassment, and fear all this means there will be less left for them. And they experience these attacks on their privilege as a desecration of the natural order, an attack on institutions that benefitted them, and to which they felt deep loyalty in return...