The New New Republic: House Organ of the Obama Administration and Martin Peretz’s Forthright Condemnation
Kudos to Marty Peretz, who in 1974 bought The New Republic and became its editor-in-chief, where he stayed until he sold the magazine in 2012. He has taken a brave step: he has gone public in the Wall Street Journal to write, having read the cover story in the current issue by Sam Tanenhaus, that: “I still don’t recognize the magazine that I sold in 2012 to the Facebook zillionaire Chris Hughes.”
Peretz continues:
“Original Sin,” by Sam Tanenhaus, purported to explain “Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people.” The provocative theme would not have been unthinkable in the magazine’s 99-year history, but the essay’s reliance on insinuations of GOP racism (“the inimical ‘they’ were being targeted by a spurious campaign to pass voter-identification laws, a throwback to Jim Crow”) and gross oversimplifications hardly reflected the intellectual traditions of a journal of ideas. What made the “Original Sin” issue unrecognizable to this former owner is that it established as fact what had only been suggested by the magazine in the early days of its new administration: The New Republic has abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or the Nation.
Peretz is more than correct; the magazine has further become an adjunct of the Obama administration, shilling for it and the most leftist Democrats. Its current stance brings to the fore the blatant lie by its new Editor-in-Chief Hughes, who has publicly said that the magazine will be non-partisan and balanced.
This was not what made the journal a must-read in the ’70s and ’80s. Indeed, as I argued a few months ago:
Before long, TNR took positions that furiously antagonized its liberal base. In the ’80s, during the Central American wars in which the Reagan administration took on the fight against the Communist revolutionaries in El Salvador and Nicaragua, TNR stood with those opposed to the Sandinistas and the FSLN. Indeed, at a critical moment, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Marty Peretz, openly sided with Nicaragua’s contras, the very armed resistance to the Sandinistas that the liberal community had painted as a bunch of fascist goons. That editorial position enraged many of its editors, who signed a letter to the editor protesting the magazine’s editorial. Before long, whenever TNR took a position opposite to that taken by most self-proclaimed liberals, a new saying emerged in Washington D.C. circles, “even the liberal New Republic says … ”.
I predicted that since Hughes said it would be a magazine of “progressive values,” the journal of opinion would quickly veer to the left and would abandon the stance that once made it essential reading, abandon what gave it a cutting edge. I asked:
Does anyone really think that Hughes will let his new magazine be anything but a vehicle for a second Obama administration?
Some were skeptical of my prediction, arguing that I had not given the new TNR a chance. Sadly, I have been proven correct, and finally Marty Peretz himself now feels the need to make this clear.
I went on to argue that we did not need a magazine slightly to the right of The Nation, and for the intellectual group, as we already had the left-wing slant of The New Yorker. At the time, I hoped I was wrong, but noting that I was essentially a pessimist, “I only expect the worst.”
Peretz accurately summed up what TNR represented when he ran it:
We were for the Contras in Nicaragua; wary of affirmative action; for military intervention in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur; alarmed about the decline of the family. The New Republic was also an early proponent of gay rights. We were neoliberals. We were also Zionists, and it was our defense of the Jewish state that put us outside the comfort zone of modern progressive politics.
The only position Peretz mentions that the journal still adheres to is gay rights, since that too has become a main cause of the left, one that is not surprising to those who make identity politics their major and sometimes only concern.
Now, with their new first issue featuring a softball interview with the president – a lovefest to his presidency by a publisher and editor-in-chief who served on his 2008 election campaign — and a second issue with a facile and extreme denunciation of Republicans as racist by Tanenhaus, its true colors are clear. The cover, one obviously taken from the White Album, reveals the new TNR — all hat, no cattle. It’s slick, larger and better print, and glossier paper. Within its pages, a very clear lack of any real substance.
Hughes is trying to rescue the magazine by lowering its subscription price from close to $100 a year to $35, and by throwing out ideas such as starting a network of TNR stores that will sell the magazine along with coffee and items with the magazine’s logo. Somewhere, Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and the contributors Peretz mentions — the likes of Virginia Woolf, Reinhold Niebuhr, Rebecca West, and John Maynard Keynes — are looking at the magazine and wondering: “What is this strange rag using the name of our old venerable publication? We simply don’t recognize it.”
So long, TNR, you will be missed.
The moderate men are still in charge, even as they move to more and more statist positions: their key words are “balance,” “social cohesion” and “political stability.” I decoded their psychological warfare tactics here: http://clarespark.com/2010/11/06/moderate-men-falling-down/.
Of course, Clare is absolutely correct.
Flowery words for iron-fisted tyranny.
As neo-leftist journOListas lily the guild.
I actually felt a twinge of regret when I let my longstanding subscription lapse several years ago. Thanks for reminding me that it was a good decision.
“Progressive” has ever been a cover for outright Communists and soft fascists.
But, really, painting the GOP as racist is very Ho-Hum. Typical lefty boilerplate. The party of the KKK, Segregation and racial division is the Democrat Party, along with the NAACP, and the other assorted racialist grievance groups they court. They merely have switched targets and try to scare minorities instead of white people.
In one of my less lucid moments, when bullied by a cabal of academics, I threw up my hands and said, “Okay, I confess. I am a racist. It is just a word, a label. Why won’t you engage with my ideas?” All that they remembered my saying was that “I am a racist,” a phrase that went all round the department. They refused to engage with my ideas. A strange thing was that one of the complaints they made was that I read Peretz’s New Republic. Stalinistas are alive and well and lurking in every corner of the globe. Marty is well out of the publishing business.
throw in the Atlantic Monthly as well-predictible, banal etc…
although still read Harpers
Proud owner of an autographed copy of Lewis Lapham’s collection, “A Portrait of the United States as Spendthrift Heir”
Another Leftist computer industry mogul, making his mark in progressiveness.
Shame, but TNR really hasnt been worth reading since Beinart left, IMO.
Marty Peretz will be and is missed. TNR, not so much.
I know readers that have cancelled subscriptions and are abandoning TNR. Like K2K who comments here sometimes.
Like the ACLU and the AAUP, The New Republic has been taken over by people with an agenda driven mostly by identity politics and little use for more traditional liberal ideals.
It is sad that the traditional defenders of such items as freedom of speech and equality before the law have for the most part abandoned their former commitments and what is worse, expend a great deal of energy to make it difficult for any others to take their place.
For many, many years I subscribed to both TNR and The Nation. There actually was a significant difference between them long ago. I let the TNR subscription lapse when the quality of the writing declined and when it’s viewpoint became superfluous to a Nation subscriber. Sad.
Traditional American “liberalism” is dead, replaced by the poisonous Left.
Incidentally, being of Central-American origin myself, I have a name for the motley, contentious collection of souls who resist the Left in America today.
I call us counter-revolutionaries, that is, Contras.
Identity politics seem to have smothered liberalism and shredded subtlety of thought. It’s all emotion now, raw and crude and seething with hate. Sad, so sad. RIP, TNR.
The Tannenhaus article is one that previously would’ve been seen only in the black press. The article’s invocation of the words “original sin” and the article itself shows to what extent not only race has become the centerpiece of the Dem Party but the extent to which it has adopted the racial paranoia and even hate speech of the black political Left.
It’s no coincidence that the titular head of the Dem Party spent 20 years in a racial cult led by a pastor who routinely targeted Jews or whites to standing ovations, and gave its highest honor to a Jew-hater and white-hater, Louis Farrakhan. Meanwhile Mitt Romney was painted with Obama’s reality while Obama himself was painted as “post-racial.”
“Original sin” indicates that not only the GOP but all white people in America bear some kind of racial guilt. The whites in the Dem Party actively participate in this canard by working off the wages of sin stamped in their “DNA” while the recalcitrant GOP stubbornly resists coming to grips with the endemic racism of whites.
It’s one thing to mischaracterize the history of America then and now and quite another thing to indulge in a logic that casually tosses about a generational guilt by race for whites even as it rails against the idea when it comes to black crime only hours old, a sub-culture where vicious sociopathy and racial obsession is celebrated at the BET Awards to be passed on to the next generation. It just depends what race you are before you can carry guilt for what your fellow skin color does.
Clever arguments like white privilege and the New Jim Crow twist logic like the wind blows about a weather vane until a binding principle is completely forgotten and the anti-racists adopt a racist argument that basically says right and wrong are conveyed by skin. The Left works almost tirelessly to scrub away morality from white people and glue it onto non-whites, even going so far as to hire 3 career race-pimps at the Dem Party’s most prominent television propaganda channel, MSNBC.
At Arianna Huffinton’s Pravda-lite, they celebrate a black and Latino voices section even as they decry the idea of a white voices section, and a “frighteningly white” Carmel, CA described on their website during the RNC. The HuffPo whines about unions even while they violate union principles by not paying their celebrity bloggers who are in essence scabs even while they jealously guard their Screen Actors Guild privileges from starry-eyed wannabes who would do the same thing those celebrity bloggers do.
Orwell once wrote “…any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer.”
That is because people who adopt a narrow orthodoxy eventually disable their ability to use reason or common sense, or make even the simplest comparisons. No matter how true a comparison is, it is heresy to acknowledge it – principle is destroyed. This has been clearly seen on the Left as regards Obama’s drone strikes. The Left acknowledges it’s wrong, but not as wrong as such power in the hands of the GOP, much the same way a room is not truly a room or a country is not truly a country unless the people in it reflect diversity – racial diversity, because race conveys, as does gender, even while content of character is lip synched.
The Left believes in the idea of the benevolent dictator – identity over principle – wise Latinas and the innate morality of gays and women. This is in keeping with nanny states, putting a helmet on the entire nation as regards salt and big gulps, and damping the ardor of straight, white men, who are the Dagwood Bumsteads of history.
The political Left in America firmly believes they are on the field with Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but the liberal de facto argument that skin color conveys and detracts qualities even while they argue the exact opposite not only put the Dem Party high in the stands of those Olympics but argues a delusional hypocrisy that grates on Winston Smith until he can stand no more.
The demonization of white Europeans in the halls of power continues apace.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/02/14/Exclusive-Judicial-Watch-USDA
Thank you, Fail Burton. as usual.
From the Atlantic Wire:
Maybe Peretz just feels left out. As we reported just over a year ago, Peretz wasn’t even involved in the initial conversations that lead to Hughes taking over the magazine. A couple of months later, news emerged that Peretz wouldn’t be contributing to the magazine for the first time since 1974. That’s almost like telling a father in the autumn of his life that he’s no longer allowed to speak to his kids. Rough stuff. So if Peretz wants to rant a little bit, let the man rant.
Perfectly nonsensical non-response to what he actually said. The hallmark of trolls and liberals everywhere.
Since Peretz made his money by marrying a rich woman, from your point of view the second best way of getting rich after simply inheriting the dough, it’s hardly surprising that you lot think he’s some sort of oracle.
Simple counterpoint: Peretz was a major fan of the Iraq war, the single dumbest foreign policy move in U.S. history. Case closed. He’s a loser like the rest of you.
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. As a result, we stationed troops in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden states in an open letter those troops on holy soil is the major reason for 9/11.
There is no more Hussein to lead to that kind of cause and effect. How is that America’s worst blunder in FP? Imagine Hussein or one of his sons running Iraq today, especially with Syria in turmoil and Iran chasing A-bombs. We put the grief the Hussein family would’ve given us for the next 50 years in one basket and got it over with. Now it’s done. The ME is better off for it.
Brilliant! I look forward to your proof that OJ was actually innocent. You argue like a defense attorney.
You start your story with the First Gulf War as if what went before never happened. In fact, Hussein, that great monster, had been Bush’s fair haired boy during the years when we supported him in his aggressive war against Iran. America has seldom had any difficulty supporting dictators and other unpleasant regimes when it suits us—we’re still in bed with the Saudis, for example, even though Saudi Arabia is the real homeland of Sunni terrorism.
There was a Kuwait invasion and a war in the first place because the older Bush didn’t manage his client very well—he had a history of that. (Noriega, you may remember, was a CIA asset in the days when Bush ran the CIA and a criminal mastermind later when it became convenient to invade Panama.) The illegality and, more importantly, the political stupidity of American foreign policy in the Middle East didn’t begin with the Second Gulf War.
I knew back in the day that no matter how disastrously the invasion of Iraq turned out, the neocons and their fellow travelers would find some way to declare victory. Your remarks show that I was right, not that you had to be much of a prophet to predict that. In fact, of course, the war was a mess from beginning to end. It was undertaken under false pretenses, promoted with lies, conducted with contempt for the norms of international law, poorly planned, and poorly executed. It made no sense at all from an economic, moral, or political point of view and predictably resulted in the creation of an unstable and miserable state with strong ties to Iran. Iraqis have every reason to hate us, even though many of them are doubtless glad that Saddam is gone. From their point of view, the whole affair exemplified the old principle that the enemy of my enemy is also a dick, in this case, Dick Cheney.
Please don’t waste your time and energy responding to Jim Harrishmuck a.k.a. Jim Hitlerson. He has venomous opinions on every topic, even ones he knows nothing about. He is simply too ignorant to understand how ignorant he is. However, he thinks he knows everything about everything and thinks he has the solution to all of the world’s problems. The guy is what Thomas Sowell might call a self-anointed messiah. He believes that civilized and successful people and countries are intrinsically evil and he has a vicious hatred of Jews and of Israel. His posts are often incoherent ramblings. He evades questions, he tells outright lies and he throws tantrums. Please don’t waste your time and energy on this immature, malignant, narcissistic, attention-starved, anti-Semitic demagogue.
I wish I had said that.
“..the single dumbest foreign policy move in U.S. history.”
A million dead Kurds would disagree.
“Case closed. He’s a loser like the rest of you.”
Behold the power of the leftist mental faculty.
You’ll be sure to convince alot of folk with coherent statements like that Jimbo.
I, too, was very moved by Martin Peretz’s piece in WSJ. It must hurt him to see his magazine fall hopelessly in love with Pres. Obama even tho he did support him the first time around. He did mention, however, that Leon Wieseltier is still writing his Washington Diarist for TNR and I have to say his article “Footprints” is one of the best analysis of the Obama-Hagel consensus on American foreign policy I have read. A few short excerpts:”The new F-word in Washington, the one that it is impolite to utter, is ‘freedom’…I do not understand all this good conscience about the weakening of America’s influence in the world world, since I regard America’s influence as generally a blessing for the world…Putin, a strong-footprint man; but from Obama their valiant opponents [those giving their lives against the Syrian and other dictatorships] get only complexity, passivity, and loquacity…[finally quoting General Eisenhower (Ike) who once said “There is no alternative to peace” Leon coments: “Alas, the world is lousy with people and powers who think otherwise. It may be the dumbest thing ever said by a soldier.” This is in the February 11, 2013 TNR. I think its worth keeping up with Wieseltier alone – you can always get or read TNR in the library. I agree the direction of TNR does not look good – but perhaps selective reading of such sane and independent writers as Paul Berman, Adam Kirsch and a couple of others may yet make it worth looking into. But thanks to Peretz and Radosh for the wake-up calls! Shalom, Cantor Bob
Well, I guess I’m glad to see Peretz staking out some independent ground, but I remember when he owned TNR and I’d read his blog frequently. His thoughts on international affairs seemed reasonable, and his defense of Israel a breath of fresh air, but on domestic politics he was shrill, hyperbolic and often downright hateful about anyone to the right of Bill Clinton.
The left has been way out since the hippie movement. From that time on, degrees don’t matter. It’s just a progressive cancer.
Herbert Croly is one of the first Leftist voices in America and the herald of the Left’s takeover of liberalism. He might not recognize the magazine now, but I would not absolve him of his part in bringing it (and American liberalism) to such a pass, anymore than I will absolve any modern Leftist of *their* role should I encounter them screaming “But I didn’t mean THIS!” among the ruins.
Hah!
Indeed.