Here’s my question about the death of The New Republic
If you’re going to buy the venerable liberal publication The New Republic only to turn it into a “digital media company,” why bother to buy it at all? Why not just start your own digital media company and leave TNR to limp along and die in peace?
I’m no TNR fan, and I often criticize it on this blog. But it’s long exhibited more intelligence than most liberal publications, and a more robust attitude towards foreign policy. When not-dry-behind-the-ears Facebook wunderkind Chris Hughes purchased it and promised to respect it, did anyone actually believe him? Certainly not this writer, who predicted at the outset that Hughes would end up canning TNR’s longtime editor and columnist Leon Wieseltier, although it took a bit longer than forecast and involved a lot more people than Wieseltier. So many people have as a result quit the magazine in addition to those fired by Hughes that it would make more sense to list the people who appear to be staying than those leaving.
Wieseltier, by the way, is a curious figure, emblematic of TNR’s former place in the liberal pantheon. He was an Obama supporter in 2008, albeit one with reservations. He wrote the following at the time, which shows that he misjudged Obama by giving him far too much credit, and he largely misread him, although not entirely. A tiny warning bell was ringing in Wieseltier’s ears, and the editor, whose Scoop Jacksonesque liberalism is as old-fashioned as the sophisticated flow of his prose, could not entirely ignore it:
Obama is a smart man. He is a decent man. He is an undangerous man, in the manner of all pragmatists and opportunists. He reveres reason, though he often confuses it with conversation. His domestic goals are good, though the titans of American finance, the greedy geniuses of Wall Street, may have made many of those goals fantastic. He will see to it that some liberalism survives at the Supreme Court. This leaves only the rest of the world. What a time for a novice! I dread the prospect of Obama’s West Wing education in foreign policy: even when he spoke well about these matters in the debates, it all sounded so new to him, so light.
Wieseltier is snob enough to hate Sarah Palin (and I think “hate” is really the correct word) but he was also patriot enough to have hated Bill Ayers even more, and distrusted Obama because of his association with him:
I must say that the Ayers affair rankles me, because I would not shake the man’s dirty hand; and the fact that Obama was eight years old at the time of the Weather Underground is no more pertinent to his moral and historical awareness than the fact that he was six years old at the time of the King assassination.
When you read the essay, you can see why newcomers such as Hughes and his henchman Vidra (who used to work for the illustrious Gawker) have no use for Wieseltier’s fussy style or his old-fashioned love of this country. When I read it myself, here in late 2014, it made me wonder what Wieseltier thinks of Obama these days.
This essay from last April gave me the answer, which is that Wieseltier is well aware that the foreign policy prospect he dreaded so much in 2008 has come true:
…[T]he president feels inconvenienced by history. It refuses to follow his program for it. It regularly exasperates him and regularly disappoints him. It flows when he wants it to ebb and it ebbs when he wants it flow. Like Mr. Incredible, the president is flummoxed that the world won’t stay saved, or agree to be saved at all. After all, he came to save it. And so the world has only itself to blame if Obama is sick of it and going home…
…[T]he Obama administration abandons to their fates one people after another, who pay the price for the president’s impatience with large historical struggles. The Ukrainians, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Moldovans, the Poles, the Czechs, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the Baltic populations: they are all living with the jitters, and some of them on the cusp of despair, because the United States seems no longer reliable in emergencies…
Obama’s impatience with history has left him patient with evil. It is not a pretty sight; but his broken foreign policy is riddled with such ironies…The grim fact is that Obama’s containment is not containing Putin, whose “green men” and “peoples’ republics” and Big Lies and Russophilic incitement and covert operations and military deployments are undeterred by it. While Obama pitches the “off-ramp,” Putin revels in the on-ramp. Geneva is now the world capital of failure. The only country that American containment is containing is America.
…But the richest of the ironies about Obama’s foreign policy is this: the world that in his view wanted to be rid of American salience now longs for it…There are many places in the world where we are despised not for taking action but for not taking action. Our allies do not trust us. Our enemies do not fear us. What if American preeminence is good for the world and good for America?
It’s worth reading in its entirety, much like that earlier essay of Wieseltier’s. There are many rich ironies, and one of them is that Wieselthier voted for Obama in 2008, and thought him an “undangerous” man.
I believe his name is Chris Hughes.
Factchecker:
Thanks, will fix.
This news that ISIS may have a dirty bomb, if true, could be a game changer.
Too bad Obama didn’t take ISIS seriously and crush them when he could. Too busy fulfilling his promise to end wars.
And is there any couple in America more repulsive than Chris Hughes and his husband?
None at all. Repulsive duo.
But reflect instead on the sheer genius of Chris Hughes being assigned to Zuckerberg’s dorm room in his freshman year.
The quote starting: “Obama is a smart man. He is a decent man. He is an undangerous man…” confesses all that is wrong with venerable liberal publications and venerable liberals, and why both will go the way of the dodo. Who could not see, if they were not blinded, that Obama is a totem and his IQ is demonstrably belied by his performance. He is also, by any measure, NOT a decent man; he is an ideological cipher. And undangerous? Risible, if it were not for the social, cultural, and political rubble that is, to a great extent, of his own making.
There’s nothing to be said in defense of venerable liberalism; either you see what is in front of your nose and object or you are steadfast to the ideology. There’s no middle ground. Straddle the fence too long and the integrity of your genitals (manhood) will be questioned.
I used to read The New Republic regularly and had a subscription for some time. This was in my liberal but not “classic liberal” years. I respected the writing, as above, and still do. Of course, they disappoint now time and again with their political views, but the Scoop Jackson Democrat views of Wieseltier are nonetheless important and refreshing in light of the Democrat party’s retreat toward Obama’s foreign policy. They also had interesting views on art and were not as wacky as the Nation in their left leaning views. So, in other words, I think they are going to be missed. Obviously. Chris Hughes bungled this and while he may be right that TNR needed to get more “eyeballs” as they say, online- this was not the way to do it. The integrity of the publication was destroyed by his ham handed approach. Too bad, as they still make a contribution. Or, made…
Interesting that Wieseltier was so wrong about Obama, even as he sensed early on that his foreign policy — sucked (not a TNR way of putting it, though I am sure Chris Hughes would use the term, though maybe not for Obama). I am glad he came to realize just how right he was… I will never understand how people like that voted for the clown, and put this country in such dangerous and put the entire world in danger. Foreign policy is no small thing. But there you go– the lemmings on the march.
Frankly, it’s also a little scary when being 60 years old is seen as a bad thing in journalism or anything besides being a runway model, ballet dancer or professional athlete. I am commenting on the interesting article you linked to about Chris Hughes and Wieseltier’s most likely outing when Hughes took over. I am not yet that old, but it looms, I think I know a hell of a lot more than I did at Hughes age, even if I am stiffer when I get up out of a chair after sitting awhile, or if my spelling is not what it used to be. Even so… so that’s a bad sign too.
“Obama’s impatience with history has left him patient with evil.”
It was always so.
I don’t feel badly for these smug DC writers who now have a real-life taste of what it means to have something they cherish “fundamentally transformed.” There are a lot of good people in other, less lofty professions who have their employer or industry destroyed by the “smart,” “decent” and “undangerous” Obama. I hope other venerable liberal media outlets befall the same fate.
Chris Hughes isn’t just a Facebook founder, he left that company in 2008 to work on MyBarackObama.com, the candidate’s social networking site. In that role he “changed politics and marketing forever” according to Fact Company. Now there’s a fine example of the kind of well-connected 1%’er who is positioned perfectly to thrive during Obama’s presidency. I’m sure that if he had instead decided to buy up a bunch of established coal processing plants and then shut them down in order to pursue green energy the writers of TNR would be cheering. An unfortunate variation of NIMBY – Not In My Industry (NIMI), I guess…
Obama is “…patient with evil.” Perfect. I’m stealing it immediately.
I subscribed to TNR for the decade of the ’70s and often bought it off the stand after that. When the then sane Andrew Sullivan was Editor it often got near conservative in its leaning. A Sully ‘TRB’ piece from February 2001 entitled “Psycho” on Clinton’s manic last(pardoning hours)rip at the presidency was absolutely brilliant. And, Michael Kelley was a hugely gifted editor, too. (RIP-Killed in Iraq ’03).
RIP old TNR. Lord, now left for The Nation and its Comrades. Gag…Patooooey..!
When Stalin spoke of “useful idiots” he had men such as Wieseltier in mind. Chris Hughes and others of his ilk are those who get wistful when reflecting upon Bill Ayers estimate that in 1970’s America, 25 million Americans would have to be executed in order to permanently transform America into a Marxist society.
neo points out, “[The New Republic (TNR) has] long exhibited more intelligence than most liberal publications.”
To a point. In my younger, more idealistic and less disgusted days, I subscribed to TNR because I believed they made the most intelligent case for the other side [which was the case and still may be the case], and I wanted to be both open to, and familiar with, that case.
Long-story-short: I finally discontinued when I got irreversibly *fed* *up* with how they constantly and consistently denigrated not just my intelligence but my *integrity*. Why was I paying to be insulted, with little-to-no redeeming accrued value received otherwise?
End of mini-rant.
What if American preeminence is good for the world and good for America?
An America run by idiot editors and evil Emperors, is good for the world?
In no world, is that so.
UGH. Ambiguity in my prose.
Please replace, in the above,
[which was the case and still may be the case]
with
[which was so and still may be so].
So when I wrote,
“I wanted to be both open to, and familiar with, that case,” I was referring back to “the most intelligent case for the other side”.
TNR was a very interesting magazine through the late 80s and much if not all of the 90s. I lost faith when the Stephen Glass affair hit the fan — and in any case I’d never liked the bitchy, Spy-magazine tone of his pieces, many of which I never read. Trying too hard to be young and hip when you’re gettting old never seems to work out too well.
I lost faith when the Stephen Glass affair hit the fan – and in any case I’d never liked the bitchy, Spy-magazine tone of his pieces, many of which I never read.
Dumb of me (immediately above this post) to say I “never read” the articles by Glass. More plausible is that I sometimes (or often) didn’t finish them. They were discordant with the tone of the rest of the magazine.
I began reading New Republic in high school. My drift to the right was assisted by New Republic’s articles against the Sandinistas in the 1980s.
IIRC, New Republic also pointed out that after the Iraq War I’s outcome was not in doubt, a staffer for John Kerry wrote a letter to a constituent about how Senator Kerry had supported the war. The only problem was that Senator Kerry, along with nearly all the Democrats in the Senate, had voted against it. New Republic pointed it out. Would it have done so today? Not likely.
The New Republic wasn’t batshit crazy like The Nation.
Over the years, I read New Republic less and less. Stephen Glass’s escapades did not escape my notice. The nail in the coffin for me was Jonathan Chait’s I hate President George W. Bush.
Even so, there was still some quality about the magazine.There were some good writers who resigned, such as Anne Applebaum, Robert Kagan, and Paul Berman. Paul Berman wrote some very good articles on the Sandinistas.
The New Republic is Chris Hughes’s toy to do with as he sees fit. I am not surprised that a nouveau riche arrogant leftie has done what what he did.
Well done. Enjoyed the read. Replete with ironies.
The nexus between TNR (in due course), Chris Hughes, the Obama campaign, appallingly illiberal electoral tactics, and Bill Ayers was out there even before the 2008 election… Writing this in 2012 or so, I intended it as an op-ed, but none of the Soviet Media would run it. I’ve flogged it in threads across the center-right blogosphere ever since…
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Chris Hughes, who now owns the venerable New Republic outright, was one of the original FaceBook developers which led in due course to him becoming a wealthy fellow indeed.
He was also in charge, during the run-up to the 2008 elections, of all the Social Media projects at the Obama for President campaign’s national HQ in Chicago.
A few weeks before the November ballot date, Mr. Hughes either was or was not personally behind Obama HQ’s organized denial-of-service (DOS) attack on the call-in phone lines for old-line liberal prof. Milt Rosenberg’s radio talk show, when Rosenberg was interviewing nasty wingnut polemicist Stanley Kurtz, Ph. D., who had just finished researching the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) held in the library at the University of Illinois, Chicago: a public institution assuredly not to be confused with the very private University of Chicago.
The CAC board was headed by the egregious silver-spoon revolutionary Wm. Ayers; allegedly, “just some guy from the neighborhood”, who had handpicked Barack Obama to be its Director throughout the three-year (?) project period. Indeed, that was Obama’s sole executive position ever, prior to his entering electoral politics.
Ayers was then still on the UIC faculty, and likely may have instigated the abortive attempt by the UIC Library to withdraw its earlier permission to Kurtz to access the stacks, which collapsed when the center-right blogosphere got wind of that ploy… Although never a word on it appeared in the mainstream media (not least, in the Chicago Tribune, which was and is the owner of WGN).
The terms of the CAC’s fund-raising required an uncharacteristically robust post-facto evaluation of the project, which concluded that essentially the $120 million (!) of public and private money raised and spent spent by the CAC went nearly entirely down the toilet.
Almost nothing could be more toxic just then to the upcoming election than a close identification in the public’s eye between Obama and Ayers and his politics.
The DOS was a dirty trick on the Nixonian slime scale, and the host of DOS clone calls that did get through parroted the same three lines: “Kurtz is an evil man; WGN is abetting evil by having him on Rosenberg’s show; and that therefore WGN’s broadcast license must now be revoked by the FCC.”
Rosenberg, for his part was just flabbergasted: in three or four decades of broadcasting, he had never been subject to a DOS attack on his call-in lines, and he was rendered almost speechless. Possibly the program can still be accessed online (it was up for at least the following six month) from the WGN website.
It should also be mentioned that the Obama campaign was invited, yea strongly encouraged, by Rosenberg to send a spokesperson to join the program with Kurtz. The campaign not-so-politely declined, claiming they had “insufficient time to prepare” a proper riposte to Kurtz’s likely points.
Again, total sound of crickets on that episode from the mainstream media. Including, not least, the Chicago Tribune, nor –to my knowledge– from any other WGN commentators…
Great work there, TNR! May you soon go the way of Newsweek. Sorry ’bout that to the handful of self-respecting writers/editors still on the masthead. (That’s you I’m talking about, Leon Wieselthier.)
GeoffreyB…I think the term is from Lenin. But, hey, it hardly matters whether he or Stalin. The latter simply refined(40-Million)the mass murder which Vlad began.
Funny, in the Communist state which Comrades Ayers, Dohrn and an endless string of midgets imagined for America, they’d have been tossed into anonymous killing pits by the Heavy Hitters. That’s the way it works, Billy & Bernardine. Now, back to “Koba the Dread”… Ahhhhhhh…..
neo writes:
“Wieseltier, by the way, is a curious figure…”
_______________________________________
Interesting adjective. I perceive him as an ideologue. One who was complicit in the “unexamined agenda of (Baraka Obama) the media’s favorite candidate.”
That Weiseltier “felt” strong enough to “hate” both Bill Ayers and Sarah Palin illustrates the reliance on emotion to drive his beliefs.
Like or dislike Palin, one is hard pressed to reconcile “hate” for the woman. Unless, of course, one is led by the narrative of her as created by the media. Far too many misrepresentations—BUT—-that’s what the Left does. It demonizes its opponents.
“Hate” Bill Ayers? Interesting. I, like many others, have no respect for him. Nor admiration. His past was never reconciled. Not by him nor by the academic elites who elevated him to star status. Only recently was he given a forum on Megyn Kelly’s program. He proved himself, on that program, to be the pathetic character he’s always been. Just never exposed by the entire mainstream media. “Hate”? Hardly. Not unless you are one of those on the Left who lavished him with undeserved praise and extolled his radical education programs (also proven to be failures in Chicago’s education system), only to turn on him with equalized disdain.
Idealogue. Yep. Weiseltier had plenty of opportunity and sources to check his beating heart over Obama. Early on. He simply did not want to hear it. He did not want to listen to it.
Bill Ayers was not the only questionable relationship of Baraka’s. Jeremiah Wright. Tony Reszko. Ronald Davis. Frank Marshall Davis. Slumlord, Valerie Jarrett. John Stroger. Richard Daley, etc., etc.
Baraka’s “accomplishments were on full display for anyone to scrutinize. Well, except for those ideologues in the media, such as, Weiseltier. Their emotions prevented such realities.
Bummer.
Obama’s version of cronyism was employed right out of the gate. Campaign financiers were hired in Czar positions and were given hundreds of millions in loans for pie-eyed enterprises like, Solyndra. I only mention this because Weiseltier could have foretold this with Obama’s non-reformer political record in Illinois.
Weieltier curious? Not at all. An ideologue whose emotions clouded his journalistic integrity, if he ever had any prior to the coming of the Messiah.
Clarityseeker:
Ayers is not a pathetic figure at all.
He is a domestic terrorist and terrorist apologist. He has been an extremely successful leftist with a profound influence on our educational system, and therefore a leader in the Gramscian march of the left through an institution that forms young minds.
I don’t think Chris Huges is a simply a very rich guy who wants nothing more than to buy baubles. Both he and his husband, Sean Eldridge, have politics in mind. Eldridge just ran for a Congressional seat in New York, after spending a ton of money to set himself up there:
as unique as it is brazen — that could have been said by those TNR staffers who got the boot, couldn’t it? Good news, though — Eldridge lost his bid for Congress by 30 points.
*Hughes*
Yep, it was Vladimir Ilyich. Said us capitalists would sell them the rope by which they would hang us. Can’t fault the logic.
Oh, Iosif Vissarionovich was much worse, if that can even be possible considering Lenin was all for the Checka and Dzerzhinsky, not to mention Trotsky and his harsh imposition of severe discipline on the nascent Red Army. But Stalin’s ‘to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs’ is one of the more chilling catch phrases to come down through History, considering what Stalin considered ‘a few’. Between the purges, the show trials, the famines imposed, all of it, his actions really do leave a lasting legacy. Maybe if Lenin had lived longer than he did (thank you Fanny Kaplan), he might be impossible to overcome in the race to the top of the worst.
Clarity…I watched with pleasure , too, as the bright-as-hell Megyn took on Dr.Pompous Ayers.
Slapped the Marxian snot outta Comrade Ayers without breaking a beautiful blond sweat.
I truly despise the loathsome Billy Ayers and his murderous Bernardine. I’d be giving the despicable duo far too much Rent Free Space in my head, I suppose, if I actively hated them. But, thoroughly despise..? Yep, without one blink of sleep lost. May they occupy a spit-in-hell over the same campfire as Charlie Manson.
RickZ…Yep, and you generously didn’t mention the vast gulags of the far north. Magadan was a bleak slave world without end. Vorkuta… Kolyma…The slave ships(or fleet)…The genocides and liquidation of entire peoples… and, the millions killed/starved in the collectivizations of the late 20s/early 30s as a massive rehearsal for The Great Terror. Felix’s inheritors: Menzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, Abakumov, Merkulov, and the boys…
I’ve studied the Stalin Epoch off and on for 40-years. A recent little romp I’d advise you to read is, “Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million” by Martin Amis. (NY, 2002) Nice breathtaking reading.
neo-neocon writes:
“Ayers is not a pathetic figure at all.”
_______________________________________
New World Dictionary of American English
Third College Edition
pa-thetic adj. 1., 2. pitifully unsuccessful, ineffective, etc. [a pathetic performance]
I used the term pathetic after, and in description of his appearance on Megyn Kelly’s hour-long interview of him just a few weeks ago. During same, he made many efforts to justify his role, that one he played in the Weather Underground.
His explanation was quite consistently “pathetic”.
His was an unsuccessful attempt to paint a picture of himself which was unbelievable. Actually—-it was JAW-DROPPINGLY pathetic.
It was significantly, “ineffective”. It did not convince me for a nanosecond. He squirmed and he split hairs with comments Ms. Kelly made. He obfuscated. He distracted from the questions asked of him with non sequiturs.
I was not buying it. Perhaps NEOCONSCUM was. Perhaps other people were buying his claptrap.
I was not.
He was pathetic. He is pathetic. I heard him interviewed some 15 years ago, cannot recall what program it was. He was treated far more softly. Softball questions. It could have been on PBS or NPR. I used to listen to those frequently. He did the same thing then; gave the appearance that he was acting righteously towards a system in America which is like a big bully in the world.
Bill Ayers is a unrepentant terrorist.
Bill Ayers knowingly cavorted with murderers.
Bill Ayers may have actually participated in incidents where people were killed.
Bill Ayers definitely participated in brutal acts where people could have been killed, and for whatever reason no one was.
In my previous post I alluded to his radical signature on failed education programs in Chicago public education.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/matt-dowd-clintonbush-fatigue-24065251
Clarityseeker:
I’m not talking about his demeanor in a recent interview (which I saw, by the way). I couldn’t care less about that, basically, although it was interesting. I’m talking about his life’s work: transforming America into a leftist place, particularly through the medium of leftist domination of education.
Pathetic= “pitifully unsuccessful, ineffective.” That’s the opposite of what Ayers has been in that endeavor. He has been spectacularly successful in his chosen task. It occurs to me that perhaps you are not all that familiar with the extent of his work to transform education by transforming teacher education. Please read this.
Understood.
However, that is not what I meant.
Fifty years later this guy can neither articulate a reconciliation of his youthful behavior from his present-day perspective nor can he seem to put some semblance of a life’s purpose together.
He tripped all over himself in the interview.
(frankly, I took it that his life is all about a lie, and cover-up, and that is why he stumbled and stammered and looked ineffective while answering tough questions for what was probably the first time).
His interview with Megyn Kelly was ineffective in communicating to me that there was any redemptive value to his mission as a young punk. Additionally, both his girlfriend and the leader of his gang were blown up. All while planning a mass-murder event which failed to be executed.
I suppose it matters not. As long as he has convinced himself and those who think like him.
Good Lord! I should have read this thread before commenting on the Dec. 8th thread.
Let that be a lesson to me.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doug-bandow/paying-for-the-neocon-mom_b_6215890.html
“Jimmy Cracker” links to Doug Bandow’s by the numbers (libertarian) neo-isolationist case against the one government competency, foreign policy: “In fact, ‘The Neocon Moment’ is distinguished by its failure.”
Except, Obama is no Neocon. And calling Neocon policy a failure is not the same as showing how an alternative solves problems. And the strongest defense of Neocon strategy – for example “After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy” by Timothy J. Lynch, Robert S. Singh – goes largely ignored by the carpers like Bandow.
Instead, what Neocon (and Neoliberal) internationalist strategies do is address the real problems of today’s globalizing capitalism.
America’s world purpose was laid down BEFORE entry into WWII in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, signed by FDR and Churchill. It outlined the terms of re-starting the 19th century’s British-led capitalism.
And today, as Thomas P. M Barnett explains, the world will inevitably go this direction of it’s own accord – the piece are already in place assuring that it does so.
This is simply an observable fact. The only dispute is how much – or little – war and bloodshed must occur to bring about the peaceful triumph of the global capitalist system. SEE Barnett’s lecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDVOP0lEECk
And here’s where libertarian fantasy hits the wall of reality: Neocon foreign policy actually solves real world problems (SEE Lynch and Singh for details.) And thus, this explains why neo-isolationism never grows in influence, but remains marginalized to political ideologues like Bandow.