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Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Is This the End Of the Liberal Media?

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Dec. 10, 2014
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No. 150
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By Jonathan V. Last
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COLD OPEN

The New Republic imploded last week. You may have read the occasional news item about it.

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But in case you missed the brouhaha, the story goes something like this: Two years ago the New Republic was purchased by Chris Hughes, a 28-year-old who made hundreds of millions of dollars by being Mark Zuckerberg's roommate at Harvard and thus being an early employee at Facebook. A few weeks ago, Hughes announced that he was starting a New Republic venture capital fund_which is an odd thing for a magazine to do. Last week, Hughes declared that he was moving the 100-year-old magazine from Washington to New York, cutting publication down to ten issues a year, and firing the top two editors, Frank Foer and Leon Wieseltier. Setting off an exodus.

By last count, 58 of the 87 people on the New Republic's masthead have resigned or have been fired. And Hughes announced that all print publication has been suspended until February. The New Republic_which once published George Orwell, Reinhold Niebuhr, Philip Roth, and Thomas Mann_is now effectively dead. Whatever editorial product is launched under the corporate brand of the "New Republic" in three months will be a different creature entirely.

The entire episode reminds you of the time Coca-Cola stopped selling Coca-Cola and replaced it with New Coke_if the Coca-Cola Company had begun the switch by publicly burning the last copy of the original recipe.

A lot of people have had fun with the angst pouring forth from the liberal mainstream over the demise of the New Republic. Clive Crook ran a droll column titled "Without the New Republic, I have no reason to live." Andrew Stiles trolled harder than Jeff Fisher with an essay calling Hughes and his husband_the carpetbagging Democratic candidate who spent $3 million of their fortune in a House race he lost by 30 points_"Couple of the Year." Here's Stiles twisting the knife:

Both men are living refutations of the poisonous Republican myth that, in America, hard work leads to success. Hughes, for example, has proved that massive financial success can be achieved simply by having a talented roommate at Harvard. Eldridge, on the other hand, reminds us that extraordinary wealth awaits all who are willing to marry extraordinarily wealthy people.

In 2014, both Hughes and Eldridge achieved great success in highlighting one of the most quintessentially American freedoms: the freedom to fail. In fact, their egregious failures give hope to all who harbor hopes of a more progressive future for this country. They proved that massive wealth no longer guarantees success, that even the undeserving rich can fail to achieve their goals in life. . . .

Hughes, who has said he doesn't consider to The New Republic to be a "magazine"_he prefers "digital media company"_has brought in new leadership to disrupt the hell out of some s**t. In doing so, Hughes offers a stirring reminder of the importance of property rights in America. If he wishes to purchase a liberal institution with money "earned" from being Mark Zuckerberg's roommate and subsequently burn it to the ground whilst behaving like an insufferable douche, that is his God-given right as a wealthy American.

At the Washington Post, Will Baude opened his (spectacularly-titled) remembrance thusly:

Like a lot of people who write on the internet, I also once worked at The New Republic. In my case it was for one summer, between college and law school, and I was a lowly intern working for "TNR Online." (I guess that was the beginning of The New Republic's transformation to a "vertically integrated digital media company"?)

People reflecting on the passing of the New Republic tended to take one of two positions: either they were deeply angered and distraught by the event, or they celebrated it.

I'm not quite in either camp. During my time in Washington, the New Republic has been just one of several important magazines. And while it has a list of genuine talents it has developed_John Judis, Julia Ioffe, Timothy Noah, Ryan Lizza, Jonathan Chait, the great David Grann, and others_it has also had more than its share of embarrassment and fraud. Stephen Glass. Ruth Shalit. Lee Siegel.

I mention this not to speak ill of the dead but simply to underscore that I do not have an especially romantic view of the New Republic. And yet I am disturbed and unsettled by its passing, just the same.

I'll explain why after the break.

LOOKING BACK

"Its pages were yellowed, its cheap binding broken, its typeface uneven: There was nothing imposing about the copy of Un Bagne en Russie Rouge_"A Prison in Red Russia"_ someone once handed me as a curiosity. Nevertheless, the book, published in Paris in 1927, was one of the first to describe the Soviet Union's political prisons on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. Quoting survivors, escapees, and what little information had been published in the Soviet press, the author Raymond Duguet accurately described the geography of the islands, the barracks within a former monastery, the lack of food, the mass executions. He correctly named prisoners and several guards. He mentioned the mosquitoes. For sixty years, Duguet's book was the most complete source on Solovetsky in the French language."

_Anne Applebaum, "Dead Souls" from our December 13, 1999, issue.

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"Unspeakably terrible, as all attempts at writing a song about Hillary must be. It's like writing a song about Microsoft: The product is mediocre on its best day, but through some mix of luck and ruthlessness, it's turned itself into an American institution. You respect it mostly for its staying power. Perhaps you've even given it money, for no better reason than that this is the system we have and you might as well work within it. What you do not do, if you're a normal human with normal emotions, is wax rhapsodic about it."

_Allahpundit on the Hillary for President country music video, December 4, 2014

THE LAST WORD

Why should you be unsettled by the destruction of the New Republic? Two reasons.

First, look at some of the gloating coming from the internet left. Here's a piece in Gawker headlined "White Men Upset Wrong White Man Placed in Charge of White-Man Magazine." It's like an Onion story lampooning identity politics. Except it's real. And oh, by the way, the new editor of the New Republic is a former staff member from ... Gawker.

Or take this piece from Max Fisher at Vox.com. In it, Fisher laments the New Republic's "race problem" and says Marty Peretz, the owner who predated Chris Hughes, was "monstrous." For starters, if Peretz_whose politics on the Middle East clearly differ from Fisher's_is "monstrous," then we have an awfully low bar for monstrosity these days. Idi Amin? Monstrous. Nicolae Ceausescu? Monstrous. Marty Peretz? Really?

(You may remember Fisher as the fellow who believed that there was a physical bridge connecting Gaza and the West Bank.)

In the same way that the extinction of the red state Democrats means that the Democratic party will necessarily move further to the left, the loss of the New Republic means that the voices on the fringiest, laziest, least-useful part of the internet media blob will fill become more prominent. Do you think the public discourse is better with Julia Ioffe at the New Republic_who travels to report and speaks Russian and is generally pretty awesome_or Max Fisher and his imaginary Vox.com bridge? Exactly.

But what really depresses me is that the death of TNR might be a harbinger of what to expect as the Millennials begin their march through the institutions.

Whatever you want to say about the Baby Boomers, after they wrecked the university in the late 1960s, it took them a couple decades before they destroyed any other American institutions. This fallow period wasn't for lack of trying_it's just that while they were in their twenties, Boomers didn't have the wealth and power to dismantle the structures they deemed inconvenient. That came later.

The Millennials may be different. Because of the tech ascendency and internet stock valuations, there is a crop of 20- and 30-year-olds walking around America with the kind of money that once took captains of industry half a lifetime to earn. This is, so far as I can tell, unprecedented in American history. For instance, when Andrew Carnegie was Chris Hughes's age, he was just getting his footing with a small ironworks. For Carnegie the real money_and hence the philanthropy and cultural influence_would come only much later. After he'd become a grown-up.

Yet Hughes, the Millennial par excellence, was able to acquire and unravel a century-old institution before his 32nd birthday. I hope that this is not a preview of what his generation intends to do with its cultural inheritance.

One of the lessons in the passing of the New Republic is that institutions are often important. And that they sometimes need defending. Whether the institution is a magazine of ideas, or an artistic heritage, or a social order.

They are the building blocks of civil society. Not baubles to be juggled carelessly. 

I'll see you next week. As always, keep calm and carry on. And remember, you can always email me with tips, thoughts, etc., at editor@weeklystandard.com.

Best,
Jonathan V. Last

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