Eulogy for The New Republic
Bookworm on Jan 17 2011 at 6:05 pm | Filed under: Media matters
Paul Kengor writes a eulogy for The New Republic — or, at least, for Martin Peretz’s thoughtful, well-argued publication. In fact, its glory years were few. I subscribed to it for many years, and started having trouble taking it seriously when Andrew Sullivan started his tenure as editor. He hadn’t yet gone off the deep end, even then I found his writing and thinking off-putting, and disliked the direction in which he took the magazine. I let my subscription lapse.
As it is, The New Republic now has gone back to its roots as a fundamentally dishonest Progressive publication that panders to those on the Left who style themselves as intellectuals. I hope that I’m not the only one who saw through that charade and started subscribing to Commentary instead.
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4 Responses to “Eulogy for The New Republic”
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Book, I had much the same experience. I enjoyed TNR in the early 90s, but by 1995 or 96 had run out of patience with its reactionary take on things.
I’ve been a Commentary reader for about 10 years. One of the things I like best about its recent redesign is the back-of-the-book column on the decline of American journalism, and the monthly joke.
Charles:
An old friend who is a staunch conservative introduced me to Commentary in the mid-1990s, when he gave me a year’s subscription. I read it, but then returned to TNR, only to discover that TNR had cratered in quality. So, there I went, back to Commentary. It’s one of my great monthly pleasures: gravitas, without the boring part. Mind food without pomposity. Sophistication without snobbery. Everything a magazine should be for those who like to think about politics and culture, but who do not believe themselves to be superior beings.
I am grateful to TNR for its articles on Nicaragua in the 1980s, which did not adopt the worshipful tone towards the Sandinistas that was commonplace among the left. Or should I more accurately say, grateful to Martin Peretz.
TNR has had some good articles in recent years on Venezuela and the Chavez dictatorship.
I became a regular reader of Commentary in the early 1980s, after I became an apostate from the Democratic Party and was in the land of “a plague on both their houses.”
I occasionally read Commentary in the 1970s, but what aced it for me was Jean Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorship and Double Standards.” An odd coincidence on its coming out in November 1979 is that at the time an Iranian technician of the company came to our operations in Argentina to repair a computer. He discussed the theocratic regime with us and with Argentines. His POV was that it the Iranian people wanted it, so be it. Less than a week after the Iranian technician left Argentina, the US embassy in Tehran got occupied. Strange coincidence.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/dictatorships–double-standards-6189?page=all
FWIW, here is a list of TNR “journalists” associated with JournoList. Of the 151 “journalists” on JournoList, 6 were with TNR. Jonathan Chait, who previously impressed me as embodying the lib trait of blatant partisanship while simultaneously claiming to be objective, was actually rather sensible about the Giffords shooting in Tuscon.
Eve Fairbanks
Isaac Chotiner
John Judis
Jonathan Chait
Jonathan Cohn
Noam Scheiber
http://thevailspot.blogspot.com/2011/01/journolist-membership.html