In the very first paragraph of The New Republic’s very first issue, the founding editors proclaimed their belief that there was a place in America for what they called “a journal of interpretation and opinion.” These men—Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann—were eminences of the Progressive Era, who were repulsed by what had become of the nation’s business civilization. They aimed, as Croly later put it, a bit grandly, to help “mould social life in the light of the best available knowledge and in the interest of a humane ideal.”
Their new journal would not so much entertain as enlighten, but it would hardly be “detached and select.” It would examine and debate the nation’s problems with “sufficient sympathy to [their] complexities.” High seriousness, the editors insisted, need not be dispassionate or dull. Engagement did not require simplification.
The founders’ words may sound ponderous today, but for an entire century, TNR at its best built on their creed, raising the intellectual and literary stakes in American political and cultural commentary with a democratic respect for its readers’ intelligence. When the magazine was running at full throttle, every sentence carried the conviction that TNR existed to argue intensely over the world, in order, if only in a minuscule way, to help change it. Over the years, it became a unique institution, not least as an all-too-rare forum where scholars could think out loud before a larger public.
Early last month, that forum imploded. Its current owner, Chris Hughes, who had made a fortune as the Harvard roommate and then business partner of Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, bought a financially struggling TNR in 2012 and made assurances that he would continue its mission. The effort would almost certainly lose money for the foreseeable future, as the magazine had for almost its entire existence, but that seemed not to matter; and Hughes spent lavishly, notably on upgrading and relocating the offices.
Suddenly, though, over the summer, Hughes began pushing in a different direction. He hired Guy Vidra, a former overseer of Yahoo News, as the magazine’s CEO. Vidra in turn announced that TNR was not a magazine at all but a “vertically integrated digital-media company.” Hughes had decided that TNR could no longer, as he later put it, “be a charity,” “something greater than a commercial enterprise,” reliant “on the largess of an unpredictable few” (which, under the current circumstances, could have meant only himself). It would henceforth be “a sustainable business.”
When Hughes unceremoniously dumped Frank Foer, TNR’s editor, in favor of Gabriel Snyder, a former editor of the gossip-website Gawker, the longtime literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, immediately resigned, which sparked a full-scale revolt, in which most of the senior staff and virtually all of the magazine’s contributing editors, including myself, resigned. Snyder has since assured readers that he intends to reinvent TNR in Croly’s spirit but in a manner that reflects “the American experience as it exists today,” whatever that means.
For its readers, TNR’s collapse is bad, not least because the magazine seemed to be in one of its periodic journalistic upswings under Foer. Its writers suffer, too. The salaried staff members who resigned out of principle showed singular courage given the parlous state of employment in serious journalism. And TNR writers of every description have lost a special audience. That audience is probably scattered forever, which is sad.
Reading the commentary on the revolt, though, has left me confused as well as dismayed. The postmortems—there seems little doubt that TNR, if not its “brand,” lies cold and dead—dwell on the political implications of its demise. Are we hearing the death knell of serious political-policy journals? Worse: Was TNR really the proud liberal voice its mourners claim it was, or had it betrayed its politics? Epithets fly: TNR, some say, cozied up to the masters of war and reaction while becoming a lily-white proponent of “erudite neo-Dixiecratism,” a journal “as notable for floating racist ideas as it was for cogent criticism.” Maybe it deserved bumping off.
The detractors dwell on some hurtful episodes, and one in particular. During the 1990s and after, TNR, ahead of other venues of high criticism and commentary, made a point of featuring some of the finest African-American writing around. Some of the authors were already distinguished, but many were just emerging into public view. More than a few of their essays, ranging from Henry Louis Gates Jr. on James Baldwin to Albert Murray on Louis Armstrong, remain essential reading for anyone interested in American arts and letters.
But in 1994, in the middle of this efflorescence, the magazine’s editor, Andrew Sullivan, over fierce objections from his staff, decided to run excerpts from Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s highly hyped book on race and IQ, The Bell Curve—a shocking step backward. The scars from that occasion, and a few others, still ache. The accumulated offenses need venting. The overwrought denunciations deserve full rebuttals. I imagine the arguments will continue for a while.
The political criticisms alone, though, are not what I find so discouraging. It has taken another of the magazine’s veterans, Paul Berman, writing in Tablet, to make the crucial point that TNR began life and then prospered not strictly as a journal of political opinion but as a home for strenuous cultural and literary criticism. The magazine’s founders could not imagine the one without the other: Any politics that lacked a strong cultural imagination would be spiritually barren, and cultural criticism severed from politics would be blinded.
There have been times, as Berman notes, when TNR’s so-called “back of the book” carried as much intellectual weight and prestige, and sometimes considerably more, than the front. Such was certainly the case under Edmund Wilson, literary editor in the 1920s, and then again for stretches of the past 30 years under Wieseltier.
That point leads to another. There are few enough places where outstanding academic writing stands a chance of getting a serious hearing outside of the academy. The knock on professors is that we can’t write well, because we write exclusively for one another, in impenetrable prose. We supposedly have neither the temperament nor the talent for the kind of freewheeling intellectual reflection and combat that once engaged the likes of Wilson, or Alfred Kazin, or Hannah Arendt. Having retreated into our university ghettos, we professors supposedly long ago abandoned the public life of the mind.
The arts-and-letters section of TNR contradicted all of that. The strong presence of academics in its pages, as writers as well as writers under review, showed that scholars and scholarship remained closely connected to the broader world of high criticism. There was nothing arcane or pretentious about the critical writings in TNR of my colleague Anthony Grafton, or Martha Nussbaum, or Alan Taylor. I could add dozens more.
TNR offered its writers, professors and nonprofessors alike, the space they needed to write at full capacity. The tyranny of reviewing a book or even two in 800 words can be not much worse than having to do so in 3,000 words or even 5,000, if the writer has much more to say. Sometimes the writer does, and TNR was the only journal of its kind where it was allowed to happen, to the point of running extended essays that nearly amounted to short books. (I’m thinking of Berman’s TNR piece of some 20,000 words that quickly became Power and the Idealists; or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer.)
The broader world of high criticism is badly endangered, but not because of creeping academic mandarinism. The threat has to do only superficially with the latest digital wizardry and the apparent shortening of postmodern attention spans. The taproot of the problem is much older—a fixation on profits, now measured in hits and clicks, which betrays no trace of respect for what one former TNR hand, Steve Wasserman, has called the culture’s “zone of seriousness.”
TNR’s undoing affirms that Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network from 40 years ago was prophetic, and in realms beyond television. Presiding over the larger attack, though, are not the boorish corporate moguls whom Chayefsky satirized, but an ascendant class of Internet plutocrats, many elite-schooled, like Hughes, and tinctured by liberal politics but strongly libertarian in spirit. This new class is contemptuous of the “old” media, with its hierarchy, its gatekeepers, its discriminations of excellence. Its chief executives mouth bogus platitudes about “transparency"—they are opaque when it comes to their own machinations—while they strive to bring all culture as well as commerce under their digitized dominion.
For a moment, TNR’s editorial management believed it had found a way for the magazine’s amalgam of political and cultural criticism to endure and even thrive inside that dominion. That thinking now seems wildly foolish. And it has been unsurprising to learn from news reports that the new management, above all else, wanted to diminish if not eliminate the back of the book.
Leon Wieseltier presided over his own preserve at TNR—very much part of the magazine, but as a semi-autonomous principality. I recall attending, 15 years ago, some of the Thursday editorial meetings, where writers reported on their continuing labors and the staff blocked out forthcoming issues. Wieseltier would sit at the far end of a long table, along with other editors and staff members connected to the back of the book, facing the rest of the magazine’s editors, contributing to the conversation, sometimes with edgy humor; and there was never a hint that anyone would interfere with his pages.
Wieseltier’s section had a political soul that could not be defined by the reigning spectrum of left and right. It was liberal, but not in the sense that the New Deal was liberal, or the Great Society, or any permutation and combination of liberal politics since then. It was more philosophical than that, yet it was also oppositional and even insurgent, which made it exciting—an enemy to the politics of identity, to historical determinism of every kind, and, more recently, to scientism. The presiding shades included, above all, two of his teachers, Lionel Trilling and Sir Isaiah Berlin.
The spirit that Wieseltier encouraged and at times himself imparted took political commitment seriously, but as a beginning and not an end of moral and aesthetic questioning. So much in our intellectual and political life runs counter to this: Enlisting in one cause or another is the essential choice, and after that you don’t have to think very hard. Wieseltier’s liberalism, which suffused the back of the book, holds that commitment commends passion and action but does not settle moral problems; it raises new ones. No value is ever absolute or perfectly stable, especially grand political values like equality, freedom, and individualism. They must be constantly re-evaluated. Rendering those re-evaluations is the critic’s job, undertaken with the certainty that however we judge, no matter how emphatically, it is always subject to further scrutiny and revision.
Keeping that liberal spirit alive was a great achievement of TNR’s back of the book. It was not, of course, Leon’s achievement alone. When asked about why his New York Yankees kept winning pennant after pennant, Casey Stengel, the manager nicknamed “The Old Perfesser,” is supposed to have replied, “I couldn’t’ve done it without my players.” (Stengel also described managing as “getting paid for home runs someone else hits.”) Still, by force of intellectual disposition as well as personality, Wieseltier enlisted and managed a roster that spanned generations as well as nationalities and colors. Along with thousands of reviews on politics and history and fiction, one regularly read the likes of Stanley Kauffmann and David Thomson on cinema, or Helen Vendler and Adam Kirsch on poetry, or Jed Perl on art.
Arraigned by its critics for the crime of “elitism,” TNR, and especially the back of the book, stood guilty as charged. But there is such a thing as democratic elitism, which inheres in standards of criticism and commentary, but which repudiates the idea that only a hereditary elite or educated clerisy could or should get it; and it presents itself accordingly. If bidding interested readers to sophistication and excellence is elitism, make the most of it. The greatest danger to our culture and politics lies in a different kind of elitism, one that promotes a monied elite that, as Frank Foer wrote in TNR just before the deluge, threatens both the variety and the quality of everything it touches and distributes. It is “depressing enough to ponder when it comes to the fate of lawn mower blades,” Foer observes, let alone writing on politics and the arts.
The New Republic was begun precisely in order to sustain enlightenment and complexity amid an earlier phase of monopoly philistinism. Its demise signals that its old mission has come round once again.
