Ta-Nehisi Coates comes not to praise The New Republic, but to bury it under big neon signs pointing to evidence that it was a festering canker of “liberal” racist drivel. He gives the publication and its more famous staff no less than they deserve.
That explains why the family rows at TNR’s virtual funeral look like the “Whites Only” section of a Jim Crow-era movie-house. For most its modern history, TNR has been an entirely white publication, which published stories confirming white people’s worst instincts. During the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s, TNR regarded black people with an attitude ranging from removed disregard to blatant bigotry. When people discuss TNR’s racism, Andrew Sullivan’s publication of excerpts from Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve (and a series of dissents) gets the most attention. But this fuels the lie that one infamous issue stands apart. In fact, the Bell Curve episode is remarkable for how well it fits with the rest of TNR’s history.
The personal attitude of TNR’s longtime owner, the bigoted Martin Peretz, should be mentioned here. Peretz’s dossier of racist hits (mostly at the expense of blacks and Arabs) is shameful, and one does not have to look hard to find evidence of it in Peretz’s writing or in the sensibility of the magazine during his ownership. In 1984, long before Sullivan was tapped to helm TNR, Charles Murray was dubbing affirmative action a form of “new racism” that targeted white people.
Two years later, Washington Post writer Richard Cohen was roundly rebuked for advocating that D.C. jewelry stores discriminate against young black men—but not by TNR. The magazine took the opportunity to convene a panel to “reflect briefly” on whether it was moral for merchants to bar black men from their stores. (“Expecting a jewelry store owner to risk his life in the service of color-blind justice is expecting too much,” the magazine concluded.)
TNR made a habit of “reflecting briefly” on matters that were life and death to black people but were mostly abstract thought experiments to the magazine’s editors. Before, during, and after Sullivan’s tenure, the magazine seemed to believe that the kind of racism that mattered most was best evidenced in the evils of Afrocentrism, the excesses of multiculturalism, and the machinations of Jesse Jackson. It’s true that TNR’s staff roundly objected to excerpting The Bell Curve, but I was never quite sure why. Sullivan was simply exposing the dark premise that lay beneath much of the magazine’s coverage of America’s ancient dilemma.
And Coates continues with his vicious slashing, like a literary velociraptor let loose in a sheep pasture, the whole article is breathtaking. Was everybody at the magazine complicit in this? No, but that’s irrelevant, frankly. As far as I’m concerned, Chris Hughes’s massive techbro hubris actually did the world a favor for once, and mortally wounded something that should have been taken out back and shot years ago. And Sully, Marty Peretz, Charles Murray, Stephen Glass, all those guys can go straight to the septic tank of history as far as I’m concerned along with their damn “liberal” New Republic.
schrodinger's cat
FYI: Joe Nocera’s op-ed in NYT about TNR is as unintentionally hilarious as anything Himalyan Salt McMegan has ever written.
David
TNR really was liberal before Peretz bought the magazine and murdered it in 1974.
Rathskeller
God, I love TNC.
Like a lot of folks, I was so entranced with The New Republic when I was in high school in the 1970s, when it seems impossibly wise and well-connected. I even described myself as a neo-con, because a muscular foreign policy seemed to make sense to me, e.g., bombing Libya directly in response to blowing up planes. In the mid-80s, I stopped my subscription forever, completely fed up with Peretz’s insane anti-Arab screeds. It’s been fucked up for decades, and a change is long overdue.
Amir Khalid
@schrodinger’s cat:
Really? I haven’t read Nocera since The New York Times’ paywall went up. What’d he say?
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: He has a sad for the death of a venerable Washington institution. That Hughes should not make any changes to the magazine even though it is a bleeding red ink, because TNR is extra special.
It is tone deaf and clueless coming from the guy who was praising Amazon and their predatory WalMart like practices and advocating abolishing tenure for public school teachers. All I can say is that Hughes and the cossetted Beltway pundits deserve each other.
I may blog about it later. I has been too busy IRL. Actually I need to get back to reading some papers.
Felonius Monk
@Amir Khalid:
Among other things:
schrodinger's cat
@Felonius Monk: As if NYT doesn’t have silly stuff on their esteemed pages. In addition to their op-ed pages, there is plenty fluff in NYT too.
Kryptik, A Man Without A Country
The Buzzfeed-ification of the rag is still better than the ‘Even The Liberal’ state it existed in previously, as the contrarian neoliberal scold that undermined the left at every turn.
Tenar Darell
Favorite quote:
Zandar
@Kryptik, A Man Without A Country: Unless of course it ends up doing both.
raven
Thermite and not nape, yall’s badass.
Felonius Monk
@schrodinger’s cat: As long as the NYT continues to publish the garbage that is Maureen Dowd (among others), it is hardly fit to be bird cage liner.
aimai
I loved the TNC piece. Its important to note that we basically don’t have political magazines and thought leader type incubators that have ever been fair, or inclusive, or truly liberal/on the left. TNR was a niche market and a path forward and leg up for a certain kind of person to pontificate about politics and worldly affairs. This world view never included anything truly radical–not communism, socialism, minority race issues, or feminism (in all its incarnations) because these were too far from the mainstream interests and identities of the kinds of persons who were invited to write there. It would have taken far more than one or two black people on the masthead to change the insularity of that outlook–the extremely conventional idea about what politics would be, could do, and who counted politically in this world.
If Ta Nehisi Coates, or anyone else, wants a more inclusive and radical perspective on politics to be pushed fowards they are going to have to do it themselves, in a magazine or other format which will be supported –how? Politics these days, and political commentary, are a rich man’s game. If you don’t have a rich asshole supporting you you simply can’t get published.
gvg
Why was this thing called liberal? I was barely aware of it until I notice Sullivan a few years ago who writes some nice things and then screws it up. But I don’t get why this described publication is supposed to be liberal. It really isn’t.
I gather that there is some ancient history and would like a quick summary just to know what went on.
Anyone that defends the Bell curve is racist. Seemed obvious to me. And I don’t consider racist liberal.
daveNYC
TNC is throwing a lot of stones for someone who worked at the same magazine with Sullivan, McArglebargle, Friedersdorf, and Goldberg.
TNR is/was balls, but it’s not like The Atlantic has always been some soaring eagle of awesomeness.
srv
If we burn down every liberal media institution, what will be left?
bg
Nobody has told me more stuff I didn’t know, or didn’t think about, about race than Coates
schrodinger's cat
@daveNYC: I was attacked when I mentioned that in another thread about TNC’s twitter feed about TNR.
Turgidson
The way the former TNR writers and editors have publicly wailed and rendered their garments, you’d think they were part of some super secret club where, as a result of membership in the club, they get to go to sleep on a pile of money, with many beautiful ladies. Or that TNR was a beloved family member who taught them everything they know (maybe even including white privilege!)
…Rather than an overrated faux liberal, pseudointellectual, culturally insular magazine, read by a few dozen people, where most of the writing was crafted in order to impress themselves and fellow wankers in their immediate social clique.
schrodinger's cat
@gvg: Apparently it used to be liberal in the past.
kc
Sweet Jesus, enough already about TNR.
Outside of a handful of well-to-do journalists, no one in America gives a shit.
Betty Cracker
@daveNYC: That thought crossed my mind too. Find a mainstream American publication that has been in business for more than 50 years that wasn’t a hive of racist, sexist, xenophobic knobs and then call me.
Turgidson
@daveNYC:
I don’t see the “glass house” metaphor here. TNC is using his platform at the Atlantic in order to push back on the insularity and privilege of TNR (and, the Village/political elite more broadly)’s writing on race. If he was simultaneously saying, “but the Atlantic’s track record on this topic, by contrast, is sterling,” then sure, he’d be opening himself up to criticism. But I haven’t read that in any of his comments. The TNR implosion provided an opening for him to write this piece, sure, but it’s entirely consistent with everything else he’s been writing lately.
ThresherK
I will no more pine for what TNR may have been (I am not old or worldly enough to say firsthand) than for for the kind of pol John McCain was once supposed to have been.
There are more important things in the world to rehab than the reputation of either of those.
Alex S.
The New Yorker is the better TNR.
geg6
@Rathskeller:
Yup, sounds like me. I haven’t looked at that rag since the 80s, when Peretz’s bigotry was like a giant red light flashing, flashing, flashing to a young liberal that what TNR called liberal and what I called liberal weren’t in the same universe. After all those years when I looked to TNR as a liberal bastion and just waiting for the day I could afford a subscription, the reality of the TNR was, needless to say, quite the disappointment. And though it was years later, when Sully championed the Bell Curve nonsense from it’s pages, I knew I’d been right to tell them to go to hell.
Davebo
@daveNYC:
I had the same thought.
Davebo
@Betty Cracker:
The difference is you don’t have to go back 50 years to find that hive at TNR.
Turgidson
@geg6:
Until the rolling atrocity that was the Bush administration compelled me to start giving a shit about politics – and led me to read political/policy mags more often, I didn’t even realize that TNR (which I read once in a while, usually on a long plane ride, but didn’t follow) was considered liberal by anyone. And it seemed just perfect that the lefty blogs were derisively calling it “even the liberal TNR” or some variant. Because I’d sort of always thought TNR’s purpose was not to be liberal, but only to scold liberals and warn of the dangers of letting those imaginary hordes of damn hippies talk us out of getting our war on.
Peretz’s bigotry, the taxi driver and Bell Curve should have brought the rag down before it had a chance to be totally wrong about Iraq War 2: Torture Bugaloo. The clarity of hindsight makes it almost obvious that TNR positioned itself on foreign policy issues not based on the merits of a given proposal, but on being against whatever the damn hippies were for. Since the DFHs tend to be proven right all along in the long run, it was bound to bite TNR in the ass eventually. Heh indeedy.
Zandar
@kc: Sorry, next time I’ll ask your permission first.
Another Holocene Human
TNC did not mince words. Go! Go! Go!
on another note, reading LGM and wondering why nobody understands that the underclass in the South doesn’t get politically involved because they’re job-scared
maybe northerners don’t know what job-scared means
Betty Cracker
@Davebo: You don’t have to go back 50 years to find that at A LOT of mainstream pubs.
Another Holocene Human
@Betty Cracker: Does the Corporation for Public Broadcasting prior to defunding and the Children Television’s Workshop in their glory days count?
Or are they not “mainstream”?
Another Holocene Human
@gvg: It’s called “liberal” in order to peel off disaffected liberals and discredit liberal thought.
That’s all it ever was since I started paying attention, and it was in disrepute well before the WARWARWAR thing that was so notorious.
I’m not shedding a tear for any of Sullivan’s former employers. Fuck him and fuck them.
Another Holocene Human
@aimai: Yeah, I mean I can go find plenty of actually radical or at least pretty lefty publications out there …
Mother Jones, Utne Reader, In These Times, Labor Notes, Alternet, Grist
There are niche news sources that only seem radical because the “mainstream” is so deep into white supremacist delusion, such as Indian Country Today or AU.org. Or Black Twitter. Or RH Reality Check.
I think it’s not just a race thing but a class thing within the race thing about rending your garments for TNR. It was a platform for very serious Villagers to talk down to stupid progressives who don’t get that important people have to do important thing and deal with hard realities delivered via the latest white supremacists worldwide assfax service. Fight brown people over there and fight brown people here. We will fight them on the beaches!
Hal
I had my first job after high school graduation in a bookstore the year The Bell Curve came out. I was astonished, and still am, at the number of white commentators who said nothing was wrong in the suggestion that blacks were genetically inferior. Hey, we’re all less intelligent than Asian! haha.
The Bell Curve, the fake crack baby epidemic that never was, the idea of the black super criminal born of housing projects and teen mothers; all these ideas have permeated American society and now we are seeing the end results of the criminalization of black people in America whether we do anything wrong or not.
Another Holocene Human
@aimai: aimai agreed. I tried to post something agreeing with you that rambled about niche and alternative news sources but got automodded. :(
maybe it will show up tomorrow
Liberty60
I think TNC sheds light on a wider problem with how we talk about race- that even-the-liberal-Publication X tends to talk about black people, or to black people, but rarely WITH or BY black people.
I notice that Zandar and Elon White often show a side of an issue that liberal white commenters don’t see. It would be a lot better conversation if there were more TNC’s with such an audience.
Betty Cracker
@Another Holocene Human: Well, they aren’t publications, and they were founded less than 50 years ago, so I’m not sure how either is relevant. But as far as I know, the Muppets aren’t sexist, racist, xenophobic knobs, and I respect them for it!
schrodinger's cat
@Hal: Asians from Asia or the ones over here? Because that is a highly self selected group and is not representative at all.
Belafon
@gvg:
It was liberal when it started in 1914, and up through the 60s. It even praised the Soviet Union back before the Cold War.
It’s called liberal now for the same reason that wingers like to talk about how Democrats are the real racists because they were once the party of slavery.
Another Holocene Human
@Hal: Moynahan report, the supposed pathology of the Black family (even my racist mother saw through the lies of that one), the obsessive TV coverage of “inner city” gang violence, the narratives of victim blaming and victim shaming and innate Black criminality vs blaming society for white criminality, the narrative of the hyperintelligent white serial killer (this was never true but a good blind for the police), the myth of crack, the myth of Black substance abuse, drug moral panics.
catclub
@srv:
What will be burnt? Will it take more than two matches? Mother Jones is the only one that comes to mind. NYT will definitely be left standing. So will MSNBC.
Belafon
@Turgidson:
You mean like every other publication? It’s a little hard to fault the old writers for what is being done to it now, though I do prefer Ben Stiller’s version better.
ruemara
Truly, the TNR could eat a bag of flaming dicks and diaf.
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: It was Charles Murrary who made this claim about Asians. I’m not sure whether or not he was referencing Asians in Asian or Asian immigrants to the United States.
catclub
@Betty Cracker:
I have my suspicions about Waldorf and Statler……
elmo
@catclub: The Nation?
SatanicPanic
@Liberty60: This. We could use more of that, definitely
Hal
@schrodinger’s cat: I don’t remember if Murray and the other author whose name I can’t remember ever differentiated.
Bobby Thomson
@srv:
Have any been burnt?
beltane
Thinking it was a “serious” liberal magazine, I was excited to open up a copy of TNR as a college student back in 1989. I don’t remember the specific article I read, except that it was a nasty, snarky piece of hippie-punching that filled me with almost physical revulsion. It was like having a favorite radio station replaced by Rush Limbaugh.
Tommy
I have a question for folks here that are either smarter and/or older than myself. Why wouldn’t a national, liberal publication (like TNR back in its prime) not attempt to at least appear to cater to the middle class if not the affluent African American communites. Many places I’ve lived decades ago (back in the 40s and 50s even) had flat out educated (I am talking graduate and professional degrees) and affluent African American communities. Two cases in points the area around Howard University in DC and East St. Louis (it used to be almost all affluent and African American — not not so much — long story). Never lived there but Harlem in NYC is another that pops to mind. I realize as a percentage of the population that affluent group of African Americans might have been much smaller than “whites” but as a marketing guy at my core, I don’t leave out any group I can sell to and maybe more importantly increase my advertising base.
Even more so now, like Montgomery County, Maryland, where there are gated African American communities that rank in the Zip Codes of the top 10 and even top 5 per capita incomes by county in the nation. I assume the same can be said for other major metro areas like Chicago, Houston, and LA just to name a few. Others I don’t even know about.
So in a long winded way my question, why is a pub like the TNR not attempting to sell to them? Is it as many has said the majority of the writers, editors, and publishers are just a click of “white” people or is there something else going on here that I am missing. Because it makes no sense to me.
Mike in NC
Andrew Sullivan has reacted to the release of the CIA torture report: Obama sucks
Bobby Thomson
@Betty Cracker:
The New Republic was mainstream? Can something be mainstream when hardly anyone reads it?
Sherparick
Peretz, who married money, bought the New Republic from the Harrison family who in turn had bought it from Michael Whitney Straight, a character out of Central Casting as real “agent of influence” of Stalin’s Soviet Union and who then came clean (finked out? I guess it depends on one’s perspective) about his Cambridge friends Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby in 1963. Eric Altermann put out an article a few years back about how Marty Peretz destroyed the New Republic http://www.prospect.org/article/my-marty-peretz-problem-and-ours
In many ways, The New Republic ceased being a worthwhile publication after Richard Strout stopped writing his TRB column. 1983. Thirty years is a long time to be slinging shit. http://www.prospect.org/article/my-marty-peretz-problem-and-ours
Tommy
@catclub: Mother Jones comes to mind for me. The Nation as another person mentioned. I think all of the others I read that I would firmly call liberal are just websites, not actual print publications. Well the 50 or so local “city papers.” When I lived in DC the Washington City Paper was most liberal publication by far. Now living in St. Louis the Riverfront Times is the same way, and BTW the best reporting by far on what has happened in the past and is happening now in Fergeson by far.
But they are weekies and focus much more on in-depth investigative reporting and not day-to-day news, so don’t know if they count.
kc
@Zandar:
Thank you.
lol
@daveNYC:
The argument is that The New Republic is a venerable liberal institution and all good liberals should be sad that the bad bad man ruined it.
I don’t think anyone will ever make that argument about the Atlantic.
Betty Cracker
@Bobby Thomson: Yes, if it reflects mainstream values and thinking, it can be “mainstream” even if only one person reads it. (If we’re attaching circulation numbers to the definition of “mainstream,” we’re left with “People” and the “AARP Bulletin.”) But TNR was more than just mainstream; it was influential once upon a time.
Another Holocene Human
@Liberty60: Yeah it would be better if white “liberals” were willing to listen to people like Elon, Zandar, and Imani (and Denise Oliver Velez and shanikka on kos, Shaun King, commenters like lamh, rikyrah, ruemara, Patricia Kayden) and site owners were more pro-active about stomping out the racist trolls who infest every fucking blog post on the internet that has to do with Black issues or is written by a visibly Black author.
Another Holocene Human
@Betty Cracker: Was AARP ever as racist or reactionary as TNR? Serious question.
Timurid
Liberals and conservatives love to call each other elitists. And they’re both right. There’s a sizable group in each camp that only exerts just as much effort in pretending to care about the “base”… be they African Americans or working class whites… as it takes to keep them enlisted as Hessians on Election Day. Upper/upper middle class Democrats and Republicans are becoming more alike with each passing day.
The (d)evolution of TNR shows that all too well…
Another Holocene Human
@Hal: I guess it’s not much of a leap for some people to go from what everyone pretty much acknowledged to be true about SAT scores and to a lesser extent grades/achievement at the time (late 90s) to BioTruth!
Nooope, couldn’t be any other explanation than ineffable worth! (And being white is better than Asian despite this scale because … reasons!)
What really gets my goat is that the students dumb enough to fall for this were also the ones who told me in our high school philosophy class (er, “Theory of Knowledge”, a good class… in theory) that they had serious doubts about a Euclidean geometry proof I had just done for my oral report YOU STUPID FUCKERS IT’S MADE UP AND FOLLOWS FROM UNPROVED AXIOMS IT’S NOT MAYBE TRUE OR 97% BUT NOT 100% TRUE YOU STUPID GULLIBLE DILDOS MY GOD I HOPE I’M NEVER FALSELY ACCUSED AND YOU’RE ON THE JURY
eh … i’m still bitter … ayup … srsly, same people who can’t get what’s wrong with the bell curve think Euclidean geometry is debatable
because morons
and many of them got into very good schools
probably subscribed to TNR
BBA
The New Republic died 40 years ago when it was replaced by a vanity magazine of the same title published by a racist closet-case shitstain with his heiress beard’s money. Say what you will about Hughes, but at least he’s out and proud.
Why TNR was still called “liberal” when Commentary, which had a similar ideological flip around the same time, hasn’t been considered liberal since, is anyone’s guess.
Joel
@srv: your troll fu is especially weak today.
Tommy
@lol:
And yes it is. Look I can’t tell what happened from the media reports. I was never a huge reader of the pub. Never a subscriber. But from 1995 until 2002 my office was across from my firm’s library. We got something like 350 pubs. Most where tech and industry related, but there were also “influencer” pubs like TNR and the Economist (to name just two of many) that we got as well. I’d often pick up 5-7 each weekend, take home and read. TNR was never “terrible” in my opinon but also not something I’d pay money for either. Maybe on the newsstand if I was headed from DC to NYC on Amtrak or a plane from DC to NC (which I did once a week). But not subscribe to.
Another Holocene Human
@Timurid: Liberals don’t call conservatives elitist because elitist doesn’t really mean working for the 1%, it means sneering at low culture , so liberals just accuse conservatives of working for the 1% or billionaires and it stings because it’s true.
Conservatives call liberals elitists because a lot of their base is some college or completed college but no post secondary education so they resent Dem-voting post-secondaries and also because it harkens back to old holy roller revival tent patter about ivory tower libertine EVILution college perfessers, probably somehow (the somehow is j00000s) in cahoots with them Eastern banks what foreclosed on Ma’s farm after Pa died.
It wouldn’t play well outside the buckle of the bible belt if the Dems were more willing to have a people’s democratic party and rally around more proletarian candidates and issues in local elections instead of going with the same, tired, safe (but not from Republicans) circle jerk of upper middle class concerned citizens.
EthylEster
@Rathskeller:
Me, too.
So…what happened to the Horde at his blog?
I stopped checking it out when he went away to study French.
Now he’s back to posting more there but no comments.
Was an announcement made that comments were discontinued?
Southern Beale
We used to call The New Republic “The New Republicans.” I never read it and I after we started hearing an endless stream of “…even the liberal New Republic …” BS, I decided they were doing more harm to the cause than right-wing publications. So, good riddance.
I think it’s very appropriate that both TNR and Mary Landrieu’s career died pretty much in the same week.
Mike Furlan
“TNR regarded black people with an attitude ranging from removed disregard to blatant bigotry. When people discuss TNR’s racism, Andrew Sullivan’s publication of excerpts from Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve (and a series of dissents) gets the most attention.”
But when I pointed this out to T-N C, when he shared a publication with A S, he deleted my post. T-N C can be as good of a careerist as the next. When it suited his personal interests to do so, The Bell Curve was AOK.
KG
holy shit, just saw that top headline for Newmax: 10 Key Findings from the CIA Torture Report. I clicked on it because I wanted to see if there was some sort of spin. It’s AP copy, and it’s straight “none of it worked, they lied about it, and they tried to avoid oversight”. I’m not sure what to make of that.
Baud
@KG:
Probably just means that they haven’t figured out which Democratic constituency to blame yet.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Hal:
I remember reading a dictionary definition of “Negro” years ago which stated “a shifty, lazy person” or some such. The Bell Curve just confirmed that definition, and by its praise of it TNR just confirmed that. I mean who on FSM’s green earth thinks that Sully is a liberal?
Another Holocene Human
@Mike Furlan: How long ago was this though? I admit I tend to treat TNC with a ten foot pole because of stuff he’s said and paths he was willing to go down in the past but I’m always rooting for him when he’s right and I feel like he’s been right more than wrong lately.
I hated his commentariat and if he’s come back without comments (probably an enormous time suck and focus redirector) all the better imo.
Tommy
@Another Holocene Human: My district voted a Republican into Congress for the first time in 60 years a month or so ago. Now how those that ran before the loser this time won in a middle class district? They talked about education (I’d say an issue over their jobs, their kids jobs), middle class tax cuts, more money for teachers, firefighters, cops, and jobs, jobs, jobs.*
Asked about guns they didn’t take the bait. Religion and abortion, again didn’t take the bait. Said these are personal and family decisions/issues government shouldn’t be involved in. End of conversation. Much more moderate than me on things like coal, which we have a shit load of here in Southern Illinois, but the successful political is able to talk outside of both sides of their mouths (Obama was for “clean coal” as a Senator — almost a trillion in spending for Illinois), as I think we know any good politician can.
I say the above a fair amount here. This is how you run and win elections in the midwest. Not rocket science. Now some of the far right people in all the states like MO, IL, or IN in some districts outside of the major metro areas and college town, which we dominate will howl. But we win, win, win.
I am for hire if anybody running wants to call :)!
*About a 20% of the people I know are either teachers, firefighters, or cops.
Another Holocene Human
@Baud: “Dems in disarray”
Tommy
@Tommy: My freaking bad. A billion, not a trillion in spending for the “clean coal” plant in Illinois. My gosh my number was off. Won’t let me edit it. Started at $500M. Pushing a billion
Another Holocene Human
@Tommy:
If anybody running on the local level here actually ran on such a platform I would be all over it.
Their most liberal positions tend to be on GLBT workforce and environment and it’s all downhill from there.
It makes me very sad, Tommy, that racial fears and race hatred means that you can’t win on that platform in your district any more either. See? This is why we can’t have nice things.
I am probably too emotional and not really realistic enough about local politics in Florida. I don’t like the attitude that nothing will ever change because there’s a whole fucking country outside of the South where they don’t do things that way so no, it doesn’t have to be this way. And I’m bitter about so-called liberals who think they are management and we the peons need to just trust them more. I’m too emotional and my analysis is probably wrong. The Fla Dem Party is stuck on stupid and it’s sad to see that.
karen marie
I have never understood why TNR was considered “liberal.” It was the publication of hippie punchers, as far as I could see.
Omnes Omnibus
@lol:
If the bad, bad man in that story is Marty Peretz, then it is spot on.
Litlebritdifrnt
OT but I have seen an Ad on TV at least three times today which promotes people without a college degree, I can’t remember what it is called but it promotes hiring people who don’t have college degrees but who know how to solve problems. The ad I saw was a person telling an interviewer that she managed to get through high school without a car, a home or a phone. The interviewer said that she was not a person who he would normally hire but she was just what he needed. Anyone know who is behind these ads?
beltane
@karen marie: Before there were hippies and hippie punchers, TNR was a genuine liberal publication. I was not of reading age in those days, and hearing stories about TNR’s liberal days reminds me of my grandmother’s old stories about the Horn & Hardart Automat.
Mike Furlan
@Another Holocene Human:
He ran interference for A S when they both were at the Atlantic.
Hey, he had a career to nurture. . .
Timurid
@Litlebritdifrnt:
North Korea?
Omnes Omnibus
@Timurid: The Gehlen Organization?
Tommy
@Another Holocene Human: Oh you CAN win on that here, the local guy just didn’t run on it. I am and I don’t know what my Congress Critter even ran on.
Five miles from my house is the end of the St. Louis rail line. At a community college. If I’d drive by with you, you’d drop to your knees. Almost all buildings build in the last ten years. Trying to become a four-year state school. State-of-the-art everything. They just spent like $750,000 to build out bike paths from Metro stop to Metro stops all around it. The school has like a plot of 100 acres of “wild grass,” what Illinois looked like here before the Europeans.
Parking at the school is free.
Using a grant from the feds to install “metro solar car parks.” Where you park your car under something, but it gathers sunlight for energy every day. To power the school. They think when the project done in 2020, they will be MAKING money on power.
Now I need to say this. I get my power from a co-op of small towns. I said I would take pics and I didn’t in comments about this. In a three month period earlier this year and a three month period now we wired the “backbone” of our town. From strach. Upgraded everything. We did this with one outside contractor. I am talking driving utility poles into the ground. Running lines. You name it.
I refuse it can’t be done other places ….
Suzanne
@Tommy: The reason white writers for TNR don’t write for African-Americans is because they fall into this same mental trap that most people do, which is to assume that most people are like themselves and their friends. It’s not just racially based—I see my architect friends assume that everyone knows who Frank Gehry is, or that it is a given that “cities should court the creative class”, or whatever. Business owners hang out with other business owners, and they start to think that everyone either does or wants to own a business. TNR writers end up writing to other white people because they assume that the people reading are white people. It really takes a great deal of self-examination to realize that one’s concerns are not everyone’s concerns.
Even here, by the amount of discussion on the downfall of TNR, one might think that it was an issue that most Americans feel very strongly about, when I’d be willing to bet that 98% of Americans have never even heard of TNR, much less read it, or give a fuck about it.
lurker dean
@Mike in NC: your post made me curious so i had a peak. ugh. so glad i stopped reading his site.
My Truth Hurts
Good riddance to smug college dining hall level contrarianism. There was never anything relevent nor intellectual about the rag. Not even very good as kindling for your fireplace.
Omnes Omnibus
@My Truth Hurts: Never?
Baud
It won’t be long before Balloon Juice is the only decent publication left.
aimai
@Mike Furlan: He’s pretty upfront about how every human being will fight to protect a sinecure, or the right to be heard, by refusing to criticize powerful people or bite the hand that feeds them. He says so right in this essay when he links to his own mea culpa over his refusal to address the Bill Cosby rape issue when he was actually covering Cosby.
And this is true. There is no special virtue in specific, individual, non white authors that make them willing or able to stand up for the interests of their entire class or caste. Some people are always going to be quislings, or cowards, or careerists. And that will be as true if some wealthy African American donor buys a political magazine and vows to produce important political writing and criticism and create an incubator for Howard University Grads and their friends (which, btw, I would totally support as a fantastic thing to do). But once they are accepting that sweet, sweet, millionaire money even those brave fighting writers will find themselves trimming their sails to meet the wind. Or inviting only their personal friends and acolytes to submit articles instead of accepting submissions from people they don’t know or didn’t go to school with.
Turgidson
@Belafon:
I wouldn’t quite say “every” other publication, but sure, point taken. It just seems like TNR has a mystique among its alumni that is grandiose and majestic (to them) in a way that seems utterly incomprehensible to those not in The Club who read its bigotry and not-very-subtle white supremacism cloaked in intellectual phrasing, and its refusal to find a war it didn’t like and thought it was nothing special.
Maybe it only seems this way because of TNR’s implosion, and the same thing would happen if the Atlantic or the New Yorker met a similar fate. I dunno. (I also think those two are, and long have been, far superior, but that’s just like…my opinion…man).
Another Holocene Human
@Turgidson: If the New Yorker imploded I think I would have to take time out from the internet for a week … except to read Cracked and The Onion.
The Atlantic lacks the “mystique” of TNR or New Yorker. They also were able to transition seemlessly* from print only to print and online and blogs so they are very relevant online. If they died it would be kind of shocking and portend doom for a lot of other online pubs.
*-at least for this reader
KG
@Turgidson: it’s similar to a college experience, thus former writers/staff referring to themselves as alumni. i’ve never considered myself an alum of any business i’ve worked for. schools? sure. but jobs? fuck no. so when you’re “alumni” that means it’s something more than a business, it’s an institution. and it seems that TNR-types saw themselves as the Ivy League of magazines, doing important things, unlike, say Time or Life that are more like land grant universities (or worse “state schools”).
i suppose, if i were on the inside of the journalism world, i would see losing TNR as losing an institution. but given how well institutions have been doing in the last decade or so, i’m not sure losing another one is necessarily a bad thing.
RSA
@Baud:
If it can resist the allure of becoming a vertically integrated digital media BJ, what with podcasts, calendars, recipes, and all.
Omnes Omnibus
@KG:
While not wanting to release my inner pedant, I, nevertheless, must ask: Aren’t land grant universities state schools? Or are you referring to the perceived prestige difference between a flagship university and the other state schools?
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: @RSA: Can a publication whose publisher is famous for telling his readership to go fuck themselves be considered decent?
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Given the readership, yes.
ETA: We are incorrigible.
Another Holocene Human
@Tommy: I agree. I think a middle class is important. Ramp up economic inequality and paranoia, xenophobia, zero-sum thinking start running rampant.
But it’s all of a piece with the cronyism. Gov’t isn’t being run responsibly or professionally. They hire cronies who hire undocumented (and un-taxes-paid-on) workers, take our tax dollars and do a shitty job. “Professional” staff and elected officials (elected in March) who live in the same ‘hoods decide that wasting money redoing the same intersection 3 times in ten years is more vital than doing anything for roads in disadvantaged neighborhoods or beefing up oversubscribed bus service.
Florida has a surplus this year coming. Will teachers and schools see any of it? Our water sources which are endangered state wide? Our transit agencies? Core courses at the state schools which were cut back during the recession? Indigent care, mentally ill, terminally ill, the blind?
They won’t even take free money for medicaid.
it’s like inequality, bad management, cronyism, corruption, bad decisions, lack of democracy, lack of participation they’re all tied in some way I’m having trouble sussing out
but when people say they don’t trust gov’t here they have good reason to say so–not a slogan–reality
Eric U.
I always thought that the best debunking of the Bell Curve was that if you took Russian Jews out of the population of white Americans the statistics even out between the races. At that point it is such a ridiculous thing to write a book about nobody but a hardened racist would even acknowlege the book at all, but Sully went ahead.
Another Holocene Human
The best project locally I know of what paid for by the Feds under fed rules–buy America only, prevailing wage, kicked up environmental requirements
local government REFUSES to meet these standards themselves
liberal my ass!!
KG
@Omnes Omnibus: the flagship schools vs other state schools… like here in California UCLA and UC Berkeley carry a lot more prestige than say CSU Long Beach (my alma mater) and San Francisco State.
ETA: actually, the UCs are land grant universities, but CSUs are not (they are descendents of the California Normal Schools – teaching schools)
Another Holocene Human
@Eric U.: Oh, snap.
Omnes Omnibus
@KG: That’s what I thought you meant, but the inner pedant is hard taskmaster at times.
Elizabelle
Enough about TNR.
Here’s a photo of a sheep on the lam in Omaha, in a “festive” holiday sweater.
In care of the Humane Society; hope the little guy gets home.
You’re welcome.
Omnes Omnibus
@Elizabelle: Forcing a sheep to wear a sweater is abusive, I am glad the Humane Society was brought in.
ETA: The sweater is probably acrylic – I am not sure if that makes the whole thing better or worse.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
Sheep needs to get a job. Moocher.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
No kidding. “Hey, let’s shave the wool off a sheep, and then put a sweater on it.”
I bet that sheep’s owners has an MBA.
Bobby Thomson
@Betty Cracker: that’s just tautological.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud:
Fixed for greater profitability. Gimme a seven figure bonus.
Baud
@Bobby Thomson:
I’ve always believed that tautological was the best kind of logical. YMMV.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
You, sir, are a maker!
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: For some reason, this comes to mind.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t even want to contemplate what valuable piece of information you had to expunge from your mind to make room to recall that clip.
skerry
@Baud: @Omnes Omnibus: MBA from a state school, no doubt.
skerry
@Omnes Omnibus: My favorite!
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Nothing at all. That found its way in early. Now what pieces of valuable information failed to lodge in my mind because I can recall that clip is a rather wide field for conjecture.
Cervantes
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not necessarily: Cornell and MIT, for example.
Villago Delenda Est
The Likud filth that is Peretz needs to meet his demise, like all Likud filth, at the same place their predecessors did in 1946.
The Nuremberg Palace of Justice.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cervantes: I did not know that they were land grant universities. Thanks.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
A valid point. I am confident that you have failed to register more information than I have ever been exposed to. You have my utmost respect, good OO.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I can’t remember where I read it, but I read that in the early 19th Century, America was experimenting with various kinds of what we would call today “public-private” partnerships for industrial activity. Eventually, however, private capital won out as the chief economic paradigm.
Not sure if that’s related to land-grant universities much, but it came to mind.
skerry
@Cervantes: Cornell is an interesting case. It is both a private endowed university and a public, land-grand state university.
Elizabelle
@Omnes Omnibus:
Shaving a sheep and selling it a sweater. I am glad I had finished my glass of wine.
FWIW, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’s on CBS in a few minutes. More fun if you can swig something everytime the Abominable or a misfit toy shows up.
Omnes Omnibus
@Elizabelle: Bumbles bounce.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: Shit, that should have come with a spoiler alert. Sorry.
aimai
@Villago Delenda Est: Can we not call people “filth”? Especially when its a term that has, historically, been applied specifically to their race/ethnicity? I am strongly opposed to Marty Peretz for everything he’s ever written, and I am opposed to Likud too, but people are not “filth” and if its wrong for Peretz to use language like that about Muslims (and it is) then its equally wrong and highly problematic to use it about Peretz. Specify his crimes, charge him with them, and try him for them why dont you?
Cervantes
@aimai:
Could not agree more.
mainmati
I read the New Republic in the early 1970s as a college student and found it drab and even then what would be considered DLC material. So, I went back to the Whole Earth Catalog (I’m an environmentalist). TNR since then has been disguised conventional GOP material.
mainmati
@schrodinger’s cat: I travel to Asia for work internationally frequently and encounter the FT Weekend Edition. The daily FT is so far better than the Wall Street Journal but their weekend edition with its rich people’s lifestyle porno while delicious to read and wonderfully presented is also totally ridiculous. In other words, all of the best papers have both good analytics and social porno.
Mike Furlan
@aimai: Not everybody. John Cole doesn’t seem to be driven careerist, his only flaw that I can see is his link to the white supremacist want to be Larison. And I think John considers the right to tell anyone to go “blank” themselves as more valuable than comfortable job stroking the right people for money.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike Furlan: Cole has a day job.
Ernest Pikeman
@aimai: Forget it Aimai, it’s Villago. Death threats and dehumanizing are his/her freak flag, and it flies proudly.
Mike Furlan
@Omnes Omnibus: He’ll need it. Not going anywhere just telling the truth the way you see it.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: The Muppet Show did a lot of jokes that were pretty sexist, really. I noticed that watching it on DVD recently. The rule is that any joke a little kid could get still holds up, but the “adult” humor has dated badly.
Vanya
@Eric U.: That’s not really a “debunking”. The Bell Curve provides plenty of ammunition for people who want to believe that white gentiles are also on average pretty stupid and violent compared to Jews and East Asians. I have a sneaky suspicion that is why The Bell Curve’s argument appealed to Marty Peretz.
Vanya
TNR was/is “liberal” in the traditional sense of “liberal” – belief in free markets, secular, personal freedoms, blah, blah. The idea that “liberal”=”progressive”=”socialist”=”Maoism” is an idea that conservatives tried to promote to discredit any ideology to the left of The National Review. I am not sure why the American left agreed to adopt the label. Back in the 1960s real hippies used to consider “liberals” mealy mouthed abetters of the existing Power Structure, which fits TNR pretty well. “Liberalism” traditionally is a very centrist ideology, and still is in Europe.
Betty Cracker
@Bobby Thomson: Tell it to the fucking dictionary. You asked if something could be mainstream if hardly anybody reads it. The answer is yes. If it reflects conventional thought, it’s mainstream.
@Matt McIrvin: Noooo! Even the liberal Muppets?
Jinchi
@Belafon:
I know it fits the conservative stereotype, but praising the Soviet Union doesn’t make you a liberal.
Vanya
In all the discussion of how awful TNR has been under Marty, why does Krauthammer’s name not come up more often? To my mind he is perhaps the most loathsome and mean-spirited of all the neocons who spent time hiding under the TNR banner.