Requiem for a TNR Dream

When Chris Hughes bought a majority share of The New Republic two years ago, I tolkd folks to "count me as a supporter." This may not have been one of my best decisions.

I haven't been a regular reader at TNR for awhile now -- Jonathan Chait was my must-read author and he's moved over to NY Mag. But I am a regular irregular reader, if that makes sense, and so I do feel invested in its success. My own relationship with The New Republic echoes that of many of the folks I've been reading over the past few days. As a high school debater I found it lively, engaging, and unpredictable -- all qualities I aspired to myself. It certainly was a "formative influence" on me -- for good and for ill (I can certainly attribute my pronounced hawkish tendencies that persisted through most of my college years to the magazine). And at least some of my blogging style -- most notably how I title my pieces -- was very consciously modeled off of my TNR reading. While I don't exactly identify with it, I can't help but give a nod to how Michael Lerner described his college-age self (I'm paraphrasing from memory): "I was a New Republic reader -- I saw through a lot of bullshit, but I didn't really have any interest in the broader structures of power and domination in the world."

Aside from being comfortably ensconced within the mainstream liberal tradition, TNR's most notable quality was its contrarian streak. This was a blessing and a curse. At its best, the magazine challenged its readers to take unexpected and controversial ideas seriously, and created a forum for debate and argumentation that was unrivaled anywhere. At its worst, it elevated genuinely mediocre ideas to a prominent platform with a smug grin about how it was "provocative". The magazine often took great glee in poking its own coalition; so much so that it sometimes didn't matter whether the poke was justified.

Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, The New Republic appears to be in a state of chaos following a mass exodus of upper-level staff and contributors. The instigating event appears to be the departure of well-respected editor Franklin Foer, who was replaced by former Gawker chieftain Gabriel Snyder. That Foer heard about his replacement through external sources added insult to injury (though it did allow him to announce his resignation rather than being fired). Longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier joined Foer in exiting, and soon a majority of TNR's upper-echelons (and a large quantity of their contributing editors) jumped ship as well.

My first reaction to this was that everybody seemed to be overreacting. To be sure, my first exposure to the breaking story was in Gawker's nyah-nyah post "White Men Upset Wrong White Man Placed in Charge of White-Man Magazine." Aside from the obvious partisanship, this seemed more than a bit cherry-picked (did Julia Ioffe, Hillary Kelly, Rachel Morris, Judith Shulevitz, Anne Applebaum, Ruth Franklin, Sacha Scoblic, Helen Vendler, and Jennifer Homans all get sex-change operations?). But my next thought, of course, was what could possibly be such a big deal as to be prompting this torrent of "RIPs" for the magazine? Everybody seemed to be overreacting. I like Franklin Foer well enough (I've never met him, but How Soccer Explains the World is an enjoyable read), but editors come and go. How we moved from "a leadership shake-up" to "the death of an American institution" eluded me.

The other half of this story appears to be boiled-over discontent at the way Hughes and his minions have been running the company -- basically a blizzard of nonsensical biz school jargon and tech-speak that evinced a conscious disrespect for the magazine's tradition and the value of genuine long-form journalism generally. The nightmare was that Hughes was going to try to convert TNR into a Buzzfeed lookalike with content reduced to a blizzard of attention-grabby but contentless niblets. That the magazine's new CEO reportedly complained that he got bored if he had to read more than 500 words in an article is certainly enough to give any TNR loyalist an aneyurism.

I want to be hopeful. After all, despite its rep Buzzfeed (and Gawker) have actually been moving towards interesting long-form journalism of the sort TNR long exemplified. There seems to be a convergence in the industry, and TNR might be well positioned to exploit that convergence. Yet some epistemic humility on my part is in order. I'm not a member of the media industry, and I don't have any inside information on the magazine. The people who do? Are panicking, and fleeing the magazine in droves. When two-thirds of your masthead cuts ties in the space of a few days, that's a genuine red flag. And it's not clear if TNR's rump staff will be able to right ship.

Long Live the King

Chris Hughes, looking to spend some of the megabucks he's earned as co-founder of Facebook, has bought a majority share in The New Republic and installed himself as the new editor-in-chief. You can read his introductory letter here.

Count me in as a supporter. The New Republic still has, I think, quite a bit to give to the progressive political community. But the increasingly misanthropic rantings of Marty Peretz were holding it back. Hughes is not only a break from the old guard, he is obviously well tied-in to modern media platforms, making him more than just a rich dude playing publisher. He has a real chance to make TNR into an opinion leader again.

Peretz Parody Alert

Marty Peretz lobs up a basically unsubstantiated hit piece on Elizabeth Warren, which argues ... well, it's difficult to figure out what it's arguing. It claims she made a mistake in bringing up Scott Brown's nude photoshoot, to which I say, yeah, probably. Then it kind of idly muses about whether Elizabeth Warren is or isn't attractive, and whether men do or don't like her. Buried three paragraphs from the end is the claim that Warren "say[s] obvious things" (such as? Alas, we have a whole political party predicated on the notion that asking a factory owner to contribute his fair share is Bolshevik, so I have no idea what is and isn't "obvious" to this polity).

And then finally, two paragraphs from the end, we are asked to wonder whether Warren knows anything about foreign policy. "Ask her about the Arab Spring, Israel, and the peace process, human rights and Africa, the American relationship with Venezuela." Hey, here's an idea Marty: Ask her about China! That will turn out well for you.

Now, I have to say, so far this is a pretty standard entry in the genre of intellectually vapid beltway punditry -- a mix of story-of-the-day (the Brown/Warren barbs over the nude shoot), smart-women-make-the-boys-cry (Hillary Clinton! Nancy Pelosi!), and unsupported babbling about whether Harvard Law Professors are really "qualified" to serve alongside the likes of Jeff Sessions in the US Senate.

But what puts it over the top is the final paragraph. Remember, this elephant of a non-sequitur comes right after Peretz complains about Warren's alleged lack of foreign policy chops:

And then there’s one of the Republican candidates for president, Herman Cain. “When the moon hits your eye … Like a big pizza pie. That’s amore.” He’s running second among all the professional politicians in the Republican race for president. Oh, yes, and he’s a black man. It can’t be. Republicans favoring a … a … a black man? Wow. There’s been very little about this phenomenon in the press. I’ve found no pretense in the man. He’s got common sense. He tells it like it is. Will someone write something serious about him?

Herman Cain. You just finished talking about the need to have thunk deep thoughts about foreign policy, and now you're waxing lyrical about Herman "Palestinian right of return" Cain? A guy who openly brags about his lack of knowledge on foreign affairs? Color me crazy, but I think there's a tension here.

Oh but yes, Cain "tells it like it is". He's bold enough to bravely tell largely White audiences that most Blacks are idiots who can't think for themselves. Surely, it is a minor miracle that the Republican Party finds that sort of Black man appealing (unless he displays the slightest bit of discomfort with the word "niggerhead". Then he's a race-baiter like all the rest).

My Replacement

Too busy to post today. So just read Jon Chait instead. Though I will defend, perhaps irrationally, Walt Whitman HS against private school competitors.

Abusive

The ever-more disgusting Marty Peretz: "I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse." Take a guess on who "these people" are.

If Peretz didn't own the damn place, this is the sort of thing that would get one fired. What an embarrassment. (Incidentally, Alex Pareene is correct that if TNR's in-house critics can't weigh in on this, then what's the point of having them around?).

Operation Make The World Hate Us

Leon Wieseltier has a brilliant column up on the Gaza flotilla incident. Seriously -- it might be the best thing I've ever seen him write (and, while I find Wieseltier maddeningly inconsistent sometimes, when he's on, he is on. So to say it is his best work is high praise). I'll try to excerpt, but it's one of those cases where I really have to resist the temptation to copy and paste the whole thing:

Israel does not need enemies: it has itself. Or more precisely: it has its government. The Netanyahu-Barak government has somehow found a way to lose the moral high ground, the all-important war for symbols and meanings, to Hamas. That is quite an accomplishment. Operation Make the World Hate Us, it might have been called.

I leave it to others to make the operational criticisms of the Israeli action, and will say only that even my amateurish understanding of the tactical challenge posed by the interdiction of the boats suffices to suggest that there were other ways to do this. I also will not pretend to a perfect grasp of what happened on board the Mavi Marmara. I have pondered the videos that both sides have released, and concluded that the Israeli soldiers sliding down that rope had no intention of attacking the people on board and that the people on board had no way of being confident of this. I cannot expect Palestinians and their supporters to believe the best about the Israeli army. (This is what Israeli hardliners call “the restoration of deterrence.”) I do not doubt that some of the activists on the ship welcomed a confrontation with Israel, but the Israelis should not have obliged them. In any event, what took place on that deck looks to me like a tragic misunderstanding. Yet there was no reason to think that anything else would have transpired.
[...]
It is also the inevitable consequence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cunning pronouncement last year that the Israel is now endangered by “the Iran threat, the missile threat, and the threat I call the Goldstone threat.” The equivalence was morally misleading, and therefore dangerous. Ideological warfare is not military warfare. I have studied the entirety of the Goldstone Report, and whereas I do not doubt (and wrote in this magazine in the days before Goldstone) that Operation Cast Lead caused the unjustifiable death of non-combatants, I also do not doubt that the Goldstone Report, which was nastily indifferent to Israel’s security predicament and to the ethical challenges of Israeli self-defense, was an instrument in a broad campaign of delegitimation against Israel—and yet the threat of delegitimation is not like the threat of destruction. It is different in kind. A commando operation is not an appropriate response to an idea. “This was no Love Boat,” Netanyahu said yesterday. “It was a hate boat.” He is right, but so what? The threat of delegitimation is not a military problem and it does not have a military solution. And the attempt to give it a military solution has now had the awful consequence of making the threat still greater. The assault on the Mavi Marmara was a stupid gift to the delegitimators.

You do not have to be a general to grasp these distinctions. In fact, judging by Israel’s recent history, it might help not to be one. But the militarization of the Israeli government’s understanding of Israel’s situation—this has been the most sterile period for diplomacy in all of Israel’s history—is not all that led to the debacle at sea. Rules of military engagement that allow soldiers to fire on political activists (I leave aside the question of their humanitarianism for a moment) may signify something still deeper and even more troubling. It is hard not to conclude from this Israeli action, and also from other Israeli actions in recent years, that the Israeli leadership simply does not care any longer about what anybody thinks. It does not seem to care about what even the United States—its only real friend, even in the choppy era of Obama—thinks. This is not defiance, it is despair. The Israeli leadership seems to have given up any expectation of fairness and sympathy from the world. It is behaving as if it believes, in the manner of the most perilous Jewish pessimism, that the whole world hates the Jews, and that is all there is to it. This is the very opposite of the measured and empirical attitude, the search for strategic opportunity, the enlistment of imagination in the service of ideals and interests, that is required for statecraft.

The complication—the one that deprives anybody who acknowledges it of membership in any of the gangs of commentary—is that there is a partial basis in the actually existing world for a degree of Israeli pessimism. There are leaders, states, organizations, and peoples whose hostility to the Jewish state is irrational and absolute and in some cases murderous. Things are said critically about Israel that wildly burst the bounds of thoughtful criticism. The language in which Israel is described by some governments and international organizations is lurid and grotesque and foul. Anti-Semitic tropes—the conspiracy theory about the Jews, most conspicuously—is regularly encountered in otherwise respectable places. The analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that absolves the Palestinians of any significant role in it is widespread. I do not see how any of this can be denied, or shunted aside, or explained entirely in terms of Israeli behavior. But it is emphatically not the whole picture, except for those Israelis and Jews whose political interests and ideological inclinations prefer it to be the whole picture. For there are forces in Israel, and in its government, that have a use for Jewish hopelessness.

Again -- read it all.

(Blogging on my lunch break -- that's right, I'm committed).

The Unthinkable Retort

I noted the other day how pleased I was by Jon Chait's largely positive response to Peter Beinart's trechant critique of the American Jewish Establishment's perspective on Israel and young Jews (my original reaction to the piece). Consequently, like Mr. Chait, I was honestly surprised at the vitriole Beinart directed towards Chait's post.

Beinart's accusation towards Chait is that he isn't angry enough, for "there is only one decent response to these truths: fury. If you're not angry, you're either not paying attention or you don't care...." I have to admit that I am not in the camp of those who think what the Middle East conflict needs is more anger, and the contributions of those who think anger is the right emotion to "build on" have rarely been positive, in my view. It is very weird to me that Chait is getting a negative reaction for essentially agreeing with Beinart's main points.

What it is most symptomatic of, I think, is this idea that any disagreement with any criticism of Israel or Israel's supporters -- even if only partial, even if expressed in perfectly temperate tones -- is necessarily some sort of wild-eyed, pro-Likud, senseless screed aimed at suppressing any and all debate. That Chait, a supporter of Beinart, got met with this reaction almost reflexively is deeply worrisome to me, and does not bode well for the success of the project Beinart claims he wants to start.

The Magic of Intent: Matt Yglesias Edition

So Matt Yglesias is angry at Leon Wieseltier for being mean to Andrew Sullivan. The argument is that Wieseltier is throwing around "baseless" charges of anti-Semitism, for the sole purpose of instilling fear in the "innocent" so they dare not critique Israel. He then compares Wieseltier to a Bolshevik show-trial ringleader (really).

The problem is that Wieseltier's argument is not "baseless", at least in the sense that it isn't supported by clearly-stated warrants. He's making pretty specific claims about what demands Sullivan makes of Jews, and how they fit into a broader history and structure of power that Christians possess over Jews (and majorities tend to possess over minorities). One could disagree with those claims on the substance, but what Yglesias is relying on is a particular definition of when something is legitimately labeled anti-Semitism:

If you call anti-semites anti-semites, then people who aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism will figure “hey, since my political opinions aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism, then I’m safe.” The idea is to put everyone on notice that mere innocence will be no defense.

And y'all know what my objection here is. Intent is not a magical ward guarding its wielders from doing racist or bigoted things. You can mean perfectly well, consider oneself to be a totally fair and egalitarian person, and still hold positions or beliefs that are marginalizing or discriminatory towards particular groups. Being "motivated by anti-Jewish racism" is not the totality of what makes something potentially anti-Semitic, and if the threshold for non-abusive discussion of anti-Semitism is getting the defendant to admit "I'm an evil bigot who hates Jews", then we're just trying to suppress any critical discussion of anti-Semitism under the guise of preventing its "baseless" deployment. It is not a good thing when everyone who isn't a Klan member gets to claim immunity from grappling with ingrained racism and anti-Semitism. It simply allows people to say that nothing is ever anti-Semitic.

What does Sullivan feel about Jews? Like Wieseltier, who writes "it is impossible to know what is in a man’s heart", I have no way of knowing. But I suspect that he considers himself a friend of the Jewish people, committed to them flourishing and living in peace and security. That's great. It's also entirely consistent with holding policy prescriptions, stereotypes, prejudices, and other attitudes that act to keep Jews in an unequal status and deny them the ability to flourish, live as equals, and enjoy peace and security. The measure of a true friend and ally isn't what's in their heart, because racism isn't fundamentally "in the heart".* It's whether they are willing to go beyond that bare assertion of friendship and dig deep when they are told "you're hurting me".

* See Tommie Shelby, "Is Racism in the 'Heart'?" 33 Journal of Social Philosophy 411 (2002).

UPDATE: I think there is a fair tactical review of the upshot of Wieseltier's piece. I still maintain, though, that restricting the scope of anti-Semitism to evil Klansman cackling in their robes is wrong on essentially every level, and buying into that framework guarantees an increasingly impoverished discourse on the subject that will continue to marginalize Jewish lives.

ChaitBlog

Jonathan Chait gets a blog all his own on the TNR website. Nice!

UPDATE: Turns out it's replacing the old Plank blog, so that's bittersweet. Meanwhile, a nice sample of Chait's newest forum is his post on the transgender quota of one. "It's very odd to witness a part of the political discourse where one side understands that its actual views are so completely socially unacceptable that they can't be expressed, and must be replaced with nonsense terms."

The Round Mound Holds Court

TNR has a very entertaining interview up with Charles Barkley. Barkley continues to flirt with running for Governor of Alabama. I have no idea how it'll play (I don't even know if he'd run as a Democrat or an Independent), but there is no denying he'd shake up the terrain there.

Heaven Forbid We Listen To Reason

Jamie Kirchick...massive asshole. I love how he doesn't bother to note whether he thinks the "nutroots"* are even wrong on issues like the FISA bill. Calling them names is so much more fun than substantive engagement.

* I can concede that the netroots has been right on more issues than I have, before I came around -- namely, the Iraq War, and mistrust of Joe Lieberman. That's because I'm a mature human being who can admit a mistake. Kirchick is a child who thinks pugnaciousness can substitute for erudition. He is sadly mistaken. On the other hand, watching him get ripped to shreds whenever he accidentally crosses path with anyone intelligent is one of the blogosphere's great spectator sports.

Fog of Faux-Warriors

I just finished reading Franklin Foer's "Fog of War" piece, his final explanation of the entire Scott Beauchamp saga. After painstakingly documenting how the magazine checked and rechecked the story, Foer concluded that "we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories."

I don't think I ever blogged on this controversy before. I don't recall doing so, and a search through my archives for "Beauchamp" yielded nothing. I don't have a dog in this hunt. Hence, I feel like I was able to read Foer's article with a relatively open mind. It demonstrates the type of complete, thorough investigation conservative bloggers have been screaming for for months on end. Judging from their reaction, it is clear that a cohesive look into Beauchamp's articles is the last thing they wanted. (here's, e.g., Powerline, Malkin, Astute Blogger)

Let's be clear. TNR took a lot of heat on this story -- far more than was ever justified even if Beauchamp turned out to be a total liar. It would have been very easy for them to just throw him to the wolves entirely and watch the heat dissipate. Instead, they decided to actually try and figure out what happened -- no mean feat when the subject is first person accounts of events that occurred in a war-zone (a war which, it might bear repeating, is still on-going).

The results of their investigation make a few things clear. First, with the exception of keeping Elspeth Reeves as the primary fact-checker after she married Beauchamp (they were friends when he started writing for TNR, and married later), TNR did nothing wrong. They fact-checked the stories as best they could, they did the effort to corroborate them from outside sources. There are limits to what a magazine could reasonably have been expected to do, and The New Republic in no way cut corners on its journalistic responsibility.

Second, Beauchamp's stories are still quite plausible. Even the one clear error -- the jokes about the woman with burns on her face at the forward base in Iraq -- looks to have been a genuine error, not a deliberate lie. The story was traced and corroborated to have occurred, only in Kuwait prior to the war, not Iraq. This is not a meaningless error, as the story was used to illustrate the way that war corrupts the minds of soldiers, and if it occurred prior to entering combat, this makes no sense. But the fact that the story likely did happen makes it more likely this was an innocent error with times mixed up than a deliberate effort at fabrication. Beyond that, none of Beauchamp's accounts have been shown to be wrong. They have in no way been "debunked" or proven false. As Foer said, Beauchamp's accounts were corroborated independently by nearly an entire company of fellow soldiers. By contrast, the supposed recantations were done under considerable duress -- there is simply no way to take seriously the kind of coerced statements the army managed to drag out of Beauchamp's platoon mates. I dare say that after reading Foer's reports, he did not have to retract the stories at all. This isn't to say we know what Beauchamp said is true -- in such a situation, we have no way of knowing, and the people who acted as if we were going to find out clear-as-day were deluding themselves. Foer's standard, "essential confidence" that every event Beauchamp described "occurred in exactly the manner that he described them," is laudably high -- indeed, likely impossible for a first-person war story to meet. Certainly, conceding that Beauchamp's tale did not reach it is hardly the same thing as calling him a liar. Hence, anybody who claims that TNR has "admitted" that Beauchamp is a liar or a fabricator is the only known liar or fabricator in the discussion.

Virtually none of the conservative bloggers I read on this story expressed the remotest interest in Foer's actual investigation. Far from it -- they mocked it incessantly. They accused him of simply trying to save his own skin (from who?), or of double-speak. Undoubtedly, this is because the investigation shows that TNR had more than enough evidence to run these pieces, and when faced with critique, they underwent a rigorous retrace of every pertinent detail to find the truth. Their conservative interlocutors, by contrast, showed no rigor and no interest in truth -- content to take selectively leaked military reports as dogma and amateur blogger investigations as articles of faith. It was embarrassing to read then, and it is even more embarrassing now, in the face of a true effort like Foer's.

From the start, I suspected that the conservative outrage over Beauchamp's articles stemmed from two primary sources, neither of which was particularly conducive to finding out the truth. The first was a desire to pin a liberal skull to their wall, and the second was a child-like belief that American soldiers could do no wrong -- the same mentality that led them to dismiss Abu Gharib, the same mentality that leads them to deny even today the overwhelming evidence of American complicity (if not outright participation) in torture. Their writings throughout these past few months have done nothing to dissuade me of that notion and a lot to strengthen it. It is immature, it is juvenile, and it is far more of a black mark on their integrity than anything The New Republic will come away with.

Professor President

Jason Zengerle objects to Barack Obama listing "constitutional law professor" as part of his experience in "public service." Personally, I love that Obama was a law professor (technically a lecturer, since he wasn't tenure-track, but I've heard from U.Chicago sources that he had a tenure-track position whenever he wanted it--which he didn't). As I've relayed to many of my friends, after eight years of being run by an over-promoted fraternity leader, I could stand for a little brilliance in the Oval Office. And while, as an aspiring law professor, I've often joked with my friends that there are few people who would call training new lawyers a "public service," in all seriousness I think the scholars who are trying to illuminate our collective understanding of the law, and set budding attorneys on the right path, are truly doing a great deed for the American people, and deserve to be lauded for it.

Fortunately, virtually all the comments in Zengerle's post agree with me, so I'm not alone here.

Guest List

Am I the only one who finds it strange that Hilzoy and Jamie Kirchick are guest-blogging at Andrew Sullivan's place at the same time?

For those of you who don't know, Hilzoy--a professor of philosophy and bioethics at Johns Hopkins University who normally makes her home as the lead poster at Obsidian Wings, is a pretty well-established progressive blogger--one of the best out there, in my (and Marty Lederman's) humble opinion. As for Jamie Kirchick, his day job is officially to be Marty Peretz's assistant, and unofficially, to prevent The New Republic from re-establishing any of the progressive credibility it used to enjoy by being obnoxiously and pugnaciously neo-conservative at The Plank.

One of my friends asked me if it was going to be like arena combat between the two. I said that, if it does turn into a war, it will resemble an arena only in the sense of the lion versus the Christian. By way of example, see here, where Kirchick tries to say that there is an "Obama doctrine" of non-intervention in cases of genocide, compared to here, where Hilzoy essentially rips it apart.