There’s probably been too much written already about the fate of The New Republic (Clive Crook certainly seems to think so), but I worry that my last post may have been misunderstood. So I want to take the opportunity of more recent comments to clarify what I was getting at.

The “eulogy” that, to my ear, harmonizes most strongly with my own is former editor Peter Beinart’s. Beinart uses generally warm language to describe a TNR that in substantive terms is not so very different from the one excoriated in Fredrik deBoer’s “Tramp the Dirt Down” riff (and follow-up). They both agree: what made TNR distinctive was that it was a magazine that saw itself as liberal and aligned with the Democratic Party, but one whose mission was to attack the left and pull the Democrats to the right, on both domestic and foreign policy.

And in the contemporary landscape, there’s simply no reason for such a publication to exist. On foreign policy, the center of gravity of the Democratic Party remains well to the interventionist right of its voting base, and on economic policy it remains attuned to the needs of finance and industry. The argument to be had is between a dominant center that is more right-leaning than a generation ago, and a left that is still searching for a set of organizing principles. That doesn’t leave much room for what TNR was in its heyday.

Was TNR interestingly heterodox back then? Yes. Would a magazine following the same strategy be similarly interestingly heterodox today? No. It’s not just that the political landscape has shifted. It’s that there’s new data. Looking at domestic policy: we’ve now seen how welfare reform works – or doesn’t work – during a long recession and a structurally weak labor market. We’ve lived for a generation under an economic regime that is some blend of the American and European uses of the word “neoliberal.” We’ve had more than twenty years of broken windows policing and experiments with private contracting of government services. The “Third Way” has been tried. Whether you think it succeeded or failed or some combination thereof, it’s no longer a proposition to advocate – it’s part of history.

So when eulogizers long for the TNR of the ’80s and ’90s, what are they longing for? Are they longing for that feeling of having a new, interesting idea inadequately represented by the political alternatives on offer? Well – TNR‘s old positioning is unlikely to provide that. Are they longing for the old positioning? Well – the current political landscape is uncongenial to that. Are they longing for the old influence? Well – the current media landscape makes that impossible. So part of the fury at what Hughes et al hath wrought is misplaced, because part is really just nostalgia, railing against the passage of time. And I hate nostalgia.

I particularly hate the pernicious effect it has had on our foreign policy discourse, which is where I need to take issue with Damon Linker’s argument that the “haters” simply don’t understand what TNR was:

[I]t is important to recognize that nothing about TNR‘s idealistically hawkish approach to foreign affairs was especially “conservative.” On the contrary, it was also the outlook of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson — card-carrying liberals all. After the Vietnam debacle and the rise of skepticism among Democrats about armed intervention abroad, many supporters of Cold War liberalism decamped to the Republican Party, voting for Ronald Reagan, supporting his strong stand against the Soviet Union, endorsing supply-side economics, allying with religious conservatives, embracing populist demagoguery. These were and are the neocons.

The New Republic, by contrast, was a magazine by Cold War liberals who remained liberals — who didn’t jump ship to the conservative movement and the Republican Party, who dissented from some aspects of Great Society liberalism but not others, who didn’t become neocons. That made TNR somewhat more conservative on some issues than mainstream liberal opinion, but on most issues far more liberal than National Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and the other leading journals of the right.

It also made TNR by far the most interesting, unpredictable, ideologically heterodox, and intellectually stimulating magazine in the country for years on end — provided that one was willing to be provoked and goaded into thought by smart, sharp, passionate argument.

I understand what Linker is saying here, but I have to disagree in three important respects.

First, if we’re talking just about foreign policy I think there is far less difference between TNR and The Weekly Standard than he implies. Just because they differ profoundly on other issues, and attempted to influence very different coalitions, should not hide how close they were on the core questions: how pro-active, how militarized, and how oriented toward promoting democracy American foreign policy should be. Joe Lieberman and John McCain didn’t disagree much on these points, and neither did TNR and The Weekly Standard in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Second, this way of framing things assumes something that very much requires proof, and that TNR declined to seriously debate – namely, what Cold War liberalism should have evolved into once the Cold War ended. The NATO alliance, the large military establishment, the notion of America as the leader of the “free world” – all of these were on the one hand an extension of America’s role in World War II and on the other of America’s determination to contain the Soviet Union.

But when the Soviet Union collapsed, the rationale for that policy collapsed. What would replace it? In my recollection, TNR did not have a raucous, freewheeling debate about how to define what George H. W. Bush called the “New World Order.” Rather, very quickly there emerged a consensus that America, the “indispensable nation,” must establish new prerogatives for itself to intervene globally to right wrongs, fight evil, and protect the innocent. TNR supported military action in Rwanda and Sudan, Bosnia and Kosovo, Haiti and Iraq. But the original premise for Cold War liberalism – the power and character of the Soviet enemy – no longer obtained. Why did the famously disputatious TNR never seriously entertain multiple possible answers to the question: where should we go from here? Why conclude, essentially without any debate, that the logical successor to Cold War liberalism was a benign American imperium?

There are a lot of possible answers to that question. Deep in TNR‘s DNA is a desire for influence, to provide power with ideas, and that is not, actually, a stance ideally suited to deeply questioning what power is for in the first place. And, to be fair, the country at large had only a limited debate about these questions.

But one answer, and the one that I alluded to in my last post when I referred to my review of The Neoconservative Persuasion, was, again, the power of nostalgia. From my review:

When Kristol looked to disparage the varieties of conservatism that came before his, he often refers to “pessimism” but even more to “nostalgia” or being “backward-looking.” But the Kristol who comes through in these pages is emphatically backward-looking, a man animated more than anything by nostalgia for the Truman administration. An age when discovering who one’s enemies really were—Stalinists and their agents—was the order of the day. When the Berlin Airlift buried the ghost of Munich. When being a good liberal meant supporting an end to segregation, not ignoring the fulminations of Reverend Farrakhan. (Remember him, and when Jewish leaders from Ed Koch to, apparently, Irving Kristol considered him an existential threat? I almost didn’t.) And in culture, the golden age of middlebrow seriousness—Great Books for everyone.

There are worse ages to be nostalgic for, no doubt. But nostalgia, as Kristol surely knew because he said so often enough, is a thin basis for a political program.

It is a particularly poor basis for raising a next generation of leadership—or, for that matter, followership. Making first-hand nostalgia a basis for one’s understanding of the world is perhaps tragic. But finding that basis in second-hand nostalgia is farcical. My father can go around saying he’s still voting for Scoop Jackson—and he does—and that just tells us what was his formative political experience. But if I go through high school carrying a copy of Homage to Catalonia and lamenting that I’m too young to fight for Spain—which I did—I’m just behaving like a character in a Wes Anderson movie.

Everything I said above about Kristol’s neoconservatism could be applied in spades to Peretz’s Cold War liberalism aprés the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is my third riposte to Linker’s argument. TNR‘s interventionism was – not always by any means, but far too frequently – not a seriously evaluated policy position but an emotional reflex animated by nostalgia. And, when he wrote on the subject, Leon Wieseltier was among the worst offenders.

Which brings me to the realm of culture, and the fabled back of the book. I should caveat right up front that TNR and Wieseltier did a wonderful job of covering a wide array of subjects, of finding talented young critics and promoting them, and engaging in intellectual debate across the landscape of culture and academia. But I still have two bones to pick with the encomia.

The first and easiest bone to pick is that there is a wild, robust and in many cases very high quality discussion going on right now across a multitude of outlets and covering any cultural topic you like. What is relatively absent in the internet era are two things: widely-recognized gate-keepers to curate that discussion, and any kind of revenue model to sustain it. These are not problems that Leon Wieseltier had any idea of how to solve. (Nor does anyone else – something Andrew Sullivan acknowledges in his own lament for passing of the “sugar daddies of yore.”)

I am very, very eager to find a solution to that particular problem. Here at TAC, I am a tireless advocate for more cultural coverage for its own sake. I produce a bunch of it myself on this blog, and some of it for the magazine. But I recognize that the prevailing structure of the internet makes it not only very difficult to justify from a revenue perspective, but very difficult to justify from a curatorial perspective – because it’s not clear that a magazine like TAC could achieve the status of a trusted curator of this kind of discourse even if it wanted to.

So, again, the nostalgia for Wieseltier’s back-of-the-book is, to some extent, a nostalgia for an information market structure that no longer exists rather than for something TNR was uniquely and selflessly committed to. Another way of putting this is: back when TNR was TNR, The New York Review of Books was still The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker was still The New Yorker.

My second bone, though, is that TNR‘s approach to culture was not so much less politically-inflected as The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker – and that Hilton Kramer’s New Criterion, at least in its heyday, also published stuff worth reading and grappling with. All of which suggests that the pretense to curating the “right sort” of criticism was more a problem than a solution, and that the current decentralized era may not deserve some of the knocks against it.

I’m going to turn to Damon Linker again, and his column appreciating Wieseltier, to bring this point home. Linker quotes a Wieseltier column questioning the politicization of The New Criterion:

Reviewing the inaugural issue of The New Criterion, the neocon journal founded by art critic Hilton Kramer and pianist and music critic Samuel Lipman to combat the politicization of cultural thinking and writing by the left, Wieseltier noted how the contributors to the ostensibly high-brow review frequently fell into a vulgar counter-politicization that folded cultural criticism into Cold War categories of evaluation. The result, paradoxically, was a defeat not just for incisive criticism but also for a freedom that went beyond politics — the free play of ideas. Here’s Wieseltier:

The real triumph of over tyranny … is not a poem about freedom, but a poem about love — a poem that neither submits nor resists, because it takes freedom for granted. Not the right politics, but no politics. The greatness of the United States in the matter of culture may be described this way — it is a place for no politics, a place for private subjects…. If the writer in the Soviet Union cannot write as he pleases because the Soviet Union is totalitarian, and the writer in the United States cannot write as he pleases because the Soviet Union is totalitarian, where on earth can he write as he pleases? [The New Republic]

Against the neocons’ tendency to treat ideas as weapons in an ideological war with the left, Wieseltier championed an alternative vision found in the writings of Matthew Arnold and Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin and Daniel Bell — the great liberal pluralists. For these writers, politics possesses a special importance and dignity in human life, but it is an importance and dignity quite distinct from the very different forms of beauty, grandeur, and wisdom found in literature, philosophy, music, history, painting, the natural sciences, film, theology, dance, ethics, poetry, architecture, and kindred fields of the social sciences, humanities, and arts. Each matters, each deserves critical attention, and each demands to be judged and evaluated on its own terms, without being reduced to the demands or requirements of any other domain of politics or culture.

I have been having this argument with Linker for some time, but it bears going around again: this position is itself a political one. The notion that culture and politics are separate realms does not correspond to how either culture or politics actually behaves. It’s a prescriptive program, and it is associated with a particular perspective associated – yes – with Cold War liberals and the need – yes – to combat the Soviet Union.

That doesn’t invalidate the perspective of anybody who took that line. I don’t care who got CIA money for their art or their criticism during the Cold War; the art and the criticism are either persuasive or not. We can read for ourselves; we can see for ourselves; we can be moved or fascinated as we are, without debating genealogy. But we shouldn’t pretend that the perspective of the Cold War liberals on culture is somehow above politics – because that isn’t true.

And, moreover, I don’t want a Pablo Neruda or an Ezra Pound stripped of their politics – nor, as would seem to be implied (but never is in practice) a Czeslaw Milosz stripped of his politics. Neither does Damon Linker or Leon Wieseltier, of course – but the rhetoric of separate realms, and the practical approach of the New Critics who carried this particular critical banner in the early Cold War years, implies just that. And TNR‘s back of the book frequently indulged in a kind of sweeping, authoritative dismissal that, in retrospect, I find distinctly unattractive, notwithstanding that such dismissals came from a high liberal perspective that I find far more congenial than vulgar left- or right-wing political reductionism.

But I don’t want to revive that spirit here at TAC. I want a better way forward.

And that’s my bottom line. I want a way forward. If TNR got certain important things right about how to construct a magazine – and clearly it did – then the question is how to apply those lessons in the contemporary landscape. Eulogies are by their nature backward-looking, but even they should leave us with a sense of pointing to the future, of what will thrive over the plot where the past is interred. The spirit of nostalgia asks us to jump into the grave with the corpse, and I have no patience for it.