Is Franklin Foer the William Shawn of the Zulus?

By Noah Millman • June 5, 2012, 10:50 PM

Okay, that header doesn’t make any sense. Nonetheless: I see that The New Republic has decided to aim high and declare its intentions to become The New Yorker of Washington, D.C. One might say that they are aiming so high that they are leaning over backward. It wasn’t that long ago that people were founding magazines to be The New Republic of this or that – The Weekly Standard was founded as The New Republic of the right – and wondering what The New Yorker was going to have to turn into to survive. But nonetheless: I get the idea: longer-form reporting, central place in the cultural conversation, incomprehensible cartoons.

Which leads me to my own question: what is The American Conservative aspiring to be the something of? The publishers clearly don’t want to be cloistered on the paleoconservative right, but neither do they want to disown those roots. They want to be situated vaguely on the right, but they appear to be more committed to prudence, in foreign and domestic policy, than to any specific policy agenda, much less an ideology. They want to be part of the national conversation, but not part of the “establishment” – or, for that matter, counter-establishment. My own personal mission here is to expand the magazine’s arts and culture coverage. I don’t look at the media landscape and see a dearth of coverage of the latest annoying thing this Republican or that Democrat said, whereas coverage of the arts – certainly on the right, but in general – is dwindling almost as quickly as coverage of local news.

So, I put it to you. What are the models? The Atlantic Monthly, traditional home of genteel pessimism, before it moved to Washington? The New Criterion before it decided to become a movement conservative organ? The n+1 of the Benedict option? (I guess that would be n-1.)

Time to find out if I have any commenters.

Tagged Franklin Foer, magazine business, n+1, publishing, The American Conservative, The Atlantic, The New Criterion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Weekly Standard, William Shawn.

29 Responses to Is Franklin Foer the William Shawn of the Zulus?

Snarky McSnarksnark says:

June 5, 2012 at 11:12 pm

I would say the Harper’s of the 80s (before its politics moved to its sleeve), or the Esquire of the early 70s. Both magazines were stolid, un-dogmatic, and adventurous.

America’s mainstream “magazines of thought” have become either overrun by necessitudes of commerical survival (the New Yorker, Atlantic), or partisan back benches (National Review, Dissent, Commentary).

In fact, The American Conserservative has become my favorite magazine to actually read, notwithstanding the fact that I’m not particularly conservative.
Wick Allison says:

June 5, 2012 at 11:57 pm

Here’s one commenter. The reason I joined those supporting The American Conservative is because, like many people, I have become disgusted with both political parties. The Red Team and the Blue Team, along with their cheerleaders and detractors in the media, have turned governance over the last 40 years into a spectator sport. Politics has become a distraction on the public field of play while the real action is taking place in private, where both sides add to their power and wealth by increasing the power of the centralized State.

The American Conservative is the only voice I’ve found that resists the combined forces of the Centrocracy (a term brilliantly employed by Leo Linbeck) and argues for self-governance. It may have begun in opposition to the Iraqi War, but it has since broadened its critique to include permanent war as the chief modern instrument for building State power.

What is self-governance? It is when power is distributed closest to the people. It celebrates variety over uniformity, localism over nationalism, the rule of law over ideological passion or political expedience.

The magazine’s position has strong roots in the best conservative political and social thought over the last 100 years, but it is not “conservative” in today’s ideological sense promoted by the propagandists. It is open to liberals and libertarians who are as alarmed by the startling increase in State power as we are. The threat to civil liberties and the abandonment of Constitutional procedures are dangers recognized by many. The never-ending drug war — which turns every hamlet’s police force into a Mayberry version of a Navy Seal team — is just one more facet of the State’s aggrandizement of power.

This magazine, as was once proudly stated by another, truly “stands thwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”
The thing is, it can be stopped. It takes will, it takes thought, and it takes people of good will of all political stripes. This magazine is only a seed, but the soil is ready.

(And we also intend to host and publish first-class cultural coverage, which, Noah, is why we are grateful you are here.)
Rod Dreher says:

June 6, 2012 at 1:30 am

I like the question, but have to think about it. But I love the headline…
razib says:

June 6, 2012 at 4:56 am

Time to find out if I have any commenters

a second! seems like this publication’s margin is covering areas where the ‘mainstream right’ dares not tread.
Kieselguhr Kid says:

June 6, 2012 at 8:36 am

Well, don’t hire Peretz.

I really, really miss the Boston-based _Atlantic._ There isn’t a big space for that kind of thing anymore, and I think it’s a good model. But a lot of that model is: assume the reader is as well rounded and complex as, well, you. Look, I don’t read you because you have access to information I don’t: that just isn’t the world anymore. I read you because you’re interesting and have a complicate, unpredictable take on things, and that take probably owes as much or more to things that make up the content of the Shakesblog, as to say the _New York Times_. So there’s still a slot for political magazines that assume _I’m_ broadly interested in culture and art and society, and have some narrow interest in the political sphere.

That _should_ be a vapidly broad description of a magazine of no help to you at all. Twenty years ago it would’ve been. Except because that space rapidly diminishing, it’s not anymore.

Dude: and hire Cox and Rathvon.
J.L. Wall says:

June 6, 2012 at 10:07 am

So… William Shawn is the William Shawn of the Zulus, that’s what you’re trying to tell me?

I, of course, am too young to remember two of the magazines in the state you describe them (well, I can remember TNC before Obama’s election, when they really went off the deep end) so I’m of no use. But in a nostalgic way, TAC’s sustained commitment to expanding dialogue, even with those of us who aren’t, y’know, paleocons, has always impressed me — and, in a way, reminded me of the late, lamented Culture11′s goal. Except much more focused, and with a better business model.

(Forgive the tortured syntax, please.)
Mr. Patrick says:

June 6, 2012 at 11:07 am

Kinda like “Reason”, but for people who don’t fully trust Jamie Dimon.
Daniel McCarthy says:

June 6, 2012 at 12:27 pm

“I shall try to cut a rather wide swath with it, covering politics, economies, the exact sciences, etc., as well as belles lettres and the other fine arts. I have some promises of stuff from men who have something to say and know how to write, and I hope to stir up the animals. In politics it will be, in the main, Tory, but civilized Tory. You know me well enough to know that there will be no quarter for the degraded cads who now run the country. I am against you and the Liberals because I believe you chase butterflies, but I am even more against your enemies.”

– H.L. Mencken describing the American Merucy to Sinclair Lewis
Roger McCarthy says:

June 6, 2012 at 1:01 pm

The one defunct magazine I really miss is Encounter.
Jack Ross says:

June 6, 2012 at 1:09 pm

I was just thinking Mercury and then Dan nails it! A right wing version of Harper’s, as Dan once put it to me over lunch, also works.
Johnny F. Ive says:

June 6, 2012 at 2:26 pm

I think it is about conserving what the authors feel is important. Another goal seems to be to see things as they actual are and not quickly box things into a popular preexisting system of thought.

I pretty much ignore the mainstream media because the boxes that they live in seem to lack contact with the outside reality. They have some slogans they teach to their audience but they really don’t dig stuff up and study it. They aren’t interested in how we went from A to B and how that affects where we are at C in order to safely reach point D. They seem to have a narrow focus on how things can be.
Mark Brown says:

June 6, 2012 at 2:41 pm

This might be hubristic, but what about the Minor Prophets.

We’re going to lose in the short term dramatically, but in the longer term the world bends to even hard truth. Breadth – from fiery Amos to gentle Hosea. And always writing, with memorable words.
Aaron says:

June 6, 2012 at 3:14 pm

The n+1 of the right (not of that awful “Benedict option”) sounds pretty good to me.

This is what I’d like to read: a smart, open, non-dogmatic, non-vitriolic, conservative-oriented magazine that welcomes readers and contributors from the left as well as the right.
Bryan says:

June 6, 2012 at 5:18 pm

For what it’s worth…

I’m not conservative, but I regularly check in on your blog, which then leads me to others on the Right I find interesting like Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher, and Daniel Larison.

I guess I find the different voices on the Right interesting, and I especially find it interesting when something’s said that resonates with my own, usually different, political commitments. It suggests the possibility of interesting political coalitions on different issues.

In regards to the magazine itself, I really enjoy the stable of bloggers the American Conservative has so far. In a way, it seems to me to be a mirror to the Atlantic (where I keep up with Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Fallows).

Hope this helps, and hope you all continue to meet with success.
Samuel Goldman says:

June 6, 2012 at 5:41 pm

The Creem of conservatism? I guess that would make McCarthy our Lester Bangs…which I consider very high praise.
Scott Galupo says:

June 6, 2012 at 7:09 pm

When I first scanned the headline, I read it as “Wallace Shawn of the Zulus.” Speaking of Shawn, and Woody Allen, and Bellow, I dare say there’s a postwar Jewish sensibility to TAC: ironic, iconoclastic, allergic to BS, etc. This is the proper reaction to, as Wick writes above, the absurdity of the powers that be…
Chrestomat says:

June 6, 2012 at 10:58 pm

I’m with McCarthy. American Mercury all the way, baby.
cw says:

June 7, 2012 at 12:11 am

Why be right or left at all? Wake up in the morning and dare to forego that shot of ideology. Leave the William F. Buckley undies there on the floor and approach the world commando. And Jesus said. “cast aside yer crutches and walk.” Unclench that catechism, doff the rose-tinted glasses. Don’t try to be zen.
DavidT says:

June 7, 2012 at 12:20 am

During the 1930′s there actually were a number of New Yorker imitators: there was Night and Day, which tried to be a British New Yorker (contrary to popular belief, it was not killed by a Shirley Temple libel suit against Graham Greene; see here for details) and The Chicagoan, a would-be Chicago New Yorker–which has recently been re-launched.

So maybe there actually was a Washington, DC New Yorker–as forgotten today as The Chicagoan was for many years. Heck, there was probably a Dubuque New Yorker…
Carl says:

June 7, 2012 at 5:12 am

A mix between the Mad Magazine of debutants and the Rolling Stone of llama herders.
Steve Sailer says:

June 7, 2012 at 5:37 am

KK says:

“I really, really miss the Boston-based _Atlantic._”

Me, too.

The idea that Boston couldn’t be home to The Atlantic anymore struck me as evidence for too much monoculture.
sjay says:

June 7, 2012 at 6:31 am

I’ve said it before — TAC has become the 2010′s equivalent of the TNR of the 1980s, the Kinsley-Sullivan era, producing iconoclastic commentary that helps the process of removing the detritus of the old framework which has been handicapping its ideological cohort.
Jack Ross says:

June 7, 2012 at 11:13 am

Scott – what you say is very true, and by no means mutually exclusive with the legacy of American Mercury. I often think of myself as a fossilized rebirth of the World-War II generation of Jewish ex-leftists who migrated right (Morrie Ryskind, Bertram Wolfe, Will Herberg, Herbert Solow, Ralph de Toledano): very, very far from the neocon sensibility and never even all that comfortable at National Review, or as I recall my very liberal father naming them in a conversation years ago, “paleoneocons.”
paul gottfried says:

June 7, 2012 at 12:40 pm

I like many of the suggestions offered above and particularly the goal of becoming a rightwing counterpart of Harpers, before that publication turned bad, sometime in the 1980s or 1990s. But the true Golden Oldie for me (I know I’m showing my senility) is NR back in the 1950s and 1960s, when I subscribed to that fortnightly and awaited every issue with keen excitement.The best part of that now defunct publication (in its pristine form) were the heated debates that NR featured, perhaps between the efforts of its head editor to throw dissenters off the bus. I loved it when the sparks flew- and especially when Meyer and Kirk or Meyer and Burnham went at each other with everything but the kitchen sink. Jack Ross is correct that some of the fireworks came from ex-Communist Jews who moved to the right.But there was so much dialectical friction that it probably had more than one source.
Jack Ross says:

June 7, 2012 at 7:06 pm

Paul – my favorite gem from our sometime-mutual friend Meir Schiller is that he refers to the old NR not as pre-neocon but simply “pre-Commentary.”
Oisín says:

June 7, 2012 at 8:42 pm

The Onion A.V. Club of politics, and Rolling Stone of culture, for Ray Bradbury conservatives.
Sam M says:

June 8, 2012 at 7:08 am

Snarky McSnark made an interesting point regarding early Esquire. If you look at Tom Wolfe’s work in that era, it really dove into various aspects of the culture. It will be interesting to see if TAC starts doing that sort of long form. Or even Rolling Stone. Would TAC publish something like “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’? I like to think so.

Either that, or Penthouse for people who think Penthouse is gross.
Marchmaine says:

June 8, 2012 at 8:22 am

Offer critique from outside the current framework:

Challenge the Right for excessive centralization in Business.
Challenge the Left for excessive centralization in Government.

Challenge them both for ineptly running an Empire for private gain at public expense.

An American Red Tory experiment (without the Albatross of David Cameron).
Scott Locklin says:

June 8, 2012 at 10:05 pm

I’m guessing a New^2 Criterion would be relevant. They experienced a steep decline after their Olin foundation moolah ran out, and, as you say, became a movement conservative organ. As if adherence to the classical forms (and, for whatever reason, Modernist inkblots) indicates approval of imperial adventures.
Good art is one of the few things in modern culture a conservative can be for. The endless litany of things conservatives are against, including movement conservatives, well, this can be rather depressing and off-putting.