If Chris Hughes knew anything about journalism, he’d throw a big party in New York and another in Washington and the media wags now heaping abuse on him would be hailing him as the last of the Medicis. But the 31-year-old owner and editor in chief of the New Republic doesn’t know a damn thing about journalism, which is why scores of hungry and thirsty journalists won’t shut up.
Hughes is getting it from the left, nostalgic for a magazine that hasn’t existed in a while, and the right, nostalgic for a magazine that never really existed at all. In their estimation, Hughes is guilty of destroying one of America’s great cultural institutions. His two top editors, Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier, resigned last week, spearheading a mass exodus of staffers and contributors. In his response, published in the Washington Post last weekend, Hughes writes: “I didn’t buy the New Republic to be the conservator of a small print magazine whose long-term influence and survival were at risk. I came to protect the future of the New Republic by creating a sustainable business so that our journalism, values and voice — the things that make us singular — could survive.”
Hughes deserves credit for seeing that TNR’s model wasn’t working. What he didn’t understand was that the biggest problem facing TNR wasn’t about markets or revenue streams. Rather it was simply that the magazine of ideas he bought back in 2012 had no ideas. Even worse is that it’s unlikely Hughes can do much about it, since he too stands for nothing.
Hughes is regularly knocked for having lucked into his wealth by rooming in college with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. And yet the reality is that most really rich people in America—rich meaning not just millions, but hundreds of millions or billions—are rich because they luck into it. It is lucky to inherit money and it is lucky to make something that people want to pay lots of money for, especially when it is something as puerile as Facebook. Zuckerberg was just as lucky as Hughes. All he did was take a staple of New England prep school and college life—a book handed out to students in the fall with the pictures and dorm addresses of all your classmates—and change the platform, from printed book to the Internet.
This is all that Hughes means when he refers to his property as a “vertically integrated media company.” Digital TNR will be to print magazine TNR what Facebook is to Harvard’s paperback facebook. Like, with old facebook, you can’t send messages to the cute boys and girls in your class. But you can do that on Facebook! Maybe TNR readers will now be able to send messages to the cute boys and girls who write for the magazine. Hughes regrets that the staffers who resigned missed the chance to help him create the next generation TNR. “If you really care about an institution and want to make it strong for the ages, you don’t walk out,” Hughes writes. “You roll up your sleeves, you redouble your commitment to those ideals in a changing world, and you fight.”
Hughes’ passionate exhortation begs the key question: what ideals? TNR has not stood for anything for quite some time now, perhaps not for twenty years. Back then it was a very good magazine insofar as it dramatized the political, cultural, and personal conflicts within the head of an interesting person, its owner and editor-in-chief Martin Peretz. Accordingly, the New Republic argued with itself—Charles Krauthammer vs. Hendrik Hertzberg, Andrew Sullivan vs. Michael Kinsley, etc.—which was the source of its glamor and cachet. The point was to make good arguments—better than the ones made by the guy in the office next to you.
That brief golden age ended for a number of reasons. Bill Clinton became president, which made the magazine somewhat irrelevant since many of the arguments taking place in Peretz’s head were now taking place in the Oval Office. Editor Michael Kinsley knew it was time to move on, so he left Washington and went to Seattle to start Slate and get close to another kind of power, Bill Gates. Another editor, Michael Kelly, stood by Stephen Glass, a sociopath whose published lies did lasting damage to the magazine’s credibility. And then when Al Gore didn’t become president in 2000, TNR went into its fatal tailspin.
Peretz, Gore’s former teacher at Harvard, could not help but take Gore’s loss personally. Denied the chance to be Alexander’s Aristotle, Peretz lashed out at what he perceived to be disloyal friends and allies. Therefore, the magazine’s hatred of George W. Bush was also personal, an emotional disposition that turned out to be a big problem with the Iraq war.
What line should TNR take on Iraq? Sure, from their perspective Bush was an idiot, and because of the Florida ballot, illegitimate, but there were other issues to consider. For Peretz, it was not only about 9/11 but also the second intifada, both part of a triumphalist wave of Arab terror that American power had to roll back. Saddam was a despot and TNR was proudly liberal interventionist, embodied by “genocide chick” Samantha Power whose reporting from the Balkans became the basis for her award-winning book, A Problem From Hell. Saddam was as bad as any of the despots Power had written about and the Clinton administration had already singled out Iraq for regime change in the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act. Thus, with 27-year-old Peter Beinart at the helm, TNR supported the Iraq war. And then it was against it.
There was no longer an argument in the magazine, or Peretz’s head, that might have taken on the serious issues the U.S.-led invasion and occupation raised—about projecting American power, for instance, or democracy promotion, both of which had been important issues to TNR in the past. Rather, the magazine simply advocated the position staked out by Democrats who, like TNR, had supported the war before they were against it.
Bush’s war, from their perspective, was so obviously bad, stupid, and vile that even American soldiers agreed with The New Republic. In July 2007, Pvt. Scott Beauchamp reported from Iraq and Kuwait that his fellow servicemen were violent jerks who, among other things, killed dogs and humiliated disfigured female soldiers. The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb was the first to note problems with Beauchamp’s diary pieces, and then in August 2007, an Army investigation showed that Beauchamp’s reports were false.
But TNR and its editor at the time, Franklin Foer, didn’t budge. The Weekly Standard was wrong, Goldfarb was wrong, the Army was wrong. What had Beauchamp, a novice journalist, done to merit the magazine’s trust, its willingness to stake its own reputation to the claims of an untested reporter? Nothing. The Beauchamp pieces weren’t part of a larger argument, rather they were part of a political campaign against Bush and his supporters, so any criticism of them from those quarters could only be more political warfare. Thus, TNR slid out of the world of ideas and facts. It wasn’t until four months later, in December 2007 that Foer finally decided that the magazine could no longer “stand by [Beauchmp’s] stories.”
Frank Foer is a good guy but the fact that he backed Beauchamp for so long was yet more evidence of a systemic problem with the culture of the magazine. It’s why Kelly stuck with Glass, why the staff was happy to take Hughes’s money when he bought the magazine in 2012, and why they walked out last week in self-righteous outrage. It’s not about ideas, but prestige, privilege, and self-image. They’re always right even when they’re wrong—like they were about Hughes, the wunderkind they once saw as the messiah: they’re arrogant. The TNR Hughes bought was a flattering looking glass that reflected back to its writers and editors, and readers, what they wanted to believe about themselves—that they’re serious people, which they are, with serious ideas, which they do not now have.
Sure, the magazine still managed to publish good and thoughtful pieces occasionally, especially in the back of the book, edited by Leon Wieseltier. But by and large reading TNR the last few years has been rather like attending a party thrown by destitute aristocrats. The house is beautiful, but it is very cold because there is no money to pay the heating bills. TNR has been living beyond its means because it has been drawing its intellectual and political capital on an empty account. The ideas that made TNR interesting 20 years ago, ideas TNR still says it stands for today—for instance, a liberalism that believes in American exceptionalism, strong national defense, and is unashamedly pro-Israel, etc.—no longer exist in the real world. The future of the Democratic party looks like the 2012 Democratic national convention—with delegates booing God and Israel from the convention floor.
Indeed, TNR’s most memorable argument of late was about Israel, or more specifically John Judis’s fashionably ignorant book about Israel, which Wieseltier rightly trashed. And what about TNR’s big foreign policy idea? Remember that for TNR the problem with Iraq was not the war itself but simply that Bush did it all wrong. TNR knew a little something about liberal interventionism—after all, it was on the front lines in the Balkans with Samantha Power.
Today, the president that TNR has championed since 2008 has sat idly by while the death toll in the nearly four-year-long Syrian civil war passes 200,000. If Obama’s U.N. ambassador really took seriously the ideas she laid out in her trenchant critiques of U.S. policymakers who did nothing to prevent mass murder, Samantha Power could not continue to serve an administration that has effectively partnered with a murderous Syrian regime. But rather than resign her position in protest, in the recognition that her credibility is called into question with each casualty, “genocide chick” has chosen rather to stay with Obama. Her most penetrating observations are reserved for her Twitter feed, where she limply rages about Assad’s depredations.
Power’s social media protest is an appropriate figure for TNR over the last two decades, its intellectual and political impotence. What Hughes has done, albeit unwittingly, is to eliminate a myth: The liberalism that TNR says it stands for does not exist. However, the values and ideas it says it advocates—like American exceptionalism, and robust internationalism—do exist. They reside with us here on the right.
In stripping TNR for parts, Hughes has compelled our friends and colleagues on the left to make a choice. Before, you didn’t have to have comity with us to share our ideas about an America leading from the front. Indeed, it was safer to sneer in order to prove your bona fides as a man or woman of the left and thereby still get invited to all the nicest parties with all the nicest people. I’m happy Hughes has trashed their Potemkin village. They have nowhere to hide. I celebrate it—especially if it means our friends from over there will join us openly on first principles. Maybe now our family quarrel can begin in earnest. What’s our future? How will we move forward in the world?