Morning-Must-Read: Ezra Klein: Even the Liberal New Republic Needs to Change
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Even the liberal New Republic needs to change: “The eulogy that needs to be written isn’t for The New Republic…
…It’s for the role once played by Washington’s small fleet of ambitious policy magazines. The internet is now thick with outlets that pride themselves on covering… policymaking apparatus. Vox… The New Republic… Wonkblog, the Upshot, Mother Jones, Storyline, FiveThirtyEight, and Politico, to name just a few. And that doesn’t even include the individual bloggers who are must-reads… Kevin Drum, and Tyler Cowen, and Brad DeLong, and Paul Krugman, and Ross Douthat, and Ramesh Ponnuru, and Jonathan Chait, and Scott Sumner, and Megan McArdle, and Jonathan Bernstein, and, again, the list goes on. This sprawling conversation over Washington policymaking used to be centered in a handful of elite-focused policy magazines, of which The New Republic was perhaps the best known and most ambitious….
The policy magazines had two dimensions. The first was what they covered–which was, for the most part, politics through the lens of policy…. The second was the angle and tone…. The New Republic oscillated from editor to editor, but tended towards a hawkish, contrarian neoliberalism (hence the ‘Even the liberal New Republic’ meme)…. To the wonk in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, these magazines were the thrumming center of the policy conversation in Washington…. But they’re no longer the center….
A deeper tension in digital journalism: the pressure for convergence is strong. We feel it at Vox, and sometimes give into it. It’s easy to see which stories are resonating with readers. It’s obvious that John Oliver videos do big numbers. And that’s fine. Right now, almost all successful digital publications are partially built on internet best practices and partially built on that publication’s particular obsessions, ideas, and attitude. Digital publications need to be smart about their mix….
But what made the New Republic and its peer policy magazines so great was how restlessly, relentlessly idiosyncratic they were–that’s how they drove new ideologies and new ideas to the fore. They were worse at covering policy than their digital successors, but probably better at thinking…. I’m less pessimistic about TNR’s future than many… and, as someone who really loathed a number of TNR’s previous eras (see the Bell Curve, or No Exit, or A Fighting Faith, for examples)… a bit less nostalgic for its past. But something is being lost in the transition from policy magazines to policy web sites…
The Martin Peretz-Michael Kinsley New Republic was world-class at snarking, but thinking–I think of Mickey Kaus, Jacob Weisber, Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Morton Kondracke and a magazine known best for the phrase “even the liberal New Republic“, and I say “no”. Hertzberg, IIRC, dialed down the snark and dialed up the policy substance, but still… And I don’t see how anybody would claim that the post-Hertzberg TNR was good at “thinking”