[D]uring his reign, Peretz has also done lasting damage to the cause of American liberalism. By turning TNR into a kind of ideological police dog, Peretz enjoyed the ability -- at least for a while -- to play a key role in defining the borders of "responsible" liberal discourse, thereby tarring anyone who disagreed as irresponsible or untrustworthy. But he did so on the basis of a politics simultaneously so narrow and idiosyncratic -- in thrall almost entirely to an Israel-centric neoconservatism -- that it's difficult to understand how the magazine's politics might be considered liberal anymore. Ironically Peretz's stance ultimately turned out to be not only out of step with most liberals but also most American Jews, who consistently cling to views far more dovish, both on Israel and on U.S. foreign policy generally, than those espoused in TNR.There's a whole lot more in there -- take a look.It is a sad but true fact of American political life that liberals rarely exercise so much influence as when they happen to be endorsing conservative causes, and this temptation has proven consistently irresistible to Peretz and his magazine. TNR under Peretz has been a vehicle that proved extremely helpful to Ronald Reagan's wars in Central America and George Bush's war in Iraq. It provided seminal service to Newt Gingrich's and William Kristol's efforts to kill the Clinton plan for universal health care and offered intellectual legitimacy to Charles Murray's efforts to portray black people as intellectually inferior to whites. As for liberal causes, however … well, not so much.
But the final irony that must also be mentioned when discussing the legacy of Peretz's control of the magazine is the fact of the magazine itself. And I think any honest reader would be forced to admit that for many if not most of these years, The New Republic was, despite everything, a truly terrific little magazine. Frank Mankiewicz once famously quipped that Peretz had turned TNR into "a Jewish Commentary." This was funny but also unfair. Unlike Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, Peretz believed that his magazine should include the views of people with whom he disagrees. And for longer than one could have imagined -- due in large measure to the editorial talents of Michael Kinsley and Hendrik Hertzberg at the front of the magazine and Leon Wieseltier in the back, coupled with the writing talents of more youngish and underpaid liberal journalists than one can comfortably name in one sentence -- this gave TNR a political frisson entirely absent from more monochromatic political magazines of both the left and right. It was alive with passion for politics and literature and peopled by some of the most talented writers and thinkers to grace any masthead, anytime, anywhere. While Wieseltier alone has remained, steadily steering the back of the ship as the front veers from war to war, controversy to controversy, many of the rest of TNR's alumni have gone on to shape American journalism for better and worse from more remunerative perches at The New Yorker, Time, Harper's, and The Atlantic, and many of the nation's (remaining) great newspapers.
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My Marty problem -- and ours -- is just this: By pretending to speak as a liberal but simultaneously endorsing the central crusades of the right, he has enlisted The New Republic in the service of a ruinous neoconservative doctrine, as the magazine sneered at those liberals who stood firm in the face of its insults. He has done so, moreover, in support of a blinkered and narrow view of Israeli security that, again, celebrates hawks and demonizes doves. Had the United States or even Israel followed the policies advocated by those genuine liberals whom TNR routinely slandered, much of the horror of the past four years would have been happily avoided -- as most of its editors (but not Peretz) now admit. At the same time, the hard work of coming up with a genuinely liberal alternative to the neoconservative foreign-policy nightmare, an alternative to which TNR might have usefully contributed, remains not merely undone but undermined in the pages of the magazine.
If the sale of TNR had meant liberating liberalism from the burden of Peretz's myriad obsessions and insinuations, TNR's loss of its independence might have been liberalism's gain. Alas, as Peretz himself has pointed out, the Asper family, which controls CanWest, happens to share these exact obsessions, right up to the point of censoring its newspapers' coverage of the Middle East conflict and replacing the word "Palestinian" with the word "terrorist" when it suits the owners' purposes. Peretz will no longer be incurring TNR's losses, but he will remain the Aspers' man at the helm. However much Frank Foer sincerely seeks to recapture the liberalism of the magazine's storied past, Peretz's continued presence will likely continue to push it in a rightward direction.
--The Editors
